High-Tech Forces vs. High-Magic Forces

[Nellisir]

Again, depends on what you shoot it with.

:blink:
Ok, you win. I can't argue with that. It does indeed depend on what you shoot it with.

 

[Derren]

:blink:
Ok, you win. I can't argue with that. It does indeed depend on what you shoot it with.

But for people to get the idea to use anything larger than a bomb it would take several failed assassinations where the assassin also got away with the knowledge that his weapon was not effective.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The thing is, in a world where magic is required to do things like cause fireballs, there are fewer threats to worry about. In that sense, it's a lot easier to prepare against powerful foes because you'll have fewer of them.

In OUR world, anyone you meet can potentially deliver an attack of house-leveling potency. And, as the shaped charge assassinations (and other mine/IED/drone/missile/etc. attacks) show, the attacker doesn't even need to be close.

The modern day leaders solve this by maintaining a certain amount of distance*...which is exactly contra to what a LeShay would want to do in order to maximize the efficacy of his personal abilities...abilities he'll have no reason to distrust.

Recruit one suicide bomber to have a HE device surgically implanted...

Edit: thought I'd post a link to the thing if we're going to keep discussing it (in case anyone else was as unfamilar with them as I was):

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Leshay

Interesting...AC 15 if flat footed.

Also, while Charm is magical, those outrageous Diplomacy bonuses are not going to mean as much if the target doesn't understand your language- I wouldn't consider any D&D's world languages to correspond with ours, honestly. (Speedbump, not barrier, to his plans.)






* not isolation, just having a lifestyle that includes limitations on where, when and how long they will be exposed with only some armed men for protection.

 

[Nellisir]

In OUR world, anyone you meet can potentially deliver an attack of house-leveling potency. And, as the shaped charge assassinations (and other mine/IED/drone/missile/etc. attacks) show, the attacker doesn't even need to be close.

I don't carry shaped charges on a regular basis, and I don't know anyone that does. And in order to use them, you have to have a target. The leshay doesn't give you a target. It teleports, it's invisible, it changes appearance, and it converts anyone and everyone it talks to (see below) into a zealot.

The modern day leaders solve this by maintaining a certain amount of distance*...which is exactly contra to what a LeShay would want to do in order to maximize the efficacy of his personal abilities...abilities he'll have no reason to distrust.

And the leshay can close that distance.

Interesting...AC 15 if flat footed.

Also 825 hit points, DR 15 epic and cold iron, fast healing 10, and heal as an at-will spell-like ability.

Also, while Charm is magical, those outrageous Diplomacy bonuses are not going to mean as much if the target doesn't understand your language- I wouldn't consider any D&D's world languages to correspond with ours, honestly. (Speedbump, not barrier, to his plans.)

True. But given it has the polyglot feat (speaks all languages) and a 33 intelligence, it's not much of a speedbump. 24 hours?

I just don't see a win here. If you don't kill it, instantly, it's gone in 6 seconds, fully healed in 12, invisible in 18, and back in 24 seconds, hasted, armed, and pissed off. If there's no one around, surviving, which seems likely, it goes elsewhere and goes to ground, maybe takes an hour or so, and then starts asking questions. Subtle questions, but the answers are always honest and as helpful as possible. It works its way up the chain, and launches a surprise attack at a place and time of its chosing. If, by a miracle that doesn't succeed, it falls back, adjusts tactics, and does it again. It's not dumb. It's the extreme opposite of dumb.

 

[wingsandsword]

Interesting...AC 15 if flat footed.

Also, while Charm is magical, those outrageous Diplomacy bonuses are not going to mean as much if the target doesn't understand your language- I wouldn't consider any D&D's world languages to correspond with ours, honestly. (Speedbump, not barrier, to his plans.)

That gives you one round to punch through 825 HP, DR 15/Epic & Cold Iron, Fast Healing 10, CON 37 and a Fortitude Save of +29 (and immunity to all Poisons and Diseases). As we've already discussed, the only way you're doing 825 HP in one round is with a high damage roll with a tactical nuclear weapon, a direct hit by a strategic nuclear weapon, or by concerted fire of a battalion-sized army unit (or other very large scale conventional assault).

It's kind of like Mungo from Blazing Saddles "If you shoot him, you'll just make him mad."

Also, the Polyglot feat that the LeShay has specifically has as it's description "The character can speak all languages. If the character is literate, he or she can also read and write all languages (not including magical script). ". By the RAW, he would understand languages he's never heard before, he's smart enough and a good enough linguist to decipher languages on the fly, understand and extrapolate, and make Epic leaps of intuition to communicate in languages he's never dealt with before that encounter.

Even if you accepted that he wouldn't know Earth languages, yeah, it's a mild speedbump. The idea behind the feat is that you're an Epic-level linguist (prereqs being able to speak 5 languages, an INT of 25+ and being at least 21 Levels or HD, so smarter and more experienced than any human on Earth) and can piece together languages kind of like a Universal Translator off of Star Trek. Give him a few hours or a couple of days at most and he'd be fluent in any language he was exposed to (especially if you remember he has Detect Thoughts as a spell-like ability, so he can hear people's thoughts in other languages, even rationalize that feat partially in his case as him copying linguistic information he telepathically extracts), In any case, turn him loose in a very cosmopolitan city like New York and he'd be fluent in most Earth languages inside of a week.

When I proposed the leShay idea, it wasn't for something that would blast through and use brute force or act quickly. The whole point is subtlety, thinking fairly long-term, and showing that to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi "You cannot win, but there are alternatives to fighting". In a straight up, conventional war, Earth would win against just about any fantasy force through superior firepower, professional tactics, and advanced technology. For a fantasy nation/army to win, they'd have to be far more subtle and take advantage of their magical advantages like magical disguises, magical healing, magical teleportation and superhuman/magical translations.

Given time to prepare, and given that LeShay are essentually Epic-Uber-Elves they can think in long term planning, they could come up with strategies as good as anything we could think of here, or better. Learn languages, learn the culture (with Knowledge: Local +59 I think he'd learn local cultures real fast), make allies, make plans, and by the time anybody knows what you're doing, you've got most of the world in your back pocket and they don't even realize it yet.

The use of Epic Bluff for a Suggestion is a good one, I hadn't noticed that, but that's another good one, essentially at-will Suggestion. Notice that he can project a false Alignment with a DC 70 check and he has a +71 to the skill, so no matter what his alignment is he could always appear to be Lawful Good to everybody. . .anybody who tries to intuit this stranger's motives or intentions would find that he is benevolent and wants peace and order.

That brings up the point, what agenda would a LeShay Emperor of Earth have? They are essentially Epic Elves that are the last survivors of a cataclysm/war that wiped their entire time/space spanning civilization from the reality so that they never existed (Elves from Gallifrey?) They are Fey, with some obvious fey affinities for nature (Knowledge: Nature +59 and Speak with Plants). As just brainstorming, I could see a LeShay that arrived on Earth deciding to conquer it for it's own good, that it finds the inhabitants too immature for their own good and too likely to hurt themselves or worse, the planet they are on. End wars, end abuse of the environment, end discrimination and bigotry. . .but at the cost of making mankind essentially indoctrinated and brainwashed into its agenda. A "benevolent dictator" with nigh-godlike powers.

Oh, and for the record, the Fanatic attitude produced by the Epic-level Diplomacy skill use is not permanent, if you'll notice, it reverts to "Friendly" after a number of days equal to the CHA bonus, in this case 17 days. That's still making people unquestioningly to-the-death loyal for 17 days (and still being friendly afterwards) by just talking to them for 12 seconds.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And the leshay can close that distance.

You missed my point- my statement was in the context of the LeShay victorious.

Because of the nature of its powers- and probably, the size of its ego- it would be less likely to resort to the kind of distance-keeping that helps POTUS and others safe from a variety of threats.

Instead, the LeShay would feel right at home in a crowd, influencing people with its Charm & Diplomacy...leaving it open to things like suicide bombers and so forth.

As we've already discussed, the only way you're doing 825 HP in one round is with a high damage roll with a tactical nuclear weapon, a direct hit by a strategic nuclear weapon, or by concerted fire of a battalion-sized army unit (or other very large scale conventional assault).

Or a Vulcan Cannon with its armor piecing spent uranium rounds, or a 17k rounds/seconf Metalstorm, or a shaped-charge molten copper IED on an infrared beam trigger or...well, let's just say there are a lot of options that people keep discounting.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That's still making people unquestioningly to-the-death loyal for 17 days (and still being friendly afterwards) by just talking to them for 12 seconds.

With a population of 7B and growing, he can't keep them all in thrall.

Even assuming he gets & keeps the humans in positions of power, that is still going to leave "The Resistance" a significant number of potential recruits.

 

[wingsandsword]

Or a Vulcan Cannon with its armor piecing spent uranium rounds, or a 17k rounds/seconf Metalstorm, or a shaped-charge molten copper IED on an infrared beam trigger or...well, let's just say there are a lot of options that people keep discounting.

No, no, no and no. Prove it. Automatic weapons in D20 do NOT do damage per projectile, there isn't one bit of evidence to that fact. Setting a firearm auto-fire does is turn a weapon into an area of effect, it doesn't do extra damage per additional round fired.

Armor Piercing rounds give a +2 circumstance bonus to hit when attacking opponents with an Armor bonus to their AC (Urban Arcana p.69). A +2 to hit won't mean much when you're attacking a LeShay and you will probably hit if it's flat footed, and can't hit on less than a 20 if it's not.

The closest weapon to a vulcan cannon in official rules is a 7.62mm minigun (Menace Manual p223.), noted as a typical door-mounted It does 4d10 in a 20 ft square, and takes 100 rounds of ammo to do that. On average damage it will barely break the LeShay's DR, and it's fast healing is fast enough that it will fully recover each round from continuous fire from that minigun. It's not doing hundreds of dice of damage because it's throwing hundreds of rounds of ammunition. There is no grounds to assume that increasing the caliber of the weapon will suddenly make the damage dice jump

How in the world is an explosively formed penetrator IED going to do as much damage as a tactical nuclear weapon? They are excellent anti-armor weapons, but it's essentially an improvised version of a shaped charge. A Hellfire Missile does 15d6 (Menace Manual p.223), that's 52 points of damage on average. These improvised devices are supposed to be doing more than 16 times that much damage?

An improvised device is supposed to be vastly superior to an actual military munition? A maximum strength Disintegrate spell in D&D does 40d6, for an average damage of 140 HP (240 at maximum damage). Is an IED cobbled together in a shack supposed to be doing more than a 6 times the damage of 6th level spell at 20th caster level, or more than 3 times the damage of a 9th level spell by a 20th level caster (Maximized Disintegrate)?

Actual shaped-charge devices are in the d20 Modern rules set already (d20 Modern rulebook p102), and having a shaped charge effect means that a weapon ignores 10 points of hardness when it strikes an object, vehicle or building.

Seriously, show me some kind of official WotC stat for any modern-day weapon system that can do 825 HP in one round that is less than a nuclear weapon (and I had to go to starship weapons systems tables from d20 Future to get that).

To get a concept of what a weapon which can do 825 HP of damage can do, look over at d20 Call of Cthuhlu (as another official WotC set of d20 rules). A 825 HP blast could defeat Hastur, could put Great Cthuhlu itself into the double-digits in HP. Taking down a LeShay by direct military action would be about the same as engaging a Great Old One in a stand-up fight (except without the automatic Sanity loss, instead you get the various mind-controlling powers).

 

[Nellisir]

I think I've reached the end here.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The closest weapon to a vulcan cannon in official rules is a 7.62mm minigun (Menace Manual p223.),

IOW, you're saying a Vulcan cannon or Metalstorm can't harm the LeShay based on the stats of a completely different weapon. That makes no sense.

There is- quite literally- a huge difference in the size & mass of the projectile launched by a minigun and a Vulcan. That is why it is used to destroy tanks.

http://www.rense.com/general93/mime-attachment 96.jpeg

In the 6 second round the Metalstorm was trained on a LeShay, that would mean 100,000 rounds of ammunition potentially hitting it- approximately 1000x the number of rounds delivered by the minigun. There simply is no weapon statted out in D20 that approximates this.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKlnMwuCZso&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/ame]

And the fact that something from the RW isn't statted out shouldn't remove it from consideration in what is, essentially, a thought experiment.

How in the world is an explosively formed penetrator IED going to do as much damage as a tactical nuclear weapon? They are excellent anti-armor weapons, but it's essentially an improvised version of a shaped charge. A Hellfire Missile does 15d6 (Menace Manual p.223), that's 52 points of damage on average. These improvised devices are supposed to be doing more than 16 times that much damage?

An improvised device is supposed to be vastly superior to an actual military munition?

I didn't say it would.

I pointed out that this is enough to take out armored vehicles and all within, then extrapolated from that that it would probably do more than enough damage to kill a LeShay. That a Hellfire missile has been statted out by someone as 15d6 just goes hand in hand with my contention that modern weapons in D20 have their damage seriously nerfed...probably to 1) keep the rules consolidated and 2) to facilitate viability of mixed-genre games.

IEDs can be very powerful.

You may note that some IEDs are made from scavenged military munitions, and that devices like the the OKC truck bomb that took out the Murrah building are considered IEDs.

And, FWIW, that particular IED has proven it can toss & shred a multi-ton armored vehicle quite a distance- equivalent to or superior to certain kinds of military munitions.