Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1774874" data-attributes="member: 3146">Actually, my position in that thread is that they are useful but not quite as useful as you were making them out to be. (You'll note that my second submission used cross-class ranks to bump his spot and listen scores up to levels somewhat similar to the PsyWars). However, in this case, I don't see a lot of use for them.Spot and Listen are at their most significant when they are used to foil an ambush. However, since summoned creatures never last much longer than two minutes, they're highly unlikely to be around to notice a sneaking foe and give warning. The same is true for sleight of hand and other rolls opposed by spot. The odds of having the summoned creature around when those ranks would be useful is pretty miniscule. Unless I'm missing something, that just leaves pinpointing enemy's locations through concealment and/or spotting hiding and invisible enemies. However, those are rather difficult tasks to begin with even for creatures with decent skills and are pretty much made moot by their possession of Scent, blindsight, or other abilities. The celestial animal's scent and the Avoral's True Seeing are so much better than spot/listen for finding invisible foes, etc that it hardly seems worth mentioning the skills.Sure, but if they can do it with scent, why bother? Keen senses are a significant advantage but it seems like pressing the point a little too much to list it three times over. Surely all of the advantages here are summed up in the ones you claim for scent.I've figured that it means that there's an amount of fairly high-level instructions you're capable of giving. I mean, unseen servant is unintelligent but you can tell it to sort all of the stalks of hay in a loft by weight and pile any coins it finds in separate piles by weight and denomination. You don't have to tell it to pick up each straw individually. I figure it's the same with astral constructs. You can tell it to smash that goblin. It does it. If you want it to trip the goblin, you can tell it to do that too. If you want it to carry the rope up to the bridge and tie it around the pillar, it will do that. It seems that non-intelligent doesn't mean "incapable of following instructions" but rather "incapable of exercising independent choice or modifying instructions when it would obviously be a good idea to do so."I don't doubt this. However, you must admit that most of these spells are somewhat specialized. Glitterdust and disintegrate are about the only generally useful ones that constructs are particularly vulnerable too. Grease is also useful but, IME, is generally taken for specific anti-construct duty.Yeah, disintegrate is not uncommon and is deadly to astral constructs. However, two things are very important here:1. Astral Constructs will often have a decent touch AC (the deflection abilities really help in this regard). That won't stop everything but a 20th level wizard with a modified 20 dex (+6 gloves) will still generally have a possibility of missing the construct without rolling a 1--especially if he doesn't have point blank and precise shot.1.5 Even if the disintegrate does get the construct (as it will at least 50% of the time), as it's summoner, I'm quite likely to be glad it wasn't aimed at me. Drawing the disintegrate is a good use of an astral construct.2. Summoned monsters also have several sets of spells to which they are particularly vulnerable. Magic Circle against evil and magic circle against good are prominent here but Dismissal and Holy Word  et al also come to mind. Vulnerability to particular magics is a two-way street.</blockquote>

Verification