Can you do inifinite damage?

[Tolen Mar]

I've never had a DM say that to me...which is sad, cause I would probably build a 'balanced' character with abilities I actually wanted. I'd probably be the only one. I can see it now:

Three munchkin sword saints and one esoteric cleric with every language available, as well as about 50 knowledges...

'I'll just wait over here till they're all dead, shall I?'

 

[Dragonblade]

One day out of curiosity I looked up the infamous hulking hurler builds on the WotC Character Optimization boards. . .

When I saw they were estimating damage output in the billions of HP for that build I had to look closer.

They were talking about taking a neutron star, using Polymorph Any Object to turn it into a boulder, throwing that boulder at a target, and have an antimagic field set up right in front of the target to negate the Polymorph, causing the target to be hit by a neutron star thrown by a Hulking Hurler and using the improvised thrown weapon rules and plugging in estimated masses of neutron stars to get a damage estimate.

At that point I realized I was on the wrong message boards.

Indeed. Back out slowly. Don't make any sudden moves and don't make eye contact, and you should be able to get out safely.

 

[Dragonblade]

-sighs- then, at the other end of the scale, you get the ones who go a bit silly. Had one guy who wanted to use his snake familiar as a whip... or the guy who wanted to describe his character going to the toilet, he was kicked out with short shift, believe me.

I had a player ask me for a salmon for a familiar. And no this was not an aquatic based campaign. Upon asking him how he would carry said familiar with him, he said he would carry it with him in a big tank...

Even more ridiculous was the fact that he was playing a sorcerer with a strength of about 8...

 

[moritheil]

A kid? Bragging? Stop the presses!

 

[Squire James]

I admit I was once guilty of claiming I had a wizard that created a race of subservient monsters whose offensive powers exceeded anything in Deities and Demigods, and were completely invincible to everything but the Stinking Cloud spell. Aside from that... don't ask!

I have a feeling just about everyone's been through a phase like this at one time or another. I mean, where ELSE do guys like Superman come from, anyway?

 

[Fifth Element]

There is a combination that can do infinite damage in a single hit: exploding damage dice from Aura of Chaos (Bo9S) plus a feat (Dragonmarked I think?) that lets you deal max damage on a hit.
-blarg

That one's easy. Aura of Chaos applies when a die "rolls its maximum amount". A d2 that rolls a 1 (regardless of whether it's considered a 2) does not roll its maximum amount, so the exploding die does not apply. Note that the rules say you can continue to reroll if the die shows its maximum possible result. Not that you do maximum possible damage.

Just like most any abusive combo, all that's needed is a reasonable ruling from a DM. Or in this case, just a reading of the actual rules.

 

[Fifth Element]

They were talking about taking a neutron star, using Polymorph Any Object to turn it into a boulder, throwing that boulder at a target, and have an antimagic field set up right in front of the target to negate the Polymorph, causing the target to be hit by a neutron star thrown by a Hulking Hurler and using the improvised thrown weapon rules and plugging in estimated masses of neutron stars to get a damage estimate.

Wait, what?

Sometime I wonder why I don't spend more time over there. Then we have reminders like this. Wow.

 

[Slife]

That one's easy. Aura of Chaos applies when a die "rolls its maximum amount". A d2 that rolls a 1 (regardless of whether it's considered a 2) does not roll its maximum amount, so the exploding die does not apply. Note that the rules say you can continue to reroll if the die shows its maximum possible result. Not that you do maximum possible damage.

Just like most any abusive combo, all that's needed is a reasonable ruling from a DM. Or in this case, just a reading of the actual rules.

Actually, the rule is "treat it as if you had rolled a 2". Which makes the combo work.

Note that they decided that a weapon that does 1 damage is ineligible, since you don't actually roll it.

 

[DestroyYouAlot]

when i was gainlessly employed at a gaming store, i would hear all sorts of folks bragging about their games from the 15 year kid that swore up and down that he rolled natural 18s for every stat... for every character he ever played to a 'charming' fellow with some rather nazi-like viewpoints who would rant incessantly to anyone nearby about how his game was the coolest game ever because his party went and killed all the gods by level six, exterminated all the elves in the multiverse by level 8, and blew up all the planets by level 10.
i did once play a game with a dm that stated, during character creation, 'oh, just give your character whatever stats you want and whatever magic items you want.'
sadly, the game turned out to be nowhere near as fun as it might seem.

I've never had a DM say that to me...which is sad, cause I would probably build a 'balanced' character with abilities I actually wanted. I'd probably be the only one. I can see it now:

Three munchkin sword saints and one esoteric cleric with every language available, as well as about 50 knowledges...

'I'll just wait over here till they're all dead, shall I?'

LOL

I almost have the opposite problem. Some of my guys refuse to be restrained from making completely self-destructive decisions during character creation because it's fun.

I remember we did this one-shot. I had this crappy 3e FR module that I felt like running; it was a pretty railroad-y hack-and-slash adventure that I figured I could ram them through in a night or two. Felt like slumming it for a bit. So I tell them, "go nuts - take full gp for your level, spend it on whatever." Not like it's gonna hurt my actual campaign. So one guy wants to use the magic item creation rules and make something custom. I say sure, figuring he's gonna make something horribly broken that we can have fun with for a night.

He instead proceeds to spend nearly his entire allotment of GP on a sentient grey ioun stone. With an ego score. And a host of abilities which have little utility short of making his PC a puppet of this horribly sadistic, thoroughly insane, useless rock that orbits his head all day. His PC doesn't like the thing, but in more of an "Odd Couple" way then a "I have a magical rock that spins around my head and makes me hurt people" way. They argue a lot (although, since the rest of the party can only hear him and not the stone, it doesn't come off that way).

Priceless.

 

[Tolen Mar]

Here's to us roleplayers! If it weren't for us, There'd be no point in playing more than a few sessions. We'd all be like a first-person shooter. Once you've run through it once, shot all the bad guys, and seen the final cutscene, you move on to the next one.