Complex Concentration Question

[Kelleris]

So my Bard/Lyric Thaumaturge/Sublime Chord is somewhere halfway through a converted version of the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords and we're throwing down with an evil goblin king who's wielding the eponymous axe, his wereboar berserker (heh) minions, and some high-level cleric of Maglubiyet. I, being something of an anti-caster, have ended up with the unenviable job of using my (level 14) character to prevent the (level 18) wizardly BBEG from killing everyone before the nasty-in-their-own-right mooks and pumped-up goblinoids can be taken care of. Naturally, I figure that I had better go in with everything I've got, which led to the following rather confusing sequence of actions:

Archmage goes first, readies an action to (I later find out), wound me grievously if I try to cast a spell. So when I start to cast, the mage drops a quickened Otiluke's resilient sphere and a delayed blast fireball on me. I survive because of my freakishly-high-for-a-primary-caster Reflex save (go multiple Bard-type classes!), and get off the spells because of the miracle of Melodic Casting, but decide that, clearly, it's time to go right to my biggest guns.

I cast a swift action creaking cacophony from a lesser spell matrix, and follow up with a song of arcane power to get my CL up to the archmages and strip his magical defenses off of him with a greater dispel magic. So far, so good, but I also happen to have an item familiar with imbue familiar with spell ability on it, who has already used its action to use arcane sight to find out what the archmage had up already. This strikes me as an excellent time to have the +2 to CL from the harmonic chorus spell, so I have my familiar cast celerity to grab a standard action and throw a harmonic chorus on me. Many successful dispel checks are rolled (yay!), and I finish my turn.

I begin to suspect that this is still not enough, despite the exorbitantly high Concentration DC of the cacophony and the debuffing I laid down. And he's going to go before I get to go again, because his readied action left me right after his initiative count. So I cast celerity myself and throw out a distort speech spell, because an archmage with a 70-80% spell failure is an archmage I can (maybe) live with. Unfortunately, he gets a 17 on his Fortitude save (dastard!), which leaves him right in an annoying sweet spot - if my familiar's harmonic chorus spell is still up, he fails the save, but if it isn't, he makes it. I would really, really like for him to fail this saving throw.

The problem is that my familiar is dazed, from the celerity spell it used to cast the harmonic chorus in the first place. But, because of the second celerity that I myself cast, this chorus-enhanced casting of distort speech is actually occurring between my first and second turns - my familiar has not had the opportunity to not be able to take a standard action to concentrate on maintaining the chorus. So is it still up, or not? Did it go caput the instant the familiar became no longer able to take actions for 1 round (though still conscious), by dazing itself, or does it end at the beginning of my next turn the turn after I use it, when I "decide" not to concentrate on it?

I'm sure there's a simple answer somewhere, but I can't find it, after checking the PHB skill description and concentration duration description in the spells chapter... We're paused at the top of the next round until next session, and this is kinda life-and-death. Does anyone know how this should work out?

 

[frankthedm]

Archmage goes first, readies an action to (I later find out), wound me grievously if I try to cast a spell. So when I start to cast, the mage drops a quickened Otiluke's resilient sphere and a delayed blast fireball on me. I survive because of my freakishly-high-for-a-primary-caster Reflex save (go multiple Bard-type classes!), and get off the spells because of the miracle of Melodic Casting, but decide that, clearly, it's time to go right to my biggest guns.

You got screwed! A ready only gives one standard, move or free action. The archmage got one or the other, NOT both.

Readying an Action http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/specialInitiativeActions.htm#ready
You can ready a standard action, a move action, or a free action. To do so, specify the action you will take and the conditions under which you will take it. Then, any time before your next action, you may take the readied action in response to that condition. The action occurs just before the action that triggers it. If the triggered action is part of another character’s activities, you interrupt the other character. Assuming he is still capable of doing so, he continues his actions once you complete your readied action. Your initiative result changes. For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately ahead of the character whose action triggered your readied action.

You can take a 5-foot step as part of your readied action, but only if you don’t otherwise move any distance during the round.

 

[Kelleris]

Hah, you know I suspected after the fact that that was the case, but since I made my Perform-as-Concentration check anyway, I figured he could have just done the sphere on his turn and readied the fireball and it would have come to the same thing.

So do you have no opinion on the concentration duration thing, or are you arguing that since the DM screwed me there, he should rule in my favor here?

 

[AuraSeer]

So the heart of the question is, if you have a running spell with Duration: Concentration and you become Dazed, does the spell end immediately or keep going until your next turn?

IMO the spell ends immediately. The duration rules say in part, "Anything that could break your concentration when casting a spell can also break your concentration while you’re maintaining one, causing the spell to end." I think that becoming Dazed during casting (e.g. by a readied daze spell) would prevent you from completing the spell, and therefore by extension, becoming Dazed at another time will end any spell you're maintaining.

There is some wiggle room, though. The Dazed condition doesn't specifically say that it "breaks your concentration," so you could argue that the rule I quoted above does not apply. The success of this argument depends on how much your DM cares about precise, literal wording.

 

[frankthedm]

are you arguing that since the DM screwed me there, he should rule in my favor here?

Oh, hell no. He should be using every trick he has to shut down all the splat material being trown around. Just that particular trick he tried should not work.

 

[Kelleris]

Oh, hell no. He should be using every trick he has to shut down all the splat material being trown around. Just that particular trick he tried should not work.

Yeah, I might feel bad about all that if I weren't having to deal with a mage 4 levels higher than me all on my lonesome...

Hating on non-core material doesn't seem like a very fair criterion for making a ruling to me. I find AuraSeer's argument pretty convincing, though. Dang, unless someone else has a suggestion for how to play it, I guess I'll have to hope the creaking cacophony holds him up for a turn or two.

 

[frankthedm]

Yeah, I might feel bad about all that if I weren't having to deal with a mage 4 levels higher than me all on my lonesome...

Hating on non-core material doesn't seem like a very fair criterion for making a ruling to me.

You SHOULD be dead in that situation. The fact you might not get killed, seems to indicate to me, that the non core material in use IS way too strong.

 

[Notmousse]

As an item familiar I can only guess it's a type of Construct. As such should it not be immune to being dazed?

 

[Kelleris]

As an item familiar I can only guess it's a type of Construct. As such should it not be immune to being dazed?

No, it's immune to stunning, a generally worse condition, and to mind-affecting effects, which includes daze and daze monster, but not to the status condition of being dazed per se. I don't think anything is straight-up immune to being dazed, actually, except perhaps for mindless creatures, which is the only reason the celerity line of spells isn't ridiculously broken.

 

[Kelleris]

You SHOULD be dead in that situation. The fact you might not get killed, seems to indicate to me, that the non core material in use IS way too strong.

Actually I only use that many splat sources because it's basically impossible to build the kind of character I wanted just out of the core rulebook - a bard quasi-primary spellcaster focusing on sonic effects and metamagic. I could do it in the core, but the character would be pretty weak, as compared to a genericized cleric or sorcerer, so it's really just about keeping up with the other, IMO more boring, options. It's not like I'm going for a really broken character by starting off with a Bard, after all.

The reasons I have a shot at this aren't primarily the use of non-core stuff. They're

a) the fact that NPCs are notoriously over-CRed, especially at higher levels,

b) the fact that I got lucky on my original saves, either of which could have instantly taken me out of the fight had I not made them,

c) that I was able to plan ahead for this fight, since I made a very high Knowledge (arcana) roll to ID the archmage in question and we knew from prior information gathering what room the guy was likely to be in and with what allies, so I could prep a plan beforehand (setting up my familiar with just the right imbue familiar with spell ability spells, setting up my spell matrices early on, buffing with greater heroism, arcane sight, and the like, and being conservative with my spell use in the main dungeon since I knew I'd have to deal with this guy), and

d) that I'm good at screwing with arcane casters, as a strength of the character - an 18th level fighter-, cleric-, or rogue-type would eat my lunch unless I got very lucky (and I know this from painful experience).

Given those advantages, a core-only character would have a shot too, as long as he was built with one of the strengths of the basic character types. A bard primary spellcaster is just such a weird character that I need to cast a wider net just to keep up. So yeah, I'm more powerful than an identically-concepted character just from core - but more powerful than a well-done, core-only cleric, druid, or theme-less wizard? I doubt it.