Death blade enhancement

Cheiromancer

Adventurer
Death blade: A weapon with this enhancement always inflicts lethal damage; it bypasses regeneration and cannot be used to subdue an enemy. Furthermore, if a death blade inflicts the killing blow to a creature, that creature cannot be raised; it is treated as if slain by death magic. Only slashing or piercing weapons can be death blades.

pre-requisites: death knell
cost: +1

Too cheap?
 

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Too cheap.

Regeneration is a very open-ended ability, what bypasses one is completely ineffective against another. So, it's not like Sure Striking, where it's something you could consistently get around just by jacking up the Enhancement bonus. Then, there's the overkill issue; with DR, you can brute-force over the threshold if need be, or use spell damage, or whatever. With Regeneration, it's all subdual, and you can't die from subdual damage (although a lot of people house rule that you can), so you NEED to find out what bypasses it.
Now, Regeneration is far rarer than DR, so that part might be balanced at a +1 price, but it's really hard to say.

Then, there's the "no raise" part. This can be really important or really useless, depending on the specifics of the campaign. Personally, I think it's a bad idea. I mean, look at the two possibilities:
1> NPC has weapon and uses it on player: okay, it's a +1 weapon enchantment, so you'd be encountering it at low levels, but requires level 7 or higher spells to deal with. If you lose one of your players at low level, the character is basically gone unless you pull a deus ex machina.
2> PC has weapon and uses it in combat: More or less useless, unless he kills the Big Bad with it, in which case there's a good chance he didn't make the killing blow, so it's not the sort of thing you'd plan around.

As written, I'd put the whole thing at a +2, but you'd probably be better off just making a +1 that didn't have the death spell part. Just my opinion, of course.

If you REALLY want to keep the death spell part, make it a power of a unique item. To me, it's just an ability that doesn't belong in a cheap enchantment.
 

Why not make it an intelligent weapon. It has specific foes it will kill and that may not be raised. That specific foe cannot be healed except by magic.
 

Spatzimaus said:
If you REALLY want to keep the death spell part, make it a power of a unique item. To me, it's just an ability that doesn't belong in a cheap enchantment.

I definately agree with Spat on this.
 

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