Does caster know the duration of her Time Stop?

[SolitonMan]

A lot of thread necromancy this week!

A maximized & extended spell would be 7-10 rounds. Since your wizard can cast into the epic levels, I would then use my remaining level 9 spells to Gate in a powerful ally (planar dragon is a good choice, per Shin Okada), use Limited Wish to Heal yourself, or plant those Delayed Blast Fireballs...

Thank you for the reply! Actually we've been off our game schedule of late, so as an exercise in futility I've been calculating epic abilities for my warlock. The feats and stuff were interesting, but once I used Excel to calculate character wealth up to arbitrary levels it became obvious that any character of sufficiently high level could afford equipment that would make class abilities mostly superfluous. For example, an amulet (say) that allows the wearer to use a maximized extended Time Stop at will.

Kind of reminds me of that old movie "The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything".

Anyway, with enough money to create magic items, pretty much anything is possible. And everything becomes mostly trivial. As long as you win initiative

Again, thanks for the information!

 

[Runestar]

You can't extend time stop any more than you can persist it (which you can't), since time stop doesn't have an actual duration.

So an empowered timestop gives 3-7 rounds, while maximized time stop gives 5 rounds. Do both for 6-7 rounds or intensify it for a solid 10 rounds.

 

[SolitonMan]

You can't extend time stop any more than you can persist it (which you can't), since time stop doesn't have an actual duration.

So an empowered timestop gives 3-7 rounds, while maximized time stop gives 5 rounds. Do both for 6-7 rounds or intensify it for a solid 10 rounds.

Ah, good catch, thanks for that. Intensify Spell is the feat I'd rather use.

Maybe you can help with my math here. Intensify Spell raises the spell level to 16, which means that the minimum caster level is 27 (spell level + 11, per the epic rules). So then the item cost would be 16 x 27 X 2000 x 4 (spell duration based on rounds, although subjective in this case) = 3,456,000 gp. I don't think that the x10 multiplier applies in this case based on my reading of that aspect of epic magic item creation.

Kind of pricey, if you could even find someone to craft it...not to mention the year of time it would take (more or less) - if the crafter has Efficient Item Creation.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

By RAW ... the caster doesn't know unless it's maximized; however, if someone wanted to figure it out, I would consider allowing them to attempt it with a Spellcraft check with a very hard DC ... at least 50. I would roll this check in secret, so the player doesn't know how well they did.

I'd allow a caster to spend a standard action while the time stop is going to figure out how long he has left (without error), I don't know. Sounds fair. Notably, by level 17+, a caster probably is starting to jack up his spellcraft mod in anticipation of epic levels anyway.