OK, my keyboard is back and I've got a lot to reply to!
if the Cathedral costs 1,000,000gp total, then it would take 4 Cleric/days of effort.
OK, that's the minimum time. Thanks for pulling together the rules on miracle and strongholds. Putting a gp cost on it is a useful way of thinking. At 18th level 1,000,000 gp is about 1/2 of the party's total expected wealth, so that might be too big of a challenge -- I was going to be offering big treasure at the end, but not that much.
the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook says it takes 1 week per 10,000 gp of the cost...
Which would suggest the answer would be "about 2 years" for that 1,000,000gp cathedral.
Reaction 1: Cool, there are actual rules!
Reaction 2: A skill challenge over 24 months is not going to feel right crammed into one session. (I thought this post would show up as a "forked thread" from
http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...ill-challenge-high-level-d-d-3rd-edition.html , but it didn't.)
In the real world, cathedrals generally took 15-100+ years to build, with long stoppages when their patrons ran out of money. Those suckers aren't inexpensive.
There's a consequence for failure I've never used before. "Another 1 on the check? OK, the cathedral proceeds as planned -- anyone who's not an Elf might not live to see it finished, though."
The real adventure hook here, of course, isn't that you're building a cathedral. It's that someone or something already claims the site that the cathedral is to be built on, and how you deal with them affects the outcome of the race. That's the real challenge.
That was somewhat demoralizing to read at first, because it strikes true -- "Pelor wants a new cathedral" is not a hook my players are going to be naturally enthusiastic about. Maybe if I told them they could design it as a stronghold as well -- but we're only running a 5-episode campaign.
If you're saying I need some human conflict in there, I did have that in mind. The party cleric is competing to "out-holy" Pelor's other two high clerics for the opportunity to evangelize a brand new plane. I was hoping to establish one as an open rival who scrys on the party's plans, and the other as a quiet man who shows up on the day of a challenge with ranks and ranks of paladins and pilgrims. So one psychological challenge and one physical.
Washington National Cathedral is built of limestone and weighs 150,000 tons... 150 pounds per cubic foot... 2 million cubic feet. But Washington National Cathedral is pretty damn big, so let's assume you're a bit more conservative and scale it down to a mere 1 million, and we get:
A sorceror/favored soul can build a cathedral in 29 days.
A generalist wizard/cleric can build a cathedral in 47 days.
A specialized conjuror or a cleric of earth can build a cathedral in 36 days.
I know I asked an interesting question when so many people want to think about the answer. I think "a month and a half" is the answer I was wishing for -- so much faster than standard human, but not instant and godlike. Enough time you can conceivably have the workers run into problems and come back to you.
There's no such thing as a wand or a staff of
wall of stone in the SRD, so you couldn't just do it one after another, either. (Looks like you were calculating about 900 castings, so even if you did have 19 wands it would take 90 minutes to do.) On the right site, though,
wall of ice is twice as long and four times as thick as Wall of Stone, and it fits on a wand...
While you've been spending 2-3 minutes a day conjuring up stonemasonry and the rest of the time kicking back with your coterie of scantily clad grey elf wizard-groupies, your fighter buddy has been hard at work chopping down trees and hauling bags of sand to the site.
lol, at least in a skill challenge he'll get an official success for his Profession (lumberjack) instead of just standing around cheering the wizard.
you'll cast fabricate a few times (one day's worth of castings will be more than enough for this); the sand will turn into stained glass windows, the trees will turn into pews, and voila! Cathedral complete.
This description actually sounds like the most fun magical part. Maybe to shorten the time frame of the skill challenge I should have them
decorate a cathedral. That's where all the cool touches like capturing gargoyles and putting icons of yourself everywhere come in. And I just long to have them put in stained glass that I can then have something crash through (even though that would be mean).
Why would the PCs not simply teleport to the destination?
The real answer is "that would mess up my idea." Maybe that's bad. But here are justifications: there's no reliable description of it because it's obscured by endless throngs of zombies? And covering two divination spells I know about, they can't scry on the zombies around it because they don't know any individuals? And prying eyes can't get through the zombies?
What do you usually do if you want a "get the ring to the Cracks of Doom" quest at high level, put dimensional anchors everywhere? Or is that just another quest like "find out who murdered the king" that you can't assign after a certain level because there are spells that auto-beat it?
Of course, a real wizard will cast time stop, then fire out two castings of major arcana to produce a cathedral approximately the same size as the Little Metropole Cathedral in Athens (approx size 170,000 cubic feet, total casting volume provided by the spells 288,000 cubic feet). He would then just hope no-one inspects it too closely.
Total creation time: 6 seconds.
Oh, that's so great. And I can see a <strike>rogue</strike><strike>spellcaster</strike> rogue trying to salvage a failed skill challenge using that as a Bluff check, too.
You see me waffling there between rogues (who have Bluff) and spellcasters (who have illusions)? That shouldn't have to be. The skill challenge would work better if
everyone could use magic on their turns, the fighter and rogue would just do it by calling in favors from other spellcasters (or paying for them).
The problem with all of these assumptions is that they're based on the idea that the spell produces the kind of quality you look for in a cathedral. When you say "cathedral" you mean a work of art meant to last for ages. Masterwork is just the minimum baseline here
This is one of the posts that got me thinking about making the challenge to
decorate the cathedral instead of constructing it. Not just laying stone on stone but using Stone Shape to make all the decorative touches on the edges (what are those called?) It also opens up the skill challenge to a broader array of skills (like Appraise).
Thanks so much for everyone's replies, reading the Enworld discussion of an encounter can sometimes be more fun than running the thing!
