In a world without sunlight...

[Rampant]

None of which addresses the issue of the sense motive rolls, except maybe that the team isn't particularly familiar with the dominated PCs and as such do not get insane recognition bonuses, which they shouldn't need.

Honestly if your players aren't even gonna try to survive there's not much you can do to fix it.

 

[Greenfield]

The Cleric/Fighter is new to the party (Been with them for a few days), and the Cleric has been staying with the servants much of the time, and with the Merchant the rest.

Since the takeover, they've had maybe an hour (during which time they weren't with him much of the time, being scattered as they are).

So give them time and somebody will notice. Someone will ask what he found in his search, and he'll be in direct conflict with his orders.

But until something occurs to put him in conflict, there isn't much for them to notice. "Go about your business", by definition, doesn't cause him to behave differently in any way from normal.

 

[Rampant]

However going about your business and acting normal are two different things. The spell description is pretty clear on how out of it the subjects are, and a command to 'act normal' would require the thrall to make bluff checks in order to fake not being a zombie, and that's using a liberal interpretation.

You may have a point about the interactions up till now but you're pushing it as it is. There better be some dice rolls before too much more happens.

 

[Arrowhawk]

Regarding Dominate: I'm a bit lost here.

Charm makes someone your friend, but nothing more. It doesn't really grant any control.

Geas gives you a mission, but you can refuse or ignore it if you choose, you can talk about it, and even seek to have it removed. Coercion, but no control.

if Dominate turns someone into your zombie/slave, then...

Is there some spell that grants a level of control in between "pretty please" and "...brains..."?

Lacking such a thing, I'm tempted to house rule that Dominate is detectable by a Sense Motive if and only if the person is currently carrying out unusual orders. If ordered to "Go on about your business", their behavior wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

In the absence of RAW which covers this type of thing specifically I can only have an opinion. In any event, it's all good. Let us know how the session turns out.

 

[Dandu]

People, people, let me settle this debate once and for all to show you how a man dominated by a vampire behaves by citing the authoritative work on the subject.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXcJTbgt1N8&feature=related]Dracula Very Funny Scene - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Greenfield]

Follow Up

Okay, the questions remain unsettled.

The party mounted up and rode off on a side quest, and we spent the entire game session not dealing with the vampire or the Frankenstein monster at all. They never interacted with the dominated Cleric again at all.

As a bonus, I think they may have made the goal of their side quest unachievable.

They were in a tunnel, a more or less natural cave that lead them a mile down the way and about a quarter mile deep (steep slope) when they ran into the problem they had to solve: I'd used that trick I mentioned elsewhere of placing a Wall of Stone on the Ethereal plane, coinciding with a real world passage. People with Bracers of Armor or Mage Armor spells couldn't pass. Since this was also one of the physical passages to the underworld (Land of the dead), the spirits of the fallen couldn't pass either. That was the problem they'd set out to deal with.

All they had to do was push. A DC20 STR check would have done it, since it's merely heavy/massive, not actually anchored to anything.

After the party rolled a few 4s and 5s, the Druid had the smart idea of walking over to the side of the tunnel and casting Soften Earth and Stone on the wall. The wall that was helping hold up the ceiling. The one supporting a quarter mile of earth between them and the surface.

Dice hit the table to see if there was a cave in, and I stacked the odds in favor of the party. I let them call whether they liked high numbers or low ones, and then I let them call which die was the high one, red or white.

Two bad calls on their part and the wall was collapsing and bringing the roof with it. I gave everyone a dice roll to get clear before the ceiling hit them. Now everyone was rolling hot, with 19s and 20s across the board. Except for the Druid, who rolled a 3. Fitting somehow.

Note: The Druid's player is normally a *whole* hell of a lot smarter than this. I have no idea what he was thinking would happen.

In any case, the party dug like mad to get him out, and were working frantically when he popped out on his own: Wild shape into Giant Badger, with a burrowing speed of 10 per round.

In any case, they now have no way to readily reach the spot where the ethereal barrier is placed. They don't have the caster levels anyplace to cast Move Earth or Disintegrate, or even Wall of Stone to shore the thing up while they work on it. They can summon Earth Elementals, but they're hardly around long enough to really do much.

Anyway, for the first time in many years, the Halloween special dungeon wasn't finished by Halloween.

 

[Rampant]

Cast mage armor on the earth elemental and let them push.

 

[Greenfield]

Every party member except the Monk is a spell caster, but all of them except the Bard went multi-class. The best we could do is a Summon Monster 3, which gets us a Small Earth Elemental, max. And if you want it to do anything more complex than fight, you need to be able to speak Terran. That limits it to the Bard, who happens to be an NPC at the moment, since he's my character.

They do plan to bring him next time, which means smaller EXP for the group (adding the NPC means it gets divided a bit thinner), so it's not a popular move.

Now, the Mage Armor spell can affect the Ethereal Wall of Stone, and the Elemental can glide through earth like a fish going through water, but will the Mage Armor spell glide through as well? Tough question.

And if it does, won't it also glide through the Ethereal stone the same way?

I hate to be the kind of hard-nose Dm that shuts down creative ideas, but I'd have a hard time rationalizing that it could be that conveniently, selectively immaterial, if you see what I mean.

A perfectly valid solution would be to just walk away, acknowledging that there are problems in the world that they aren't yet ready to tackle. The effect of the blockage is that sometimes, when people in the area die, their spirits are trapped in and around the mortal realm. This means more Ghosts than usual in the area, and sometimes when someone should be dead their spirit can get back into the body and live again, at least temporarily.

Note that I'm not the one who came up with these limitations. The "Land of the Dead is Temporarily Closed" theme came from another DM in our game and he came up with the rules. All I'm doing is abusing it for the sake of a Halloween scene.

In any case, a Small Earth Elemental has a Strength of 17, so a +3 modifier. Needs to roll a 17 or better on the dice while he's there. Figure it can Earth Glide as fast as it normally moves, 20 feet per round, and figure that the spell area was 50 feet across (5th level Druid), so we'll call it a round lost to movement. That leaves 10 rounds of Strength checks to roll that 17.

Multiple castings will probably be called for. Bull's Strength would improve their odds considerably.

So yeah, if it can work at all, it has good odds of success.

 

[Rampant]

Elementals can selectively slide through earth-stone, otherwise they'd never be able to break or lift stone stuff. If you let them throw boulders or break stone walls, then they can control the effect.

 

[Greenfield]

The question is, can the Mage Armor selectively glide through earth and stone? It's effectively a force field around the subject, after all.