Protecting against Blasphemy

[Nail]

A good solution? Become a Psion. They have powers that can be activated even while dazed.

No kidding.

At any rate, one of my groups recently fought demons with the Blasphemy power. It really sucked to be them; while the hezrous used blasphemy, the other demons carved up the party's Ftr and Mnk like a roast of lamb.

Now they carry around a wand of silence, which they use at the start of every combat in which they think there might be demons.

No kidding.

 

[Nail]

"Dazed: The creature is unable to act normally. A dazed creature can take no actions, but has no penalty to AC."

This is the real killer, and happens even if your level is equal to the caster level.

Sucks. Compare to the supposedly equivalent Holy Word and revel in the suck-atude.

 

[moritheil]

The Str penalty is moderately nasty, but I'm sure most fighter types can still do something at that level.

But on reflection, the dazing is potentially very unpleasant. An at will Blasphemy bad guy could sit there uttering one per round, while their mooks carve up the party... boring and likely to lead to hacked off players, but what do you do about it?

Mock and taunt your players for their feebleness?

Of course, an at will Blasphemy caster might be very confident in his or her ability to suppress the PCs no matter what, so they might simply be taken prisoner . . . if the bad guys stand to gain anything from it.

 

[RangerWickett]

Last week in my game we executed a tactical strike against an evil vizier who had been giving us trouble, trying to make us do his bidding. It consisted of scry, silence, and then a silent teleport. We beat the crap out of him, grappled him, and kept him from casting any spells. Most satisfying.

 

[Dark Dragon]

Use Shapechange to take construct form (hm, helps as usual only wizards)...
Counterspelling is always a good choice.
Increase SR (AFAIK, there is cleric spell that gives SR).
House rule Blasphemy: Use deafened instead of dazed (as does Holy Word, IIRC).

As a side question: What is the CL of a fiendish red dragon's Blasphemy SLA?

 

[Nail]

You mean "Half-fiend Red Dragon".

And the answer is: "Caster level equals the creature’s HD, and the save DC is Charisma-based."

 

[Nail]

Minimum age for a Half-fiendish Red dragon with Blasphemy would be Young (13 HD), BTW.

Imagine. Such a dragon is CR 10, yet it's Caster level is 13. Sounds like those APL 10 adventurers will be using more than 20% of their resources.....as they will be Dazed and Weakened automatically.

 

[Dark Dragon]

You mean "Half-fiend Red Dragon".

And the answer is: "Caster level equals the creature’s HD, and the save DC is Charisma-based."

Yep, I meant half-fiend red dragon.

As CL equals a creature's HD, a CR 23 half-fiend old red dragon (28 HD) would kill an ECL 18 party in an instant and an ECL 23 party would be in serious trouble unless every PC has Freedom of Movement online (that does not protect against the weakening and daze effect, BTW)....Nice

 

[moritheil]

Yep, I meant half-fiend red dragon.

As CL equals a creature's HD, a CR 23 half-fiend old red dragon (28 HD) would kill an ECL 18 party in an instant and an ECL 23 party would be in serious trouble unless every PC has Freedom of Movement online (that does not protect against the weakening and daze effect, BTW)....Nice

CR, which is what I think you mean, does not equal a creature's HD automatically. See elementals.

 

[werk]

I got TPK'd as a player by blasphemy. We were low level, and working under a big mage guy who had a cambion 'under his control'. So the big guy disappears, mysteriously, and we effectively broke into his keep to see if we could save him or help him in some way. We fought some low-level outsiders and found the cambion locked in his bedroom. The cambion convinced us hook-line-sinker...thanks goodness you're here, the big guy is in trouble, just follow me. We followed him into a lower part of the keep (where scrying and teleport and such didn't work) and he got ambush, surprise, and several minutes to kill everyone at his leisure becaue he had blasphemy 1/round.

After the encounter the players were all a little upset and the DM said "I love blasphemy!"

At lowish level, with regular non-anti-blasphemy character builds we couldn't figure out anything that would have saved us. The only defense for this 7th level evil cleric spell was to be higher level and have SR or more tricks in our hat. Of course if we were higher level we wouldn't have all been paralyzed.