OP Builds As Gods

[Chamomile]

I heard a concept a while back that I have now decided to steal: broken builds from 3.X are the pantheon. They're hyper-powerful adventurers who found some way to break reality in half and now they've come together and decided that nobody gets to do that ever again, which means if you discover some kind of infinite power loop, inevitables come to kill you before you can complete it. If it's a brand new power loop and the inevitables don't recognize what you're up to until you're already seeing benefits, you get invited to join the god club. If it's a known path to power because it was taken by an existing god, or just because it's super obvious long before it starts to pay out, the inevitables murder you and drag your soul off to some kind of super prison, probably Carceri.

The key component of this is having lots of broken builds to make into deities. The only ones I know are the Wish, the Word, and Pun-Pun, and I'm pretty sure I want the Wish to just be a ring that the Word has. So what other terribly broken builds are there for D&D and how do they work? Bonus points if the build in question is clearly aligned with a specific outer plane or lends itself clearly to a specific divine portfolio. I don't really care about domains, because those are super-abundant to the point where basically any concept for any deity will have at least a few of them, and most actually common concepts have eight slightly different domains to choose from.

[Grek]

Omniscificer obviously gets to be the Hadesian Knowledge God in this pantheon. Likewise, the Jumplomancer is our Ysgardian God of Athleticism. For kicks, include the Psionic Sandwich as a johnny-come-lately trickster deity.

[Username17]

Pun Pun has always been very weird to me. 99% of the shit people claim that build does it actually can't do. The unlimited wishes, the magic immunity, the divine ranks, none of that shit is remotely by-the-book legal. "All" it is is a never ending stat ratchet where you can convert downtime to permanent increases to your Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity and never have to stop. That's fine, but it's no better than the old 3.0 Spelldancer or 3.5 Artificer Skilldancer. Never ending stat ratchets aren't unique. And actually becoming Pun Pun isn't particularly clever, it's just asking a high level NPC to cast polymorph any object on you - it's no different or more exciting than level 2 entrance into Beholder Mage (followed naturally by getting a divine casting catchup class like Blighter and then Mystic Theurging them because that is how we roll when the DM lets us use PAO for the NPC services cost at 1st level).

So anyway:

God	Portfolio	Broken Gimmick
The Word	Opposition	Abuses caster level calculations to autoslay everything with Holy Words and Blasphemies.
The Wish	Bargains	Uses wording changes in 3.5 to successfully Wish for More Wishes
The Dancer	Art	Uses Perform check results to calculate bonuses to Charisma and then makes new larger perform check results to calculate bigger bonuses etc. Then has an arbitrarily large
Master of the Rod	Craft	Uses Use Magic Device check results through Artificer Staves to calculate bonuses to the Use Magic Device Skill, repeates indefinitely, and then uses arbitrarily large UMD results to make arbitrarily bonuses to everything else.
The Favored	Magic	Has personal immunity to own Antimagic Field. Also has a bunch of metamagic shenanigans but it doesn't really matter because they are literally playing a different game to everyone else.
Pun Pun	Strength, Boasting	Uses asymmetric bonuses from permanent size changes to set physical stats to arbitrarily high values.
The Great Mother	Vision	Qualifies way too early for catch-up caster classes and has Arcane and Divine casting at level 9 at level 9. Then does fucking whatever.
Pariah	Disease	Infects self with lycanthropy (or whatever), then loses a level, then restores level loss, then cures lycanthropy, then repeats until an arbitrarily large number of levels are gained.
Cacophony	Debate	Uses psionics to split and refuse self and resulpt own brain over and over again until they have literally all skills and powers.
Rust	Corruption	Has immunity to taint death but not immunity to taint score increases. Uses the tainted magic rules and then literally masturbates to an arbitrarily large taint score and thus arbitrarily large virtual casting stat.
Shadow Over the Sun	Darkness	Uses Create Undead. Then starts sacrificing chickens to fuel their army of Shadows. Then kills every single creature in their world.

-Username17

[spongeknight]

Is the goal of this campaign to come up with new tricks and therefore join the pantheon?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I did something similar with a few gods in my homebrew. The magic god got to his position by abusing loopholes in reality and now can't be removed from the pantheon, so the other gods tolerate his presence. Think this:

[Chamomile]

Pun Pun has always been very weird to me. 99% of the shit people claim that build does it actually can't do.

Unfortunately, Pun Pun is also the most famous superbuild there is. If I can convince people that Pun Pun can't actually get the divine ranks and etc., they usually don't have any difficulty with the idea that Pun Pun is only famous because he was the first superbuild that went viral, and he's actually just the tip of the iceberg with regards to broken 3.5 builds. Unfortunately, that first part is often much harder than it should be. Leaving Pun Pun out entirely is conspicuous, though.

The exact function of these aren't all clear to me, and a lot of them have really hard to Google names. Exactly what rule the Dancer is using? Perform checks don't seem to do anything with Charisma bonuses in the SRD. Also, can someone link or post an explanation of how the Favored, the Great Mother, the Pariah, the Cacophony, and the Shadow Over the Sun do what they do? It doesn't seem to be contained in the SRD and their descriptions don't contain any keywords that make them easy to look up like the Master of the Rod.

I found the Psionic Sandwich build and it's hilarious, but I don't see why it's break-the-game levels of powerful. Am I missing something? If not, I think it's probably better as a failed attempt rather than an actual deity.

Is the goal of this campaign to come up with new tricks and therefore join the pantheon?

This isn't the kind of goal a GM can set for players, since the GM can't decide for the players that they want to join the pantheon. It does sound like something a player might want to pull off, but I'm not sure there's any new tricks to be mined out of 3.X at this point. Maybe if we include Pathfinder material, but then you get backwards compatibility issues.

[rampaging-poet]

Shadow Over the Sun creates a shadow using Create Undead, then channels negative energy to command it. He then feeds the shadow other creatures, spawning more shadows which are under his commanded shadow's control. This allows him to command an arbitrarily large and growing army of shadows to sweep across the land and extinguish essentially all life.

[Chamomile]

then channels negative energy to command it.

How does this work? Saying that it's specifically "channeling negative energy" makes me think that it's probably not just casting the Command Undead spell (which anyone who can raise Shadows at all surely has plenty of, but which requires an opposed Charisma check against a creature with +1 CHA to get them to actually follow an order, although if we assume any given Shadow is game for killing everything and the Shadow Over the Sun's only goal is to kill everything, he won't need Charisma checks to get his Shadow army to follow those orders). In the SRD, Shadows can only make more Shadows when they kill humanoids, so feeding them chickens is useless. Is this a 3.0/3.5 change, or some special trick of the build, or what? The fundamental plan of "make Shadow, have Shadow breed army of Shadows" works regardless, but it's important to get particulars right for this kind of thing.

Also, I really like the idea of a god of necromancy/darkness/death/general spookiness who has a feudal structure of shadows bound to other shadows descending down from him.

[rampaging-poet]

Sorry, I should have said "rebuke undead" instead of "channel negative energy." I gapped on the name and didn't bother looking it up. Per turning or rebuking undead an evil cleric that's at least twice the level of an undead they successfully rebuke can command it indefinitely instead. Despite shadows' turning resistance any cleric high enough level to make their own shadow can easily command one.

It also looks like you need greater create undead to make your own shadow, but in theory you could just find one somewhere and command one as early as early as level ten.

There's a few non-cleric classes and prestige classes that let you rebuke undead, but I can't name any off the top of my head.

Also I don;t kow whether 3.0 shadows could raise chickens as shadow spawn, but finding any humanoid village without so much as a magic weapon to their name is enough to get you started - especially because shadows are completely silent and very stealthy at night.

[Grek]

I found the Psionic Sandwich build and it's hilarious, but I don't see why it's break-the-game levels of powerful. Am I missing something? If not, I think it's probably better as a failed attempt rather than an actual deity.

You can substitute the sandwich for anything you want. Including, if you needed to hide what you were doing, something crazy PaO'd into a sandwich.

[Username17]

Spelldancer is a prestige class from Magic of Faerun. It allows you to add extra free stacking copies of metamagic based on your Perform result. Since it came out in 3rd edition where Eagle's Splendor was empowerable, you could use it to multi-empower Eagle's Splendor and do it again with a higher Charisma modifier and thus a higher Perform result and thus more empowerings and a larger bonus to Charisma. You could also slap an increasingly large number of extends, and have your arbitrarily large Charisma bonus follow you around for an arbitrarily long period of time.

Spelldancer is much harder to use now because they nerfed Eagle's Splendor from both ends in 3.5, which means that you have to use bullshit obscure spells like Nymph's Hoohaw. But also you don't really care because while Spell Dancer was the first never ending stat ratchet (2001, it's old enough to drive now), the Artificer Staff Dance is strictly superior. The Artificer Staff Dance is however named as a "dance" in honor of the Spelldancer loop, which was the first of its kind.

The Favored is named that because among other things he casts Favor of Ilmater on himself to produce a really long list of immunities to go with the fact that he wanders around in an antimagic field that he is personally immune to. So basically you can't do shit to him unless and until you dispel his buffs, which you can't.

The Great Mother just uses Polymorph Any Object to qualify for monstrous prestige classes at 1st level. The key is Beholder Mage, because that gives you 9th level spells in 5 levels because you are supposed to take it as a Level 13 Beholder and not as a level 1 character who spent 1200 gp on an NPC caster service. Once you've done that, it's trivial to qualify for any of a number of bullshit catchup classes and once you have two of them you can start taking levels of Mystic Theurge to advance both.

The Pariah is actually just abusing Level Loss and Level Adjustment. When you lose a level, your XP is set to an amount based on your new level. When you gain a Level Adjustment, your level goes up several but your XP stays the same. So if you contract Lycanthropy you gain a bunch of shitty levels and your XP stays the same, if you then lose a level, your XP is set to a point many thousands higher than it was before you contracted Lycanthropy. If you then cure the Lycanthropy, the virtual levels go away but the XP doesn't so you get to cash all those levels back into Cleric or Druid levels. Then you can contract Lyncanthropy again... All you need is a werewolf and a wight chained up in your basement and enough divine casting to reset yourself after each level ratchet.

The Cacophony uses two different psionic power loops, but I honestly don't remember how either of them work because I fucking hate all four versions of 3rd edition Psionics and purged that information from my brain long ago. One of the power loops involved stupid math for dividing and recombining yourself for profit and the other one involved using a character rebuilding power over and over again to resculpt yourself into gaining more than you lost until you had all the powers. I think the end result is you have literally every power in the game and a functionally limitless number of power points to manifest them with.

If you want more fun with level loss, you can also do the Snake Eater - the guy who loses levels while he has large Intelligence and Constitution penalties and restores them with the penalties removed. That gives you arbitrarily large numbers of hit points and "all the skills."

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Alright, figuring out relative power scales for these guys to try and finangle out which ones are reasonable characters to have in the campaign world mucking about even before players have discovered any infinite power loops of their own (if they ever do).

If I'm reading Omniscificer correctly, he has +infinty (not +$TEXAS but literally +infinity) to all skills, including Knowledge, which allegedly allows him to know everything. I think that's a little shaky. DCs past 30 do not appear to exist, so there doesn't seem to be any rules support for knowing anything that's beyond a "really tough question" in the related field. The Epic Level Jokebook does not expand upon this. Every 5 points by which the check is exceeded does grant an additional useful piece of information, but since there's a finite amount of knowledge to be had in any setting, the cap on that can reasonably be set to "all things known to mortals" just the same as "all things that could possibly be known."

If we grant the Omniscificer total omniscience, then given enough time to prepare he can defeat literally anyone. If any amount of Knowledge above a +30 is useless, though, the Omniscificer is "only" a level 4 Artificer with +infinity to all skills. It's not really clear if the Wish can say "I wish my brother and I were immune to the Omniscificer's persuasive abilities" and successfully resist any +infinity Bluff or Diplomacy checks. Worth noting that a lot of the Omniscificer's tricks come from convincing gods to do things for him, and the premise of the setting is that the Word killed them all. Even so, a truly omniscient Omniscificer is a singularity.

That fact is what makes me want to apply a more strict "all knowledge currently known to mortals" cap on the availability of knowledge results, though. If the Omniscificer existing makes the world post-singularity, it's unrecognizable. Additionally, if it allows him to defeat the Wish or Word given time, then the result of the knowledge check on how to defeat the Word may well be "too late, contingent wishes have already detected someone gaining a bonus in excess of +100 and he's on his way to Blasphemy your face off right now." That still leaves a character with +infinity to all social skills, UMD, stealth skills, perception skills, and who knows at minimum everything known by all mortals anywhere.

Pariah has as many levels as he wants. The Epic Level Jokebook extends the XP progression indefinitely, so the limit on the Pariah's levels is only in how many classes there are to take levels in. This means that the Pariah has the HD to laugh off the Word's Blasphemy and every single class feature in the world, so while I haven't sat down and playtested (actually constructing the character sheet of a maxed-out Pariah would be a nightmare), I'm pretty sure he can beat the Word. I'm not sure if anything lets him get past the contingency wishes of the Wish, but if there is any combination of class features anywhere in the world that lets him do this, he is more powerful than both the Wish and the Word. Of course, there's no particular reason why those two wouldn't use the same trick themselves once it's been discovered. The Word did all kinds of leveling shenanigans to get where he is. In theory, every single one of these builds could be benefiting from the tricks of all the others. I'd prefer to keep them separate, just for the sake of having some variety between characters.

The Shadow Over the Sun has a planet's worth of Shadows, but he, personally, is a tenth level necromancer Cleric, and while he has enormous amounts of them, his minions are only CR3. Assassinating the Shadow Over the Sun seems like a plausible mid-level adventure.

Pun Pun can hit and kill absolutely anything in one hit if he fights them in melee and his HP is as high as he wants it to be, but in terms of Reflex, Will, and AC he is a level 5 character, so he's actually a pretty low-level threat, with the caveat that he can plow through entire armies that fight exclusively in the low-level paradigm of trying to win through HP damage. A bunch of level 5 wizards with Charm Person will do fine, though.

The Jumplomancer can have as many fanatic followers as he can find and convince to watch him jump like crazy, but he, personally, is still just a level 15 character with an amazing jump check. Nine of his levels are in Druid, but his feats are all aimed at boosting jump, so he can't cast while wildshaped. A level 12 party could probably give him a bad time provided they can get past his followers and can either stop him from getting his running start or put him down before he completes his leap of faith.

[Kaelik]

Pun Pun can hit and kill absolutely anything in one hit if he fights them in melee and his HP is as high as he wants it to be, but in terms of Reflex, Will, and AC he is a level 5 character, so he's actually a pretty low-level threat, with the caveat that he can plow through entire armies that fight exclusively in the low-level paradigm of trying to win through HP damage. A bunch of level 5 wizards with Charm Person will do fine, though.

Pun Pun can also ratchet up Dex, and can take the feat that lets him use Con on will saves. So he can have arbitrarily high AC and all saves, making him effectively immune to all normal opposition.

[Username17]

When dealing with broken shenanigans, you have to decide whether there's a difference between infinity and arbitrarily large. And for shit like skill and ability checks you have to decide if there's a difference between getting a result of five thousand and five million. The Infinite Damage Engine that the Omniscifer depends upon crucially depends on every instance of the damage loop propagating instantly so that it goes to infinity in one round. If you invoke the limited free actions rule, then the Omniscifer's skill bonuses are "just" arbitrarily large.

However the big takeaway is that yes, most of these broken loops aren't actually that hard to set up, and most of them can be accessed with very few resources. Anyone who is as cognizant of the break points of the universe as would be necessary to become The Word would also be able to become Pariah if they felt like it. Anyone who can do a Staff Dance can make themselves a pain engine.

Pitting these guys against each other doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, the claims made online about these various builds are generally "completely bogus and also crazy." Both the entrance requirements (there's no fucking way to do the Omniscifer at 4th level because you don't have nearly enough wealth to make all the custom magic items you'd need to do all that shit) and the actual effects (the Sarrukh ability granting abilities can give you webbed fucking toes, not the ability to summon demon lords, read the fucking chart!). I honestly have no idea why people constantly embiggen on what min/max builds are capable of and what levels they are capable of doing it. For fuck's sake, you already set your Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity to whatever number you decide to stop at, what more do you need?

But secondly and no less importantly, any fight between these assholes is going to involve a lot of rules dumpster diving and fringe interpretations. Most explicitly, a lot of these fuckers have Spot checks in the thousands and that makes surprise rounds super weird.

The actual canonical fight between The Word and Pun Pun was that the author of Pun Pun claimed infinite spell resistance (which he is of course not entitled to, but whatevs) and told The Word to do his worst. The Word responded by using Supernatural Transformation on Word of Chaos and bypassed Spell Resistance, killing him instantly. That shit is dumb. Ranking these guys in terms of power is senseless. They are all throwing irresistable forces and immovable objects around. Keep 'em off screen.

-Username17

[Ice9]

Was "Simulacra everywhere" mentioned? I don't have a name, maybe call it the King/Queen of Infinite Fakes. It could be considered an affiliate of the Wish, because it's a thought experiment to demonstrate why no-cost Wishes* always bring things into TO territory.

1) Get a shitload of Wishes. One single no-cost Wish can do this, with no custom items, by wishing for a scroll with NI copies of the Wish spell that each have NI xp invested in them.
2) Use one to get Time Stop, so you can do the rest of this in one round of real time.
3) Make shitloads of Simulacra of the strongest creatures in the setting - or if you're playing the "Air Bud" way, then make them of shit from the ELH with a ton of extra HD and a hundred templates glued onto it. Maybe start by making ones that can help you with this process.
4) Polymorph all the Simulacra into animated objects, and replace all inanimate objects in the world with them. Every grain of sand, every thread in someone's shirt, every fallen leaf ... secretly your agent. Also Wish for Contingent spells on all of them.
5) If nobody else uses this, then you just win everything forever. If the enemies also do, then the game crashes because there's not a good way to resolve fights between arbitrarily large armies of arbitrarily powerful creatures that each have contingencies going off before anyone can even roll initiative.

Which is really just a way of saying:

That shit is dumb. Ranking these guys in terms of power is senseless. They are all throwing irresistable forces and immovable objects around. Keep 'em off screen.

Because a lot of people like to throw no-cost Wishes around as part of their plan, but pretend like they're still playing in a way that's not Calvinball.

* Referring to 3.5E Wish. Pathfinder Wish can't make items, although you can still do a lesser Simulacra-flood using Blood Money.

[Chamomile]

The goal here is not to rank the builds in order of power. Like, I don't care if the Omniscificer can successfully kill the Jumplomancer or Pun Pun. I also don't really care about the WBL, because it is clearly true that in any given setting some characters inherit tons of wealth as a level 3 aristocrat and others become high-level adventurers but then lose or simply never attain their wealth through misfortune. WBL is like CR, a guide for the GM applied specifically to player characters, not a law of physics for the setting. It's an important consideration for chargen competitions, except as mentioned chargen competitions have already escalated into the stratosphere to the point where fights between these titans can't be meaningfully resolved.

The two power comparisons I do care about are:

1) Can the build kill the Wish and the Word? The setting's premise is that the Word is maintaining a detente in which infinite power loops aren't repeated, enforced by his ability to super-murder everything, his command of the inevitables (this is purely a fluff thing, after the Word killed all the gods he just turned up to the inevitables and said "I'm in charge now, these are the new laws," and the inevitables rolled with it), and the fact that he can trust his brother the Wish to never turn on him, which means there's contingent wishes ready to go for any problem the Wish can think of. If there's a superbuild out there which can plausibly kill the Wish and the Word anyway, those two can no longer maintain the detente.

The reason why the Word in particular gets this honor is because his build is the only one that actually has a built-in backstory to it that is more than one scene long. He has to gather up ioun stones and a thought bottle and get himself intentionally slain by a shadow, then break free of his master's control to reincarnate into a rakshasa and then again into a human for his final form and ascent to unlimited power.

Pun Pun cons a Sarrukh into granting him unlimited power, and that can be written into a decent story, but it's gonna be like two thousand words long. Pun Pun's story is like a one-off myth, whereas the Word's could be fleshed out into the Odyssey without doing anything more than just putting meat on the existing bones. The Pariah just locks a werewolf and a wight in his basement and finds an indefinite supply of Restoration spells (like a Cleric friend or something), then camps out with them for a few months while gaining all the levels. The Omniscificer just convinces or coerces a few random yahoos to participate in an infinitely excruciating artificer experiment (with no longterm side effects physical or mental) and sinks what is, in the grand scheme of things, a paltry amount of time and gold into a handful of magic items with which to conduct the experiment. Generally speaking, these characters have to do one thing. The Word has a big sequence of actions he needs to complete for his trick, and that makes him more narratively interesting.

2) Can a regular party kill the build? The Jumplomancer is a great and super broken build, but he could totally be assassinated by six plucky heroes in the neighborhood of level 12. The Shadow Over the Sun isn't just a potential villain, he's a particularly awesome villain. The concept of someone who ascended to godhood by feeding an entire plane to his army of shadows is one cool enough to show up in single-author fiction, the fact that he is a totally playable build which actually is that broken - but still within the reach of a party of six to assassinate even without coming up with a superbuild of their own - is just gravy.

[OgreBattle]

I heard a concept a while back that I have now decided to steal

Hah I found that exact post while looking for 'how to build the wish and the word'

It'd be neat to create a D&D setting where broken builds like these are the Gods. So the Wish & Word have some kind of agenda and will intervene to stop others from becoming like them.

Y'know it's funny, I was just thinking the same thing.

[Chamomile]

I'd actually forgotten where exactly I'd first heard the idea, which is why I gave it a somewhat vague attribution. I didn't remember I'd actually been a part of that discussion (probably because it was a short discussion subsumed but other issues and I didn't say very much, but still).

[CapnTthePirateG]

The actual canonical fight between The Word and Pun Pun was that the author of Pun Pun claimed infinite spell resistance (which he is of course not entitled to, but whatevs) and told The Word to do his worst. The Word responded by using Supernatural Transformation on Word of Chaos and bypassed Spell Resistance, killing him instantly.

Is this fight recorded anywhere?

[Aryxbez]

Isn't there also the Planar Shepherd who can get a time bubble where get he gets like 10 turns for every 1 round everyone else gets, or even longer? So he can just cast a gallon of spells or some other nonsense and murder the party? That's a more faceable, overpowered god I would imagine?

He could also be like super awesome Time Wizard dude who seeks to forestall doom, and clean up potential problems.