The Legitimacy of Pun-Pun

[shadzar]

is [Savage Species] the book that brought us Punpun?

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Edited in the book title so the post would make sense out of context.
[/TGFBS]

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm not 100% sure, but I know The Word wouldn't have existed without several things in this book. Even so, both Pun-Pun and The Word pulled from a lot of different really stupid sources; it's not possible for one book to contain that much.

[koz]

is this the book that brought us Punpun?

The book that "brought" us Pun-Pun was Serpent Kingdoms. In the same way that you could argue that eating celery "brings" you obesity, mind you.

[Silent Wayfarer]

The core of Pun-pun was Manipulate Form, from Serpent Kingdoms, and Supernatural Transfer, which let you assume the (Su) Manipulate Form ability when you took the form of a Sarrukh, the creatures who had it.

Not sure if Supernatural Transfer was from Savage Species, though.

[Slade]

is this the book that brought us Punpun?

The book that "brought" us Pun-Pun was Serpent Kingdoms. In the same way that you could argue that eating celery "brings" you obesity, mind you.

By celery you meant fudge or lard, of course.

Serpent kingdoms is its own stupidity. What designer thought making a god-like creature that can do anything fair at any CR?

[Whatever]

For the curious, here's the infamous ability (from this web enhancement):

Manipulate Form (Su): At will, Ghiz'kith can modify the form of any Scaled One native to Toril, except for aquatic and undead creatures. With a successful touch attack, he can cause one alteration of his choice in the target creature's body. The target falls unconscious for 2d4 rounds due to the shock of changing form. A successful DC 22 Fortitude save negates both the change and the unconsciousness. Sarrukh are immune to this effect. The save DC is Charisma-based.

Ghiz'kith may use this ability to change a minor aspect of the target creature, such as the shape of its head or the color of its scales. It may also choose to make a much more significant alteration, such as converting limbs into tentacles, changing overall body shape (snake to humanoid, for example), or adding or removing an appendage. Any ability score may be decreased to a minimum of 1 or increased to a maximum equal to Ghiz'kith's corresponding score. Ghiz'kith may also grant the target an extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like ability or remove one from it. The change bestowed takes effect immediately and is permanent. Furthermore, the alterations are automatically passed on to all the creature's offspring when it breeds with another of its unmodified kind.

See Serpent Kingdoms for the typical physical alterations that sarrukh bestow with this ability.

The "typical physical alterations" are stuff like +2 Natural Armor.

[Koumei]

Supernatural Transfer, which let you assume the (Su) Manipulate Form ability when you took the form of a Sarrukh, the creatures who had it.

It's Assume Supernatural Ability, hilariously. You were so close with "let you assume the (Su) ... ability".

And yeah, the ability itself is very vague. And over time, people "refined" the build to find quicker and easier ways to get it, such as a Web Enhancement article offering a template that would let a level 1-2 character qualify, Pazuzu-calling etc.

Looking forward to seeing more vitriol on this, even the very first chapter was a sign that it was going to be bad. They should have called the book "FUCK YOU, PLAY AN ELF".

(Also note that later published races completely ignored the bad advice of this.)

[K]

Supernatural Transfer, which let you assume the (Su) Manipulate Form ability when you took the form of a Sarrukh, the creatures who had it.

It's Assume Supernatural Ability, hilariously. You were so close with "let you assume the (Su) ... ability".

He's probably mixing it with Metamorphic Transfer, the psionic version of the same ability from Expanded Psionics.

[Username17]

Pun Pun is not and never has been a legal build. It's just wankery about how Serpent Kingdoms allows the gaining of "an ability", and then gives examples like "slippery skin" for a who-gives-a-fuck bonus to Escape Artist checks. But since it doesn't have extremely specific limits, dumbasses claim that they could take abilities like at-will Gate or some shit. Because apparently they could totally convince their DMs at home that that is equivalent to having slippery skin. It's just stupid. It is actually more retarded than the people who want use activated True Strike on their swords for 1800 gp that grants +20 to-hit on every attack. It would be like asking for a use activated belt of Miracle for 1800 gp on the grounds that the item creation costs are open ended and the DM can raise or lower the costs of an item.

But for whatever reason, Pun Pun gets mouth breathing charoppers to masturbate. The avalanche of group think is so massive at this point that I doubt one person in ten who rants about how powerful Pun Pun is has even read the ability that supposedly lets him exist. The fact that it really really doesn't do that hasn't even slowed this shit down. Interestingly: the original idiot who designed Pun Pun was asked to do a fight versus The Wish and The Word - and got curb stomped. He took refuge in Magic Immunity (infinite spell resistance) and took a round to taunt The Word - who then used a Supernatural Word that bypassed SR and instantly killed him. Fucking idiot.

---

Anyway, the Savage Species system was badly broken by concept. And at higher levels it just got worse and worse. You paid one level for every hit die, but you also paid levels for your abilities. There wasn't even an attempt to figure out how many of your abilities "fit" into the hit dice you had. So if you had a "monster" that was simply a 10th level Elvish Paladin, you'd pay 10 levels for the hit dice, and then 4-6 more levels on top of that for the abilities you had. So the 10th level Paladin would be like a 14th or 16th level character once Level Adjustments were taken into account.

In an interview a while after Savage Species came out, Rich Redman said that he was instructed to error on the side of weakness for making monster characters on the grounds that players were going to figure out how to powergame that shit, and thus the "baseline" for a player character monster should be almost unplayably weak. With that as a design goal, it is easy to see how Savage Species could be an unbelievable pile of fail - how could it be anything else? The other people writing on that book include Sean K. Reynolds of "can't write his way out of a paper bag" fame, and it's edited by the fine lady who wrote the Book of Erotic Fantasy.

But while Rich Redman can in fact write to design specs, he has serious problems with evaluating power levels. DragonChild and I saw him in person a few months after this book came out, and he was talking about writing new spells. And he said that you shouldn't make a 1st level spell that was more powerful than magic missile, because magic missile was the "best spell". I could not stop myself from laughing out loud, and I'm not sure he understood that what he had just said was so stupid, so mired in 2nd edition AD&D thinking, that it could not be taken seriously.

But anyway, here's the March 2003 quote:

The assumption here is that "Racial HD are a bad thing, as they do not provide class effects, and generally are weaker than equivelent classed HD."

As Canamrock has pointed out in his LA Law thread on this board, racial HD buy monster abilities that classes don't have like natural armor, better ability scores, breath weapons, spell-like abilities, and so forth.

I know everyone who reads the preceding paragraph will argue that you're paying for something twice - once with racial HD (which do you get you BAB and saving throw bonuses just like character levels) and once with LA. You're right. That's the real challenge: Balancing racial HD vs. LA. You're goal is an acceptable ECL.

Which, of course, raises what may be the core issue: What's "acceptable"? For many people on these boards, an acceptable ECL is one that makes the monster PC roughly as viable as the standard race PC. Most people acknowledge some urge to power game, and most people acknowledge that they're willing to err on the low side for ECL because they or their players will play the role to the hilt and the role-playing drawbacks of the race will have a real effect in the campaign. I don't think anyone needs me to tell them to lower ECLs if that works better in their game - come on. We play RPGs. We always house rule things.

The design guidance that I had was to make ECLs slightly worse than playing a standard race character. Otherwise all the Wizards of the Coast campaign worlds (it's been almost a year and I still want to say "our") become invalid. Look at them. Dragonlance, FR, and even Greyhawk are populated almost entirely by standard race characters. Not just the RPG products, but the books as well. In order to maintain that racial balance, we provided a mechanical reason for standard race characters to be more common.

You can disagree with that. I'm not sure I agree with it anymore. I'm not arguing one way or the other. Nor am I claiming that the job we did on SS was perfect (I've complained enough in the past about errors that crept in at various points after I left the process). I'm just pointing out that if you change that underlying assumption about campaign worlds, there's a ripple effect on ECLs.

Note that since NPCs don't actually have ECLs, that entire line of argument does not make any sense and never did. But it's totally consistent with the WotC and even TSR methodology. You saw it 11 years earlier with the design concern that maybe players would make cyborg characters or something. The people giving design guidelines are so concerned that players will find non-standard character options compelling enough to actually use in play that they preemptively shit on their own product to make sure that never happens.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Interestingly: the original idiot who designed Pun Pun was asked to do a fight versus The Wish and The Word - and got curb stomped. He took refuge in Magic Immunity (infinite spell resistance) and took a round to taunt The Word - who then used a Supernatural Word that bypassed SR and instantly killed him. Fucking idiot.

Neat. How was the post-fight commentary?

[Libertad]

Pun Pun is not and never has been a legal build. It's just wankery about how Serpent Kingdoms allows the gaining of "an ability", and then gives examples like "slippery skin" for a who-gives-a-fuck bonus to Escape Artist checks. But since it doesn't have extremely specific limits, dumbasses claim that they could take abilities like at-will Gate or some shit. Because apparently they could totally convince their DMs at home that that is equivalent to having slippery skin. It's just stupid.

But isn't that kind of the point? That the letter of the rules is so vague that it could logically be argued that "an ability" can be almost anything, from an at-will spell to Swallow Whole? That it's open-ended enough can be abused to perform crazy shit, technically making it a "legal build?"

Edit: I looked at the thing. It can grant a spell-like ability, but it doesn't specify how often it can be used. So it's more of a gray area thing.

[Username17]

Pun Pun is not and never has been a legal build. It's just wankery about how Serpent Kingdoms allows the gaining of "an ability", and then gives examples like "slippery skin" for a who-gives-a-fuck bonus to Escape Artist checks. But since it doesn't have extremely specific limits, dumbasses claim that they could take abilities like at-will Gate or some shit. Because apparently they could totally convince their DMs at home that that is equivalent to having slippery skin. It's just stupid.

But isn't that kind of the point? That the letter of the rules is so vague that it could logically be argued that "an ability" can be almost anything, from an at-will spell to Swallow Whole? That it's open-ended enough can be abused to perform crazy shit, technically making it a "legal build?"

It doesn't have limits, it has guidelines and examples. The examples are very weak. Abilities that you wouldn't care about one way or another if they showed up in a variant subrace of Elf or Gnome. Literally anything you can convince the DM that you can get through Serpent Kingdoms ability theft cheese is something that you could get at first level by getting your DM to agree that the ability met the "equivalent abilities" sniff test for a subrace you wanted to play. I don't know, Muck Halflings or some shit.

The failure point on Pun Pun was the claim "My DM uncritically allows me to make up and pass off abilities that mimic the most powerful abilities of epic monsters and gods". That is a ridiculous claim that doesn't generally pass even in the late night power fantasy games of 13 year olds. The material in Serpent Kingdoms wasn't even being used.

Neat. How was the post-fight commentary?

The guy shut up for a while, and then a while later he just went back to boasting about Pun Pun again, and all the other dumbasses sort of burped about it only a bit.

Really, the only thing the "my character can beat up your character" challenges ever do by presenting a clear and unambiguous beat down is to have the loser drop of the thread and pretend the challenge never happened.

-Username17

[K]

Pun Pun is not and never has been a legal build. It's just wankery about how Serpent Kingdoms allows the gaining of "an ability", and then gives examples like "slippery skin" for a who-gives-a-fuck bonus to Escape Artist checks. But since it doesn't have extremely specific limits, dumbasses claim that they could take abilities like at-will Gate or some shit. Because apparently they could totally convince their DMs at home that that is equivalent to having slippery skin. It's just stupid.

But isn't that kind of the point? That the letter of the rules is so vague that it could logically be argued that "an ability" can be almost anything, from an at-will spell to Swallow Whole? That it's open-ended enough can be abused to perform crazy shit, technically making it a "legal build?"

Edit: I looked at the thing. It can grant a spell-like ability, but it doesn't specify how often it can be used. So it's more of a gray area thing.

Yeh, I never could figure out how people equated the sample of granting minor bonuses with granting Divine Ranks.

The listed examples are extremely unimpressive.

It feels like an editing error. With the grafts section and the badly-edited spells that do weird things with people's supernatural powers, it feels like Serpent Kingdoms must have had entire sections devoted to ability creation and swapping that never made it past editing.

If true, it's a shame. I always wanted to play a Blue Mage.

[Echoes]

Pun Pun is not and never has been a legal build. It's just wankery about how Serpent Kingdoms allows the gaining of "an ability", and then gives examples like "slippery skin" for a who-gives-a-fuck bonus to Escape Artist checks. But since it doesn't have extremely specific limits, dumbasses claim that they could take abilities like at-will Gate or some shit. Because apparently they could totally convince their DMs at home that that is equivalent to having slippery skin. It's just stupid. It is actually more retarded than the people who want use activated True Strike on their swords for 1800 gp that grants +20 to-hit on every attack. It would be like asking for a use activated belt of Miracle for 1800 gp on the grounds that the item creation costs are open ended and the DM can raise or lower the costs of an item.

No one cares about the bullshit physical alterations that you can hand out with Manipulate Form; they care about the ability to hand out extraordinary, supernatural, and spell-like abilities. Y'know, like it says right in the description of the ability:

A sarrukh may also grant the target an extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like ability or remove one from it.

Now, you are absolutely right that Pun-Pun is in no way a playable character, and anyone who seriously puts it forward as such is fucking stupid. I've never personally seen anyone try to suggest it as such, however (of course, those people may still very well exist). I've only ever seen it referenced as a theoretical idea, a thought experiment.

Given that, there are limits to what Manipulate Form can do; it can't just arbitrarily give you infinite CL, for example. What it can do is give you any printed extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like ability in the game. So while you can't run around making up bullshit abilities, you can totally crib bullshit abilities from stupid monsters, like Demogorgon's dual action ability, an infernal's ability to just shit out 4 balors/pit fiends, or a solar's 1/day wish SLA.

[Kaelik]

Actually Echo, you are wrong or you are wrong.

It says that it can give you SLAs, but it says absolutely nothing about what those SLAs are in the context of the game.

So either you can only give SLAs comparably powered to the guidelines, in which case you can't get Wish 1/day, or it can give you a SLA of any spell at will at any CL, including arbitrarily high CL.

So no, you can't say "it can give SLAs outside the guidelines" but give any limits at all.

Either it has limits (the guidelines) or it doesn't (and you can give it SLAs of spells that don't even exist, where you make up the spell you want).

[Aharon]

Pun Pun is not and never has been a legal build. It's just wankery about how Serpent Kingdoms allows the gaining of "an ability", and then gives examples like "slippery skin" for a who-gives-a-fuck bonus to Escape Artist checks. But since it doesn't have extremely specific limits, dumbasses claim that they could take abilities like at-will Gate or some shit. Because apparently they could totally convince their DMs at home that that is equivalent to having slippery skin. It's just stupid.

But isn't that kind of the point? That the letter of the rules is so vague that it could logically be argued that "an ability" can be almost anything, from an at-will spell to Swallow Whole? That it's open-ended enough can be abused to perform crazy shit, technically making it a "legal build?"

It doesn't have limits, it has guidelines and examples. The examples are very weak. Abilities that you wouldn't care about one way or another if they showed up in a variant subrace of Elf or Gnome. Literally anything you can convince the DM that you can get through Serpent Kingdoms ability theft cheese is something that you could get at first level by getting your DM to agree that the ability met the "equivalent abilities" sniff test for a subrace you wanted to play. I don't know, Muck Halflings or some shit.

The failure point on Pun Pun was the claim "My DM uncritically allows me to make up and pass off abilities that mimic the most powerful abilities of epic monsters and gods". That is a ridiculous claim that doesn't generally pass even in the late night power fantasy games of 13 year olds. The material in Serpent Kingdoms wasn't even being used.

-Username17

Why not also include fluff in your analysis, if you use examples and guidelines? By the copious amounts of fluff text given in the source book the monster is found in, the Sarrukh created Naga and Yuan-Ti, both species which do have spell-like abilities. Of course, this may have happened via epic magic, but given the fact that they possess an ability to do that without epic magic, it seems likely that the ability works as intended.
As a cautious upper limit (i.e. the strongest creature belonging to a race that is described in Serpent Kingdoms as having been created by Sarrukh that I could remember), this gives us the Yuan-Ti Anathema (FF) which, among other things, has Blasphemy 1/day at CL 20.

ETA: OT musing:
One can only guess what the designer intended - my guess would be something like "add (ex) abilities that exist on other scaled ones, (sp) abilities that exist on other scaled ones, or (su) abilities that exist on other scaled ones", which, in conjunction with the spells in the same book (Ability Rip, Trait Removal), would give the Sarrukh a motivation to search out powerful beings, rip abilities from them and grant them to other sarrukh or a being from a servitor race.

[rasmuswagner]

Are you guys seriously going to argue about RAI for Manipulate Form?

Get a room.

[Kaelik]

Are you guys seriously going to argue about RAI for Manipulate Form?

Get a room.

I don't think anyone is arguing with Aharon about RAI for manipulate form. He is the only one who thinks that matters.

Frank's point is that If you saw a line in the book that stated "You can then take an Attack of Opportunity." And Attack of Opportunity was not spelled out anywhere in the rules, that in fact the ability to take such attack gives you nothing instead of the ability to cast 47 spells.

The traditional Manipulate Form argument is "The RAW says I can grant myself SLAs but it doesn't define anything at all about those SLAs, so therefore I can give myself the at will SLA at CL 1000 Win D&D which has whatever effects I want whenever I activate it as a free action."

And obviously, the problem with that argument is that it actually doesn't give you that ability, it gives you the ability to SLAs, but forgets to provide all the needed variables.

It is is exactly like a line in the Storm Lord class that states, "You gain the ability to Cast Windwall." but does not specify a CL or save DC. You don't get to claim it gives you Windwall with whatever save DC you want, you only get to claim that the ability is missing key information, and so you want to houserule in some stuff that isn't there.

Since the Manipulate Form ability giving anyone any SLAs at all is by definition invoking houserules to finish the parameters, the fact that your houserule allows you to get Divine Ranks is totally fucking unimportant.

[Aharon]

Actually, the point about RAI was more of an addendum/OT musing, I edited my above post to reflect that. My On Topic point was that if you refer to the examples to show that the ability isn't supposed to be able to give powerful abilities, the fluff, which includes creatures with Ex, Su and Sp abilities being created, matters. It shows that manipulate form is indeed supposed to be able to give ex, su and sp abilities beyond the listed examples.

@Kaelik:
I thought the traditional Manipulate Form argument is "The RAW says I can grant myself ex abilities, therefore I can grant myself all printed abilities as ex instead of whatever else they are printed as, therefor I can create Ice Assassins of Gods, and have them bestow Divine Ranks on me."

[Echoes]

Actually Echo, you are wrong or you are wrong.

It says that it can give you SLAs, but it says absolutely nothing about what those SLAs are in the context of the game.

Spell-like abilities are already defined in the context of the game, dumbass. They're called "spell-like abilities", and for examples of such you should probably find a monster that has some.

So either you can only give SLAs comparably powered to the guidelines, in which case you can't get Wish 1/day, or it can give you a SLA of any spell at will at any CL, including arbitrarily high CL.

So no, you can't say "it can give SLAs outside the guidelines" but give any limits at all.

Either it has limits (the guidelines) or it doesn't (and you can give it SLAs of spells that don't even exist, where you make up the spell you want).

Or we can ignore your false dilemma and look at what is actually printed in the actual books for examples of spell-like abilities.

The list of guidelines, by the way, are examples of typical physical alterations that a Sarrukh often give out. Physical alterations are listed completely apart from the sentence "A sarrukh may also grant the target an extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like ability or remove one from it." Hence the "also" there.

[wotmaniac]

Yeh, I never could figure out how people equated the sample of granting minor bonuses with granting Divine Ranks.

The Divine Rank thing actually came from a mind-numbingly fucktarded interpretation of the spell Ice Assassin from It's Cold Outside.

It feels like an editing error. With the grafts section and the badly-edited spells that do weird things with people's supernatural powers, it feels like Serpent Kingdoms must have had entire sections devoted to ability creation and swapping that never made it past editing.

This is also the book that brought us such gems as Venomfire.

[Kaelik]

@Kaelik:
I thought the traditional Manipulate Form argument is "The RAW says I can grant myself ex abilities, therefore I can grant myself all printed abilities as ex instead of whatever else they are printed as, therefor I can create Ice Assassins of Gods, and have them bestow Divine Ranks on me."

Only because the people who suggested it don't see the logical conclusions of their own interpretations.

For example, the ability says, "you can grant SLAs" and literally nothing else.

So can you grant yourself and SLA of Magic Missile at CL 1 once per day?

Most people say, "sure" because they are arbitrarily inserting houserules that fill in undefined variables to allow them to grant SLAs.

But tell me, if you can give yourself an SLA of Magic Missile at CL 1 once per day can you give yourself an SLA of Wish at CL 3000 at will? If the answer is no, then what possible rules text in the manipulate form ability creates that distinction?

And the final step is to recognize that SLAs are just abilities, and there is no reason in the general SLA text that requires SLAs to be copies of a spell. In fact, monsters already have summons that are not mimiced in any spells. And we all take advantage of that fact every day when we write a class called Storm Lord that gets the SLA Lightning Wall, which isn't a spell.

So if you think that manipulate form can grant Wish at CL 200 at will, then what part of the text of Manipulate Form prevents you from giving the SLA "Kill Tordek the Barbarian with no save" and what part of the manipulate form ability prevents you from giving the SLA "Win D&D" which is basically just a more powerful version of Alter Reality?

TL;DR People who advocate using Manipulate form to make Ice Assassins to give them Divine Ranks are too stupid to see that they could just give themselves "Grant Divine Ranks" as an SLA.

Spell-like abilities are already defined in the context of the game, dumbass. They're called "spell-like abilities", and for examples of such you should probably find a monster that has some.

And you are an idiot. Strength is defined in the game. But a spell that says "When you cast this, you have Strength score" is completely different from a spell that says "When you cast this, you have a Strength score of 500."

One of them gives you a specific thing with all the necessary variables, and the other gives you a function call to a function without giving you the variables you need to run the second function.

So for example when you say "Look at monsters to see some examples" why do you say that? Do you think Manipulate Form can only give SLAs that are identical to Monster SLAs? If so, what part of the actual rules of Manipulate form make you think that?

And once you have realized that of course you are not confined to monster SLAs, I ask you, can you give yourself Magic Missile at CL 4 million at will? And if you can grant any SLA at all, what part of the rules of manipulate form lead to your claim that you cannot grant said magic missile?

Or we can ignore your false dilemma and look at what is actually printed in the actual books for examples of spell-like abilities.

Of course you can look at the books to find examples of spell like abilities. But if you have a spell that says "This spell gives you a Strength Score" then you can look at the book to find examples of Strength Scores, but so what. The ability still doesn't give you any idea what Strength Score you have when you cast that spell, and for god sakes there is absolutely no reason to believe that you can only possibly have a Strength score that is that same as some monster in the books. Strength scores go from 1-infinity, and cover all the numbers in between, even if their is no monsters with specifically a Strength of 13.

[Slade]

Yeh, I never could figure out how people equated the sample of granting minor bonuses with granting Divine Ranks.

The Divine Rank thing actually came from a mind-numbingly fucktarded interpretation of the spell Ice Assassin from It's Cold Outside.

Exactly, you don't grant yourself divine ranks.
You grant yourself the SLA of Ice Assassin thus ignoring material components, making fake deities with Ice Assassin SLA who grants you divine ranks.
This is RAW and legal.
1) SLA ignore material components
2) Manipulate Form can grant an SLA
3) Ice Assassin (a stupid silly spell) works on anything that exists, but you normally need material components.
4) Divine ranked creatures can grant divine ranks to others.
5) you are an other
6) You can be granted divine ranks.

There is no SLA that grants Divine ranks directly, Ice Assassin grants it indirectly correctly.

[Kaelik]

There is no SLA that grants Divine ranks directly, Ice Assassin grants it indirectly correctly.

SLAs can do literally anything at all. So in fact, you can just make up an SLA that grants divine ranks and give it to yourself if your above proposal is legal.

[K]

ETA: OT musing:
One can only guess what the designer intended - my guess would be something like "add (ex) abilities that exist on other scaled ones, (sp) abilities that exist on other scaled ones, or (su) abilities that exist on other scaled ones", which, in conjunction with the spells in the same book (Ability Rip, Trait Removal), would give the Sarrukh a motivation to search out powerful beings, rip abilities from them and grant them to other sarrukh or a being from a servitor race.

Like I said, it feels like there was a system for granting abilities that got edited out and all we are left with is the broken remnants of the poor editing process.

For example, Ability Rip permanently costs a supernatural ability or two HD for a temporary 1 hour per level gain in a supernatural ability. This feels like it must have either interacted with a way to make the gain permanent or was originally written as permanent (instant) because no one sane is permanently losing abilities to temporarily gain others.

The way it's written does lead to two interesting questions: (1) can you dispel the permanent loss of HD or supernatural power since it's a permanent effect, and (2) can you use the spell to remove monster HD and thus reduce the ECL for powerful monsters by removing their useless HD?

The world will never know. And I won't get my Blue Mage unless I write it up myself.