Death spell vanquishing skeleton warriors

[Guest Thomas]

This seems wrong, because the lesser "Greater Skeletons" are immune to death effects and the description for skeleton warriors states that skeleton warrors should also be immune.

 

Has anyone encountered this?

[Demivrgvs]

This seems wrong, because the lesser "Greater Skeletons" are immune to death effects and the description for skeleton warriors states that skeleton warrors should also be immune.

 

Has anyone encountered this?

Yeah, everyone encountered that because the "bug" would actually be if Greater Skeletons are really immune to this spell...they shouldn't. Are you sure they are immune in your game?

 

Unfortunately vanilla's Death Spell is actually a sort of two PnP spells in one, Death Spell and Banishment, which doesn't make much sense for me, especially because the latter is an Abjuration spell and not a Necromantic one. The end result is that Death Spell banishes any (well, almost any) summoned creature effectively "removing" them, not 'killing' them. Only creatures with less than 8HD are effectively killed. Skeletons are immune to the necromantic 'death' effect, but not to the 'banishing' one.

 

I cannot remove the "banish" effect from this spell because almost any decent AI script relies on this feature of Death Spell.

 

A suggested solution was to replace Death Spell with Banishment, because AI generally use this spell only against summoned creatures...but we never actually reached a consensus about it (at least I think so).

[Guest Tom_Again]

Good to know that everything is working as intended. Thank you for the quick response.

 

I could swear blind that my greater skeletons survived death spell, but I must be mistaken.

 

For game balance, I don't know if I agree with the new death spell. The principle benefit of 'Animate Dead' has aways been that the creatures can't be swept away by death spell. I can roll with it, 'tho.

[Jarno Mikkola]

The end result is that Death Spell banishes any (well, almost any) summoned creature effectively "removing" them, not 'killing' them. Only creatures with less than 8HD are effectively killed. Skeletons are immune to the necromantic 'death' effect, but not to the 'banishing' one.

 

I cannot remove the "banish" effect from this spell because almost any decent AI script relies on this feature of Death Spell.

 

A suggested solution was to replace Death Spell with Banishment, because AI generally use this spell only against summoned creatures...but we never actually reached a consensus about it (at least I think so).

Ii-hi-hi. (Ii-hi-hi)

The actual fault is that the Skeletons are 'summon' gendered creatures, which are subject to the banishment without save nor magic immunity check. The gender is also used to cap the summoned creatures to 5.

So the optimal solution would involve making a new gender, not capping the creatures to 5, and allowing to giving the new gender a save vs the banishment spell to it and adjusting the death spell accordingly.

 

Of course this might require a bit of AI rewriting... but the Death Spell wouldn't need the banishing effect, as it would have a max HP depending effect, so it can kill goblins, orcs have save etc. and of couse the effects wouldn't be automatic, so 100% magic immune goblin won't be effected, no matter what, nor a necromancy immunity one.

[Demivrgvs]

Good to know that everything is working as intended. Thank you for the quick response.

 

I could swear blind that my greater skeletons survived death spell, but I must be mistaken.

 

For game balance, I don't know if I agree with the new death spell. The principle benefit of 'Animate Dead' has aways been that the creatures can't be swept away by death spell. I can roll with it, 'tho.

There's actually no 'new' Death Spell at all, I never changed it, and I'm pretty sure skeletons from Animate Dead could be wiped out by Death Spell in vanilla.

 

For game balance I'm not sure it would be good to have such a low level summon immune to Death Spell/Banishment, but it would surely be appropriate, and an interesting feature to make this kind of summons "different". Anyway, I'm almost sure SCSII AI uses Death Spell to destroy "summoned" Skeleton Warriors, and changing it would cause issues.

 

 

The actual fault is that the Skeletons are 'summon' gendered creatures, which are subject to the banishment without save nor magic immunity check. The gender is also used to cap the summoned creatures to 5.

So the optimal solution would involve making a new gender, not capping the creatures to 5, and allowing to giving the new gender a save vs the banishment spell to it and adjusting the death spell accordingly.

Well, you know I'm not sure about removing the cap for balance purposes, but we may give it a try. Still, I would have to know how AI scripts (vanilla, SCS, RR, ...) react to such a change because I think most of them check for 'summon' gender before casting Death Spell.