Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele
a behavior that complies with the letter of the rules while violating logic, common sense and/or realism.
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Keeping in mind we are talking about magic spells to control animated undead.
Subversion operations are a thing that happens in the real world. With a military unit made of living beings, propaganda and bribery are the tools. By extension, if you face a magical zombie unit, you might opt for a magical attempt at subversion. It is something that is entirely conceivable, logical, realistic, and makes sense. Whence the existence of Control Zombie - which is clearly designed to take control of
someone else's zombies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele
If you know the password of your computer, "stealing" the password from yourself does not make the password safer. Concluding that it would have that outcome is illogical, reality-defying, and against common sense.
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It's a matter of perspective: is Control Zombie stealing a password, or CHANGING a password? The latter is done regularly to increase security.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele
On the contrary, using a spell that is designed to take control of someone else's zombies on one's own zombies, for the opposite end (not stealing control but making that control firmer), might not violate the letter of any rules, but it is clearly twisting the rules so as to obtain an advantage that the rules were not designed to grant.
Munchkiny. YMMV, of course, but this is my take.
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Semantically it's worth noting that it's "Control Zombie" not "Steal Control of Zombie" so I don't think "cementing one's control" is necessarily straying too far off-path.
M28 spells (vs Elementals) have sort of a similar argument to be made for them.
"Create Elemental" gives you some initial control over your creation (an hour) where eventually you're probably going to lose sway over a contest w/ combined IQ+ST of the creature.
"Control Elemental" could be a good backup because it doesn't add anything to the ST of the elemental: it will just substitute Will if it's better.
Control costs halve as much energy as Create so it can be a lot cheaper to beef up the effective skill via Ceremonial Magic (extra energy) to make sure you'll win that contest. It's also a one-time save so long as you maintain it.
Control Elemental can be used to steal control from an elemental who's serving someone else, I think? That's interesting since it's the elemental themselves who resist, not the spell which created them, nor even a pre-existing "Control Elemental" spell currently acting on them. It's like a "last to cast dominates" kind of situations AFAIK per the RAW?
If in both cases these can't be used to retain control then I gues the next best bet is to combine either w/ Delay so that the spell goes off on a condition like "someone else controls my minion" at which point it activates and tries to steal it back for you?
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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
a character with Control Zombie-25 is probably going to easily end up with a horde of zombies if they want them.
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Largely why I'm wondering about countermeasures.
When it comes to an elemental that you create, you could just give them "Magic Resistance" to make it harder to work Control Elemental against them (since THEY resist)
But in the case of a zombie, the zombie doesn't resist control zombie, your spell does...
So unless it's possible to cast Magic Resistance on a spell, the closest is probably Spellguard, which is explicitly for meta spells but not for non-meta spells like Control Zombie and... maybe there's some other one like that?
Kinda wonder how that works with (Animal) Control too... is there no option for an existing mind control spell to work like a guard against a 2nd competing one?