Bloodwalk

[tribunal]

There has been some new updates and bloodwalk was one of them

Changes to Bloodwalk, Blood Mark now creates two runes. One has to be given to the targeted PC and consent is achieved by accepting the rune and keeping it in the player's inventory. Bloodwalk should now also correctly teleports to the marked PC.

Why ?? Just why ?!?

Why do we need to give Rune to the other person ? Why the other person has to agree if blood magus want to teleport through her ??

Everything was working perfectly well one year before. BM was able to teleport through the any person that he marked. As it should be!

Since everyone have right to attack BM after such act ( especially if BM were using Burst Forth exit ) why he need consent of the other player for Bloodwalk!? Its harsh thing for the most powerful ability of the BM and mostly for his RP!

Blood Magus is mostly seen as ''chaotic'' class by the environment. By forcing BM to seek consent of the other players, for such spell, or anything , you are killing the essence of this class and make it useful only along his ''friends'' ... Its killing many RP possibilities.

Not even to mention Burst Forth which was most frequently used as an element of surprise... Now becoming almost completely useless, since there is no mage who will risk to be so close to an opponent and almost certainly get slayed!

[7threalm]

cause it was broke any fix is the right move, wanna thank the devs for fixing it.

[tribunal]

I really appreciate and respect all the hard work of the people who are working to fix the bugs.

However I am not talking here about the bug . I am talking about use of this ability, that was completely changed by previous ''fix '' who bugged it in first place. Since they put a rule that other player need to accept or NOT your Bloodwalk through him.

I was writing even then about whole this concept of '' permission to do the bloodwalk'' . And I hopped it will be fixed to function like before.

And its even better to wait for one more year, to return ability to work as it was working two years ago , than to play it like this .

That was my point .

[Aeb Ankor]

Yes, initially it worked without bugs, was as described in the class feat, was interesting to use and rp, also gave purpose to BM 10...

I rcr'ed my epic BM and gave up exp, because after the 'fix' and a year of waiting it was and still is useless; plus pointless if you need to inform and get consent ahead of time. I'd hostile my target, Bloodwalk to them and then rp for pvp (if intended) and then burst forth... I risk my character alignment shifting for the class use, and you expect that I can get permission for such an evil/ chaotic act ahead of time from another character I 'might' just pvp or walk to in the future?!? Making them give up an inventory slot for MY rune.

Not to mention requiring such an OOC act to use the feat!

Why not then, have all Assassins make a target carry a rune around 24/7 to allow them to use Death Touch on said targets?!?

Oh no! No more casting Wizard spells in PvP unless head of time you both meet and OOC exchange runes (heavy space eating objects) on the off chance we might have a future disagreement!

Who the hell is ever going to say yes except your friends to pack around an extra rune in their inventory forever!

This must be a joke right?!?


#SayNO2NannyState

[Hawke]

Let's keep a cool head and calm collective, please.

[Side]

If the rune on the target player isn't part of a fix to the ability it does seem like an odd choice. I can understand the idea behind asking OOC permission, and that can be worked into RP fairly well. That said inventory slots don't grow on trees, and while I'm sure weight is no problem here it is a note worthy concern.

Does it have to be an item, and does it have to be on the target player? If not to either what was the reasoning behind this choice? I have no vested interest in the class at the moment, but seeing as how the topic has been brought up now's the time to ask.

[7threalm]

just tested it when i cast mark rune it only makes one rune and when i try and transfer it to a player it disappears and another rune doesnt appear in their inventory or the pc that casted mark blood.

could a dev tell us the process?

[Endelyon]

This particular part of the update hasn't gone in yet and is part of the features that will be put in this weekend.

FYI, the rune is given as OOC consent that IC roleplay happened where you obtained a sample of the PC's blood--as is ICly required by the spell. This is so Blood Mages can't arbitrarily mark blood on people mechanically without the accompanying role play happening.

Basically when you hand the other person this second rune, they are OOCly confirming the fact that you ICly do in fact have a sample of their blood. This was changed to prevent potential griefing/godmodding of the targeted PC. Since you only have to do it once with each player you marked, it's really not terribly inconvenient.

[Aeb Ankor]

If I mark 20 people, they all have to carry a single rune of mine... if another BM also marks them, they carry yet again another rune... and so on and so on... you need a better plan because this one is not a good idea.

In addition:

– Griefing
– Do not intentionally harass or disrupt the playerbase. This includes, but is not limited to, OOC harassment, stealing from campfires, repeatedly instigating PvP with the same person without consideration for the 24-hour rule, and using summons which can be sent hostile to circumvent PVP rules. If you are proven to be harassing players and disrupting the playerbase, you will be warned and/or removed from the Server, up to a permanent duration dependent on circumstances.

This idea is not a solution to griefing, griefing is against the rules and if enforced then there is no need for OOC consent, equals warning and if continued the rulebreaker is gone. Why is this about Bloodmages that follow the server rules?

[Endelyon]

Simply put because we've had multiple problems with this sort of thing and a mechanical solution that requires no maintenance or intervention is preferable to conventional enforcement. Investigation, mediation, discussion and arbitration of these PVP offenses takes time and energy from DMs and administration staff that could better be spent in ways that don't induce headaches and frustration.

I could ask exactly how many different Blood Mages will mark a given PC on average and then wonder why this is such a big problem. We tried a popup for consent that never worked correctly and this was the next best thing. Perhaps I'm mistaken but it seems more like you're taking issue with the idea of having to have another player OOCly consent to the fact that their PC's blood was taken at all.

[Aeb Ankor]

This is why it is not godmodding or needing of consent:

Subject: Bloodwalk is broken 2015-01-11

Bloodwalk
Type of Feat: Class Ability
Prerequisites: Blood Magus 10th level
Specifics: The blood magus attains the supernatural ability to transport himself over great distances via the blood of living creatures. Once per day, as a standard action, he can seamlessly enter any one living creature whose size equals or exceeds his own and pass any distance to another living creature in a single round, regardless of the distance separating the two. If he desires, the blood magus may attempt to make a "bloody" exit from the destination creature. He bursts forth explosively from the creature's body, dealing 16d6 points of damage unless the target passes a fortitude save. (15 + Class Level + Blood Magus's con modifier)
This ability can be used to mark a person, to travel to this person as if by teleport or to attack a person.
Use: Selected

A blood magus merely designates a direction and distance (“a living creature twenty miles due west of here”), and the bloodwalk ability transports him to a destination creature as close as possible to the desired location. He can’t specify a named individual as the endpoint unless he has previously obtained a sample of that creature’s blood and has it preserved in a vial that he carries.

Based on this part of the information no consent is needed nor personal knowledge of an individual's blood to Bloodwalk, simple as saying to yourself "Human (or elf) in/ near the cloakwood 5000 miles away" and pop your ability to seek and know blood finds a blood target and you emerge. The target gets no choice, defense or damage, unless the Blood Mage chooses to burst forth.

he can seamlessly enter any one living creature

seamlessly: adjective, 1 having no seams. 2 .smoothly continuous or uniform in quality; combined in an inconspicuous way.

The blood magus attains the supernatural ability 'to Blood Walk'

Does this not mean a Blood Mage may smoothly immerge and emerge without breaking the boundry (seams) of the skin in a uniform (complete) and inconspicous way?

To select an individual target then knowing their blood by having access is not overly hard... the server is full to brimming with adventurers that fight and bleed on nearly a daily basis. It depends on how pure or clean of blood you need:

Dirty blood from the pool of it after a fight? The ground is covered most days in a trail easy enough to not need trackers.

How about just the left over blood that is covering the weapons of your foes whom you just slaughtered? Can't a Blood Mage just wipe it off of the discarded weapons from your kills.

Dried or Set blood on clothing, backpacks, discarded bandages, or hospital linens? Blood mages would follow you to the laundry after returning to the city or to the healer 's tent or infirmary where a simple bribe to a commoner gets access to the bloody rags.

How about a Blood Mage whom is just a regular Doctor, Healer or Cleric as their day job? They could gather a person's blood with hardly a bit of concern. Sell it to the other known friendly blood mages might even be possible.

There is a millions ways to gather your character's blood unnoticed and unasked. Permission should not be needed and only in a personal pvp or RP iteraction is it realistic to consider your character knows when a blood mage might have access to their blood, especially if you are bleeding badly, unconsious, delirious from painful wounds or dead. The blood you left on the entire scene of a battle is not in the forefront of your mind. You the player are then metagaming that your character knows a blood mage is near by, that blood mages even really EXISIST, that the character knows of the powers a blood mage can use if they have the blood, etc. etc. Acting like your character really cares at all except in the most knowledgable scholors or neurotic obessed clean freak OCD constant hand washer and 3 times a day bather would consider it a valid risk.

Blood Mages are extremely RARE and people are lazy and unconcerned about their spilled blood in most cases. You don't know a person IS a blood mage to have even a shred of concern.

You say 'But my character would know or be suspicious if another person just appeared beside them!' Really??? I can think of many ways a character might walk right next to your character unknoticed. This is a world with multiple forms of invisibility, etherealness, abilities to hide in the shadows (litterally), to cloud or control the mind...

You say 'But, but my character would FEEEEEL it if someone took my blood or emerged from my body!'. Don't you personally have mysterious pains or pinpricks or scrapes or pimples that you feel on a daily basis and pay such little heed to them unless it needs real care?? Haven't you ever felt nothing and then noticed a drop or two of blood on your hand/ arm and just licked it off like 'no big deal'?

I think myself as a normal human being and I am 44 years old, in my life I have had 100's of stitches and staples, a half dozen surgeries (4 in the last 2 years) and multiple sports/ work/ car accident related injuries that were bloody or even left pools of blood... people don't really care about what happens to spilled blood except a concern of disease or yuckiness to have it moved away from themselves.

A Blood Mage can and might USE your character for Bloodwalk and the character is likely to not even know it happened... You the player knowing is different and if you use that info in character then YOU are the one breaking immersion and metagaming.

Requiring consent makes the coolest Blood Mage ability boring and nearly useless. My Blood Mage's runes are worthless token filling valuable inventory slots for nothing since rarely will a PLAYER consent to a bloodwalk. It makes a Blood Mage less fun, less interesting and less of a reason to play that character.

Bloodwalk is THE prime supernatural ability and cool factor of makiing this an interesting class to play

Bloodwalk (Su): At 10th level, a blood magus becomes perfectly attuned to the song of blood. He gains the supernatural ability to transport himself great distances via the blood of living creatures. Once per day as a standard action that does not provoke attacks of opportunity, he can seamlessly enter any living creature (except an elemental, ooze, plant, undead, or other creature without blood or a similar fluid) whose size equals or exceeds his own and pass any distance to another living creature on the same plane in a single round, regardless of the distance separating the two. A blood magus merely designates a direction and distance (“a living creature twenty miles due west of here”), and the bloodwalk ability transports him to a destination creature as close as possible to the desired location. He can’t specify a named individual as the endpoint unless he has previously obtained a sample of that creature’s blood and has it preserved in a vial that he carries.

The entry and destination creatures need not be familiar to the blood magus. A blood magus cannot use himself as an entry creature. If an intended entry creature is unwilling, he must make a successful melee touch attack to enter. (A missed touch attack does not use up the ability for that day.) When exiting a creature, a blood magus chooses an adjacent square in which to appear. Entering and exiting a creature is painless unless a blood magus wishes otherwise (see below). In most cases, though, the destination creature finds being the endpoint of a magical portal surprising and quite unsettling.

If he desires, a blood magus can attempt to make a bloody exit from the destination creature. He bursts forth explosively from the creature’s body, dealing 10d6 points of damage unless the creature makes a Fortitude save (DC 10 + blood magus’s class level + blood magus’s Con modifi er). When he makes a bloody exit, a blood magus must succeed on a DC 15 Fortitude save or be stunned for 1 round from the shock of his expulsion.

Bloodwalk(Su): At 10th level, the blood magus is perfectly attuned to the song of blood. He gains the supernatural ability to transport himself great distances via the blood of living creatures. Once per day as a standard action, he can seamlessly enter any living creature whose size equals or exceeds his own and pass any distance to another living creature in a single round, regardless of the distance separating the two. The blood magus merely designates a direction and distance ("a living creature 20 miles due west of here"), and the bloodwalk ability transports him to a destination creature as close as possible to the desired location. He can’t specify a named individual as the end point unless he has previously obtained a sample of that creature’s blood, preserved in a small vial that must be carried on the blood magus’s person.

The entry and destination creatures need not be familiar to the blood magus, but they must be alive and possess blood in their veins. (Thus, plants and the more bizarre outsiders are not eligible targets.) The blood magus may not use himself as an entry creature. If the intended entry creature is unwilling, he must hit with a melee touch attack to enter. When exiting a creature, the blood magus chooses an adjacent square in which to appear. Entering and leaving a creature is painless, unless the blood magus wishes otherwise (see below). In most cases, though, the destination creature finds being the end point of a magical portal surprising and quite unsettling. If he desires, the blood magus can attempt to make a «bloody exit» from the destination creature. If the creature fails a Fortitude save (DC 18), the exiting blood magus takes on solidity a little too soon. He bursts forth explosively from the creature’s body, dealing 16d6 points of damage. The blood magus must succeed at a Fortitude save (DC 13) or take 2d4 points of damage from the shock of his exit.

Except where noted above, this class feature resembles the dryad’s ability to move from tree to tree (see Monster Manual, page 79).

[Endelyon]

That's all nice and well, and I can even see the merit in your logic, but at the end of the day without a blood sample you can't specify a specific destination creature but only a general destination. Mechanically speaking our version of Blood Walk takes you directly to the PC regardless of where they are or whether or not your PC has IC knowledge of where they are, and on top of that you can burst forth from them as a hostile action with pinpoint accuracy.

You do seem passionate about the issue and I'm not trying to kick you in the ribs for that. An explanation was asked for and I offered it--if you disagree with the reasoning behind the change I can both understand and respect that, and I have no personal stake in the issue either way. But staff discussion led developers to decide that this was the most efficient solution to the problem, and this is the mechanic we ended up with.

[Aeb Ankor]

Better to just delete the class, if you desired an efficient solution after being broken for about 2 years... that is called failure

[Maecius]

I think the thought process behind it is that a blood magus has to get the blood from another creature in order to bloodwalk to them.

This could either be done with consent or without consent in character, but (from our perspective) requires out of character consent and coordination for it to occur as legitimate PVP. You can't simply say you got blood from a character who hasn't bled.

You can cut them, or collect their blood after cleaning their wounds, or gather it from the site of a battle they fought in and took injuries from. But all of this requires some sort of out of character "OK" from the other player, as you are otherwise assuming that they bled, they left their blood behind, and you were able to collect their blood unnoticed -- and then are able to PVP them without offering an RP out (by essentially exploding out of their body). The RP out in this situation is coordinating with them the collection of their blood.

I don't think most people will deny it if there's a legitimate RP reason behind it. This just prevents people from being marked without even the character's player knowing it. Which is something that generated a number of complaints from the player base.

As Endelyon states, I also have no pony in this race, and don't mind if it's changed later on. But I am glad the devs are at least working on fixing it to the point where the class ability is actually operational. It may require some additional tweaking before it's operating fully as intended -- but if the fix generates a lot of outcry from the player base, we can of course consider alternatives to the current setup. Ideally, though, we'd like to keep the ability as in line with the PVP rules as possible (for an ability that allows you to damage people from maps away with very little warning).

[Aeb Ankor]

Here is some old info about Blood Magic, just for more perspective.

Subject: Blood Magic.

This is the reference material we have staff side. Keep in mind that the DM team may alter or supplement it. Or they may tell you things from the perspective of an NPC who believes something different, or believes something wrongly. Or who is withholding information. And so on. Your characters will NOT know this. The information is entirely out of character. But it helps to understand the background so that you can see where you might come into contact with Blood Magic and Blood Magi.

Blood Magic is very old, as old as life and magic. It is a form of specialized necromancy that focuses on the manipulation of life's vital element: blood, through which magic can be empowered and the normally required ingredients may be substituted. For blood magic to be potent the sacrifice must be voluntary (the way spirit shamans use it on themselves if they have the feat), which is why victims are often manipulated or enspelled. Potent power can also be drawn from spilled blood and bleeding wounds, whether internally or external so long as the magic can access it. This is how Blood Magi normally power their spells, by injuring victims and drawing on their blood, reserving the more demanding sacrifices for rituals.

Because of how Blood Magic works the specialized field of the Blood Magus is a moral slippery slope. Despite not being inherently evil it produces many power crazed madmen and women, contributing to the bad reputation necromancy in general is known by. The fact that many evil monster races practice crude forms of blood magic and associated ritual sacrifice cements this reputation as practically beyond redemption.

Ever since the Mulhorandi people and their pantheon arrived on Faerun Blood Magic has been the domain of Set and has been almost exclusively practiced in the far east. With the ascension of Bhaal as part of the dead three Blood Magic has however begun to become less rare in the rest of Faerun, largely because Bhaal has been competing with Set to draw it into his portfolio. Blood Magic is now shared between the deities' portfolio's, neither possessing it exclusively. This is a source of continuous strife between Set and Bhaal, through it will not prevent them from allying temporarily if expedient. Finding practicing Blood Magi among Bhaal's faithful is quite common these days as those with a talent for the arcane are encouraged to take the easy path power that it promises. Blood Magic is still also practiced by those unaffiliated with Set or Bhaal, but these practitioners find themselves under their deific manipulations to tempt them into acts of wanton evil and lust for power or mayhem.

In the eastern nations of Mulhorand, Unther and Thay Blood magic is considered especially barbaric and unstable because of its more public historical record. Instead of having been largely restricted to use by monster races there have been repeated historical incidents involving power-crazed cabals of Blood Mages. In Mulhorand the practice is considered an unforgivable sin and implies links to Set. In Thay there are known cabals of mages who practice blood magic though the field of study is excluded from the school of Necromancy by ancient decree.

Thayan Blood Magi are not affiliated with any school of magic and are normally evicted once their dabbling becomes known, or is not immediately abandoned. Such Red Wizards normally live on the fringe of thayan society and are considered unsavory company at best. While most Thayans are perfectly happy to do business with Blood Mages it is always the sort of business others shouldn't know about. As a consequence many Blood Mages work as assassins or spies and face the risk of disappearing themselves if their employer wishes to tie up any loose ends. A particular animosity exists with the school of Necromancy, which wishes to eradicate the practice of Blood Magic for the unsavory reputation it attaches to necromancers and because of the mages which the promise of power tempts from its ranks.

-----
Due to Set's initial exclusive incorporation of Blood Magic into his portfolio many literary sources are Mulhorandi in origin. Cabals of blood mages are outlawed in Mulhorand and barely tolerated in Thay because of their tendency towards wanton slaughter and the ritual sacrifice of fellow mages.

It is likely for that reason that students of Blood Magic on the Sword Coast may procure access to old Mulhorandi or Thayan sources, be it independently, through the manipulations of Bhaal, or of Set.

Blood Magic remained relatively obscure in ancient Netheril, the craft having been cataloged in Xinnizer's guide to the obscure Art which details exotic forms of magic, including Elven, but focusing in particular on primitive humanoid races. Xinnizer catalogued Blood Magic as being a form of ritual sacrifice practiced by various Orc and Goblin tribes in his day.

More detail is provided in Khuzon Delvind Dachar's account of Mulhorandi sects undermining the moral fabric of the Empire. In his account, known as Khuzon's warning, he describes blood magic in considerable detail, which led some to question whether the author had been involved first hand and was a remorseful reformist. While insightful and revealing a link to Set as well as some of the underlying magical principles the book does not provide any detail on the necessary preparation for the described (horrific) rituals and vile deeds. It is by this book that most Faerunian scholars know of the subject as it has been remarkably well preserved and copied many times by later generations seeking to strengthen the empire against Set's depredations. Such copies have inevitably also made their way to the Sword Coast, and though rare they are not impossible to acquire for people of means.