Spiritual Weapon (spell)

[Steve]

Hello!

Noticed something about Spiritual Weapon (spell) that is NOT how it is described (at least, on the BGTSCC wiki). That is: on the wiki, it states....

The spiritual weapon can be affected by dispel magic, disintegrate, a sphere of annihilation, or a rod of cancellation. It has 20 AC and 14 base hitpoints. It gains 3 hitpoints every casterlevel, to maximum of 104 hitpoints.

However...the PnP version of the spell states:

A spiritual weapon cannot be attacked or harmed by physical attacks, but dispel magic, disintegrate, a sphere of annihilation, or a rod of cancellation affects it. A spiritual weapon's AC against touch attacks is 12 (10 + size bonus for Tiny object).

You can see the difference in description easily enough!

And...IG, the Spiritual Weapon CAN, very much so, be attacked and destroyed by a mob, on BGTSCC.

Is there any way that the spell can be made to work as it does in PnP? Any reason why not it should follow PnP "rules?"

Cheers.

[DaloLorn]

My guess would be a tech thing, paired with an AI thing. We can't make the weapon untargetable to regular attacks without making it ethereal (which then makes it untargetable to everything) or cutscene-invisible (which might not have an effect at all, but would certainly make it imperceptible!). We also can't tell the AI that this thing is indestructible, so it would make for an even more implacable tank than Bigbies already are.

[Steve]

Thanks Dalo, it’s kinda what I thought.

Só, how does Rasael’s clone system work? They do not get attacked, or work as tanks, but DO attack mobs. Can that be applied to Spiritual Weapon?

[DaloLorn]

I've seen them get attacked, actually, but the reason they usually get away with it is that they only exist for one round at a time. That's obviously not an option with Spiritual Weapon.

[Steve]

We also can't tell the AI that this thing is indestructible....

If the Spiritual Weapon is described as "...cannot be attacked or harmed by physical attacks...," then why not give it 100% Immunity to Bludgeoning, Slashing and Piercing damage? The description doesn't say "...enemies won't attack it," so if a creature in the world was dumb enough to try and kill this "object" but failed, that's not actually wrong per se.

Now, I understand that if the AI will ALWAYS go to attack a Spiritual Weapon first and mainly in any encounter, we do have a problem in that it will be used as a tank and allow for the PC or PCs to flank such an occupied mob. But I'm not convinced this is the case, 100% of the time. Because, the Spiritual Weapon should function like any Summons in terms of "reaction" or "attention" by mobs/the AI, right? And mobs do not 100% go to kill the summons first (at least in my experience). Is it not that the AI begins to focus attention on whatever attacker is causing it the most damage?

Also, the Spiritual Weapon itself only does 1d8 force damage, total. Yes, it bypasses—supposedly—Damage Reduction, but really...that is so super low dmg, to say that Spiritual Weapon cannot be made Immune to Physical Attack damage.

[DaloLorn]

The AI generally tends to target one of three things:

• The first thing it sees.
• The first thing that enters a melee with it.
• The easiest thing to hit. (Granted, we could crank its AC up to 100 or something...)

These are fairly easy to adjust your strategy to, and since I don't know my way around the AI scripts, I can't force it to ignore this one creature.

[Steve]

[*]The easiest thing to hit. (Granted, we could crank its AC up to 100 or something...)[/list]

As long is doing this wouldn't interfere with the dispel magic, disintegrate, a sphere of annihilation, or a rod of cancellation options to destroy it.

[Deragnost]

[*]The easiest thing to hit. (Granted, we could crank its AC up to 100 or something...)[/list]

As long is doing this wouldn't interfere with the dispel magic, disintegrate, a sphere of annihilation, or a rod of cancellation options to destroy it.

It may actually interfere with disintegrate, because it's a ranged touch attack!