Ever sat down with your TTRPG group and gone “alright, so what do we want to play for our next campaign?” What if the answer was “four systems at once?” Well, you’d have an excruciatingly bad time. Here’s where I’d usually say “unless you’re doing a wizard battle”, but a royale put together by YouTuber Deficient Master doesn’t, uh, disprove anything.
Watch On
The task is to get the most amount of points before the round ends—either by killing people, or by retrieving chests from interestingly-placed tactical areas around the map, defended by goblins. In any other TTRPG session, this map would lead to an interesting, multifaceted combat. In a multi-ruleset wizard royale, however, about 8% of the map gets used before everyone obliterates each other from 500 feet away.
This is because wizards, regardless of the system, are notoriously squishy, and Deficient Master has placed all of these wizards at level one (or ‘1st level’, depending on the rulebook). The chunkiest of them all, the PF2e wizard played by YouTuber Nonat1s, has 14 hitpoints.
This does not save him from instant death.
The royale begins simply enough—Vagabond creator Indestructoboy, playing the Vagabond wizard (naturally), creates a giant leech to go get one of those aforementioned chests. This is about as much as anybody gets to interact with terrain or secondary objectives before it all goes to crap.
Nonat1s, flexing his PF2e rules knowledge, taps into a focus spell to cast Hand of the Apprentice, which has a range of 500 feet, and telepathically hurls his battleaxe at the Dungeon Crawl Classics player, Bobworldbuilder. This deals enough damage to instantly kill him.
However, Bobworldbuilder is playing Dungeon Crawl Classics—meaning he isn’t technically dead at 1st level, but instead needs to be “rolled over” by an ally or, in this case, a curious goblin searching him for loot. Surprise! Bobworldbuilder isn’t dead. He then goes and stands in some coals, “spellburns” away most of his stats to gain a plus 33 to his spellcasting check.
This produces a roll of 44 on a casting of Choking Cloud, which both sets the DC Nonat1s needs to beat and produces the failure effect: Instant death. In PF2e, Nonat1s literally cannot beat this save, because even a natural 20 would simply upgrade his critical failure to a failure.
This kills the Wizard. For emphasis: Neither of these people have moved more than 10 feet, yet. Bobworlduilder then immediately dies to the burning coals he stepped in.
On the other side of the map, Indestructoboy casts Disintegrate on the poor D&D 2024 ruleset player, TheADHDM, who so far has cast Magic Missile at a goblin and done nothing else. He can do this because in Vagabond, a “far” range for a spell target is just simply anything within sightlines.
He takes 14 points of damage and spends the rest of the short-lived combat bleeding out. It’s over. I don’t think much wisdom was gleaned from this experiment, and I do not recommend using it to settle rules system disputes for your next campaign. Cross-map instant death wizard tag does, however, make for some pretty great entertainment.
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