Dreambinding And Creatures

And here we have a question that’s too complicated for a comment…

It occurs to me that, presuming the GM allows it, there’s little reason why dream-binding can’t bring forth creatures as well as items. Costs for mounts such as horses and riding dogs are in the Core Rules, other sourcebooks have prices for slaves (even if d20pfsrd.com removed them; they’re still on Archives of Nethys, though), and Pathfinder’s Ultimate Campaign has prices for “teams” of low-level characters. And of course, various sourcebooks have prices for certain monsters, such as the burrowing creatures in the equipment section of Races of Stone.

For that matter, you can use the “spellcasting services” price in the Core Rules to price out a single casting of animate dead/create undead/create greater undead and bring forth such creatures that way. The same goes for outsiders brought forth via the “cost” of a casting of one of the planar binding spells (and appropriate cost of cutting a deal with that outsider), though I suspect most GMs would disallow the much cheaper planar ally spells. And constructs have their prices listed in their monster entries.

All of which is to say that, if the GM signs off on the above, there’s a bit of a gap when it comes to creatures for which no easy pricing can be determined, such as dragons, magical beasts, fey, etc. Not withstanding making an item that uses a summoning spell (since summoning spells last only for a few rounds), what metric(s) would you suggest for determining the “price” of bringing forth some other creature type via dream-binding?

-Alzrius

For reference…

Dream-Binding (Occult Skill, Charisma) allows the user to draw objects from dreams into reality. To do so, the user must get a full nights rest and forfeit the natural healing and attribute recovery that would normally result, whereupon he or she will awaken with his or her allotment of items. The total value of such items may not exceed (Bonus x Bonus x 100 GP) and no more than one third of that total may be allotted to any single item. Dream-binding cannot create items with charges (although uses-per-day limitations are fine), or skill-boosting items. Consumable goods will vanish once the skill points are re-allotted, so the creation of food and water is ill-advised. Finally, of course, the game master must approve of the list of items to be created.

The original version got you a lot less gear because you had to divide up the skill points rather than portion out the total value – so at Skill 9 you could have three items worth (3 x 3 x 100 = 900 GP) each. This could be useful – but it was very limited and turned out to be far too much trouble to work with, particularly when reaching – say – +30 got you a maximum of 30,000 GP worth of gear, and likely less. Fortunately, Occult Skill allows for multiple versions of a skill if the GM finds it acceptable, so this version would wind up at 8100 GP at skill 9 and 90,000 GP at Skill 30. That makes Dream-Binding a powerful and very useful skill at lower levels, but of less and less use at higher ones where wealth by level starts greatly exceeding what it gets you and the primary utility moves towards equipping yourself with special-purpose gear suited for particular missions. That still handy of course, but it relies heavily on foresight, scouting, and planning to be really useful.

As far as the actual question goes… personally I’d be pretty reluctant to make anything made of dreams sapient; I’d expect rather erratic behavior at the least. Even disregarding the eccentricities of dreams, temporary, thrown-together, minds are not likely to be stable.

On the other hand, of course, most of what you’d want an unintelligent creature – like a horse, dog, a construct, or most dinosaurs – to do is pretty straightforward. even in terms of dreams – and you could reasonably argue that such creatures aren’t too likely to spend a lot of time on introspection and start cracking up.So Constructs and things with animal intelligence could be a “go” even with the basic version of the skill.

Still, if you or the GM is worried about the instability of minds woven from dreams, all you need to do is to take a variant (“Spirit Minions” or “Dimensional Wraiths” or something) and say that it summons aspects of existing creatures from elsewhere in the multiverse to your aid.

Which gives us some justification, but still no good way of pricing things – and there really isn’t one since all we’ve really got to go on with monsters is their challenge rating, which is a really poor measure of how helpful something will be to an adventurer. That’s why Pathfinder took Unicorns off the Summon Nature’s Ally IV list; they easily beat out Cure Critical Wounds (heal 4d8+Caster Level, Max 20) – being able to heal 5d8+20 damage and offering access to Neutralize Poison and a Circle Of Protection From Evil (as well as direct combat utility) on top. If you used the level five version of Summon Nature’s Ally – where Cure Critical Wounds resided for Druids – you got 1d3 Unicorns. That single summons could make a druid into a fairly powerful healer.

Challenge Rating 3 didn’t really cover it properly.

For Undead, I’d be reluctant to use the Creation price, since that doesn’t include the expense of controlling the thing, which is the hard part given that they sometimes spontaneously pop up on their own.

Teams would be kind of cheap, if of relatively little use at higher levels – but the team prices are predicated on being settled, sleeping at home, and having time off rather than going on adventures. And while there are rules for Hirelings, there really aren’t rules for purchasing them – just for paying them on a day-to-day basis. I know that I used team prices for Innate Enchantment (Portable Settlement) – but that’s more or less a persistent thing, not something that can be traded out daily. Its also something that appears and disappears as needed – while having forty or fifty people trailing along on your adventures will probably be more trouble than it’s worth.

There are, as you note, fairly extensive price lists for animals in Pathfinder – https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/goods-and-services/animals-animal-gear/ – but that has it’s problems too; rats are a mere 1 CP – if you invest, say, 20,000 GP of your “virtual gold” in rats, you get two million of them. Enough for something like 5000 Rat Swarms. Certainly enough to devastate a sizeable settlement. Walled town besieged by Orcs? for a mere 7200 GP you could send out a dozen Deinonychus each day. Or perhaps 10550 GP for ten Dire Tigers? Or the same for 105 Leopards? Having them disappear in the morning while you get new ones is an even bigger benefit. At (Bonus x Bonus x 100 GP, no more than one-third on any single creature) you could achieve most of those totals fairly readily. The problem is that not having to transport, care for, and control such beasts is an enormous advantage. No low-level party is likely to be able to afford and manage a trio of combat-trained woolly mammoths (13,500 GP in total) – but that amount is readily achievable with a +12 skill total. Take +4 at L1, +4 Attribute, +2 Skill Emphasis, and +3 Skill Focus for a +13. This makes it easily possible to simply “rent some for the day”. A trio of CR 10 Battle-Trained Woolly Mammoth mounts can be a pretty big help when you’re attacking a goblin camp or something.

That certainly doesn’t work very well.

Using the costs of hiring a spellcaster to cast “planar binding” is inappropriate too. Those are the prices for a spell cast in town at the spellcasters leisure after you journey to a large city and find someone to do it. For adventurous casting… you’d need to pay to bring them along. And your “payment” would mean nothing either since it would shortly vanish – not a good thing if you are accessing creatures that actually exist rather than just making dreams solid.

That still doesn’t get us very far in search of a general rule. The vast majority of the ways for “pricing” monsters include a variety of assumptions that don’t fit in with the “daily summoning” model.

So “Daily Summoning” it is. At least that takes care of being able to command them and food and care and such.

That’s (Generalized Summoning +5 Levels of Persistent (Lasts all day)) -2 Levels (Price break for built-in Metamagic) -1 Level (specific creature type) -2 Levels (lengthy casting procedure – a full night sleeping, giving up nightly healing, using ambient magic). So the spell level used is equivalent to the base Summoning effect for the creature of the CR you want. That gives us a set of spells for undead, psychic constructs, or whatever. It also puts unicorns back on the table, because why not? There are lots of other options for healing people.

Ergo, it’s (Spell Level x Caster Level x 1800 GP (Command Word) x.2 (Once Per Day). So that comes out to…

• CR 1/3: 180 GP (Skill 3, CL 1). Well, if your bard wants an entourage of songbirds, or you want some squirrels to fuss over the baby or a small dog or something, here you go. To be somewhat more practical, your aspiring necromancer can have a few human skeletons, your starting-out warlord could command a few basic goblins, and anyone could have a small monkey that can bring them the key to their cell or ferrets to gnaw on the ropes they are tied with.
• CR 1/2: 360 GP (Skill 4, CL 1). Here we get basic servants, pageboys, baboons, eagles, common ponies, and untrained orcs. For the most part, basic utility creatures.
• CR 1: 2160 GP (Skill 8, CL 3). Ghouls, heavy horses, lemures, riding dogs, pseudodragons, small elementals or animated objects, wolves… There is significant utility at this point, as well as enough combat power to terrorize normal people.
• CR 2: 5400 GP (Skill 13, CL 5). At this point Tarzan can have his apes, bears, boars, and cheetahs are available, you can ride a dire bat, or be accompanied by a lantern archon, quasit, or imp, or snuggle with your pet wolverine.
• CR 3: 10,800 GP (Skill 18, CL 7). Infant dragons, small dinosaurs, dire wolves, mephits, hell hounds, giant eagles, pegasi, unicorns, medium elementals… Sure, unless you’ve made skills your characters focus you are probably not particularly impressed by such creatures, but the spread of options available is probably more important than your creatures relatively minor combat utility.
• CR 4-5: 16,200 GP (Skill 22, CL 9). A barghest to make sure your enemies stay dead, a gargoyle to guard your camp, a hound archon to provide advice, a tiger to look impressive, a basilisk to threaten your captives with, a djinni or bearded devil to show your power, trolls, winter wolves, wraiths… Certainly Skill 22 is getting up there – but an impressive supernatural entourage is still useful and definitely makes an impression.
• CR 6: 23,760 GP (Skill 27, CL 11). At this point it’s generally not combat power. It’s intelligent minions who can do things while you’re busy or elsewhere, impressive flying mounts, advanced megaraptor skeletons for intimidation, and so on. If you just want a wall of meat, go with giant vermin
• CR 7-8: 32,760 GP (Skill 32, CL 13). Huge elementals, giant construction crews, the ever-popular succubus “aide”, ogre magi, dire tigers, shield guardians, and tyrannosaurs all come into play here – but by the time most characters have +32 in a skill these sorts of creatures will be handy to have around, but fairly unimportant except for where they let you break the action economy.
• CR 9: 43,200 GP (Skill 36, CL 15). The Androsphinx, bone devil, greater elemental, triceratops, and vrock all come into play here – but while that’s cool, a +36 skill bonus is getting well up there. If your interest is in combat, any decent summoner has had creatures of this level on tap for some time. Your advantage lies in having the creatures around all day, and being able to send them off on long-term independent errands, rather than using them up for the day getting in an extra round or two worth of semi-effectual attacks.
• CR 10-11: 55,080 GP (Skill 41, CL 17). Barbed devils, elder elementals, some kinds of young adult dragons, stone golems, and twelve-headed hydras can all be at your command – but against most opponents suitable for characters with skill bonuses of 41+ they probably aren’t going to be all that effective. At this point you’re probably much better off bringing in supporting staff rather than monsters to go adventuring with.

—Epic (Level 10+) Spell Threshold—

At this point we’re looking for exotic special abilities that would be useful to have access to, some major support powers, or sheer coolness (riding a dragon makes ANYONE look good!). By the time a character can summon creatures like this, they just won’t mean much in direct combat – and that isn’t going to change much, so there’s no need for further descriptions.

• CR 12-13: 68,400 GP (Skill 46, CL 19)
• CR 14-15: 83,160 GP (Skill 50, CL 21)
• CR 16: 99,360 GP (Skill 55, CL 23)
• CR 17-18: 117,000 GP (Skill 60, CL 25)
• CR 19: 136,000 GP (Skill 64, CL 27)
• CR 20-21: 156,000 GP (Skill 65, CL 29)
• CR 22: 178,000 GP (Skill 73, CL 31)

CR 23+ is – under the standard rules – not possible; the base cost of the “item” required exceeds the 200,000 GP limit. Even going by the standard Epic Magic Item Rules that puts the cost at a little over two million GP – and the skill requirement at +247. Even as it is… the table above likely far exceeds the limits of most games.

Now, since the effective value of Dream-Binding is (Bonus x Bonus x 100 GP), but no more than one third of the total may be spent on any given item, those skill totals suffice for three monsters of that level – or, as usual, you can go down a level to get 2 monsters, or down two levels to get four. So at Skill 27 you could have a daily entourage of four CR 3 Unicorns, four CR 3 Deinonychus, and ride a CR 6 Ankylosaurus. Or you could specialize in something – perhaps Demonology – and have some imps and things even at fairly low levels.

You’d probably get more powerful creatures, and more raw power, with Leadership – especially after the investment needed to boost a skill to 27 at relatively low levels – but this method has the advantage that your creatures simply appear on the days you need them, don’t require transport or attention, always obey orders, and are completely disposable, since – if “killed” – they are just dispelled and can be summoned back in the morning. That can be pretty useful.

Now the really powerful creatures – with challenge ratings of 12+ – are summoned with spells of level 10+, and their availability will depend on how your game master feels about such spells. On the other hand… by the time you can reasonably have a skill of 60+, having a few high-level creatures about won’t make a lot of difference.

As usual in Eclipse, there’s a tradeoff here; lower level characters will find this a substantial boost, a mid-level one will find it useful, but just another tool in their toolbox, and high-level characters will find it mildly useful. Of course, that is more or less the expected pattern for skills; they never really lose all utility, but they are certainly far more useful at relatively low levels.

And I hope that helps!