Question about Opportunistic Sacrifice

[Turim]

Opportunistic Sacrifice states that you gain the benefits of the Ritual Sacrifice feat any time you slay someone with magic, melee, or ranged attacks. So, do you get 1 PP for each 4 HP your enemy had before you killed him, as you do when you coup de grace someone with Ritual Sacrifice?

Example: Leif, a scholar/barbarian (who has Opportunistic Sacrifice) gets a melee critical hit on Bob the thief for 51 points of damage. Poor Bob has no armor, and only 31 hit points, so he's pretty dead at -20. Does Leif get 7 PP added to his PP pool, assuming of course his Maximum Power Point pool is big enough?

 

[spydacarnage]

That's certainly the way I read it...

 

[Elaith the Serpant]

So does that mean you can?

1. using ritual and/or tortured sacricfice to buff up on power points
2. walk into the middle of ones adversaries
3. unleash a defensive blast
4. get power points for killing people with fiery death
5. go back to step 2

not that i myself would do this in a Conan session as most sorcerors seem to want to hide behind many minions and operate from there.

 

[Jason Durall]

So does that mean you can?

1. using ritual and/or tortured sacricfice to buff up on power points
2. walk into the middle of ones adversaries
3. unleash a defensive blast
4. get power points for killing people with fiery death
5. go back to step 2

not that i myself would do this in a Conan session as most sorcerors seem to want to hide behind many minions and operate from there.

I guess it would work, though as a GM, I'd question it whenever a sorcerer spends considerable time "buffing up" on PP through elaborate preparations, then jumps into melee, explodes, just to regain the PP from the sacrifice. Turning into quasi-suicide bombers isn't really the nature of Hyborian Age magicians...

I'd certainly do everything in my power as a GM to see that they would suffer from this tactic, such as having them immediately run into folks who were outside of their blast radius, or just having archers go to town against the demon-like sorcerers who walk from a shroud of fire.

 

[argo]

So does that mean you can?

1. using ritual and/or tortured sacricfice to buff up on power points
2. walk into the middle of ones adversaries
3. unleash a defensive blast
4. get power points for killing people with fiery death
5. go back to step 2

Yep, which seems perfectly thematic to me given things like the Rule of Success and all.

Of course this is still highly dangerous for the sorcorer. Even with getting your PP back due to opportunistic sacrifice you can still only perform a free action on your turn which means that if there is a warior with enough balls to attack you after you let your DB go you are still in trouble. One good PA should put most Scholars down due to massive damage if nothing else.

Also, I use the house rule favored by many people here that a DB counts as a Mighty Spell, so trying to use it more than two, maybe three times in a week gets very risky very fast.

 

[Elaith the Serpant]

Yes there would be ways around it, i'm just wondering would it be possible. As a starting GM i'm not letting the Chars start as scholors although if they do find the relevent tombs later on and wish to study magic i might be willing to let them.

My NPC scholors, both malevolent and benign, would not use this tactic as it fits more with DnD than Conan magic users. I was just asking in a Hyperthectical sense as it bugged the hell out of me, before i found this forum that is, of whether stuff like that could be done.