Repose Domain Ability

[valiea987]

Hello!

I was reading through Faiths and Pantheons about the Repose Domain. It has:

• Granted Power: You may use a death touch once per day. Your death touch is a spell-like ability that is a death effect. You must succeed at a melee touch attack against a living creature (using the rules for touch spells). When you touch, roll 1d6 per your cleric level. If the total at least equals the creature's hit points, it dies.

That just seemed like a neat ability. Any chance something like that could be added in the future? Or is there concern it is too strong since there's no save, just HP restriction?

[Nokteronoth]

I'd think so. The only other kill-on-HD spells have a limit on level 10, I believe? Everything else has a DC. A low DC at that, for most class abilities- see Deathless Master Touch. DC 17 for 10 Palemaster levels, compared to the proposed single-shot here. (That would only require a single level, though I suppose it'd be d6/class level? Not character level?)

~BR

[valiea987]

Yeah, d6 per cleric level. I think it is up to interpretation as to whether cleric prestige classes (Doomguide, Hospitaler, Harper Priest or whatever else adds) would add to it. There are other domain powers like Divine Strength... Do prestige classes also help those?

I looked into what you said about the spells, and the closest thing I can find is Power Word: Kill. No save, just spell resistance, but it is limited to below 101 hp. This strikes me as mechanically being the closest to how Repose domain is meant to word... Except Power Word: Kill doesn't scale based on anything. For the Repose ability, the HP that can be instant killed is based off of a roll. So...

A level 30 cleric (human and all) would be 30d6. That translates to a range of 30 to 180, with 105 as the average. So at level 30, it would be just a bit better than Power Word: Kill on average that bypasses all resistances.