Talk:Tome of Prowess (3.5e Sourcebook)/Cultures

If I can grab part of my opponents magic sword for a moment, may I purposely fail the activate blindly check to make it temporarily non-functional?-173.242.124.71 13:13, 22 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Hrm. I had honestly not considered the offensive options of that ability.


 * As written, you could certainly make a check against a foe's item if you grabbed on and held on for the standard action (or longer) that you needed to activate the item. While I'm fine with intentional failure (though some weak items might have problems getting a failure into that range at high levels) and the activation action cost seems unlikely to happen too often (relegating this to a rare tactic), it brings up an interesting behavior incentive. If you grab an item to contest it (instead of simply disarming, stealing, or sundering it) it may be more beneficial to disable it instead of fight over it. And I don't think that's the sort of behavior I want the ability to encourage. I will probably add a "you must have sole possession of the item to use this ability" rider to the various magic item checks floating around to avoid it. I'd rather have people fight over getting to use an item in these situations than fight to render it inoperable. And I can add a temp disable to devices that doesn't have the numeric problems here if there's a desire to shut items down in a fight. - Tarkisflux Talk 23:55, 22 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Can I use it to disable cursed items?--173.242.124.71 16:15, 23 November 2012 (UTC)


 * No. The ability is missing clauses about how long an item activated with the ability remains on as well as a clause about not multi-activating things, which I need to add (thanks for bringing up an example that pointed that out). Without these things you get weirdness with items that I don't like at all. I'll get that cleaned up shortly.


 * Anyway, once a cursed is activated it isn't going to turn off again until you have deactivated it through other means, and if you can't multi-activate you never get the second try to auto-fail so it's not going to matter. And if you know it's cursed and it isn't activated, you probably wouldn't want to activate it in the first place. But you could auto-fail to try and disable it temporarily, but that runs into the same auto-fail problems described above where rolling a 1 on the check won't necessarily case it to fail if you have a large enough bonus otherwise. - Tarkisflux Talk 17:46, 23 November 2012 (UTC)