Talk:Ghost Step (3.5e Feat)

Uncanny Dodge?

I was wanting some clarification with regards to how the 19 ranks ability works with Uncanny Dodge. My issue is that it doesn't cause the opponenent to be flat footed but instead treats them as as though they are flat footed. With the amount of opponents that have Uncanny Dodge it does seem to weaken the feat if it's final ability is bypassed by a low level class ability.

I think the author choose a poor wording here. I'm not even sure what 'counts as flat-footed but isn't actually flat-footed' would even mean. If you're not actually flat-footed, do you lose your dex mod to AC? Except in the very few cases where an ability triggers against a flat-footed opponent, it's unclear that the ability even does anything under such a reading. For that reason, I suggest that you should instead read it as 'makes the opponent flat-footed against your attacks'. That out of the way, lets dig into the Uncanny Dodge text. It doesn't say you aren't flat-footed, but that you retain your dex bonus to AC when you are flat-footed. So the interaction here would be to make the target flat-footed against the attack, but they would still get their dex to AC and thus ignore any effect that needed that gone to trigger. Which still gets us to your concern that it's weird for a low level ability to counter a high level one like this, I just wanted to be clear about the reading and function.

I don't really agree with your concern though. Uncanny dodge lets someone respond to attacks that they're completely unaware of, whether they come from ambush a football field away or invisible creatures or whatever, and I'm not really sure why people forgetting you're there is much different than those. And while it's true that a lot of creatures have the ability, a lot more don't. This is still useful more often than not when you want to SA (or whatever dex denied thing you have in mind) something without a ring of blink or a flanking buddy. So you could certainly rule that this was supposed to work on everyone, but I don't think that's really warranted or necessary. Some people just have to be killed in different ways. /shrug. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 06:38, 17 September 2014 (UTC)