Creature effect omniscience and self-harm

LostWormOnItsWayHome · Oct 19, 2018

I hadn't thought of that.

Garthanos · Oct 19, 2018

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't is fun. Sometimes you have to set it up AND sometimes you are a fighter

Balesir · Oct 22, 2018

And don't forget melee blast attacks, "all adjacent" attacks, opportunity attacks, attacks that impose some effect as well as making a melee attack... And what happens if an ally redirects one of a monster's melee attacks against you, when maybe they can't redirect it against the creature itself? At 27th level - which this power is - you're looking at some pretty kooky combinations of effects available to both monsters and PCs.

Making others pay a price for some of the options they have, or pulling off a combo that surprises everybody with its effectiveness, is a big part of the fun in 4E.

pemerton · Oct 24, 2018

LostWormOnItsWayHome said:
I don't believe the power was designed with the general rule in mind.

I agree.

Even if we bracket the general rule, there's another issue - if the GM knows what the player has done, then s/he knows that any attack against the rogue will rebound, even if the creature doesn't, which makes action declaration hard on the GM's side.

One option would be to reword the ability: on the creature's next turn, if it has a melee attack as a standard, move or minor action then you can have it attack another creature of your choice, including itself, instead of its normal action of the attack's type. I don't think that's going to break the game.

Another option is that the player doesn't tell the GM the effect, just the damage - this will work better at some tables than others, depending on table conventions for handling action resolution, recording hits and damage, etc. Then if the GM triggers the effect the player calls in the "gotcha".

A third option will likewise work only at some tables (eg mine) - rely on the GM to forget about it by the time the creature's turn comes around. This happens to me all the time with marking and similar effects, so no doubt would work fine with this ability too!

Garthanos · Oct 24, 2018

pemerton said:
One option would be to reword the ability: on the creature's next turn, if it has a melee attack as a standard, move or minor action then you can have it attack another creature of your choice, including itself, instead of its normal action of the attack's type. I don't think that's going to break the game.

In the name of predictable tactical value for an ability I like that...