True Strike as a Swift Action

[Lord Pendragon]

So horses, in mid stride, can turn 180 degrees as a free action and keep running?

No, because running and charging have movement restrictions. A horse can however, charge a foe, wind up on the other side of said foe, then charge straight back the other way the next round. There is no facing, so the mount can be facing in any direction it chooses when it next moves.

If the horse is moving normally (hustling) then yes, it can turn 180 degrees as a free action at any point and keep on going, just like a human can.

I know if the knight was on a Giant Eagle and flying, making the same charge, that would not be possible.

Unless the Giant Eagle had picked up Improved Flight, you would be correct. That's a downside to flying, which is obviously a lot different from moving on the ground.

Sounds like something else is broken. No way should you be able to do a mounted charge on the same target every round.

I've seen enough riders in enough movies and at enough RenFaires charge something, then come to a stop and wheel around in place, that I'd say they absolutely should be able to do so. A horse is quite maneuverable.

And as far as balance is concerned, a high-level character is giving up all his attacks in a round for one charge attack. Usually the damage works out as similar, save for very high AC critters, wherein a full attack wouldn't connect with all attacks, while a charge attack gets to apply all damage if the single highest-BAB attack hits. Then again, unless the PC spends considerable resources to strengthen it, most mounts can be killed in a single round, either by a melee brute or a spellcaster (mounts pretty much have terrible saves.) So that "charge every round" is a bit conditional.

 

[Storyteller01]

I had alluded to this combo in my earlier post, but I guess I should spell it out.

Start with a BAB of +20.

Power Attack gives 2 for 1 when used with a two-handed weapon, or a one-handed weapon used in two hands. It doesn't matter which side you fall on in the old argument about whether a lance gives 2 for 1 Power Attack when used in one hand when mounted - just do whatever is necessary in your view to give the lance 2 for 1 Power Attack. This coverts the BAB of +20 to a damage bonus of +40.

Add in Leap Attack from Complete Adventurer. I can't find anything in the feat which would suggest that it cannot be used when mounted, and if a Medium sized humanoid jumping down on you at the end of a charge is going to make you hurt extra, a Medium sized humanoid mounted on a Large mount jumping down on you at the end of a charge is likely to make you hurt double extra. Leap Attack has been errata'ed to state that when you make a Leap Attack, "you deal +100% of the normal bonus damage from your use of the Power Attack feat." Note that it's not a doubling. It's +100%, which in this case makes the bonus damage from Power Attack +80.

Now, throw in ten levels of Cavalier from Complete Warrior. The Unstoppable Charge ability allows a Cavalier to deal quintuple (5x) damage with a lance. The damage from this combo is +400 from the conversion of BAB to damage alone. That's enough damage to kill practically everything in the Monster Manual apart from the largest dragons and the Tarrasque.

So how unbalanced is it if the CA book material is removed from this equation?

 

[FireLance]

So how unbalanced is it if the CA book material is removed from this equation?

If you remove Leap Attack, you halve the effectiveness. The damage bonus goes down to +200.

Without the Cavalier prestige class, the effectiveness drops by 40%: +240 damage with Leap Attack, or +120 for the core-rules only Spirited Charge with Power Attack.

Of course, without true strike, the difficulty is hitting anything at all when you are taking a -20 penalty to your attack roll.

Unless, of course, you're using material from the Expanded Psionics Handbook. The psionic feat Deep Impact allows you to make a single melee attack as a melee touch attack if you expend your psionic focus, which is effectively the same as a quickened true strike against an enemy with high armor, shield, and natural armor bonuses. This requires the expenditure of three feats for a non-psionic character: Wild Talent (to take psionic feats), Psionic Weapon (prerequisite) and Deep Impact itself. Take another feat, Psionic Meditation, which allows you to regain your psionic focus as a move action (you still need to make a DC 20 Concentration check, though), and you get one happy horseman.

 

[Zimbel]

In your above example, that's Level 20! At that high a level, I do not see it being that big a problem for 1 attack. Especially with the types of mosters and encounters players will be facing at CR 20. There is no garuntee that attack will succeed, and there are still many counters available, especially for CR 20 opponents.

Yep; I tried the worst example I could come up with in core Note that this is the damage from the LV 1 spell; the base attack should be doing at least 50+ by itself.

However, i'ts 1 attack every time the PC is willing to spend a standard action for this effect (if they're willing to shell out a standard action and a charge off of a cheap wand/every other round - at this level, you could actually go Fighter 20 and just put a lot into UMD/Cha - or you could just buy a lot of potions).

I've run high-level adventures in 3.0; here are the defenses I can come up with:
1) Stay out of range. Difficult in 3.5, where you can't just be hasted and Dimension Door/ Teleport every round. Flying will do, if the player with the mount has no way to make it fly (unlikely at LV 20).
2) Displacement (assuming that the PC can't counter with Blindsight or True Seeing). Quite possible at LV 20.
3) Ethereal (assuming not a ghost-touch weapon).
4) High AC. Possible, but rare - the higher the AC, the lower the other defenses need to be to keep the same CR. At high levels, if a front-liner's primary attack misses (other than a nat 1), that likely means that they're fighting something well above their CR.
5) High HP. This is the most likely one. Of course, that dosen't mean it won't do 100+ points of damage, but at least the creature will survive that attack.
6) Leave after the casting of True Strike. Or just get out of range for 1 round.
7) DR. The problem is that in 3.5, this isn't all that high (heck, in 3.0, it isn't that high around CR 20). Sure, it negates some damage, but the vast majority will get through. For that matter, some damage from the base attack should get through. And, of course, the weapon may defeat the DR.

I agree with you that it's less of a problem than 3.0's Harm or Time Stop. I do think that it's significantly stronger than any other core LV 1 spell at high levels.

Edit: due to Hypersmurf's correction.

 

[Hypersmurf]

(... or you could just buy a lot of potions).

True Strike is a personal-range spell.

-Hyp.

 

[glass]

Swift and Immediate actions aren't really optional rules. It's more like, "you know all that garbage under Quicken Spell about free actions you can only use once per round? Well, we cleaned up the language and now it's Swift Actions. And Feather Fall? Immediate Action."

That's all true, but it doesn't make them not optional. The various splatbooks that feature them can't overwrite the PHB, unless you let them by agreeing to an optional rule. This is still true, even if the new rule changes very little and is eminently sensible.


glass.

 

[Malachi_rc]

I think you've missed another thing

I had a character using options from quentisential (yeah, I was stupid) that let you do true strike as a free action. He made a fighter/wizard/prestige class (one that could ignore some spell failure) and then used disarm. I never worried about disarm before, but he regularly disarmed my bosses using two handed weapons with LOCKING GAUNTLETS. It wa a HUGE pain.

I also saw one character who did truestrike/power attack/ sunder, for the same effect. Only they couldn't pick it up again.