Charm of Misplaced Wrath

[kerbarian]

This seems pretty ridiculous... I'm trying to see if there's actually anything wrong with the interpretation. Charm of Misplaced Wrath (wizard encounter 1) has the effect:

The target is dazed until the end of your next turn. You slide the target 3 squares. The target then attacks a creature of your choice with a basic attack. It gains a bonus to its attack roll and damage roll equal to your implement’s enhancement bonus.​

An artillery monster (which has a ranged basic attack) is marked by a fighter. A wizard casts Charm of Misplaced Wrath on it, slides it next to the fighter, and tells it to make its ranged basic attack against itself. It then suffers three attacks:

1) The fighter's opportunity attack, since it's making a ranged attack.
2) The fighter's combat challenge attack, since it's making an attack that doesn't include the fighter.
3) The attack against itself, with the implement enhancement (and -2 for marked, +2 for CA from dazed).

Some possible issues:

Can a creature attack itself? With a bow?

Does the wizard get to decide which basic attack the creature uses? My guess here is that if the wizard tells it to target one of its allies at range, it would have to use its ranged basic (provoking OAs), but for a target within melee range, it could choose its melee basic.

 

[eamon]

This seems pretty ridiculous... I'm trying to see if there's actually anything wrong with the interpretation. Charm of Misplaced Wrath (wizard encounter 1) has the effect:

The target is dazed until the end of your next turn. You slide the target 3 squares. The target then attacks a creature of your choice with a basic attack. It gains a bonus to its attack roll and damage roll equal to your implement’s enhancement bonus.​

An artillery monster (which has a ranged basic attack) is marked by a fighter. A wizard casts Charm of Misplaced Wrath on it, slides it next to the fighter, and tells it to make its ranged basic attack against itself. It then suffers three attacks:

1) The fighter's opportunity attack, since it's making a ranged attack.
2) The fighter's combat challenge attack, since it's making an attack that doesn't include the fighter.
3) The attack against itself, with the implement enhancement (and -2 for marked, +2 for CA from dazed).

Some possible issues:

Can a creature attack itself? With a bow?

Does the wizard get to decide which basic attack the creature uses? My guess here is that if the wizard tells it to target one of its allies at range, it would have to use its ranged basic (provoking OAs), but for a target within melee range, it could choose its melee basic.

I've seen a bard level 5 power similar to this (but daily) in play, and it sounds cooler that it is - usually. Typically, it's hard to get all three factors to trigger. Firstly, many encounters don't have artillery or you don't know whether they're artillery (dudes with spears - can they throw them? the lizard - does it have a ranged attack at all?) Secondly, it's not always that easy to get the mark to trigger, because the marked guy is often some particularly scary thing the defender can stay close too - not the back-row artillery (particularly for fighters that need to be adjacent to get CC). Third, the -2 of the mark is kind of unhandy. Fourth (and quite subtly so) - most monsters have lower damage than PC's and much, much more hit points. Basically, it hardly hurts them to hit each other. On the other hand, if you used such a power on a PC, it would really be nasty.

That last point is really the kicker - for this kind of "self-attack", you're losing out on a lot of damage, and you need to succeed on two attack rolls (for the original power and the subsequent attack). So you start off badly. These kinds of powers really only work well if you can get em to trigger extra attacks+damage, like OA's or CC's. Alternatively, real domination simply takes the monster out of the game for a round or two, that's also worth something. But the attacks themselves are quite poor.

 

[Wepwawet]

Can a creature attack itself? With a bow?

Good grief! Are you serious?!

Edit: Ok, if I was the DM I'd make the spell fail. You know, like those conditions on 3.x spells where you could never order self destructive behaviour to dominated creatures. And if this rule is not on 4E, it is covered by the bag-o-rats rule.

 

[Ryujin]

Given that there are a few powers that actually specify that the creature can damage itself (sorry, drawing a blank on an example at the moment), I would say that in this case the creature cannot attack itself.

 

[Joshua Randall]

First, a lot of monsters (particularly in Heroic tier) have very limited basic attack options. Be sure to look at the attack icons to see which is which. If a monster doesn't have a ranged basic attack, then it can't be ordered to make one; or vice versa with melee basic attack.

Second, as a DM I would never allow a create to make a ranged attack against itself. You might be able to make some rules argument for why it should be able to, but the reason the game has a DM is to adjudicate against nonsense like that. I'd rule that the creature needs to make an attack against some other legal target (another monster would be ideal from the PCs' point of view).

 

[Jhaelen]

Can a creature attack itself? With a bow?

Does the wizard get to decide which basic attack the creature uses?

In my game?

Making the target attack itself won't work and the target will choose which basic attack to use based on it's normal preferences (i.e. it will act as if its target was an enemy).

 

[Neonchameleon]

Making a ranged basic attack against itself should fail. But making it make a ranged basic attack by throwing its sword at someone else? (Thereby leaving it disarmed...)

 

[Flipguarder]

Ranged basic attack with a bow = straight up in the air. I don't understand why this is so gorram confusing?

 

[Mort_Q]

... it is covered by the bag-o-rats rule.

This.

 

[kerbarian]

Making a ranged basic attack against itself should fail. But making it make a ranged basic attack by throwing its sword at someone else? (Thereby leaving it disarmed...)

I've seen this come up in discussions about domination, and clearly it's pretty disruptive -- the DM has to work out a ranged basic attack with an improvised weapon, then decide what the creature's attacks will be like without a weapon. The way I'd probably go with this is: Creatures don't have a ranged basic attack unless it's in their stat block. The DM can, of course, let creatures throw their swords if it fits story purposes, but there's no basic throw-my-sword attack for characters to take advantage of.

The PHB says "A basic attack is an at-will attack power that everyone possesses, regardless of class. The power comes in two forms: melee and ranged." But that's referring to characters. It's certainly a reasonable interpretation that it also applies to monsters, but I don't think it has to.