Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Infiniti2000" data-source="post: 2373827" data-attributes="member: 31734">I didn't 'somehow' latch on to that rule, I latched onto it specifically because it is the rule on flying. Unless some creature's ability provides an exception, a creature with a fly speed cannot fly through any substance other than air. What is air may be open to interpretation, I'll grant you that (i.e. mostly any gas substrate), but it must be air. So, a xorn with wings cannot fly through solid matter. A beholder cannot fly through water. Et cetera. Incorporeal creatures have an exception in their subtype description. There is no definition in the rules for alchemy. The fact that it's magical, or has some magical component to it, does not make it a non-science. I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that anything that has a magical component (and the jury's way out on how much of the alchemy is magical, as many of its 'products' are not actually magical) is by definition not a science. So, anyway, in the absence of a definition, we have to use the dictionary. I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone and have already put all this forward. So, does the definition say it's a science? From <a href="http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=alchemy&x=17&y=15" target="_blank">M-W Online</a>: " a medieval chemical science ..." QED. I don't think you understand my point. Let me try to be plainer. The player wants his PC to make an unarmed attack. Do you not allow the player to be descriptive? Of course not. Everyone DM allows the player to be descriptive should he want to. Does it matter what his description is as long as he only plans to make, per the rules, an unarmed attack? You say, Yes. Most everyone else says, No. You know why? Because (1) the description is pure flavor and should have little or no bearing on the rules, (2) you should never punish someone for role-playing (or trying to roleplay). This is what would happen:PC: Okay, I grab the orc by the back of his greasy head and try to drive his nose into his brain with my knee.DM: Are you planning to grapple?PC: No, I just want to drive my knee into his face.DM: Well, you can't do what you're proposing unless you grapple first and then while grappling, you can drive your knee into his face, or rather an undisclosed area of his body because we don't have called shots. Oh, while we're at it, you can't say 'knee' because it would just be a generic unarmed strike, and you don't specify body location unless you want me to penalize you for trying to hit him so high with a low body part .... Okay, I'm being mildly sarcastic here and I mean no offense (I hope you read this with a little bit of a sense of humor), but I think my point is more clear now. Well, that just really sucks. It makes for a much more boring game. You might as well number the squares on the board and merely call out, "Wizard to B4. Action #36C." I'd prefer the player use any descriptive text she wants and to clarify the rules she is using if necessary. Maybe different styles are necessary depending on how well the players and DM work together. I urge it to try it this way, though, as it greatly frees up the roleplaying and keeps people from merely stating rules or, probably worse, using the same tired cliché description over and over again. No, you are not mischaracterizing it, but we have a much larger point of disagreement and has a very thinly related tangent to this thread. No, the spell doesn't. And this is where you are wrong. Although I appreciate the huge effort you went to in your post, your reasoning is fundamentally flawed because you're using descriptive text of one attack method (grapple) to equate it to another (bull rush), when they are TOTALLY unrelated for purposes of rules and game mechanics. I can't be any clearer: they are not related at all. FoM gives you freedom from grapples, not from bull rushes. Period, end of story. The only argument you can make is whether bull rushing someone 'impedes their movement'. I say it doesn't because the defender of the bull rush can still move wherever he wants (just because he was moved out of his turn does not impede his normal movement during his turn), but if someone says it does then they have a lot more leg to stand on than by using your argument presented here. You have the same false assumption here: it does NOT do the same thing. Tripping is NOT a subset of entangling. You are making that up. You are not without reason, but you are definitely making it up and attempting to spin a thin thread to tie tripping into entangling and bull rushing into grappling. Of course you can move normally during your turn. If the tripping weapon said, "The subject cannot get up and move about." You'd have a point. Tripping doesn't say that, however. The target can still move normally. Tripping is not grappling no matter what you say, and it's not impeding the target's normal movement.</blockquote>

Verification