Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Space Coyote" data-source="post: 3258114" data-attributes="member: 29895">I need some clarification here. My nephew and I keep butting heads over rule disputes. When I DM, I like to use only the core books, Spell compendium and a few rules that I garnered from other books, which I specify in my house rules. When playing a friends campaign however, he allows pretty well any book, especially any "Complete" book.My nephew keeps popping up rules that he says comes from other WOTC books. I cannot find information in the core books or eratta, so I cannot truly confirm what he is claiming. When I ask him about him, he merely says, "It says this in the complete books."Here is the jist of the discussion:1) I have always known 3.x rules to make a clear distinction between what are considred "weapon" attacks are what effects come from "spells". Weapons are man made objects that you weild to attack with (such as swords and bows), and can include "natural" weapons like unarmed strikes and creatures using natural weaponry. Basically, anything "physical" to cause damage.2) Spells use "magic" to cause damage. Some form of magical energy is summoned or called upon and the target takes damage.3) Therefore whenever a feat or spell or ability specifies "Weapon damage", then it only applies to physical weapons. For example, the +1 luck bonus from Prayer specifies "weapon damage", therefore you would not gain the bonus with, lets say, a Magic Missile or Scorching Ray. Things like Damage reduction applies only to "weapons". Certain rules will specify exceptions, such as weapon focus stating that you can use it with ray spells.However, my nephew is stating that the Complete books clarified that spells are now considered "weapons" for the purposes of gaining benefits from other sources. The final straw, however, was recently, when he advised that ranged touch spells are considered ranged "attacks" and follow the same rules for such.Here are some of the debates that came up recently:1) Does a Ranger's favoured enemy bonus (which specifies weapon damage) apply to spells?2) What about spells like Prayer? Do spells like Scorching Ray or Magic Missle get the bonus on damage?3) Since a range touch attack spell, such as Ray of Enfeeblement, is a "ranged attack", it provokes an AOO twice, once for casting the spell and once for being a ranged attack (it still does not provoke a third AOO from being "unarmed", since touch attack spells specifically state that they are considered "armed").I would be happy with considering physical weapons and spells were two separate things. I dont have an issue with spell "attacks" (spells that require an attack roll) from gaining certain bonuses (such as Point blank shot or +1 to hit from Bless), but outright stating that spells are considered weapons whenever it is beneficial to do so just seems to give spells a bigger boost than they already get. And stating that ranged attack spells provoke an AOO, seems a little TOO penalizing.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /></blockquote>

Verification