What does an acrobatic stunt do?

[Stalker0]

The 4e book gives a DC and everything for an "acrobatic stunt". They even give a mention of what happens if you fail. But....what does it do?

 

[Thasmodious]

Whatever a player comes up with. Fighting in a tavern? Maybe one player wants to hop up on the table, grab the chandelier and swing across the room to land on the stairs above the fray. Maybe the pirate wants to jump down from the crows nest by sticking his sword through the sail and riding it down. Maybe you want to throw your shield on the ground and surf it down a flight of stairs while shooting things with your bow. Any of those things can be handled by an acrobatic stunt.

 

[Stalker0]

If that's all it does then there's no need for a skill check, I just say I move down the stairs in a cool way.

Skill checks are to provide a mechanical benefit, at the cost of a possible mechanical failure. In this case there's a penalty for failing the check, but no bonus.

 

[Ahglock]

Cool factor might not be a mechanical benefit, but who cares its cool.

 

[ranger9]

The DMG provides a brief, sketchy framework for adjucating stunts. Basically, depending on level, there's a low-moderate-high difficulty class you assign to pull the stunt off, and also the expected amount of damage (which goes up as you go up in level), segregated again by low-medium-high, but twice: Once for the sorts of stunts that occur all the time and thus have high repeatability and therefore do less damage, and one for hard-to-repeat stunts where damage can be a big higher.

It's not a very detailed framework but it will work well enough with just a bit of DM adjudicating.

I don't think stunts have to be acrobatic. Athletics ad other skils can be used to pull off stunts.

 

[hong]

So if you succeed on a stunt, you can do damage? Is this in addition to your other options in a round?

 

[ranger9]

It also provides the useful advice that you're generally supposed to say yes to a proposed stunt, becuause DM's are supposed to encourage stuff like swinging from a chandelier to kick an ogre into a fireplace's embers.

That's the example they give. That one I think is supposed to get an Easy difficulty, and is repeatedable so it uses the lower damage amounts, but is rated High as far as that lower damage scale.

So basically every stunt is either Easy, Moderate, or Hard, easily repeatable or unlikely to be repeated, and then, within those two broad damage categories, doing Low Medium or High damage.

Pretty lickety-split. Not very detailed, but a simple framework that will cover most stunts.

 

[Surgoshan]

If that's all it does then there's no need for a skill check, I just say I move down the stairs in a cool way.

Skill checks are to provide a mechanical benefit, at the cost of a possible mechanical failure. In this case there's a penalty for failing the check, but no bonus.

Of course there's a bonus. In the example of riding down stairs on a shield while firing a bow, it sounds like the character wants to take a basic attack while also making an extended move motion. The bonus is that if he succeeds he's at the bottom of the stairs and has made an attack. If he fails, he didn't get the attack and he's prone. If he doesn't want that failure, he'll have to take a standard action to attack and a move action to move, as normal.

 

[ranger9]

>>>So if you succeed on a stunt, you can do damage?

If you're doing the sort of stunt that ultimately results in damage. I'm not sure what the rules are for a stunt that results in a status like combat advantage or dazed or a forced move. Probably just a variation, like "reduce damage one level for each status or move you want to inflict" down to zero damage.

I dunno.

 

[ranger9]

>>>Is this in addition to your other options in a round?

If you mean can you use a stunt to effectively conjure up the equivalent of another encounter power, I believe the answer is "yes." Subject to plausibility and suitability of the battle-space and terrain and features and the like.

PS, while it works for many stunts pretty easily, it doesn't really tell you how to resolve others, like "I grab the tall flag-standard, hold it crosswise across my body, and charge the four minions with it, using the standard to push them all back over the edge of the pit."

I don't know if it has a framework for that sort of thing. Following the basic rule of "try to say yes" I guess you'd just call it a multiple-target bull rush with a penalty of (say) -2 per additional target, Str vs. highest Fortitude. If you pull it off, I guess they all go flying into the pit of lava. Or maybe you just roll against each of them individually, taking a -4 penalty (as you're pushing four figures). I dunno.

The framework, as written, and as far as I read (skimmed), really only handles the simplest sort of "inflict damage upon one target" sort of stunt.

That is 90% of them, tho.

Given the basic spirit of "Say Yes to Stunts," tho, I think you're supposed to allow most plausible action hero stunts like this.