PDA

View Full Version : Attacks with Magic Weapons



ShadeRaven
January 25th, 2015, 03:38
I know immunities and resistances work on their own well (RESIST: bludgeoning) but when it comes to things like the wight (resist against nonmagic), I haven't been able to figure out if there's a way to automate the attacks to it recognizes a magic weapon when it attacks.

Do we just adjust a weapon (property) or is there a tag that will account for when one player attacks with a warhammer doing half is different than the next who hit with his +1 mace?

Thanks in advance!

Treegreen
January 25th, 2015, 04:05
I'm not totally sure what you're asking in the second part but to make a weapon magical you change the damage type to magic under the attack. So, if you had a player with a +1 Warhammer you would have them go to the Actions tab, then under weapons click the magnifying glass to the right of their +1 Warhammer and change the type line from bludgeoning to magic.

ShadeRaven
January 25th, 2015, 10:25
Gotcha... but what about creatures with bludgeoning resistance that's not reduced by magic?

Treant comes to mind, but I know there's a few more. Same way with immunities.

I assume that, unlike 4E, we don't have a specific tag or field we can use to designate that this weapon is magic. Changing piercing to magic doesn't really indicate the weapon is magic but still does piercing damage, it changes its actual damage type to magic so that only things that were RESIST: magic or IMMUNE: magic would trigger.

Not that there's not work-arounds, just curious if there was something there that I was missing :)

spoofer
January 25th, 2015, 10:48
List the damage type as the following.
bludgeoning, magic

ShadeRaven
January 25th, 2015, 14:15
We tried that, spoofer, but it didn't seem to allow magic weapons to do the full damage against creatures with resists such as "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical weapons that aren't silvered". The resist for piercing would kick in.

Zacchaeus
January 25th, 2015, 15:18
So I tried this out against a Wight as follows;

1. Weapon with piercing - as expected the Wight resisted and took only half damage.
2. Same weapon but with piercing, silver - again as expected Wight took full damage.
3. Same weapon but with piercing, magic - yet again as expected Wight took full damage.

Conclusion is that this seems to be working as expected. Have you perhaps incorrectly tagged the damage types? A common mistake is to capitalise i.e. Magic, instead of magic.

Another possibility: has the effect on the monster parsed correctly? Mine reads:

RESIST: necrotic; RESIST: bludgeoning, piercing, slashing, !magic, !silver; IMMUNE: poison; IMMUNE: poisoned

Note the '!' before magic and silver.

ShadeRaven
January 25th, 2015, 19:48
I'll ask the DM who was running the campaign if he had all the tags set up correctly. :)

Thanks! That looks pretty clearcut.

Zacchaeus
January 26th, 2015, 12:10
Jolly good, keep us updated :)