Question about Jabbing Style's extra damage.


Rules Questions

Liberty's Edge

3 people marked this as FAQ candidate.

So,I'm having some trouble figuring out how Jabbing Style function mechanically.

Prerequisites: Improved Unarmed Strike; base attack bonus +6, brawler’s flurry† class feature, or flurry of blows class feature.

Benefit: Once per round, when you hit a single target with two unarmed strikes, you deal an extra 1d6 points of damage to that target. That extra damage is added to the damage of your second attack. If you hit a single target with three or more unarmed strikes, you instead deal an extra 2d6 points of damage, which is added to your final unarmed strike against the target during the round.

The retroactive nature of the damage has me a little bit confused on how to play with it.How does it function if I would knock out some one with the extra damage from two hits give that I won't know if he will take enough damage to drop below 0 until after I decide to weather or not to use another attack on that enemy?


Jonsphantom wrote:

So,I'm having some trouble figuring out how Jabbing Style function mechanically.

Prerequisites: Improved Unarmed Strike; base attack bonus +6, brawler’s flurry† class feature, or flurry of blows class feature.

Benefit: Once per round, when you hit a single target with two unarmed strikes, you deal an extra 1d6 points of damage to that target. That extra damage is added to the damage of your second attack. If you hit a single target with three or more unarmed strikes, you instead deal an extra 2d6 points of damage, which is added to your final unarmed strike against the target during the round.

The retroactive nature of the damage has me a little bit confused on how to play with it.How does it function if I would knock out some one with the extra damage from two hits give that I won't know if he will take enough damage to drop below 0 until after I decide to weather or not to use another attack on that enemy?

I would view the 2d6 as separate die. If you hit with 2 attacks, deal an extra d6. Afterwards, if you get a 3rd hit, ad another d6.

Personally I would like to know how this interacts with attacks of opportunity and other extra attacks. The language talks in terms of rounds rather than turns so do attacks not on your turn count?

Also, does switching in and out of the style via feats like combat style master reset the counter?


link to thread asking same question
Yes its retroactive nature makes it iffy and mostly useful when you know you're not going to kill it anyways.


This . . . oh wow. Given that you can choose to change your target as each attack resolves, this ability is pretty weird. You should know whether you dropped a foe after the second hit. If the foe doesn't drop, but would drop if you changed targets (thereby limiting the number of hits on that target to 2 and adding extra damage) . . . Ugh, my head hurts. I guess you're supposed to apply the damage, then retroactively remove it and add it to the third hit if the foe didn't drop on the second hit? *headdesk* Was this really necessary?


Personally If you wanted to make it a little less gamble you could say that on your second hit deal 1d6 extra and your third hit deal another 1d6 extra and then no more from then on. It'd be a house rule, but I think it'd be a very good one to use.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
blahpers wrote:
This . . . oh wow. Given that you can choose to change your target as each attack resolves, this ability is pretty weird. You should know whether you dropped a foe after the second hit. If the foe doesn't drop, but would drop if you changed targets (thereby limiting the number of hits on that target to 2 and adding extra damage) . . . Ugh, my head hurts. I guess you're supposed to apply the damage, then retroactively remove it and add it to the third hit if the foe didn't drop on the second hit? *headdesk* Was this really necessary?

Worse than that, the bonus damage is always added to the last attack made against the target in the round. Basically, for each successful attack, you roll the jabbing style damage, then on the next successful attack, retract the jabbing style damage and reroll it.

Here's a weird example. Say you're fighting a goblin with Roll With It. On your second hit, the goblin uses Roll With It and fails its reflex save. You hit it with a third attack, but after retracting the damage from the second attack, you find that the goblin would have succeeded on his reflex save, and so it rolls out of range, taking no damage from the second hit and being out of range for the third.

Not sure how this is meant to be resolved. I guess the developer looked at hammer the gap and thought "How can we make this complicated enough monks will want it?"


I'm looking at the wording, and as worded it seems that you get +1d6 damage per hit, applied per each unarmed strike within a fob? It says:

When you hit a target with an unarmed strike and you have hit that target with an unarmed strike previously that round, you deal an extra 1d6 points of damage to that target.

So that for each hit after the first, when you calculate the damage of that hit, you deal an additional 1d6?

And then for jabbing master, what it does is increase it to 2d6 on the second hit and then 4d6 on each hit after the second. Am I mistaken in thinking you can change the targets of each hit of your flurry of blows to hit essentially as many targets as you get attacks with your flurry? So that really, you're calculating damage on the go, not after rolling all hits, and thus you would know before choosing who to attack next whether your attack had already killed the target, and wouldn't 'waste' any attacks on them after they were dead?

Dark Archive

Arraveci wrote:

I'm looking at the wording, and as worded it seems that you get +1d6 damage per hit, applied per each unarmed strike within a fob? It says:

When you hit a target with an unarmed strike and you have hit that target with an unarmed strike previously that round, you deal an extra 1d6 points of damage to that target.

So that for each hit after the first, when you calculate the damage of that hit, you deal an additional 1d6?

And then for jabbing master, what it does is increase it to 2d6 on the second hit and then 4d6 on each hit after the second. Am I mistaken in thinking you can change the targets of each hit of your flurry of blows to hit essentially as many targets as you get attacks with your flurry? So that really, you're calculating damage on the go, not after rolling all hits, and thus you would know before choosing who to attack next whether your attack had already killed the target, and wouldn't 'waste' any attacks on them after they were dead?

This thread was created before the ACG errata so many of the things they are saying are no longer correct. Please see my own thread on the subject for a more accurate picture of how the feat works, with dev commentary.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Rules Questions / Question about Jabbing Style's extra damage. All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.