If something strikes your energy shield (mechanic or armor mod) that does ability damage as well as normal damage, but the normal damage is completely absorbed by that shield, do you still take the secondary effects like disease, poison or ability damage?
Huh... most other editions / spinoffs of D&D end up addressing this in their poison/disease rules section, but there's nothing on the matter in the Afflictions section. So by RAW, it appears so, since it doesn't seem to say anything about it that I can find. For what it's worth though, most other versions of D&D have had a rule that if you were able to completely prevent damage from a damaging attack by any means then any secondary effects of the attack would also be stopped. I'd just roll with that.
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Huh... most other editions / spinoffs of D&D end up addressing this in their poison/disease rules section, but there's nothing on the matter in the Afflictions section. So by RAW, it appears so, since it doesn't seem to say anything about it that I can find. For what it's worth though, most other versions of D&D have had a rule that if you were able to completely prevent damage from a damaging attack by any means then any secondary effects of the attack would also be stopped. I'd just roll with that.
I would also agree with this but I would need to know what the source of damage is and what the actual nature of the effect is.
weapons with the injection special property indicate they automatically deliver their poison on a successful attack. (pg 181)
The rules for damage reduction indicate that whenever damage from an attack is completely negated from an attack that the special effect of the attack such as injury based disease or injury based poison are also negated but that contact poisons would still inherently work (pg 263) I understand that damage reduction is a different set of rules but I post it to help establish a pattern of thought about afflictions and secondary effects
Contact and injury based poisons can both be put in a weapon with the injection special property but the contact poison acts like an injury based (poison) affliction except that it targets EAC and not KAC like standard injury based (poison)afflictions do. Injury based (poison) afflictions only produce their effect if damage is dealt (pg 417)
Damage dealt to a target wearing a force field is dealt to the force field itself before being applied to the target (pg 206).
I would say that if the secondary effect is related to disease or poison that the answer is no since no actual damage occurred to the target and was done completely to the shield itself instead and therefore doesn't damage the target which is a necessary condition for the effect to work
if you roll a natural 20 to hit you automatically do a critical hit (unless your total result is not numerically high enough to hit the EAC or KAC you are rolling against, in which case it does not count as a critical hit but still hits) (pg 245)
if an attack has a critical effect it is applied when you score a critical hit (pg 182)
However, Shields do not inherently protect against critical effects (pg 206) so if the effect was coming from a critical effect I would say that the answer is yes, you still take the special/secondary effect as actual damage to the target does not seem to be a specifier for critical effect to take effect.
However, The critical effect for "Injection" simply increases the Save DC by 2. So you would still have to deliver damage via the rules that govern injury based (poison) afflictions. So the answer for the one would be, again, no.
If this question is in relation to some magical effect, I would definitely need to know more
Pasting from the other thread where you asked this:
What do you mean by shield or energy shield?
1) If you mean most of the force fields in the game, yes. They're only temporary hit points, which means that fundamentally speaking, they do not behave anything like a force field outside of your body - e.g. any damage reduction you have applies to them.
2) If you mean any source of energy or damage resistance, it depends. Diseases and Poisons that are injury vector need to injure, so completely resisting the damage suffices, but contact vector ones only need to hit. Ability damage would depend on the source. For example, you can apply the Wounding weapon fusion to a sword. The Wounding sword only needs to hit and crit, and to roll 18-19 on the Wounding table, and for you to fail a fortitude save, to make you take the ability damage - soaking the sword's actual damage is irrelevant. If the Ability damage was coming from a spell, it would depend on the wording of the spell.