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Luminalle wrote:

According to rules, the special statistics can be adjusted only by circumstance bonuses, status bonuses, and penalties. This doesn't really exclude any of the above, since they aren't really item bonuses.

The rule is "If you take on a battle form with a polymorph spell, the special statistics can be adjusted only by circumstance bonuses, status bonuses, and penalties."

Whether or not they're item bonuses is irrelevant to the point. The rule doesn't say "Can't be affected by item bonuses" it says "If you take on a battle form with a polymorph spell, the special statistics can be adjusted only by circumstance bonuses, status bonuses, and penalties."

So the series of questions is "Is this a statistic gained from the battle form?" If the answer is "yes" then we know that the only things that can modify it are "circumstance bonuses, status bonuses, and penalties". It doesn't matter what else it is, only that it isn't one of those three things.

Are the strikes you gain "special statistics"? The battle form says "You gain the following statistics and abilities regardless of which battle form you choose" and then it lists the AC etc. and after those it says "You also gain specific abilities based on the type of x you choose:" and then it lists the strikes. This would imply that the strikes you get are not statistics. I don't think this is clear at all. Furthermore, dragon barbarians experience a huge reduction in damage if they transform to their dragon form and they don't get neither property runes or weapon specialization. Sure, they gain fly speed and other stuff, but it would still feel really bizarre to transform to a huge dragon and... deal less damage than before.

After all this time some things about battle forms still continues to baffle me a little. I have seen these questions before, but I never have gotten any definitive answers to these. So do you apply handwraps striking runes to battle form attacks? What about property runes? Do you add your weapon specialization damage to the attacks if use your own attack modifier?

According to rules, the special statistics can be adjusted only by circumstance bonuses, status bonuses, and penalties. This doesn't really exclude any of the above, since they aren't really item bonuses. The rules also say: "Your gear is absorbed into you; the constant abilities of your gear still function, but you can’t activate any items"

Are the striking runes or property runes constant abilities of your gear? I don't think striking runes are intended to work, since the forms have different amount of die between options to begin with, but according to rules it kinda sounds like they do. I lean towards them not working and property runes working. Weapon specialization shouldn't work, because the forms say that you are trained with the attacks, but what about when you use your own modifier? Do you also use your own proficiency in a sense that you apply your weapon specialization to the attacks, since when you use your own modifier, you might be expert or higher with unarmed attacks.

I would be really grateful to get these cleared up.

In The Apocalypse Prophet book, there are enemies that use mancatchers, and those weapons are also listed in their stat block in the items section. However, mancatcher isn't an official weapon that has official stats anywhere. Is there a planned mancatcher weapon coming sometime in the future or something? My players might want to use the weapons, so I have to design the stats myself, which honestly isn't a big problem, but I was curious if there is an "official" version of the weapon somewhere in the making. It's honestly pretty weird, since the enemies also have a passive ability which specifically says they can use the mancatcher with one hand, which confirms it's a two-handed weapon, but also kinda implies it should have stats somewhere, because if it meant to be an "enemy only" weapon, there wouldn't be any need to have an ability like that, it could just be a one handed weapon in the first place.

Speaking about the stats, it seems to be a two-handed d6 weapon which has the reach and grapple traits. This seems to be a fairly weak weapon, since we have a Gill Hook already, which has the same stats except it's damage die is d10. One solution might be to make it a simple weapon, but lore wise it doesn't make sense to have a mancatcher be a simple weapon in my opinion, it doesn't seem to be that "simple" to use.