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Surprising Combatant (Combat)
You can briefly trick your foes into discounting you as a combatant.
Prerequisites: Improved Initiative, Bluff 3 ranks.
Benefit: At the beginning of combat, after initiative is rolled but before the first round of combat begins, you can attempt a Bluff check as a free action. Each opponent who is aware of you must succeed at a Sense Motive check (DC equal to the result of your Bluff check). Failure means that an opponent is treated as if it were not aware of you when determining whether it is aware combat has begun. If none of your opponents are aware of you, you may act during the surprise round. If an opponent is effectively unaware of any foes, it cannot act during the surprise round.
I think I get what this feat is trying to accomplish, but the description of what it do is very confusing.
Let's look what it say it do, and what I feel are the problem with that:
* At the beginning of combat, after initiative is rolled but before the first round of combat begins, you can attempt a Bluff check as a free action.
1) You can act this way during the surprise round even if surprised?
2) You have acted "At the beginning of combat" so you are no longer flat footed? That would be reason enough yo take the feat even if it didn't do anything more.
* Each opponent who is aware of you must succeed at a Sense Motive check (DC equal to the result of your Bluff check). Failure means that an opponent is treated as if it were not aware of you when determining whether it is aware combat has begun.
so far so good, but
* If none of your opponents are aware of you, you may act during the surprise round.
1) That mean that if even 1 of the enemies make is Sense motive check you can't act during the surprise round?
2) It mean that if all the enemies fail the Sense motive check you get to act during the surprise round, even if you are surprised?
* If an opponent is effectively unaware of any foes, it cannot act during the surprise round.
1) Shouldn't be "If an opponent is effectively unaware of all foes, it cannot act during the surprise round."?
I am not native English, but to me the original phrase meaning sound as "If an opponent is effectively unaware of even 1 foe, it cannot act during the surprise round." The people with which I have played has always played as "If you notice even one opponent you can act during the surprise round. You lose your dexterity bonus against the people you haven't noticed until you become aware of them."
All of this assumes that there isn't a surprise round anyway, right? I mean, if you surprised them by springing out of hiding, then you don't need this feat at all.
So the first bit:
Yes, you can use this feat even if you're surprised - surprised or not, your enemies think you're just a commoner in the street or a hired commoner who came along to carry stuff and cook meals, or whatever.
No, this is a free action taken before your turn - you haven't taken a turn yet so your flat-foodedness is unaffected by using this feat.
The second bit:
The wording of the feat is wonky and inconsistent with the Core Rulebook Combat chapter. Since I don't believe this feat was intended to rewrite the general rules of combat, I can only assume it's a poorly worded feat.
But, sticking as close to the feat wording as I can, the RAW provides a way for it to work by remembering that speaking is a free action that can be taken out of turn. So:
Yes, if even 1 of the enemies makes his Sense Motive check, he shouts a warning to his allies to watch out for you, preventing you from getting a surprise round.
Yes, that's what the feat says. So assuming they surprise you but you bluff all of them into thinking you're harmless, you can act in the surprise round. I'm not sure exactly how to justify this. I would think this should be clarified to give you a surprise round only when nobody is surprised, but if you ARE surprised, you stay surprised - however, that's not what it says.
The last bit:
In English, that's exactly the same thing. "Unaware of any foes" is the same as "unaware of all foes" but it not the same as "unaware of any foe" - that last one has singular "foe" rather than plural "foes" and that singularization of the word changes the meaning of the clause. Also notice that your rewording "unaware of even 1 foe" uses the singular rather than the plural.
You're correct: if you notice even one opponent then you can act in the surprise round, if there is one. But no, you don't automatically lose your DEX bonus against unnoticed foes until you notice them - you actually lose DEX bonus against EVERYTHING while you are flat-footed which ends when you get your first turn and then you get your DEX bonus against EVERYTHING, even foes you still haven't noticed, unless those foes are using something like Stealth or Invisibility to deny your DEX bonus - without them using something extra, they cannot deny your DEX bonus by simply being unnoticed.
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You're correct: if you notice even one opponent then you can act in the surprise round, if there is one. But no, you don't automatically lose your DEX bonus against unnoticed foes until you notice them - you actually lose DEX bonus against EVERYTHING while you are flat-footed which ends when you get your first turn and then you get your DEX bonus against EVERYTHING, even foes you still haven't noticed, unless those foes are using something like Stealth or Invisibility to deny your DEX bonus - without them using something extra, they cannot deny your DEX bonus by simply being unnoticed.
If you have failed a perception check against someone you don't have a dexterity bonus to AC against him, AFAIK, until you notice him.
Obviously, if he move and don't use stealth you will notice him and immediately get your dexterity bonus to AC, but the unnoticed demon in the middle of a deeper darkness that see you perfectly can attack you and you will not benefit from your dexterity bonus.- * -
Thanks for the bit about foe and foes, something it is easy to miss those little details.
- * -
Yes, you can use this feat even if you're surprised - surprised or not, your enemies think you're just a commoner in the street or a hired commoner who came along to carry stuff and cook meals, or whatever.
So it is really the unobtrusive skill from L5R, or like we call it, the "furniture" skill.
"Don't take notice of me, I am only a piece of the scenery or a lowly servant." :)|
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Diego Rossi: Hey. So, after talking it over for some time with other rulesy Paizo folks, we came to the conclusion that the Surprising Combatant feat in this book—while well-intentioned and not without its merits—doesn't really work as-is. The more we tinkered with it the more convoluted it became, so we decided to rework the feat from the ground up. Here is what the full text of the Surprising Combatant feat should actually look like:
Sorry about the confusion!Surprising Combatant (Combat)
You can get the drop on foes by tricking your opponents into overlooking you as a combatant.
Prerequisites: Improved Initiative, Bluff 3 ranks.
Benefit: At the beginning of a combat in which you would normally be able to act in a surprise round, after initiative is rolled but before the surprise round begins, you can attempt a Bluff check as a free action. The DC of this Bluff check is equal to 15 + the CR of the encounter. If you succeed at this Bluff check, you may treat the result of your Bluff check as your initiative result for the surprise round. If your Bluff check fails, you cannot act during the surprise round. Regardless, you use your normal initiative result to determine initiative for the remainder of the encounter.
From the thread about blood of the Moon.
Ouch.
Well, add that feat to the list of feats nobody will EVER take.
For the price of a whole feat, you can sometimes go extra early in the initiative order but only during the surprise round where you only get one action, and after that, you have to use your normal initiative.
Note that everyone who has this feat probably averages around a 15 initiative (or higher) anyway, so with bluff as a class skill and a decent CHA, they might go, on average, around a 20 - if they succeed on the Bluff check. At higher levels, this goes up if they are a character who focuses skill ranks on Bluff. But it's still ONLY for the surprise round for one single action, then back to normal initiative.
You better have an AMAZING one-trick pony planned for those surprise rounds to justify blowing a feat on this...
Maybe, if the feat worked exactly as the update but also gave a +2 initiative bonus that stacks with Improved Initiative (of course, only if they make their Bluff check in the first place), then at least they gain a benefit for the whole fight. Even though this proposed benefit is just half of what they got for Improved Initiative, they also get the chance to spring their amazing super-high surprise round action, too.
Or maybe if the feat allowed them to use their Bluff check result for the surprise round and the first round, then I might consider it fixed.
But now, it looks fairly broken, in the bad way.
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Yes, a pity. Probably it was hard to rework it so that it would stay in the word count and do what it was intended to do, but it would have been interesting.
I don't think that the reply is set into stone, for now, so someone would try to rework it so that we can get something similar to the original version?
Houseruling the original version to make it work in a home game isn't so hard, the hard part is developing a good description that can work for anyone.