"Amazing Initiative" mythic power - does spell trigger / completion count as a spell?

[Face_P0lluti0n]

For reference: "Amazing Initiative (Ex): At 2nd tier, you gain a bonus on initiative checks equal to your mythic tier. In addition, as a free action on your turn, you can expend one use of mythic power to take an additional standard action during that turn. This additional standard action can't be used to cast a spell. You can't gain an extra action in this way more than once per round."

During my most recent game, I had a PC try to cast a spell with their standard action, and then use Amazing Initiative to activate a wand with the extra action provided by this ability.

There was a disagreement at the table regarding whether wand or scroll use counted as casting a spell for the purposes of being prohibited by this ability. My assumption was that while rules-as-written says that using spell trigger or completion is magic item activation and not spellcasting, the intended use of this ability did not include adding additional spell use of any sort, and I felt the rules as written were a bit murky regarding this issue because spell trigger and completion create spell effects and require that the item user be a spellcaster who is capable of casting this spell, or good enough at UMD to fake it.

TL; DR: Does Amazing Initiative allow you to use a wand, staff, or scroll, or are those close enough to spellcasting that they are also not allowed as part of the extra action granted by this ability?

[Claxon]

I would agree with you that the intention of the rule is not to allow spell casting of any sort, including the use of scrolls, wands, staves, etc.

[Rerednaw]

Face_P0lluti0n wrote:

For reference: "Amazing Initiative (Ex): At 2nd tier, you gain a bonus on initiative checks equal to your mythic tier. In addition, as a free action on your turn, you can expend one use of mythic power to take an additional standard action during that turn. This additional standard action can't be used to cast a spell. You can't gain an extra action in this way more than once per round."

...

TL; DR: Does Amazing Initiative allow you to use a wand, staff, or scroll, or are those close enough to spellcasting that they are also not allowed as part of the extra action granted by this ability?

Seems pretty straightforward by RAW...only spellcasting. Spell-trigger, completion, and so forth is not spellcasting per se.

However I would consider if you are a GM ask yourself do you want to count spells that are not 'spellcasting' that also include other options than using spells from items.

Don't forget Su abilities can be used twice. You know...like Witch Hexes.

And anyway...it's Mythic. It's high-power you could just let everyone go nuts. :)

[Face_P0lluti0n]

To add to the confusion, the RAW descriptions of spell trigger/completion items make a lot of references to "casting spells from" that item.