Intelligent Item, Charm Person, who wins?

[Dafydd]

So if a person with an Intelligent Item gets hit with a Charm Person and fails to resist, can the Item force an Ego check in an attempt to gain control of the charmed person?

If yes, can you fail the Will save vs the Ego on purpose?

I know it sounds a little rules bendy, but it seems to be all by the rules. That said, I could be missing something.

Thank You.

[Deighton Thrane]

An intelligent item only forces an ego check if there's a personality conflict between it and it's wielder. So if the effects of charm person create a personality conflict, then yes, but otherwise no. If that happens, yes you can willingly fail your save. You can always willingly fail your saves. But you have to remember, after that your GM basically gets to run your character according the several options in the intelligent items section. So your character might continue fighting as he normally would, or he might surrender, or start removing other magical items, or look for a good a good hiding spot, or even find someone more suitable to wield his weapon. So yes, this could work, but relies on a lot of GM fiat to actually be useful.

EDIT - Actually, went to double check on willingly failing your saving throws, and technically you can always fail a save versus spells, it's less clear about saves from other sources. So, I don't see why you couldn't automatically fail all saves, but I could see a GM restricting it to specifically spells.

[Dafydd]

Well, my general thought was, it might stop me from attacking my allies. Basically, if I am ordered to attack friends, the item may take offence at this and try to stop me. We are CN, but the only alignment I can think of that would willingly attack allies with enemies present is Evil. An argument could be made for CN, but that is not my job to make the argument.

The specific character I have in mind is a Blade Bound Magus and his black blade. My will is not very strong, so charm, suggestion and dominate are actually a threat. However the item has telepathy and would likely notice telepathic communications ordering me to do bad things.

I was also wondering if you could ask the item to control you if something else does gain control of you. As far as I am aware, while dominated, you still control your mental actions. Thus, you could ask your black blade to save you from the control.

[Claxon]

If charm person causes you to act in a way that the intelligent item wouldn't be okay with I would say it's because the magic hasn't altered your mental state, causing a conflict.

Because you're mental state has been altered, I would say that your character cannot choose not to resist. Don't think of it from yoru perspective as the player and what you want to happen, think of it as being brainwashed into believing the person who just cast that spell is your best friend. Now, for many characters this would immediately cause a dissonance if ordered to attack their companions. However, if for some reason it did not, your character would want to kill their adventuring companions because their best friend just asked them to. If the intelligent item attempted to resist being used in such a way, I can't see a way that allowing you to forgo the save makes sense except in a metagame way.

[Jeff Merola]

Not to mention the only mention of deliberately failing a save is talking about spells, not other effects. Here's the full text that mentions it:

Quote:

Voluntarily Giving up a Saving Throw

A creature can voluntarily forgo a saving throw and willingly accept a spell's result.

Emphasis mine.