My understanding (I'm not saying I'm right, just how I do it) is that sneak ATTACK requires an attack roll.Where is thiis understanding coming from?
No, aura of the unremarkable clearly does not have an attack roll, but it is an attack (see spell attack definition quote in OP) since it requires a save, and sneak attack rules only mention attacks, not attack rolls.
I think you would be hard pressed to find a GM that would add sneak attack damage to an emanation Charm spell...
As for sneak attack, the text of sneak attack uses the word attack repeatedly.
rogues don't have spells, and references to sneak attack say to consult the rogue entry... so that's what I do.
I don't think I'm alone in treating it this way. :D
Hmm. Let's look at it this way. For normal proper sneak attack with a knife. You sneak behind the person and cut this throat, it is a vital spot so you deal extra damage, that's sneak attack.
As for fireball. It's like throwing molotov at a person. Doesn't matter if they are aware or not, you hit close enough, everything's on fire. Sneak or not, makes no different damage wise. You can cut people's throat with fire that you can't control completely, nor you can stab people with fire. If you argue that it will deal more damage because the target can dodge, that's what the reflex saves for.
The only way you can sneak attack with a fireball is if you have the arcane trickster capstone.
You don't make an attack roll with it, so you can not cause precision damage (like sneak attack) with it.
This has been covered many times before. Please go and read the old threads where this has been debated to death and those asserting you could sneak attack were wrong then, just as you are wrong now.
the text of sneak attack uses the word attack repeatedly.Yeah, it is an attack. And I agree I'd never allow it at my table. It's just an interesting thought experiment and people ask this all the time, so a new angle on it is of interest.
But this is getting quite circular, same stuff coming up. So I'm gonna leave off the thread unless something new and cool comes up. Silly in practice, maybe allowed by slavish, technical RAW though, is my conclusion, for some odd spells.
As usual, you are technically correct... the best kind of correct.
You should get into game design, I think the community could use clarity like yours. :D
(totally sincere, you really bring light to a lot of... odd... rules situations).
Sure, I'm reading it. It's an excellent example of why RAW is unimportant at our table.I completely agree, I would not allow it for a second.
This is the rules forum, though, not the advice forum.
I don't really see the point in discussing the rules of a game nobody plays though. In any game of Pathfinder, sneak attack doesn't apply to fireballs - that doesn't change if they never wrote it down.
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Attack (the game action) is defined by the combat section of the rules, under the action Attack and it require a to hit die roll.He already quoted the text in the OP that makes it very very explicit that any spells that require a save throw, deal damage, harm, or hamper opponents are attacks.
This is a more specific rule pertaining just to spells, and Specific > General
Not true, he cited this piece of the rules from the magic section:
Special Spell EffectsMany special spell effects are handled according to the school of the spells in question. Certain other special spell features are found across spell schools.
Attacks: Some spell descriptions refer to attacking. All offensive combat actions, even those that don't damage opponents, are considered attacks. Attempts to channel energy count as attacks if it would harm any creatures in the area. All spells that opponents resist with saving throws, that deal damage, or that otherwise harm or hamper subjects are attacks. Spells that summon monsters or other allies are not attacks because the spells themselves don't harm anyone.
but that section isn0't the definition of the attack action that I cited, is the definition of what is an attack for spells like invisibility or sanctuary.
The definition of the attack action is here:
AttackMaking an attack is a standard action.
Melee Attacks: With a normal melee weapon, you can strike any opponent within 5 feet. (Opponents within 5 feet are considered adjacent to you.) Some melee weapons have reach, as indicated in their descriptions. With a typical reach weapon, you can strike opponents 10 feet away, but you can't strike adjacent foes (those within 5 feet).
Unarmed Attacks: Striking for damage with punches, kicks, and head butts is much like attacking with a melee weapon, except for the following:
Attacks of Opportunity: Attacking unarmed provokes an attack of opportunity from the character you attack, provided she is armed. The attack of opportunity comes before your attack. An unarmed attack does not provoke attacks of opportunity from other foes, nor does it provoke an attack of opportunity from an unarmed foe.
An unarmed character can't take attacks of opportunity (but see “Armed” Unarmed Attacks, below).
“Armed” Unarmed Attacks: Sometimes a character's or creature's unarmed attack counts as an armed attack. A monk, a character with the Improved Unarmed Strike feat, a spellcaster delivering a touch attack spell, and a creature with natural physical weapons all count as being armed (see natural attacks).
Note that being armed counts for both offense and defense (the character can make attacks of opportunity).
Unarmed Strike Damage: An unarmed strike from a Medium character deals 1d3 points of bludgeoning damage (plus your Strength modifier, as normal). A Small character's unarmed strike deals 1d2 points of bludgeoning damage, while a Large character's unarmed strike deals 1d4 points of bludgeoning damage. All damage from unarmed strikes is nonlethal damage. Unarmed strikes count as light weapons (for purposes of two-weapon attack penalties and so on).
Dealing Lethal Damage: You can specify that your unarmed strike will deal lethal damage before you make your attack roll, but you take a –4 penalty on your attack roll. If you have the Improved Unarmed Strike feat, you can deal lethal damage with an unarmed strike without taking a penalty on the attack roll.
Ranged Attacks: With a ranged weapon, you can shoot or throw at any target that is within the weapon's maximum range and in line of sight. The maximum range for a thrown weapon is five range increments. For projectile weapons, it is 10 range increments. Some ranged weapons have shorter maximum ranges, as specified in their descriptions.
Natural Attacks: Attacks made with natural weapons, such as claws and bites, are melee attacks that can be made against any creature within your reach (usually 5 feet). These attacks are made using your full attack bonus and deal an amount of damage that depends on their type (plus your Strength modifier, as normal). You do not receive additional natural attacks for a high base attack bonus. Instead, you receive additional attack rolls for multiple limb and body parts capable of making the attack (as noted by the race or ability that grants the attacks). If you possess only one natural attack (such as a bite—two claw attacks do not qualify), you add 1–1/2 times your Strength bonus on damage rolls made with that attack.
Some natural attacks are denoted as secondary natural attacks, such as tails and wings. Attacks with secondary natural attacks are made using your base attack bonus minus 5. These attacks deal an amount of damage depending on their type, but you only add half your Strength modifier on damage rolls.
You can make attacks with natural weapons in combination with attacks made with a melee weapon and unarmed strikes, so long as a different limb is used for each attack. For example, you cannot make a claw attack and also use that hand to make attacks with a longsword. When you make additional attacks in this way, all of your natural attacks are treated as secondary natural attacks, using your base attack bonus minus 5 and adding only 1/2 of your Strength modifier on damage rolls. Feats such as Two-Weapon Fighting and Multiattack can reduce these penalties.
Multiple Attacks: A character who can make more than one attack per round must use the full-attack action (see Full-Round Actions) in order to get more than one attack.
Shooting or Throwing into a Melee: If you shoot or throw a ranged weapon at a target engaged in melee with a friendly character, you take a –4 penalty on your attack roll. Two characters are engaged in melee if they are enemies of each other and either threatens the other. (An unconscious or otherwise immobilized character is not considered engaged unless he is actually being attacked.)
If your target (or the part of your target you're aiming at, if it's a big target) is at least 10 feet away from the nearest friendly character, you can avoid the –4 penalty, even if the creature you're aiming at is engaged in melee with a friendly character.
If your target is two size categories larger than the friendly characters it is engaged with, this penalty is reduced to –2. There is no penalty for firing at a creature that is three size categories larger than the friendly characters it is engaged with.
Precise Shot: If you have the Precise Shot feat, you don't take this penalty.
Fighting Defensively as a Standard Action: You can choose to fight defensively when attacking. If you do so, you take a –4 penalty on all attacks in a round to gain a +2 dodge bonus to AC until the start of your next turn.
Critical Hits: When you make an attack roll and get a natural 20 (the d20 shows 20), you hit regardless of your target's Armor Class, and you have scored a “threat,” meaning the hit might be a critical hit (or “crit”). To find out if it's a critical hit, you immediately make an attempt to “confirm” the critical hit—another attack roll with all the same modifiers as the attack roll you just made. If the confirmation roll also results in a hit against the target's AC, your original hit is a critical hit. (The critical roll just needs to hit to give you a crit, it doesn't need to come up 20 again.) If the confirmation roll is a miss, then your hit is just a regular hit.
A critical hit means that you roll your damage more than once, with all your usual bonuses, and add the rolls together. Unless otherwise specified, the threat range for a critical hit on an attack roll is 20, and the multiplier is ×2.
Exception: Precision damage (such as from a rogue's sneak attack class feature) and additional damage dice from special weapon abilities (such as flaming) are not multiplied when you score a critical hit.
Increased Threat Range: Sometimes your threat range is greater than 20. That is, you can score a threat on a lower number. In such cases, a roll of lower than 20 is not an automatic hit. Any attack roll that doesn't result in a hit is not a threat.
Increased Critical Multiplier: Some weapons deal better than double damage on a critical hit (see Equipment).
Spells and Critical Hits: A spell that requires an attack roll can score a critical hit. A spell attack that requires no attack roll cannot score a critical hit. If a spell causes ability damage or drain (see Special Abilities), the damage or drain is doubled on a critical hit.
If a fireball is an attack, I know what my sorc is doing next time someone provokes an AoO from him...
If a fireball is an attack, I know what my sorc is doing next time someone provokes an AoO from him...
Uh, stabbing them with a dagger? You don't threaten with Fireball.
If a fireball is an attack, I know what my sorc is doing next time someone provokes an AoO from him...Uh, stabbing them with a dagger? You don't threaten with Fireball.
I dunno, I sure find fireballs threatening
(I'm only in this particular thread to troll)
There's no attack roll on Ear Piercing Scream (only a saving throw), so it does not qualify for Sneak Attack.
Well...
... If you're in position to make a melee attack on an opponent that is engaging a friend in melee combat, you can attempt to aid your friend as a standard action. You make an attack roll against AC 10. If you succeed, your friend gains either a +2 bonus on his next attack roll against that opponent...
I think it needs to be more than just an attack.
/pedanticjesting
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Can we please have a game developer put this to bed?
They are probably too busy rolling on the ground laughing or banging their heads against a hard surface.
However, I am claiming that this is a logically reasonable interpretation of the rules as far as I'm reading.
A twisting of the words and language is certainly a way to read the rules. I see that a lot in these forums. It does not mean they are being read, or understood, correctly.
Context, as always, is important. The use of the loosely defined term for attack under the magic section trying to be used to justify the SA on AoE spells is a case of misapplied context.
@Crimeo, yes this is the rules forum, an we should be discussing RAW. When RAW allows for multiple interpretations (however twisted/convoluted some of those might be) we should look to RAI to understand the correct reading of RAW - then reject those that don't match, not claim them as allowable by RAW.
The rules weren't written with intent to have an air tight legal presentation. They were written to be easy to read, and with the application of at least a little thought, understand the RAI. The only value in arguing RAW is to get to the RAI - sometimes that means a FAQ or an errata is needed to clarify it. But here there is no question as to the RAI, so why insist on reading the rules in such a way as to deny the RAI when it is perfectly possible to read them in a way that gives the RAI.
I'm with James. This is not an interesting thought experiment. It's just a facetiously twisted way of reading the rules.
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Ah, I was reading "target" more of as "victim of choice" rather than something with a Target line.
Looking through the list of spells, there actually seem to be very few which actually jump all the hurdles we're setting up here. Still, all it takes is a couple.
In any case, it's more of a conceptual question: "Can something without an attack roll qualify for sneak attack at all?"
Most people say no, but as has been pointed out, it really doesn't say this specifically in the rules.
The rules don't state explicitly that you can't take any actions when you're dead, either.
Look, D&D is not German civil code. It was not written by lawyers for lawyers, and does not aim to spell out everything in excruciating and precise detail. For 15 years, the combination of "sneak attacks requires an attack", "attack is a melee/ranged/spell that requires are to-hit roll" and "fireball doesn't require a to-hit roll" was interpreted by the judges ... I mean, GMs and players, as "you can't apply sneak attack to a fireball".
This interpretation is reinforced by the so-called "common sense" thing, which says that if sneak attacks are precise and aimed blows to vital parts of the target, you can't pull them out using magical napalm strike.
And there's been so much written about this during 3.5 era, that when PF authors put the game together as a product aimed primarily at 3.5 players, everybody just assumes that PF will grandfather all paradigms and rules interpretations done insofar, and not much attention was necessary for cleaning "obvious" cases like this one.
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My point is that rules are incomplete and even contradictory, sometimes. They're not the unassailable body of fully worked out, logically constructed regulations you're asking for.
Each time a player's token lands on or passes over GO, whether by throwing the dice or drawing a card, the Banker pays that player a $200 salary.
But nowhere in the rules does it define "passes over". So a rules lawyer, fresh from arguing that Pathfinder is like "...some homebrew amateur community project hobbled together in a basement by volunteers..." for not resolving all ambiguities, even the ones that nobody finds troublesome can now declare that Jim doesn't get $200 for passing Go because he didnt actually pass his counter over the space on the board, but just placed it at the end position directly.
It's equally silly and it would be foolish to include a definition of "passes over" in the next rendition of the Monopoly rules.
You'll find gaps, contradictions, ambiguities and assumed knowledge in any body of sufficiently complicated rules. It's not worth stressing over the ones that everyone who plays the game has just sorted. Even the people in this thread claiming there's a "problem" all agree that it's obvious how things are supposed to work. The rules team could spend hours combing through the rules to chase down these kinds of weird wording inconsistencies but they're never going to be finished and in the meantime exactly zero actual games of Pathfinder have been improved - so what's the point?
Let's get them to answer the problems causing actual, real confusion at the table rather than chasing the latest faux-error. Did you read the "fighters should be archmages" thread? It's exactly the same. Cute, but a waste of the design team's time to go through and actually "correct".
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You're not sticking with default baseline, you're sticking with your interpretation of the default baseline. That's two entirely different things.
Comparing Monopoly to D&D is like comparing School Glee Club rules to U.S. Code in terms of size, complication, required interpretation and possible variables due to stuff that happens when rules collide with reality.
At the point when PF was published, "people who do not have and don't know" weren't the target group, plain and simple. These days, between the Beginner Box and Strategy Guide there is stuff newbies out there, and sure the hypothetical PF 2.0 could benefit from being organised in a more newbie-friendly manner, but that does not change the fact that fireballs don't generate sneak attack damage :)
fresh from arguing that Pathfinder is like "...some homebrew amateur community project hobbled together in a basement by volunteers..."No no, I am not complaining about Paizo. I think they HAVE given us an excellent product that does a great job of standing alone, all told.
I am saying that IF Paizo's position were "Oh come on, you can't go by written rules as a baseline, you have to assume every convention in D&D since 1975 also" then that would be b+!~#%@s.
Critically, note that Paizo didn't tell me this, a guy on a forum did. Or actually several people, now and then, tell other people this regularly, I don't even mean to call anyone specific out.
You'll find gaps, contradictions, ambiguities and assumed knowledge in any body of sufficiently complicated rules.I'm also not complaining about or denying this inevitable truth. Of course there will be gaps.
And recognizing this, Paizo has put up a convenient forum to help people discuss where they might be, where they might not be, and the intriciacies therein.
Intricacies which should generally not be based on assumptions from other games that aren't pathfinder. Nor should the discussion of said intricacies in general draw ire from people on a forum specifically designed to discuss intricacies.
Fair enough, I misunderstood. (Although, also to be clear - I didn't intend my last post to come across as 'ire', I just don't think this is a problem worth the design team's time).
I still think you're barking up the wrong tree. This issue is irrelevant (just like the "dead condition doesnt prevent you taking actions" issue or the "fighter taking an archmage mythic path can cast any arcane spell" issue or even the "placing your token directly on the space doesn't 'pass over' Go and doesnt earn you $200" issue).
I'd much rather the design team ignore stuff like this and resolve the things which are actually causing problems at the table. Fixing stuff like this properly isn't as quick as people seem to think, imo.
"The rogue must be able to see the target well enough to pick out a vital spot and must be able to reach such a spot."
"Ranged attacks can count as sneak attacks only if the target is within 30 feet."
Ok, I have a solution here.
Using those two above quotes (I'm gonna go the Crimeo route and do strict RAW readings).
You must be able to reach such a spot. So you have to be able to touch it.
Fireball has a 20ft radius.
You must be within 30ft (actually able to reach it, it seems, so ignore that).
So, even if Fireball is allowed, as the above quotes show, you must be within touching distance of the target.
Enjoy!
I think it should be fairly clear that it means "reach it with the damage/attack" not your fingers, in the case of ranged sneak attack. Otherwise, like... all ranged sneak attacks would be impossible, even with bows, and the text would be pointless.
Though even if you did want it to be actual literal reach, you could simply aim the fireball (or whatever spell that might actually work instead) 25 feet in front of you so that the 20 foot radius comes back and just barely covers your opponent but not you, while you're standing adjacent to it.
Fun fact by the way: aura of the unremarkable specifically only targets non-allies, so even this hypothetical hurdle is jumped without the slightest inconvenience by that one! Best. Spell. Ever. hehehe :P
Nah, I'm gonna stick to the RAW.
You gotta be able to reach them. That IS what it says.
So yeah, if you wanna use common sense, use common sense. If you wanna use RAW, use RAW.
Please don't mix and match, it waters down your argument to the point of total dissolution.
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I've started skipping some posts, because I saw something that should end the argument.
Everyone agrees that if you can't crit then you also can't sneak attack, correct? We're past the point where I would have to go find the multiple texts for that?
Now read this:
Spells and Critical Hits: A spell that requires an attack roll can score a critical hit. A spell attack that requires no attack roll cannot score a critical hit. If a spell causes ability damage or drain (see Special Abilities), the damage or drain is doubled on a critical hit.
So...if it can't crit, it cannot apply sneak attack damage. In order for a spell to crit, it has to have an attack roll. Only exception is the arcane trickster.
Case closed?
I think it should be fairly clear that it means "reach it with the damage/attack" not your fingers, in the case of ranged sneak attack. Otherwise, like... all ranged sneak attacks would be impossible, even with bows, and the text would be pointless.
Though even if you did want it to be actual literal reach, you could simply aim the fireball (or whatever spell that might actually work instead) 25 feet in front of you so that the 20 foot radius comes back and just barely covers your opponent but not you, while you're standing adjacent to it.
Fun fact by the way: aura of the unremarkable specifically only targets non-allies, so even this hypothetical hurdle is jumped without the slightest inconvenience by that one! Best. Spell. Ever. hehehe :P
While alexd1976 does so in jest, it is this particular type of intentionally reading the rules in a twisted and convoluted fashion that got us to "fireballs can do SA" in the first place.
As for aura of the unremarkable, SA does the same type of damage as the source. SA shocking grasp does electricity damage, SA piercing weapon does piercing damage. What kind of damage does aura of the unremarkable do? Even with the convoluted reading of applying SA to AoE, this spell does nothing for SA. Even with the valid ruling of SA on Surprise Spells, this spell does nothing for SA.
SKR saying: Sneak attack normally works with weapon-like spells, including rays.
SKR makes several other posts in this thread that are worth reading. He plainly explains RAI for Sneak Attack with spells.