Full-attack archery on a mount moving over 5' but less than a double-move?

[Jared Walter 356]

Slim Jim wrote:

Would you agree, or not agree, that the sentence "You can make a full attack with a ranged weapon while your mount is moving." meets that definition?

Disagree.

That is not the theme of the paragraph. The theme of the paragraph is ranged attacks while mounted, not full ranged attacks while mounted. Every sentence in the paragraph refers to ranged attacks, but is not restricted to full attacks.

Even if it were the theme, the topic does not have to be at the beginning of the paragraph. In persuasive writing, there are two solid paragraph structures:
1) Key point - then supported arguments.
2) Supporting arguments - Then conclusion.

The "topic sentence" you are looking for is omitted, because it is redundant. The topic sentence should be "You can make ranged attacks while mounted, but suffer penalties in some cases."

The -4 and -8 apply to ALL ranged attacks even if you can only take one because of your BAB, or choose to only take one. This is the mechanic the game chooses to use for the jostling of the horse making it harder to aim. They did not apply penalty when the mount is taking a single move, and thus they did not address that case, because it has no special rules not covered elsewhere.

There is no requirement that a paragraph have an explicit topic sentence that summarizes the whole paragraph. Good writing, sure. Critical requirement, no.

By overreading the first sentence as restricting the topic you are changing the meaning on the paragraph and obscuring what is otherwise pretty clear. As I noted earlier, paragraphs do not need to begin with a topic sentence, or even include one. The definition of a paragraph includes no indication that it typically starts with a topic sentence nor a mention that it needs one. It only indicates that the sentences share a topic and are offset by either indentation or line.

[Lelomenia]

This reminds me of a thread we had here a while ago where someone argued that, based on sentence order, Power Attack gives gives +20 BAB -6 attack and +13 damage for two-handed attacks and +11 damage for offhand attacks (read it again for the first time, as the saying goes).

And I would grant the OP of that thread that the writing suggests the author treated characters with BAB greater than +3 to be a corner case relative to characters making attacks with offhand weapons, but the sentence order doesn’t change meaning.

And here, it does appear the author treated the concept of some high level characters using “full attack” sequences was somewhat a corner case (probably used mostly by those oddball BAB-greater-than-+3 builds that in 2009 they thought might appeal to some players), but again the words say what they say, and pulling extra RAW out of that order is seeing something that just isn’t there. Here, if they’d put the “full attack” sentence at the beginning, now we’d have people arguing that the penalties only apply during a full attack. And that would also be incorrect, despite being implied by that sentence order and lack of a topic sentence.

[blahpers]

Ye gods, it's still going.