I'm probably just slow today, so I apologize before the stupid question.
Certain traits have inherent qualities such as "Sonic" trait abilities only working when they can make a sound, or "positive" trait abilities healing the living and harming the undead. Weapon attacks made that deal damage of the type inherit the trait themselves, so your attack action gains the sonic trait when attacking with a thundering weapon, and an attack with a poison weapon gains the poison trait and so on.
Due to the sonic traits being crippled in silence, are you effectively disarmed in silence if you are wielding a thundering weapon, or is the rune turned off by the silence so that the attack is no longer sonic?
There's also the issue of whether or not attacks with positive energy descriptor heal the living, fail to harm the living, or function as a "manipulate positive energy" effect and just do the damage leaving the harm/heal note in the trait as fluff.
Some of these questions are cleared up a little with the compound immunity rule, where you can be immune to part of an attack but not another part of the attack, but it seems unclear what traits are adequate components to create a compound immunity situation. It's clear that if an attack does both acid and fire damage, and a target is immune to fire damage, that the acid damage still happens, but if you're immune to attacks with the fire trait, I think you also wouldn't take the acid damage as the attack inevitably comes from an attack with the fire trait.
For my specific example. I thought it would be fun to play a goblin who threw a greataxe of divine fire. I took a goblin with the burnit feat, went universalist wizard with hand of the apprentice, got an axe with the flaming rune, then grabbed barbarian archetype for the spirit instinct at level 6. Raging makes the melee weapon positive, necromantic, divine, rune adds fire, hand of the apprentice makes it evocation and allows for a spell attack with a melee weapon. The fire and positive traits are inherited directly by the hand of the apprentice ability, since that's the attack dealing the damage.
My concern is, at which step does each trait begin to apply. If someone is immune to abilities with the fire trait does my axe bounce off them harmlessly? If they are a living creature does my weapon heal them?
I believe the sonic trait only applies to the damage from the rune, not the whole weapon. So it only affects the sonic damage that would be delivered. In an area of silence, a thundering rune wouldn't deal any damage.
I think your misstep is thinking that the whole weapon gains the trait, I don't think that's true.
I think that the attack gains the trait, but not all the damage does.
So your Axe deals 1d8 slashing damage. The flaming rune does 1d6 fire damage. The attack as a whole has both the slashing and fire traits, but the damage of each part remains only the traits that it has.
So if they are immune to fire, they would ignore the fire damage, but that doesn't help them with the slashing damage.
So your Axe deals 1d8 slashing damage. The flaming rune does 1d6 fire damage. The attack as a whole has both the slashing and fire traits, but the damage of each part remains only the traits that it has.So if they are immune to fire, they would ignore the fire damage, but that doesn't help them with the slashing damage.
I think that's straight forward, the weird part of the question comes into play when you start looking at things that mess with abilities that have traits.
For instance, you can't use actions with the fire trait while underwater. Can you swing a flaming axe underwater?
How I'm interpreting it is that the runes give the trait to the weapon, so if the trait gets shut down the rune stops giving the trait to the weapon. So for instance a Thundering rune has the sonic trait, and this gives a Thundering weapon the sonic trait for as long as the rune functions. When brought into silence, the entire thundering rune turns off so the weapon no longer has the sonic trait.
Really, I don't see anything that says Runes pass traits along to the weapon.
Am I missing something? I can't find a single thing that says weapons gain traits from the rune, nor attacks made with the weapons.
To me it seems only the affects of the rune would carry the traits of the rune.
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Is anyone else having trouble editing posts?
I've been trying to alter affects to effects for the last 25 minutes and there just seems to be something wrong with the forum coding itself.
It wont let me use the submit, cancel, or preview buttons when attempting to edit a post.
The rune doesn't pass a trait along to the weapon, but adding the damage type to an attack does pass the damage type's trait along to the attack.
Core Rulebook pg. 451
When an attack deals a type of damage, the attack action gains that trait. For example, the Strikes and attack actions you use wielding a sword when its flaming rune is active gain the fire trait, since the rune gives the weapon the ability to deal fire damage.
As written, you can't attack with a flaming axe underwater. Perhaps there's a rule I've missed where the function of use activated items is suppressed if one of their traits would be suppressed.
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Since the flaming rune has the fire trait, doesn't it stop functioning underwater and thus no longer give the attack fire damage and the fire trait?
If that's the case, I'm not sure where the rule is. Being underwater prevents casting spells or using actions with the fire trait. The rune isn't either of those things and I don't believe the rune itself is taking actions or casting spells. The fire trait itself has no inherent limitations that I could see.
The rune doesn't pass a trait along to the weapon, but adding the damage type to an attack does pass the damage type's trait along to the attack.
Core Rulebook pg. 451
When an attack deals a type of damage, the attack action gains that trait. For example, the Strikes and attack actions you use wielding a sword when its flaming rune is active gain the fire trait, since the rune gives the weapon the ability to deal fire damage.As written, you can't attack with a flaming axe underwater. Perhaps there's a rule I've missed where the function of use activated items is suppressed if one of their traits would be suppressed.
It seems like the quoted rule just needs to be changed.
It should only apply to the extra effects granted by the rune, not the whole attack.
Otherwise, I think you're correct. The whole attack from a flaming weapon gains the fire trait which would mean it can't be used underwater.
Which seems like nonsense.
I think traits could have been used to spell out how effects change in different mediums like the fire/water interaction and the sonic/silence interaction, but they would have needed to have more complete atmospheric traits for describing flammable or conductive mediums. I would have preferred that method but it would have played hell with readability, so I understand why they didn't do it.
For this specific difficulty, I think Claxon is right. The alternatives are either creating a tedious load order for traits so you know when and what to cut off, or reworking the fire/water rules so things aren't nullified based on trait.
All that leaves me with is whether or not the positive/negative trait description is purely descriptive rather than relevant to play.
I seem to remember a specific rule about resistances not blocking the entire attack, even if they have a rune applying a trait. I'd look it up but I'm at work today. I think the rules spell out divvying up damage types, so I would look there and apply the same ruling to these situations
That's what I referred to as the compound immunity rule. You can be immune to part of an effect, but the rule hedges.
You can still be targeted by an ability with an effect you are immune to; you just don’t apply the effect. However, some complex effects might have parts that affect you even if you’re immune to one of the effect’s traits; for instance, a spell that deals both fire and acid damage can still deal acid damage to you even if you’re immune to fire.
The problem comes in when the attack that generates the damage inherits the trait of the damage being done, and how that interacts with trait immunities rather than damage immunities. It's not common, I'm only seeing trait immunity attached to sonic/silence and fire/underwater, but this is the sort of thing that would cause problems down the line.
Another odd case would be poison immunity as that is typically a non-damage trait, but there are examples of poison damage. This makes it harder to find a clear line between trait immunity and damage immunity.