Mobile Combat Style Tree

[Evan Riggs]

ok, i have mobile Bulwark style:
While using a tower shield, add the shield’s bonus to AC (including its enhancement bonus) to your CMD against bull rush and overrun combat maneuvers. While using this style, you can use a tower shield to grant you total cover along one edge of your space (Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook 153) as a move action.

and mobile fortress:While using a tower shield, you add half of the shield’s bonus to AC (including its enhancement bonus) to your touch AC and take only a –1 penalty on attack rolls because of the shield’s encumbrance. While using Mobile Bulwark Style, whenever you would use a tower shield to gain total cover, you also grant any adjacent ally total cover against attacks passing through the selected edge of your space.

my DM uses a magic missile spell on me and can he circumvent the tower shield or do i need Mobile Stronghold to stop magic missile?

Magic Missile: Description
A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target, dealing 1d4+1 points of force damage.

The missile strikes unerringly, even if the target is in melee combat, so long as it has less than total cover or total concealment. Specific parts of a creature can't be singled out. Objects are not damaged by the spell.

For every two caster levels beyond 1st, you gain an additional missile—two at 3rd level, three at 5th, four at 7th, and the maximum of five missiles at 9th level or higher. If you shoot multiple missiles, you can have them strike a single creature or several creatures. A single missile can strike only one creature. You must designate targets before you check for spell resistance or roll damage.

Mobile Stronghold: While using a tower shield, you do not suffer a penalty on attack rolls because of the shield’s encumbrance. While using Mobile Bulwark Style, whenever you use a tower shield to gain total cover, you also gain partial cover (and grant partial cover to adjacent allies) against spells passing through the selected edge of your space. Also, while using this style, you can gain total cover against a single attack made against you as an immediate or swift action.

[zza ni]

total cover granted by tower shields doesn't work vs spells. and the cover from the feat doesn't work against magic missile. so it hits you.

[Evan Riggs]

ZZa NI

Can you explain why magic missile doesnt get stopped.

by mobile fortress.

[VoodistMonk]

The style feat specifically grants you Total Cover.

The spell specifically doesn't work on targets that have Total Cover.

The style feat doesn't say it gives you some modified version of Total Cover that only works for physical attacks, it gives you Total Cover...

Unless, of course, it has been errata'ed to give the upper hand to the spellcasters... which is very probable because martials can't have nice things.

I don't think your GM is in the right.

[avr]

Mobile bulwark style just says it gives total cover. Then mobile stronghold (dependent on and expanding on MBS) says it gives total cover vs. attacks and partial cover vs. spells. If you take mobile stronghold as defining how MBS should work, magic missile can target you thru MBS. But by the letter of the MBS feat it stops magic missile.

[Claxon]

Mobile Bulwark Style gives you total cover ALONG ONE EDGE of your square.

Because of this, I'm inclined to say that Magic Missile ignores this edge of total cover and just goes to a part where he doesn't have total cover and hits him anyways.

The way the feats are written anyway, imply that the last feat (Mobile Stronghold) grants you partial cover against spells passing through that edge. If it was only partial cover Magic Missile would definitely ignore it.

And since this is supposed to be the higher level feat, the implication is that it should do something the lesser version doesn't.

Otherwise, don't bother with anything else. You already have total cover from the first version.

But ultimately, the fact that you don't have real total cover, and it's only along one edge makes me say the magic missile just finds a way around it. Because that what magic missile does, it hits it's target unerringly unless it just physically can't find a path to do so.

[zza ni]

Evan Riggs wrote:

ZZa NI

Can you explain why magic missile doesn't get stopped.

by mobile fortress.

here's the thing. the words posted by the op say as follows:

"
While using this style, you can use a tower shield to grant you total cover along one edge of your space (Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook 153) as a move action."

if you actually go to the rulebook you will see that the page is the tower shield page and not the total cover page ,which btw is pointed to in the tower shield info, along with something else:

"This massive wooden shield is nearly as tall as its user. In most situations, it provides the indicated shield bonus to your AC. As a standard action, however, you can use a tower shield to grant you total cover until the beginning of your next turn. When using a tower shield in this way, you must choose one edge of your space. That edge is treated as a solid wall for attacks targeting you only. You gain total cover for attacks that pass through this edge and no cover for attacks that do not pass through this edge (see cover, Core Rulebook 195). The shield does not, however, provide cover against targeted spells; a spellcaster can cast a spell on you by targeting the shield you are holding. You cannot bash with a tower shield, nor can you use your shield hand for anything else."

as the feat talk about the page of the tower shield and mention you gain the total cover (along one edge like in tower shield info) as move action (which change the general rule of using a standard action) i think it's clear that the one-edge-total-cover given by the feat work just like the one written in the page it link to -not blocking targeted spells such as...magic missile.

they just didn't want to repeat the whole text starting from using the standard action to gain total cover so they linked the page to say how it work and only listed what has changed from there, the action to gain the cover.- standard > move.

if we go by general and specific rules this look like this:

General rule - total cover blocks targeted spells
- specific rule - tower shield can be used as standard action to gain total cover on one edge that does not block targeted spells. (which btw is stated to not be because of the edges but because they can target the shield which has no cover)
-even more specific rule - mobile style - with a tower shield you can use a move action to gain total cover along one edge (see tower shields page).
since the feat doesn't state that the rule of tower shield about targeted spells is changed and only talk about the action that part of the rule stay the same.

[VoodistMonk]

I stand corrected.

Thank you for the thorough explanation.

[zza ni]

my pleasure, English is not my main language so i tend to repeat myself when i explain to make sure im understood. some read it as if im excited or angry, but im just thorough. so it's nice to know it went right.