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This new feat is really cool, but I'm confused about action economy with it. For reference, here's the Feat from the book.
Stella Fane had perfected a technique for using playing cards as weapons that's one part sleight of hand and one part magic. When you enter this stance, choose whether to treat playing cards in your possession as daggers or darts; you can wield a playing card in all ways as the chosen weapon until the stance ends. As long as the majority of the deck remains in your possession, any cards that are lost or thrown can be found after 1 minute. Otherwise, the remaining cards are likely lost or destroyed.
A character who has this feat can enchant a single deck of playing cards as a magic weapon, etching fundamental and property runes directly onto the deck of cards.
The book states that the "Playing Cards" item takes two hands. The description of the item has nothing useful in it about this use case either.
The feat makes it sound like the Deck is a weapon, where you can draw a card and use it as a Dagger or Dart. Since it's obviously meant for throwing, I see two scenarios on how this feat works:
1. You hold the deck in one hand and can throw cards without having to use an interact action, since you are already "wielding" all 54 cards. This occupies both your hands.
2. You still need to use an interact action to draw individual cards. This means you wont have both hands occupied.
If it's scenario two, why make it a Swashbuckler feat? They don't get Quick Draw, and even if you do get it, you still need 2 actions to perform a finisher. At that point, a returning rune is much better since you can place it on a superior weapon, like a Star Knife, plus you can get Ricochet Stance and other cool throwing stances.
Let me know what you think. I've been pondering this for over a week now. I personally believe it's used as Option 1, otherwise the feat is simply flavor, and not actually useful in any way.
While I agree 1 makes sense, 2 is how it appears to be written. You "wield a playing card in all ways as the chosen weapon" so if you pick daggers, one individual playing card is treated as a one handed melee weapon and there's no real provisions in the feat for altering your action economy for how you draw more of them.
Though like I said, I agree that doesn't really feel fitting and turns it into a feat that doesn't actually do much. I guess it lets you wield two "daggers" with the same runes without a doubling ring.
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Combined with Quick Draw the Feat does allow you to basically not worry about Returning on your 'dagger' or 'darts', since you have 54 of them before you run out.
It also lets you use the same Runes and cost for both daggers and darts, allows cheaper dual wielding, and several other interesting possibilities. To say nothing of the 'cool' factor of killing people with a deck of cards.
I don't think it also needs action economy advantages to be a pretty decent Feat.
Though RAW's vague, it seems like if the deck's using both hands then the weapon(s) is/are drawn: They're being wielded.
Plus, they're similar to "Reload 0" shuriken, which (in media, not necessarily IRL) are stacked in one's palm while the other hand sprays them at the enemy. That seems like the traditional image for lethal playing cards. Bullseye and Gambit do this (though the latter sometimes pauses for extra charging).
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Also, nothing in the feat says it has to use up both of your hands, just that the cards are "in your possession."
As a GM I would probably rule that if someone wanted to hold the deck in their other hand they could draw from it as a free action, since that'd take up both their hands anyway.
The item entry for "Playing Cards" says it takes two hands. This would be relevant to another related feat, Fane's Escape.
Since this is referencing drawing a whole deck, it for sure would require two hands. You wouldn't use your rune deck for this, standard decks only cost 5s. Not a bad price for a guaranteed Create a Diversion.
