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It says:
Melee [one-action] jaws (deadly, reach 10 feet), Damage 1d12 piercing;
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this looks like an error.
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It says:
Melee [one-action] jaws (deadly, reach 10 feet), Damage 1d12 piercing;Maybe I'm missing something here, but this looks like an error.
True . I've never seen a deadly die less than the base weapon size. So I would be assuming Deadly d12.
It may also be missing rules, as you can't add striking runes at all.
It says:
Melee [one-action] jaws (deadly, reach 10 feet), Damage 1d12 piercing;It may also be missing rules, as you can't add striking runes at all.
The striking runes are sort of baked into the forms - you start with 2 damage dice for some of the attacks and 1 damage dice for the other ones (that have larger dice) and those dice double if you heighten it to 5th level.
Heightened (5th) Your battle form is Huge and your attacks have 15-foot reach, or 20-foot reach if they started with 15-foot reach. You instead gain 20 temporary HP, an attack modifier of +18, a damage bonus of +6, double the damage dice, and Athletics +21.
Striking Runes would get kind of weird on top of that - for example, the lowest level striking rune increase the damage dice to 2 damage dice, so a Deinonychus gets no benefit to its talon attack (as it already does 2d4 piercing) while its jaws attack increases to 2d10.
Dragon form with a black dragon and a greater striking rune would increase the jaws attack to 3d12 from 2d12, but the claw, tails and horns attacks already have 3 dice so get no benefit, but then if you apply a major striking rune on handwraps you suddenly get a benefit to all of the attacks when the previous rune only boosted one of them.
Basically, striking runes on battle forms would scale things in a really bizarre way, applying to some attacks and not others at different points in the upgrade path, meaning as you go from rune to rune you would end up changing which of the multiple unarmed attacks are stronger.
For an extreme example of what could happen, imagine if a form had two attacks
Punch - 2d4 damage (2-8 damage)
Slap - 1d8 damage (1-8 damage)
Punch is clearly the attack with the most damage output.
But with a striking rune, punch already has 2 damage dice (so gains no benefit) while slap gets an extra D8.
Punch - 2d4 damage (2-8 damage)
Slap - 2d8 damage (2-16 damage)
All of a sudden the battle forms least damaging attack has become its strongest attack, and its theme of being a weak slap compared to its stronger punch no longer reflects reality.
Striking runes work for weapons an player characters unarmed attacks because they all have the same number of damage dice - battle forms are emulating monsters which don't follow that rule.
The same is also why you don't get anything equivalent to striking runes for spells.
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The striking runes are sort of baked into the forms... -SNIP-
Yes, but that doesn't tell you how that interacts with the Deadly trait, which is what Gortle was getting at, I'm pretty sure.
The Deadly traits add's extra damage die on a crit but how many depends on what sort of striking runes you have on your weapon usually. Not how many die the attack in question does.
With the heightened form of the spell, it says to "double the damage dice". Does this include the die from deadly? Assuming that the die in question is a d12, then does the heightened form have 2d12 deadly damage?
I'd assume not, but it isn't very well clarified.
Usually an attack wouldn't get 2 dice on the deadly trait until the weapon had a greater striking rune and thus did 3 die of damage. What if there was a level 9 version of the spell that said to triple all damage dice? Would you turn it into deadly 2d12 then to keep it in line with what you'd expect from striking runes? Or would you make it deadly 3d12 since it says "triple all damage dice"? Or would you leave it at 1d12 because even if the damage dice number is equal to a greater striking rune, it isn't actually one?
Again, I'm pretty sure the answer is to keep the deadly damage to once dice unless it specifies otherwise, but I do wish we had some more specific guidelines to go off of.
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Something more to add to my list of battle form rules problems.
Thanks
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Yeah, I think it should read (deadly d12).
The question of when do you get the second d12 from deadly is moot, since 1) there is no striking so it is irrelevant, and 2) no form of the T rex has 3 dice.
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I think I've seen some creatures get 'deadly 2d10' or something similar instead of 'deadly d12' if they lack the appropriate striking weapons but still deal multiple dice worth of damage. That may make more sense in this case than changing the rule for the typical use case.