Hello,
I've seen this referenced elsewhere, but no one seems to have answered this satisfactorily (or I'm just dumb).
So the text for Blade of Law reads as follows:
"You call upon the power of law and make a weapon or unarmed Strike against a foe you have witnessed breaking or disrespecting the law or otherwise acting disorderly. The Strike deals two extra weapon damage dice if the target of your Strike is chaotic. Whether or not the target is chaotic, you can convert the physical damage from the attack into lawful damage."
So my questions are:
1. Why would you ever use this against a non-chaotic creature intentionally?
2. Why would you convert your physical damage to lawful if the creature isn't chaotic?
I thought alignment damage only worked on the opposed alignment trait (good hurts evil, lawful hurts chaotic, etc.).
Can someone help me understand the full intended use for this ability, because I'm just not seeing it beyond getting extra dice against chaotic creatures and potentially bypassing physical damage against said creatures.
Thanks!
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You've basically got it right. It's a lawful equivalent to the Champion feat that does the same thing but with good damage. Indeed, the function is pretty much "I can hurt the antithesis of my philosophy harder" and "I can ignore most types of resistance they might have" with the one additional supplemental feature "If I mistakenly use it on a creature that is not evil/chaotic, converting the damage means I can choose to deal 0 damage and restart negotiations, if relevant".
Be advised, of course, that if you intend to start using the remastered rules patch coming out in a couple months, abilities like this will soon be irrelevant since no creature has alignment anymore (except, like, fiends and celestials).
You've basically got it right. It's a lawful equivalent to the Champion feat that does the same thing but with good damage. Indeed, the function is pretty much "I can hurt the antithesis of my philosophy harder" and "I can ignore most types of resistance they might have" with the one additional supplemental feature "If I mistakenly use it on a creature that is not evil/chaotic, converting the damage means I can choose to deal 0 damage and restart negotiations, if relevant".
Be advised, of course, that if you intend to start using the remastered rules patch coming out in a couple months, abilities like this will soon be irrelevant since no creature has alignment anymore (except, like, fiends and celestials).
Okay, thanks. I figured that was about the size of it, but I've been wrong before.
And yeah, I'm deeply curious to see what ends up happening to these things in the absence of alignment.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You've basically got it right. It's a lawful equivalent to the Champion feat that does the same thing but with good damage. Indeed, the function is pretty much "I can hurt the antithesis of my philosophy harder" and "I can ignore most types of resistance they might have" with the one additional supplemental feature "If I mistakenly use it on a creature that is not evil/chaotic, converting the damage means I can choose to deal 0 damage and restart negotiations, if relevant".
Be advised, of course, that if you intend to start using the remastered rules patch coming out in a couple months, abilities like this will soon be irrelevant since no creature has alignment anymore (except, like, fiends and celestials).
Okay, thanks. I figured that was about the size of it, but I've been wrong before.
And yeah, I'm deeply curious to see what ends up happening to these things in the absence of alignment.
We actually know a little bit. I dont know how much you've followed the remaster, but at least we know that law and chaos damage are fully gone. Good and evil damage are also gone but taking up the same narrative space is holy and unholy sanctification. Abilities that used to do alignment damage seem mostly to be replaced with 'spirit' damage and people who are sanctified can use spirit damage to trigger fiend and celestial weakness. I'm not sure but it may be possible that sanctified creatures are also weak to holy or unholy spirit damage. Other than that, spirit damage harms everything with a spirit, so there's no issue of selective damage types anymore, unless the distant future Champion builds it back in manually with some weird work around.
I guess we'll see. I'm honestly a bit surprised about the remaster, given all the work they did towards scalability for this edition.
Like many others, I'm still of two minds on the subject, and especially interested in how places like Archives of Nethys will handle it, or the numerous modules that run the game on Foundry and other VTT services.