Creatures with grab.
Would they still get to grab the pc they attacked?
Do they now have only the option to grab the Guardian that intercepted?
Or is grab interrupted because they didn't get to damage the original pc they attacked?
It says "you take the damage".
You do not become "the target" or "take the hit".
So best as i can read it, all non-damage effects stay with the original target.
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It says "you take the damage".
You do not become "the target" or "take the hit".So best as i can read it, all non-damage effects stay with the original target.
That makes mechanical sense in terms of strict mechanics as they are written right now.
Its is an odd interaction though and probably shouldn't stay that way for the final version of intercept strike.
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It says "you take the damage".
You do not become "the target" or "take the hit".So best as i can read it, all non-damage effects stay with the original target.
That makes mechanical sense in terms of strict mechanics as they are written right now.
Its is an odd interaction though and probably shouldn't stay that way for the final version of intercept strike.
It's even more odd when you line up 5 Gardians, they each Intercept, and transfer the damage 25'.
And yea. I hope it changes.
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Yes the trigger of Damage doesn't line up with the name of the power Intercept Strike.
Thematically it is a contradiction. Mechanically it is messy as damage is not cleanly atomic.
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Yep, this just came up in my playtest too. I have used Intercept Strike to take the damage from my adjacent ally who as a result of the triggering attack has the Restrained condition. So, I take the damage, but is my ally still Restrained? Or am I? And how, if I took the hit, is my ally affected at all? It makes…no sense.
Well if you read the grab ability...
The monster's last action was a successful Strike that lists Grab in its damage entry....
The question is... Just because a strike was intercepted... Is it still a 'successful' strike?
I'm actually leaning towards no, now. The monster did not succeed in their goal of striking their target. They hit someone else.
I’m inclined to agree. But who is grabbed? I mean I can see that on the one hand it *was* a successful Strike, so maybe I took the force, but the Grab got my ally? Or I took the hit and the Grab? It unfortunately for me makes the most sense for the latter - I have essentially interposed myself to take damage and effect, and am now Restrained.
But I’m not sure that was the intent of Intercept Strike, and as Mellored points out, if we go by this logic, putting 5 Guardians in a row means it is possible to move the damage AND the Grab 25’.
One alternative is that *no-one* gets Grabbed, but that seems…wrong.
The strike was definitely successful. If its not, why is there damage to intercept at all? The success condition of the Strike action is literally "you deal damage".
It isn't super clear how it works right now for things like Grab though. Some things would logically carry over because the condition requires dealing damage, but Grab isn't one of those (ie if you shield block all the strike's damage, Grab still applies because Grab only requires you to hit). RAW, only the damage moves and everything else still applies to the target, which is how we ran it for playtesting.
In terms of verisimilitude or the fantasy of the character in action, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that you "intercept" the attack, you take the damage, but the person you're protecting is now somehow poisoned/grabbed/on fire/etc. Especially on a class that supposedly isn't using magic to redirect damage the way something like Shield Other/Share Life would.
The simplest fix is probably to change it to "you are now the target of the attack", so it resolves against your AC instead and everything applies to you. That is what the text is implying should be happening anyway, and it would also fix the goofiness of chaining damage across multiple guardians and having it somehow shrink every time as it moves down the line.
You'd need to change how AoEs are handled with that, but that seems solvable.
There's room for interpretation here. If there is a high level monk feat or something for example that redirects somebody's strike damage onto themselves as a reaction, then would that be a successful strike? Then who is the target of the grab?