Combat Questions: Slam Down, Incorporeal Tumble Through

[Cozened]

Slam Down:
You make an attack to knock a foe off balance, then follow up immediately with a sweep to topple them. Make a melee Strike. If it hits and deals damage, you can attempt an Athletics check to Trip the creature you hit. If you’re wielding a two-handed melee weapon, you can ignore Trip’s requirement that you have a hand free. Both attacks count toward your multiple attack penalty, but the penalty doesn’t increase until after you’ve made both of them.

Question: Player with a reach weapon contends that the weapon is being used for the Slam Down, while the weapon lacks a Trip trait. I contend that the weapon is not being used for the Trip attempt; even the verbiage of Slam Down does not specify that the weapon is being used for the Trip attempt, unless the weapon itself has the Trip trait; nor does it state that this can be done with reach.

Tumble Through:
Specifies that the player moves through a square occupied by an enemy who is unwilling. Incorporeal trait states that the creature and corporeal creatures can move through their square without treating it as difficult terrain:

An incorporeal creature or object has no physical form. It can pass through solid objects, including walls. When inside an object, an incorporeal creature can’t perceive, attack, or interact with anything outside the object, and if it starts its turn in an object, it’s slowed 1 until the end of its turn. A corporeal and an incorporeal creature can pass through one another, but they can’t end their movement in each other’s space.
An incorporeal creature can’t attempt Strength-based checks against physical creatures or objects—only against incorporeal ones—unless those objects have the ghost touch property rune. Likewise, a corporeal creature can’t attempt Strength-based checks against incorporeal creatures or objects.
Incorporeal creatures usually have immunity to effects or conditions that require a physical body, like disease, poison, and precision damage. They usually have resistance against all damage (except force damage and damage from Strikes with the ghost touch property rune), with double the resistance against non-magical damage.

Question: Is Tumble Through necessary; can it be done simply to gain Panache when the square is not occupied by a creature who can demonstrate willingness or unwillingness for the other to move through it?

[graystone]

Cozened wrote:

Tumble Through:

Specifies that the player moves through a square occupied by an enemy who is unwilling.

It in fact does not say that. "You Stride up to your Speed. During this movement, you can try to move through the space of one enemy." They CAN try to move through an enemy, not that they must. You may use the Tumble Through action to simply Stride and never attempt to move through anyone's space.

Cozened wrote:

Question: Is Tumble Through necessary; can it be done simply to gain Panache when the square is not occupied by a creature who can demonstrate willingness or unwillingness for the other to move through it?

"A corporeal and an incorporeal creature can pass through one another, but they can’t end their movement in each other’s space." This answers it all: there is no check asked for with this movement.

[Cozened]

graystone wrote:

Cozened wrote:

Tumble Through:

Specifies that the player moves through a square occupied by an enemy who is unwilling.

It in fact does not say that. "You Stride up to your Speed. During this movement, you can try to move through the space of one enemy." They CAN try to move through an enemy, not that they must. You may use the Tumble Through action to simply Stride and never attempt to move through anyone's space.

pg. 422, PC2:
You can move through the space of a willing creature. If you want to move through an unwilling creature’s space, you can Tumble Through it. You can’t end your turn in a square occupied by another creature, though you can end a move action in its square provided that you immediately use another move action to leave that square. If two creatures end up in the same square by accident, the GM determines which one is forced out of the square (or whether one falls prone).

[The Raven Black]

Cozened wrote:

Slam Down:

You make an attack to knock a foe off balance, then follow up immediately with a sweep to topple them. Make a melee Strike. If it hits and deals damage, you can attempt an Athletics check to Trip the creature you hit. If you’re wielding a two-handed melee weapon, you can ignore Trip’s requirement that you have a hand free. Both attacks count toward your multiple attack penalty, but the penalty doesn’t increase until after you’ve made both of them.

Question: Player with a reach weapon contends that the weapon is being used for the Slam Down, while the weapon lacks a Trip trait. I contend that the weapon is not being used for the Trip attempt; even the verbiage of Slam Down does not specify that the weapon is being used for the Trip attempt, unless the weapon itself has the Trip trait; nor does it state that this can be done with reach.

PC makes a melee Strike. Note that there is zero requirement about the kind of Strike, so yes a Reach weapon without Trip can be used.

Strike hits and deals damage: requirements fulfilled to go to the next step => PC can attempt an Athletics check to trip the creature they hit. Again nothing here says anything about the attack used, so Reach weapon without Trip is still OK.

The only thing about the attack in the feat is a benefit for the PC: if it's a two-handed weapon, you do not need a free hand to trip.

Note that the Trip trait already says that "You can use this weapon to Trip with the Athletics skill even if you don’t have a free hand." There would be zero reason to state it in the feat if it could be used only with a weapon with the Trip trait.

So, the player was right.