How exactly do you want me to stat that?
Like D&D already did.
Per Sharktooth Staff, SS49, with a successful attack you can initiate a Grapple as a Free Action and you don't provoke an AoO like normal. You don't have to move into their square (ie smaller creatures do not gain soft cover). You automatically hit, ignoring the penalized attack roll. And you get to use a Two-Handed weapon with full damage bonuses. But in exchange for all of this, you only deal damage once per round.
You're making up half that stuff because the actual book text is pretty unclear. I know it because I already had players want to use that exotic weapon and ask me to rule what exactly happens.
A wielder who hits a Small or Medium-size opponent with a sharktooth staff does normal damage and can immediately initiate a grapple as
a free action without provoking an attack of opportunity (see Grapple in Chapter 8 of the Player ’s Handbook). The wielder of a sharktooth staff may choose to deal normal damage(WTF COUNTS AS "NORMAL" DAMAGE? POWER ATTACK FOR MAX? MAGIC BONUS?) for the weapon on subsequent rounds without making further attack rolls against the grappled victim(YAY FOR NO MENTION OF ACTUAL ACTION! OR HOW MUCH TIMES YOU CAN DO IT PER ROUND!)
So it's just a lost simpler and saner to say "you can keep whacking them with the damn weapon with normal attack rules".
Because yes, technically the weapon is grappling them. If you want to say while grappling a creature you can pick them up and pale drive them into them, well why would that be exclusively linked to a hook rather than your hand? See also Setting Sun in Tome of Battle, the art of slamming people into other people and objects.
Thank you for confirming again how little you actually read since otherwise you would've noticed I've also written plenty of fancy grappling maneuvers.
You're right, it's simple and effective, but it's not balanced. The pro of grappling is shutting down an opponents actions, the con is doing the same to yourself. Crowd control is overwhelmingly powerful like that. You're trying to eliminate any downside to committing to a grapple.
Also I did suggest just using the base weapons damage as the constrict damage so there wouldn't be anything to calculate. You can even state that the damage type is the same as the base weapons'.
And again, constrict damage happens when the grapple roll is sucessful. Which means right after the weapon hits, so you end up dealing heavy weapon damage then constrict damage right away. And then it's not that hard to roll a bunch more grapples every round to multiply that heavy damage. It's a lot more damage.
As for disadvantages, you still end up easier to hit and mobility is heavily restricted too, plus you still only get to hit the grappled guy. It's not much of a crowd you're controlling when it's a single target.
Ugh, fine. I'm giving you an actual rundown of the actions. AGAIN. I just hope it's not wasted by bullshit this time.
I use my standard action to crash through a bunch of discs with Retributive Image in them (or Persistent Image, whichever gets me the greatest amount of illusory Hugos) as well as a Dimension Door at the end so I'm floating right in front of the Neikapool's cockpit. Alert so I can dodge a stray AoO if it gets to me. and Invincibility so I can tank it if they still hit. Move so I can get into the cockpit.
After using this spell, you can’t take any other actions until your next turn.
For starters, Hugo's stuck in place after dimension dooring.
By my calculations, each 10-foot cube gives me approximately 8-12 Hugos, and it starts at 4 +1/CL, which means... not counting the real Hugo, there are between 144-216 copies of him per Retributive Image disc. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there's five of them.
For the sake of simplicity, let's use what we already had agreed on:
-I get the idea of trying to limit the number of disks thrown per round, but you'll remember Hugo tends to use predetermined "configurations" (I'm the one who ends up picking them on the run). So let's say he could save up to Int mod in "configurations" (this is a mage weapon after all and Int is related to remembering stuff) with up to four disks per configuration (later upgrades could increase that amount), or up to his Dex mod for on-the-fly stuff.
Hugo's Int mod is only +4 as per his sheet. This will be what, the 3rd configuration used for this campaign day? Not sure, but the cap is still only 4 disks.
Then there's the matter of distance. Nei already was 150 mu away from hugo, that's 900 feet, barely in range of long-range on-foot spells from Hugo (960 feet from 400+(14*40)). But that was before Katherine moved away to get between Nei and her approaching ship, which I'm pretty sure would be over 10 mu (60 feet), leaving Nei out of range of even on-foot long-range spells from Hugo. However I didn't give an exact distance, so I'm letting this one slide... But Nei could still use some immediate-action movement of her own to simply get at a safe distance from the Hugo horde.
Then of course, Nei's packing True Sight like a good high-level girl that once had an illusionist boyfriend.
Because of course she is, why not completely inutilize the illusionist - OHWAITI'MAFUCKINGSHADOWCRAFTMAGE.
It could be much worst, like you could be a grappler and run into somebody with Freedom of Movement.
Also FINE, I use TELEPORT instead of DIMENSION DOOR, WHICH HAS NO SUCH MOBILITY CLAUSE OR RANGE ISSUE.
See what I mean? Why bother detailing my actions if you're just going to shoot them down!
Because this was another case of you outright ignoring the spell rules. Dimensional Door shuts your character down until the next turn. But teleport indeed has no such clause, so that's one problem solved.
Also, the configuration thing is only for the disc launcher. Hugo's just drawing discs the old-fashioned way out of a handy haversack or whatever. He DOES have Quick Draw, remember? He could just as easily draw-drop as free actions and smash them on the ground rather than in his hands.
Hugo's standing on beach sand and isn't 10 feet tall, the disks aren't gonna break that easily. And even if they did, if Hugo wants to teleport he needs to smash said disk on himself.
EDIT: Either way the Hugo Army is meant to prevent AoOs from someone who isn't her. Even if she does AoO him, he's got Alert and Invincibility up. And she's in a mecha to boot - can a mecha-scale weapon hit a medium-size creature without some splash? Unless the answer is yes, she's bound to hit some of the fake Hugos too.
Yes they can, just like a normal colossal creature can target a medium one. Although she'll probably still just pull back from the clingy boyfriend than risk making mincemeat of the real Hugo.
Also to make something clear, one illusion of multiple Hugos is still just one illusion. One disbelief will make them all begone and will only cause one backlash.
...I just noticed something in the True Seeing description. Does the "see through illusions" part equate to automatically passing a disbelief Will save?
I swear illusions are the most headaching magic.
I'm gonna rule that no since if the authors meant to say it counts as disbelieving they would've said so instead of using different wording.
*shrugs* Okay.
I'ma just keep rolling with the hits like I do, whatevs~ Is cool.
Kuro, he wouldn't be "shutting you down" so much if you were actually doing things you know you can do instead of just tossing assumptions around. For the most part, his denying of your actions so far seem to be due to you not being clear about rules, both SRW ones and in the case of Dimension Door, regular core rules.
I know I get lost on this stuff to sometimes. Not too long ago I was pming Os about certain maneuver and spirit interactions for my previous turn cause I just didn't know if I could actually do what I wanted to do despite that it all looked viably legal. Turned out it wasn't
Thank you for the understanding. It makes my job easier if the players actually make their actions clear, and using a spell that stops you from taking actions then declaring more actions isn't very clear.