Talking the Monster to Death (new feat)

[Raineh Daze]

I'm confused about what the actual concern for this feat is from a lot of people. Is it the unlimited damage? Is it the level of acquisition? Something else?

'Something else'; you automatically inflict damage independent of AC, attack bonuses, equipment (aside from charisma buffs), and other feats. A will save currently only reduces the damage. Plus it's ranged and can be used as two weapons.

[Concerned Ninja Citizen]

The damage is also not resistable. It's untyped and, though it's technically nonlethal, it still works on targets immune to nonlethal damage.

Currently, the only way to prevent taking at least 1 damage per use is mettle and that's a rare ability.

Reserve Feats, by contrast, either require attack rolls or allow reflex saves (evasion being much more common than mettle.)

[veekie]

I'm looking at it, and I see several key factors in play:
-Untyped and stacking bonuses/penalties. These are never a good idea in a game where control of bonus quantities are paramount in a game, and encourage abuse(a group of four level 1 characters TWF-ing this and a weapon would get a net +1 to attack and +3 to damage each, it only scales up with more people, particularly focusing on a target). In this circumstance the types are quite obvious, Morale should be the type, and if they are to be significant, then let them scale with the number of ranks rather than stack indefinitely. The setting concerns aren't an issue, maybe you have entire villages having a brofist based monster defense strategy, maybe you don't, but the potential for abuse remains. A smaller concern is both the synergy with bard and the diminishing of the benefits of inspire courage, as you can replicate a high level bard's performance with multiple cheerleaders.

-Action type, as an attack action, it becomes significantly more abusable, slap a Haste down and your squad of cheerleaders is now outputting twice as much cheering power and easily making the bard look bad. It's also counter to theme, your TWF-ing full BAB types get more benefit out of this than the typical skill specialist 3/4 BAB types. It's not really a weapon either, which further causes complications with other rule interactions(for example, you make a martial strike using this as the melee attack channel, the strike will attempt to modify nonexistent qualities such as accuracy or crit range. This is specifically a save-based attack and should not be classified as an AC based attack). If you want to make it usable with weapon attacks, make it a swift action(and boost the output to match) rather than this mess.

-Untyped irresistable damage, the trappings of this indicates it should be entirely mental in nature. Base resistances off mind thrust or other pure mental damage sources. Save for half isn't really a problem since it does pitiful damage that way.

[oslecamo]

Save for half isn't really a problem since it does pitiful damage that way.

-20th level warblade.
-23 ranks in the skills plus +12 Cha mod  for 11 auto-damage per attack.
-Time Stands Still+TWF feats+Snap Kick+Haste+random graft/natural weapon=20 attacks.

Defeat a Balor (225 HP) provided it fail one of the saves. Since it's rolling twenty saves, I would say there's a pretty good chance they fail at least one.

If it's two 17th level warblades, they're just losing 3 damage per attack, but geting twice as many, so they can take down a Pit Fiend (290 HP) whitout failure.

Funny how "pitiful damage" translates into "easily take down enemies of your level or higher". All you need is lots of attacks, and that's easy enough to get when you no longer need to care about attack bonus or bypassing defenses.

And if it's turned against the players... Well, players do have much less bloated HP than monsters.

Could be solved simply by making it only multipliable by basic iteratives.

[Raineh Daze]

-23 ranks in the skills plus +12 Cha mod  for 11 auto-damage per attack.

You've lost 5 damage somewhere, 23-3+12=32, 32/2=16.

[veekie]

See above regarding the abusability of attack action usage.

[Garryl]

Has anyone noticed that The Way of Words is affected by DR? Only energy attacks (even nonmagical ones), spells, spell-like abilities, and supernatural abilities ignore DR without explicitly stating it (although I think force effects were added to that list in the Rules Compendium), and this is neither of them. Ergo, its small amount of damage per attack gets cut down dramatically by even DR 5 or 10/magic that many monsters have (and that most adventurers ignore by having cheap magic weapons).

[bhu]

I like this concept.  It's fun to think I could have a magical talking squirrel as a cohort who calls the troll im fighting 'peanut dick' in the middle of a fight.