KRyan

So yes, logically, swarm attacks are made with the bodies of the individual members of the swarm. That doesn’t, by itself, mean a swarm attack is a natural weapon. That’s just not something the rules support.

Clearly, here, the unarmed strike is a separate category of thing from natural weapon, so to work with either, they couldn’t just say “natural weapon.”

> Magic fang gives one natural weapon or unarmed strike

For that matter, one of the best examples of an unarmed strike being treated like a natural weapon is magic fang:

Swarm attacks don’t get any of that; nothing anywhere ever says they are natural weapons, or can be chosen for things like Improved Natural Attack

Because they’re so weird, sometimes counting as a natural weapon and sometimes not, unarmed strikes are usually handled specifically when it would matter

Unarmed strikes are very weird in a whole lot of ways, but at least for the sake of demonstrating that non-natural-weapon attacks with body parts are possible, they work pretty well

At least in the context of Improved Natural Attack, unarmed strikes are not natural weapons—and they are clearly performed by attacking with a body part.

> Choose one of the creature’s natural attack forms (not an unarmed strike).

And there is a ton of precedent for the idea that an attack made with a body part may nonetheless not be a natural attack: namely, unarmed strike. A lot of things that apply to natural weapons also apply to unarmed strikes, but a lot of things that apply to natural weapons don’t apply to unarmed strike. Cf. Improved Natural Attack, which says

@GodDog That’s affirming the consequent. If something is a natural attack, then it is made using a body part. That does not mean that if an attack is made using a body part, it is automatically a natural attack. Something somewhere has to say it is. In the case of a swarm attack, nothing does.

Anyway, sorry for the heat, but asserting the presence of something without telling me where to find it was extremely frustrating. Also, to bring these comments closer to what they should be—improving this answer—even if I were to stipulate to everything you claim, I would still downvote this answer because all of that needs to be in your answer. Because as it stands, your answer still suffers from that deficiency.

As for 1, 2, and 3, you cannot “infer” that the swarm attack is a natural weapon. That’s not the way the rules work. I might buy that for some weird niche case that is under-defined by the rules, but swarm attacks have like an entire page of text—saying “sure, they never said it even though they spent a page talking about it, but synthesis of these rules statements scattered across the book(s) implies...” is just a non-starter. Also, you’re incorrect about the “grammatical necessity” of interpreting 1 the way you do.

If we move away from RAW, and try to interpret this mess, the by far most likely thing is that they didn’t think of swarms at all when writing magic strike, and had absolutely no idea that this issue even existed. If we’re going to amend the rules that were written to make more sense, fixing magic strike is a far smaller and clearer change than changing every swarm ever written. Your ruling instead treats magic strike—a smaller, specific, later rule, with its own internal issues—as immutable and ironclad, a retcon on a full page of core rules. That does not strike me as reasonable.

So the question becomes, are we talking about strict RAW? Strict RAW, hellwasp swarm “has” magic strike, but it’s completely meaningless—it has no natural weapons to benefit from magic strike. It also doesn’t matter, because it has its own, unnamed ability to ignore DR/magic with its swarm attack—which would be redundant for most creatures, but not for the hellwasp swarm. Other creatures have two almost-identical abilities, one unnamed and natural, the other “magic strike (Su)”—which is a whole can of worms itself, since RC shouldn’t be doing stealth errata like this and this is kind of why.

Anyway, yes, RAW—at least assuming we accept RC errata to begin with, a contentious issue—these creatures have both magic strike and their original rule. Why? Because those are the rules that they wrote. Period, that’s it, that’s how “rules-as-written” as a concept works. RC does not say that the original rules for those creatures is eliminated, so RC didn’t eliminate those rules. Does that lead to wonkiness in an antimagic field? Yup, sure does! Guess they shouldn’t have tried to do stealth errata in RC, obviously. So the rules, as written, already have issues.

Thank you for quoting the specific text you mean—I had not seen it. Alluding to an entire book, or even to an entire page, is not terribly helpful; citations need to be precise. My own answer lacks them because one cannot quote the absence of something: you’re claiming that something exists, the burden of proof is on you to show evidence that it does. Which means this argumentation also needs to be in your answer itself, not just in these comments.

“a look into the book would show”—you keep doing this, to the point that it’s getting exceptionally hard to assume good faith: where? You claim it’s there, quote something. This entire answer and conversation is like that, you assert things, claim books support it, but don’t actually provide the support itself, and when I go looking, it’s not actually there at all. Entirely equivocation, fallacy, non sequitur, and wishful thinking.

This is too long for comments and I don’t feel like dealing with chat: there was no global retcon, just some updated monsters—and hellwasp swarm isn’t one of them. Exception-based ruleset means that swarm attacks are just exceptions to the general rules (e.g. descriptions of natural attacks, RC 100, etc.), not that swarm attacks are something they’re never stated to be. You cannot generalize outward from specific examples like that. Ultimately, you are correct in one thing only: there is no ambiguity about it. But what’s unambiguous is that you’re wrong about everything else.

Also, in both the hypothetical case of a swarm that did have magic strike, and with the bronze locusts, your reasoning relies on “I must be right, because if I’m wrong, this ability would be useless”—that’s not sound logic, because creatures can have abilities that are useless. It just means they have a mistake —and resolving the mistake locally is much more appropriate than taking it as a binding precedent with widespread implications throughout the rules. Again, exception-based ruleset means that logic is invalid even if the example isn’t a mistake.

Furthermore, the hellwasp swarm doesn’t use the term “magic strike” anywhere in it, so even if Rules Compendium were relevant here—dubious in the extreme—its statement doesn’t apply to the hellwasp swarm to begin with. The hellwasp swarm doesn’t overcome DR as a magic weapon because it has magic strike, it does because it has its own unique ability that says it does just that. You can’t say “oh, this ignores DR, magic strike ignores DR, therefore this is magic strike.” No, it’s something else that ignores DR. And the rules for magic strike don’t apply to it.

“It's clear that while a nonstandard form of attack, they're still treated as a natural attack.” Err... what prior to that sentence makes that clear? You have a reasonable case for the swarm attack being an attack, but I see nothing at all that suggests it is specifically a natural attack. DR applies to swarm attacks because the swarm attack rules say they do, not because they are a natural attack—nothing says that they are. The DR definition is no help—that’s a converse fallacy. Even if it wasn’t, it’s an exception-based ruleset.

@annoyingimp yes, you are allowed to do that, but does it count as a charge if you do? And even if it does, does it count as charging in unison with the rider, while the rider is charging a different target

@annoyingimp Charge is different, but I’d have to double-check whether it’s different in that way, it’s a good point. But I would point out that even if this is so, “in unison” might well still block that unless both reader and mount charge the same empty square—it’s not clear that the rider can charge a target and the mount can charge an empty square and still be “in unison”

@annoyingimp this is what I mean, and what I disagree with; it was their job, if they meant it, to say it, and they did not. They didn’t; there are no words in the rules that say that.

@annoyingimp “as you direct it”—how do you direct it? you handle it, if it’s an animal. Unless you have some other way to direct it? The knee-handling thing might be that, maybe, but I think it’s inaccurate to say with certainty that it does mean that, and not alert the reader to the issue

@annoyingimp I am merely analyzing what the rules actually say. You are inserting your own sense and sensibility that is not found in the actual rules. Paizo certainly appreciates it when we ignore their failures and do their work for them like that, but it is, IMO, inappropriate to do so on a site like this, because accurately answering the question is paramount, and we are not the DM for our readers’ tables and cannot rely on our own sense and sensibility like that.

@annoyingimp ultimately, until they decide to give us a solid way to move things to chat ourselves, I think any undesirable comment chains are their fault and not theirs, and I make little-to-no effort to avoid it when warranted

@RisingZan That’s irrelevant here: d20sed.org agreed not to when they licensed material under the OGL and the d20 System License. Even if they could have gotten away with reproducing a lot of the content without licensing, once they agreed to those licenses, they’re required to obey them, and that includes not putting in any product identity or XP tables.

@RisingZan It’s worth noting that this provision is found in the d20 System License, and not the Open Game License. This is why, for example, Pathfinder could include its own XP table and rules for creating a character and applying experience to a character. (Also, please do not use code formatting for quotations or emphasis or any other non-code purpose; it can harm site accessibility.)

@HeyICanChan Anyway, I’ve asked the question on the Law Stack, so we’ll see.

@HeyICanChan Or just makes up their own numbers, or just uses milestone leveling :P Anyway, yes, I know what you mean, I’m just saying that I’m not sure that the law cares.

@HeyICanChan I’ll admit, I don’t know how fair use considers the “context” like that, but this work alone is not sufficient to play 3.5e without buying the books. Even this whole site isn’t (remotely) that. This site plus the SRD pretty much gets you there, but... is that our responsibility? We didn’t put the SRD out there. Anyway, in the end, stuff like “impact on sales of the product” is one of many things that the law directs judges and/or juries to consider in cases of fair use, neither damning nor exonerating on its own. I think WotC would have a hard time here.

@MatthieuM. I could work around such a limitation, yes. I don’t think the answer would be everything it could or should be. And I don’t see any reason to do so.

@HeyICanChan I don’t think it would have. The SRD omits the XP table, and this it is not open-game content, but that only matters to those who are licensing the content under the OGL. We are not; this is being quoted under a fair use rationale, not under any license. I can’t know for sure that Wizards would not have sent a C&D over this, but I am dubious. At any rate, that’s their business to figure out, not really ours. Without the complete list of XP requirements, I cannot back up the claim that 3,000 XP is optimal.

@Erik oops, yeah, my bad; misremembered that. You’re correct, it only “includes” those rather than being defined as just those.

@Erik To me, though, the problem is here: natural abilities are both given a definition, and claimed to be the catch-all category for everything not explicitly labeled. But those two things contradict one another; plenty of unlabeled things do not remotely meet the definition of natural abilities, since that definition is not all that general.

In practice, a DM probably would (and certainly should) just make ad hoc decisions about each questionably-Ex ability as necessary, though of course that is useless to a RAW analysis.

@Erik I think it’s pretty clear that anything not explicitly labeled extraordinary is on thin ice with respect to cunning brilliance, whether it’s natural or some other, not-explicitly-defined category. Though of course that’s pretty dumb in a lot of cases, e.g. monk’s unarmed strike, but I think that’s more an issue of the fact that the author(s) of the factotum were having to succinctly describe something that was already under-defined by the rules.

(By contrast, psionics says that the ability to manifest powers is, itself, a psi-like ability. The universal community consensus is that absolutely no one knows what on earth that means or is supposed to mean, and even the most rigorous analyses just... ignore it. Nothing useful can be gained trying to make heads or tails of that nonsense.)

“surely X’s fall into the category of X-like things,” absolutely not. Spell-like abilities are so-called because they are each, individually, like some spell. That is, a fireball spell-like ability is “like” the spell fireball. As a class, though, they are explicitly separate and distinct. Those differences, in fact, are precisely why a fireball spell-like ability is only “like” the spell fireball, and not just actually casting the spell itself. So much breaks down trying to read it your way; it’s just not tenable.

The 3.5e solar lists “Special Attacks: Spell-like abilities, spells,” pretty clearly indicating that those are special abilities and distinct from spell-like abilities. And yes, quickly summing up rules about counterspelling, dispelling, disrupting, and antimagic is most of the point of them, which is part of why I list those three things in particular—they have their own rules for those things that don’t fit into any of the three categories. But the categories are also used as a way of grouping features—Ex pretty rarely, but Sp and Su get called out pretty often.

At least a few things are pretty clearly distinct from the categories you list: spells, psionic powers, incarnum soulmelds. The last are pretty similar to magic items, but then, we could also add magic items themselves as another category. Just food for thought, not especially relevant to the actual question here.

@fuzzywuzzy1951 You are the one making a claim, so yes, you are the one who has to provide evidence. So far, you have asserted the existence of evidence to support your point, but my point is that even if I stipulate that it is what you claim, it doesn’t actually support the conclusion you want it to as well as you claim it does. I don’t need “evidence” for this point—I’m analyzing your evidence, and pointing out that it is lacking. To wit: your claim of what they are “always” explicit assumes that leech field itself isn’t a counterexample. That’s circular reasoning.

@fuzzywuzzy1951 I would greatly appreciate it if you stopped assuming what my motivations and background are—every time you have, you have been wrong, and every time you do, I am going to stop interfacing with the discussion.

@fuzzywuzzy1951 I simply do not believe you when you say “Always.” Wizards of the Coast’s editing was just never that good—and how do you know leech field itself isn’t a counterexample? Anyway, the game isn’t run “as written” (it, in fact, cannot be), and the insistence that running it differently from your interpretation is “willfully misinterpret[ing] text” is just not so. You have massively more confidence in your conclusions than the evidence warrants. And expecting anyone to just accept them as such because you have determined it is not a winning strategy.

@fuzzywuzzy1951 If the context clearly indicated that, sure, but it doesn’t. All it says is “a foe’s power,” that could very easily be a constraint on which powers are eligible. Just saying, it’d be bad form to show up to a table expecting that to work without discussing it with the DM.

@fuzzywuzzy1951 You are falling into the trap of assuming that words are consistently used to mean exactly one thing. This is not true, not even in RAW analysis. What Nobody has here is evidence that the word “foe” is used inconsistently in 3.5e, so you cannot expect that the implications of its use in one place apply anywhere else. “Foe” could mean what you want it to, but it would be incorrect to claim that it does mean what you want it to—an honest RAW analysis has to accept that it is simply ambiguous and requires a ruling.

@John I’ve worked in the third-party D&D industry under the OGL—have you? Trust me when I say, it’s not useless. While rules are not copyrightable, the expression of those rules is. And the big, big problem is, it’s not super-clear what counts as copyrightable expression. Which means you’d have to make a case in court, in front of a judge, which is monumentally expensive. Wizards of the Coast can afford that—can you? You can be right on every point and still bankrupted by even trying to defend your rights. The OGL was supposed to prevent that.

The references to Pathfinder are confusing—both editions of Pathfinder use the OGL and include WotC’s d20 System™ SRD in their Copyright Notice. That’s a completely different scenario from working without a license.