Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 contagem Jan 30, 2012 13:43:14	Hi , sorry i'm posting this in the wrong place , its just a little doubt that i had in my group and i guess this is the right place to resouve it. =) One of us has a lvl 8 Fighter that have the feat Power Attack and at the level 6 got the Resolute character variant. We wanna know if this fighter use his power attack anadding +4 of his abb , then in this same round he needs to make a Will check an active his Resolute hability. How much bonus does he get? +4 or +2? Thanks
#2 Tempest_Stormwind Jan 30, 2012 14:15:58	Hi , sorry i'm posting this in the wrong place , its just a little doubt that i had in my group and i guess this is the right place to resouve it. =) One of us has a lvl 8 Fighter that have the feat Power Attack and at the level 6 got the Resolute character variant. We wanna know if this fighter use his power attack anadding +4 of his abb , then in this same round he needs to make a Will check an active his Resolute hability. How much bonus does he get? +4 or +2? Thanks Power Attack adds a penalty to your attack rolls, while Resolute (which, since it's noncore, the convention is to source it - it's in Complete Champion Cheeseball) actually reduces your base attack bonus when it triggers. Since Power Attack doesn't lower his base attack, he still has  a +8 base attack bonus, meaning that after using Resolute he'd add +4 to his Will save. It's pretty clear in this case - the penalty for Power Attack "rests on top of" his actual base attack, along with all other modifiers (charging, flanking, two-weapon fighting, fear effects, etc). Mind you, this is another case where Complete Cheeseball didn't properly playtest things. Reducing your actual base attack bonus as an immediate action has the ability to do things like make Power Attack illegal. (If your 8th level fighter Power Attacked for any number higher than 4, then after he used Resolute, he'd have a penalty on attack rolls in excess of his base attack bonus, which Power Attack disallows). I understand what they're trying to do, and some of the interactions are actually rather clever (i.e. a 20th level fighter using Resolute would only get two attacks per round, and the temporary loss of base attack bonus would disable any of his higher-level fighter feats such as Greater Two-Weapon Fighting or Robilar's Gambit, due to the overall rule governing loss of prerequisites), but there are plenty of fringe cases that just aren't covered by the rules. The Power Attack interaction is one of them: would a Power Attack for -8, followed by a Resolute, result in a continued -8 penalty, a -4 penalty (changed to match your new base attack bonus), or no penalty (as the feat disallows higher penalties)? There's no clear answer on this case. Of course, that doesn't factor in on your specific example.