Throwing people help

[b300mussolini]

so in this campaign my character is going for a throwing build and due to some weird combinations of feats, magic items, and a few home ruled stuff. one of the tricks in my characters bag would be to throw either a ally or an enemy. now the campaign is a 3.5 base with a splash of pathfinder thrown in. One of the magic items in pathfinder is called belt of mighty hurling, greater which gives any thrown weapon i use the returning enchantment. My DM has already confirmed that yes people thrown my guy if i went this route would count as thrown weapons so the belt would work for them.

so my question is how the heck does this attack work because either me or the DM or any of the players can figure something out that is not completely OP?

anyway if you guys have got any ideas i would love to hear them

[Divide by Zero]

Complete Warrior page 159 has rules for improvised thrown weapon damage.

[BCOVertigo]

so in this campaign my character is going for a throwing build and due to some weird combinations of feats, magic items, and a few home ruled stuff. one of the tricks in my characters bag would be to throw either a ally or an enemy. now the campaign is a 3.5 base with a splash of pathfinder thrown in. One of the magic items in pathfinder is called belt of mighty hurling, greater which gives any thrown weapon i use the returning enchantment. My DM has already confirmed that yes people thrown my guy if i went this route would count as thrown weapons so the belt would work for them.

so my question is how the heck does this attack work because either me or the DM or any of the players can figure something out that is not completely OP?

anyway if you guys have got any ideas i would love to hear them

OP? I don't know if I'd agree necessarily.

Has the DM ruled that characters being thrown through an enemie's threatened squares wouldn't provoke an attack of opportunity? A thrown character would already have to ready an action to attack on contact I would think. This would prevent a full attack.

Can you clarify how you feel this setup is OP?

[Edit]: On rereading I think you are looking for rules on this. In that case you should check out Fling Ally from RoS.

[b300mussolini]

basically this started with our DM seeing the feats for throwing creature in races of stone and said F that crap cause well as it was written you could throw someone one off a 1000 ft cliff and they wouldn't take any damage. so the DM homebrewed his own feat for throw creature since he wanted to use it for his giants cause hey i can throw a boulder but i can pick up the half-ling rouge stabbing me in the foot and toss him over the nearest football goal post. what he came up with works pretty well all things considered. And we know about the monster feat in savage species, he still didn't like the stuff the players got because it made no since.

but the question that we had is how does having the returning quality on a creature work in this case? from looking at many different sites that talk about it the weapon in question is either just floating in mid air or in fact flying back towards the person who throw it during the round thus ending up near enough to the person who throw it to catch it at the start of his turn.

so basically here is what i think is going on, i throw creature A at *blank*, then at the start of my next turn creature A has made the return journey back to me and i can catch it again and throw. Now one of the major questions is how does this effect creature A's turn when it finally rolls around. does he get his move since technically he would still be flying back towards me? would he be able to make an attack if he does not have something like shot on the run or spring attack.

and on a side not do i have to take anything special in order to catch creature A on his return trip due to the fact that a .5-2lb dagger is a whole lot different then the 300+lb, angry, ax wielding barbarian i just tossed at the *blank* (most of my allies don't have the HP to take the falling damage or get all pissy about me doing damage to them).

[supermonkeyjoe]

Races of stone has the feats Fling Ally and Fling Enemy which do exactly what you want

[Deadline]

Look up the various throw maneuvers (Mighty Throw, Comet Throw, etc.) in Tome of Battle. They are in the Setting Sun school.

[Gotterdammerung]

You have wandered off into the land of homebrew, which is NOT a bad thing. However it does mean that we will be less qualified to answer your quandaries. You and your DM will be the most suited to answer any questions you have about how this ability works. We will just be blindly guessing about how it might work.

Now you could of course give us specific details about all abilities involved in the combo and we might be able to help more directly.

As it stands, I will attempt a shotgun answer, and maybe I will get a lucky hit on the answer you are looking for.

#1 you can rule this from an angle of rationalization, trying your best to make sense of it all. In this case, you would likely rule that player A can take normal actions on his turn but is flying through the air and can not move unless he has the means to do so through a creative source of movement like flight or teleportation. You might rule that if he cancels the returning momentum somehow that he will not return on your turn. (However keep in mind that returning doesn't have to be fluffed Xena Chakram style. It can also be fluffled as a magical teleportation I.E. the weapon blinks from the final position back to the wielders hand).

#2 you could rule this from a strictly rules mindset. In which case, the player is both a player and a weapon and therefore allowed all aspects of being a player and a weapon. In theory, for that one round he could throw himself on his turn if he wanted since he is still treated as a ranged weapon. And on your turn, no matter what the player A has done, he will automatically return back to your hand. Under this mindset, the exact wording of everything involved is extremely important. The grammar must be analyzed to interpret exactly how everything interacts. The end result might not be the original intent of the DM, who created the material. Which is why i said it would be faster for you and your DM to work this all out.

[TripleD]

I had the same problem a while back (it was a question about "Enlarge Person" and chucking an enemy). The feats mentioned in Races of Stone seemed ridiculously expensive, feat-wise, for something that seemed like a basic motor function rather than a specialized skill. So I threw together a homebrew:

Chuck-a-Critter[3.5 Throwing Enemies and Allies] (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=276553)

It seems to work pretty well. The one thing I didn't mention was what happens if you throw one enemy at another. For now I'm splitting the damage between the two, since I figure each is absorbing the impact as much as the other.

[b300mussolini]

Hey tripleD i think our DM was looking at your thing when he was coming up with his own because the two are fairly similar, His is more like a combat maneuver like improved trip or grapple and the like, he has promised to come up with the improved and greater versions when he has the time.

here is the break down, i got to build my own class, so i made it large and gave it the ability to hurl boulders like a giant. My DM is calling his Feat Fling creature, and i have posted what he made on the chuck-a-critter page. the magic item i am thinking about getting (still a few levels off) is the belt of mighty hurling greater:

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/a-b/belt-of-mighty-hurling

it lets me use my str score to throw and it would give me a +4 str bonus, +10 feet to range increment when throwing, and returning on thrown weapon.

between these three things i have the base foundation of the build. throw people as my attack. after that things start to get a bit fuzzy. the DM said he was going to make the improved and the greater versions which would have a few more options that you could do with thrown unwilling and a few more options to the thrown willing. along with some other feats that he has not told us about that he has been cooking up, he just laughs evilly when we ask him.

i don't want to limit my self to just one thing but some of the other players have shown tried to point out ways to really break this to me, i just cant remember any of them off the top of my head, maybe something like multi-thrower or something

[TripleD]

Hey b300,

There are some pretty awesome ideas that your DM came up with. Can't say I agree with all of them (but then again, when do two people ever agree on the perfect homebrew?) but I've edited my original post to incorporate some of the one's I think are particularly insightful.

One thing you could look into is beefing the teamwork aspect of the throw. So far all the feats have focused on the thrower. What about the throw-ee? I created two feats back on the original page (renamed to "Throw Creature" to make it's purpose clearer) called Cannonball and Master Cannonball that are designed to make it easier to be thrown.

It seems like in both our builds we're inching towards a character who supports more than directly attacks, so teamwork will be a huge factor in how well this concept works out.

Maybe you could try to knock another character over as a ranged trip attack (like with a bola)? Then you end up with two enemies lying prone, just waiting for the fighters to step up and do their thing.

Or maybe a Sorcerer could share a touch spell with their familiar, you throw the familiar at the enemy, and it delivers the spell on contact?

The possibilities are nearly endless with this.

[b300mussolini]

i will admit that it was a little clunky so let me try and clear some stuff up before i go back and fix the feat.

Damage and distance

with a thrown weapon you add your Str mod to damage so we just keep that since it is part of rules as written.

we were working throwing a creature like a thrown weapon with the normal 5 range increments that come with thrown weapons. this played a factor in many of the decisions when it came to damage. the max distance a creature could be if it was 1 size smaller and a max weight would be 50ft. from there the max distance goes to 100ft size 1 med , 150ft size 1 light, 200 ft size 2 med, 300ft size 2 light, 450ft size 3+ light. since we said that this falling damage didn't cap out at the normal 20d6 because a falling creature will reach terminal velocity after so long but here it was about throwing speed that was doing the damage which is directly related to the distance it went. we assumed that the creature would hit the ground and end up rolling to its final position which would mean that some of the force dealing the damage would be taken up in the impact.

Granted looking back over i see i entered in something wrong and left something out. when a creature is thrown at another creature both take 1/2 distance thrown in falling damage + throwers STR mod. if a creature is thrown at a wall or other un-moving object it takes damage as if it had fallen the whole thrown distance.

Weight damage, i know we factored in weight when it came to throwing distance and the like. the weight damage was only against the creature that was being attacked. in complete warrior it explains at the very end about improvised weapon damages and it bases it off of weight but in that case something between 200-400lb deal 5d6 of damage. it also says that for each additional 200lb add 1d6. we kind of loped off the rest of those numbers before hand and went with d6's all the way. i am sure there is a better way to handle extra weight damage then to have it be factored in twice but for the life of me it makes since and i cant of any more logical way.

Actions

you pointed out that the way he had written it took three turns to pull this off. i think i might have miss wrote some thing. it normally takes a standard action to start a grapple and then in this case instead of maintaining a grapple when the turn rolls around you can make a special grapple check that is both a grapple check and an attack check as a full attack action to throw the creature. maybe it would be better to call it a throw check instead of a grapple check. as for how long it takes to pull this off it was meant that the improved fling creature reduced the time steps by one. free action to pick up a willing creature, move action to throw a willing creature and to grapple a unwilling one, standard to throw an unwilling creature. greater fling creature reduced it by another time step (you can throw as many willing creatures as your bab allows).


everyone?

while the chain was meant to work off of the large creatures who could throw boulders around, your right that everyone should have the joy of tossing monsters and other things. but that changes some things around a bit. first of all same size vrs weight and maybe the feat change for fling creature would lets throw larger and larger creature as well as reduce the time to prepare and increase the range and add extras to the willing and unwilling creatures?

i would have to work a few things, but something could be made workable.