Flame Whips D&d 3,5

[MiyamotoMusashi]

Hello everybody. I've got a problem. I'm playing a 3,5 Forgotten Realms campaign. I'm a lvl.7 elf wizard and I have to choose my 4th level spells. I've found an interesting spell called "Flame whips".
My dm says my two attacks get two-weapon fighting penalties, I'd like to think not.
I can't post any link to the spell text, but the core is that I earn 2 fire whips in replacement of my two arms, each of 6d6 damage.

Please help!

[Venger]

Your dm is wrong.

You gain 2 attacks at your normal melee attack bonus.

Assume your guy has a 10 str, you'd have +3 ba from wizard, and +0 from strength, so you'd make touch attacks at +3. no twf involved because this spell is not a weapon.

[MiyamotoMusashi]

That's what I'm telling him, they're no weapon. I'm waiting for more opinions to prove my thesis, thank you very much for your help.

[Jormengand]

Either you're two-weapon fighting, or you can't use both in one round because two-weapon fighting is the only way of doing so.


Touching an opponent with a touch spell is considered to be an armed attack

If you wield a second weapon in your off hand, you can get one extra attack per round with that weapon. You suffer a -6 penalty with your regular attack or attacks with your primary hand and a -10 penalty to the attack with your off hand when you fight this way.

[MiyamotoMusashi]

Either you're two-weapon fighting, or you can't use both in one round because two-weapon fighting is the only way of doing so.

The problem is that the text doesn't mention this aspect. According to it seems that both the attacks aren't treated as normal attacks with weapons...
I don't know.

[KillianHawkeye]

I'm waiting for more opinions to prove my thesis, thank you very much for your help.

Are you aware that opinions don't actually prove anything?

[MiyamotoMusashi]

Are you aware that opinions don't actually prove anything?

Of course I do. Then who's right? You tell me, if you're so sure about the rules. I've opened such a thread since I'm not.

[Deophaun]

If I wasn't sure, I'd think the big tip-off would be where it replaces natural attacks. As those don't deal with TWF penalties, the spell probably wouldn't either.

Unless your DM has been running bears wrong the entire time...

[Tohsaka Rin]

The spell says it gives two attacks, so you have two attacks.

No mention of two-weapon fighting, so it's not two-weapon fighting.

[Andorn]

From Monster Manual, page 299:


FULL ATTACK
In this step, you’ll determine the monster’s attack routine when it
uses a full-round action to make a full attack. This is based on the
individual attacks the monster has available to it (see Attack,
above), but you need to account for the difference between primary
and secondary attacks.
Natural Weapons: In general, a creature attacks once with
each natural weapon it has. For most monsters, that will be two
claws and a bite (or the other way around). Decide which of the
monster’s natural weapons is its primary weapon. A monster
many have two or more primary weapons if it has two or more
of the same natural attack—for example, a treant attacks with
two slams, one for each limb, and both are primary natural
weapons.
Primary weapons use a creature’s full attack bonus, no matter
how many primary weapons it has. The monster applies its full
Strength bonus on damage rolls with its primary natural weapons,
or 1-1/2 times its Strength bonus if the monster has only one primary
natural weapon (for example, a wolf ’s bite).
All other natural weapons are secondary attacks. Reduce the
creature’s attack bonus by 5 for all such attacks, no matter how
many there are. Creatures with the Multiattack feat take only a –2
penalty on secondary attacks. A monster applies 1/2 its Strength
bonus on damage rolls with its secondary natural weapons.


Cool spell, by the way, makes me think of the psychic warrior with claws. Duration 1 round/level, extend and persist.

[Jormengand]

It replaces natural weapons but it's not a natural attack, it's a touch attack, which is an armed attack, which takes TWF penalties. The text is at least somewhere explicit on all of these things.

[Incanur]

I interpret the RAI as two attacks at full BAB, like primary natural attacks. That's how I've always run the spell in the past. We had an unforgettable moment when an arcane hierophant character cast flame whips and shared it with his dire badger companion familiar: a giant badger with front limbs replaced by fiery 15ft appendages. :smallamused:

Potentially dealing 12d6 (or 18d6 with haste) damage per round ain't bad at all at level 7, but I think it's okay considering that you have to take a standard action to do nothing to get it started. I can see why a DM would want to nerf that, especially in lower-powered campaign.

[MiyamotoMusashi]

Thank you all for your opinions and rule interpretations.

[Troacctid]

The text isn't clear as to whether they're meant to be treated as whips, as natural attacks that happen to resemble whips, or as spell attacks a la Chill Touch. I think you could make a decent case for any of them.

[Fizban]

You can argue anything you want but when the spell says "you gain two. . . attacks," any interpretation that relies on other rules which limit attacks is pretty suspect (it doesn't matter that there's "melee touch" in there since that's targeting information, not action). The description does everything to imply they function at full attack bonus the same as natural weapons, more than enough that anyone who's arguing is clearly doing so because they think it's too strong and not because they're misunderstanding how it's written. You can also compare it to the spell Claws of Darkness which does explicitly mention natural attacks, and happens to have the same range, and both spells are from Forgotten Realms setting books (possibly even the same author).

Incidentally Flame Whips isn't all that great: losing all magic items on your forearms is four+ slots (2 rings, gloves, bracers, as well as worn shield and bonuses from items held in hand), the damage doesn't scale and is heavily reduced by any amount of resistance, and it lacks the [Fire] descriptor required to use Searing Spell. It's a high-floor spell that scares people who don't know how to optimize, best used with Share Spells as mentioned above and as a surprise trick or against foes you're sure cannot gain any resistance. Even then you must start your turn within 15' of your target to get both attacks, which means either they've hit you or you've already locked them down.

The clerical spell Darkfre is much more powerful with a 120' range, iterative attacks, no loss of magic items or somatic components, a proper [Fire] descriptor, and a lower base level. You can get it on an arcanist's list via a couple methods or just be a cleric. Consider Magic of Eberron for Storm Touch and Scalding Touch if you really want to scare people with multiple high damage touches.

[Jormengand]

(it doesn't matter that there's "melee touch" in there since that's targeting information, not action)

What? They're melee touch attacks meaning they count as weapon attacks because it literally says that in the text on touch attacks, therefore you are counted as armed in both hands so you must TWF to get both attacks. The rules are entirely unambiguous.

[zergling.exe]

What? They're melee touch attacks meaning they count as weapon attacks because it literally says that in the text on touch attacks, therefore you are counted as armed in both hands so you must TWF to get both attacks. The rules are entirely unambiguous.

You are treated as armed in both hands when you have claws, do you need to use TWF to get both claw attacks as they are clearly both a natural and manufactured weapon?

[WildCard578]

The DM is here.

Let's proceed RAW (Spell Compendium 95):


Flame Whips

Transmutation
Level: Sorcerer 4, Wizard 4, Spellthief 4,
Components: V, S,
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Personal
Effect: Flaming whips
Duration: 1 round/level (D)

Technical information on the spell. Nothing to discuss here.


At the conclusion of this spell, your arms stretch into whiplike appendages and burst into flames.
Your forelimbs transform into flaming whips.

Not much to discuss so far as it is just fluff.


You gain two melee touch attacks with a 15-foot reach that each deals 6d6 points of fire damage.

The player gains two melee touch attacks: she only obtains the capability to make such attacks, nothing else. There's no mention on how these attacks are made, because they still are assumed to follow the general guidelines given in the relevant section on touch attacks (Player's Handbook 136):


Touch Attacks: Some attacks disregard armor, including shields and natural armor. For example, a wizard’s touch with a shocking grasp spell hurts you regardless of what armor you’re wearing or how thick your skin happens to be. In these cases, the attacker makes a touch attack roll (either ranged or melee). When you are the target of a touch attack, your AC doesn’t include any armor bonus, shield bonus, or natural armor bonus. All other modifiers, such as your size modifier, Dexterity modifier, and deflection bonus (if any) apply normally. For example, if a sorcerer tries to touch Tordek with a shocking grasp spell, Tordek gets his +1 Dexterity bonus, but not his +4 armor bonus for his scale mail or his +2 shield bonus for his large wooden shield. His AC is only 11 against a touch attack.

Which in turn sends back to the normal melee attack rules (Player's Handbook 139) as it is just a peculiar situation in which armor/shield/natural armor is completely disregarded:


Melee Attacks: With a normal melee weapon, you can strike any opponent within 5 feet. (Opponents within 5 feet are considered adjacent to you.) Some melee weapons have reach, as indicated in their descriptions in Chapter 7: Equipment. With a typical reach weapon, you can strike opponents 10 feet away, but you can’t strike adjacent foes (those within 5 feet).

As quoted, the normal attack rules only envision the player attacking with a weapon (i.e. one), unless they have Two-Weapon Fighting which brings into consideration a subset of rules of its own that I won't quote.

Going on with the spell:


Attacks with these flaming whips replace any natural attacks you had with those limbs.

This just enforces the reading of the spell as player races are generally considered unarmed when talking about natural attacks (Player's Handbook 139):


Unarmed Attacks: Striking for damage with punches, kicks, and head butts is much like attacking with a melee weapon, except for the following:

Attacks of Opportunity: Attacking unarmed provokes an attack of opportunity from the character you attack, provided she is armed. The attack of opportunity comes before your attack. An unarmed attack does not provoke attacks of opportunity from other foes, as shooting a bow does, nor does it provoke an attack of opportunity from an unarmed foe. You provoke the attack of opportunity because you have to bring your body close to your opponent. An unarmed character can’t take attacks of opportunity (but see “Armed” Unarmed Attacks, below).

“Armed” Unarmed Attacks: Sometimes a character’s or creature’s unarmed attack counts as an armed attack. A monk, a character with the Improved Unarmed Strike feat (page 96), a spellcaster delivering a touch attack spell, and a creature with claws, fangs, and similar natural physical weapons all count as being armed. Note that being armed counts for both offense and defense. Not only does a monk not provoke an attack opportunity when attacking an armed foe, but you provoke an attack of opportunity from a monk if you make an unarmed attack against her.


Luckily, the player who casts this spell is considered "armed" for she is a spellcaster with a melee touch attack spell.

I just realized while re-reading my post that technically the player is still not considered armed as she's not using a touch attack spell as per text description (à la Chill Touch) but using a spell that confers only the capability to make melee touch attacks with reach in lieu of her natural attacks so, unless she previously had the Improved Unarmed Strike feat (or any equivalent magic item/spell) thus "arming" her (unarmed) natural attacks, she still provokes attacks of opportunity from opponents who threaten her when she attacks with the flame whips.

What's really relevant about this particular spell is that player races generally use manufactured weapons (unless they have a peculiar racial trait that gives them natural attacks) or are considered unarmed (with minor caveats, such as Improved Unarmed Strike) as opposed to monster races which do have natural weapon attacks (primary and secondary, as correctly noted earlier) and the relevant ability to attack with them using a different subset of rules.

And on top of that there's the difference between the capability of player races to make iterative attacks with manufactured weapons while monsters with natural attacks cannot.

The last bit of the spell:


While this spell is in effects, you cannot cast spells with material components, nor can you carry items with your forelimbs. Any items worn on your forelimbs cease functioning while the spell is active.

Nothing to discuss about this.

Hope this post clarifies my view on the spell: once it has been cast, the player gains the capability to make melee touch attacks with the flaming whips as well as the potential to deal massive fire damage.

But the mechanics of attacking properly with them is still subject to the normal attacks rules, which a wizard renownedly sucks at.

She can use iterative attacks (with one of them) and she still can benefit from combat-boosting buffs (such as haste), but there's no way under the rules in which she can attack with both of them with no penalty.

[Fizban]

Consider how many rules you just quoted in order to arrive at your conclusion. The very fact that you've gone through so much effort in order to arrive at the less-intuitive ruling indicates that you have a vested interest in making sure the more-intuitive ruling is not allowed. Please re-examine your methodology.

Not much to discuss so far as it is just fluff.
It's not as prevalent in the SpC, but there are in fact printed spells that have an italicized fluff section which must be referenced for mechanics of the spell, though in this case it's not relevant. WotC is not perfect, and spells are not blocks of code. Even the spells in the SpC are taken mostly as-is from their original books, so the fact that one is more precise and the other more fluid in it's description (Claws of Darkness vs Flame Whips) does not mean that they have been made different on purpose. If the spell reads smoothly it should be an indicator that there's no chain of references required to use it.

The player gains two melee touch attacks: she only obtains the capability to make such attacks, nothing else. There's no mention on how these attacks are made, because they still are assumed to follow the general guidelines given in the relevant section on touch attacks (Player's Handbook 136):
Which in turn sends back to the normal melee attack rules (Player's Handbook 139) as it is just a peculiar situation in which armor/shield/natural armor is completely disregarded:
The quoted section from the PHB is targeting/calculation information (how to calculate when something is a touch attack). After that. . . your argument seems to be that PCs usually don't have natural weapons, thus the spell cannot possibly use anything other than weapon/touch spell rules? None of these lines have anything to do with the spell or how you would make attacks with it. At first I thought you were talking about action costs, but it's not even that: you're using the rules for seeing if an attack hits to determine the rules for when you're allowed to roll an attack, which is backwards and absurd. The spell gives you an attack, you exercise that attack via the method of your choice (standard action, full attack, AoO, etc), and then when you roll to hit it uses a touch attack. None of that has any impact on how many attacks the spell could give you.

If you wanted to prove it worked like a Touch spell, you'd be looking at the Target. Unfortunately it's not a touch spell:

Range: Personal
Effect: Flaming whips
Flame Whips is an effect spell. The effect of the spell gives you two touch attacks. Any interpretation which results in a person casting the spell and receiving less than two attacks is willfully ignoring the text of the spell. While you do have to make a full attack in order to gain both (falling under the "special reason" clause in Full Attacks, same as every non-iterative attack in the game) the spell does not give you any penalties (nor does it automatically gain any penalties or restrictions from Full Attacks), it just gives you two attacks. The most painfully obvious comparison is the next line of the spell:


Attacks with these flaming whips replace any natural attacks you had with those limbs.This just enforces the reading of the spell as player races are generally considered unarmed when talking about natural attacks (Player's Handbook 139):
Please re-read the portion you quoted. I do not understand how you can interpret the phrase "replace any natural attacks you had" as referring to people the don't have natural attacks, it has nothing to do with unarmed or counting as armed, and the PHB section you quote says nothing about natural attacks. Your argument continues to read like someone grasping at straws to justify the ruling they want. As stated multiple times by now, the line "replace any natural attacks" makes it clear that the Whips fall under natural weapons and not manufactured weapons or touch spells or unarmed attacks: if you have natural weapons, they are replaced by flame whips, if you do not have natural weapons then they are replaced by flame whips anyway (and no, you don't need to have innate natural weapons in order to use those gained from other stuff). You are willfully disregarding one of the most important lines of the spell, by pretending it refers to a rule it has nothing to do with.

in lieu of her natural attacks so,
Your own phrasing just implied they work like natural attacks.

as well as the potential to deal massive fire damage.
And this makes it clear why you're so set on your interpretation.*

If you feel the spell is too powerful then by all means tell your player honestly and disallow it, but don't twist the rules because you don't like it.

Now, I could play my own devil's advocate and say they're meant to be iterative attacks with the option of TWF, but if I did it would be based on the Effect: Flaming Whips line, comparing it to Flame Blade rather than Claws of Darkness. It has a nice feel and is capable or more attacks, I actually kinda like it. Doing so would still require ignoring the obvious connection to natural weapons as a flavorful drawback rather than an actual replacement effect as written. It would also not require jumping through three different hoops. This comparison results in the spell working the way you want it to, but it's already clear that you were more concerned with stopping your wizard from getting two "free" attacks than you were with comparing the spell to other spells or taking the cues given in it's own text.

*And 6d6 is not massive, it's ~14 21 damage (learn to math Fiz) per hit that actually lands. What's massive is what you get from say, a TWF Rogue build using a scroll of Flame Whips to deliver flanking sneak attacks with 15' and his full number of attacks because you've ruled the spell to support it. You want the natural weapon comparison the spell uses, because it makes the spell far harder to abuse for PCs. I have a whole ream of notes on abusing Darkfire and Flame Whips, and Flame Whips is not the one to worry about. Meanwhile as you've already said yourself, a caster who's not built for it has terrible melee attack rolls, which means they don't automatically hit with both attacks (or even one), which are again made from dangerously close range. So maybe stop overreacting.

[Incanur]

Small correction: 6d6 averages 21, not 14. With haste you can get up to 18d6 (63) per round, which ain't bad at level 7. I never found the spell excessively powerful, but campaigns vary.

[Fizban]

Whoops, embarassing mistake. I was thinking 6.5x3=18 and something, then switched to pair of d6=7 and took the answer ending in teen rather than remembering to count the pairs. Naturally I still agree that it's not a devastating amount of damage, but it is a bit more.