Incorporeal question- Gloves of Heartfelt blows

[Yogibear41]

Positive energy, negative energy, and force effects generally ignore the 50% chance of missing vs Incorporeal creatures, If I am wearing a pair of Gloves of Heartfelt blows which adds my Cha damage as fire damage to any melee or melee touch attack, and attack an incorporeal undead using a cure wounds spell (thereby ignoring the 50% fail chance) do I have to roll a % chance for the bonus fire damage from the gloves or does it automatically hit (assuming the touch attack hit) since the original attack ignores the incorporeal chance.

[Psyren]

Yes, you still have to roll even though you successfully landed part of the attack. That's because the 50% isn't a miss chance, rather it's a chance for the target to ignore that damage.


Even when hit by spells or magic weapons, it has a 50% chance to ignore any damage from a corporeal source (except for positive energy, negative energy, force effects such as magic missile, or attacks made with ghost touch weapons).

Therefore the fact that you successfully hit doesn't actually matter.

[the_tick_rules]

i'm not familiar with these gloves, where does it come from?

[Thurbane]

Huh, I'd never noticed that positive and negative energy ignore incorporeal miss chance before.

So to extrapolate on Psyren's answer: if I hit a Shadow with my +1 flaming longsword, and overcome the 50% miss chance with the sword...I then have to roll separately for the 1d6 fire damage?


i'm not familiar with these gloves, where does it come from?

Dragon magazine 314, pg. 22.

[Yogibear41]

i'm not familiar with these gloves, where does it come from?

They are also in the Dragon Compendium

[Psyren]

Huh, I'd never noticed that positive and negative energy ignore incorporeal miss chance before.

So to extrapolate on Psyren's answer: if I hit a Shadow with my +1 flaming longsword, and overcome the 50% miss chance with the sword...I then have to roll separately for the 1d6 fire damage?


In that case no, because the magic sword and the fire don't interact differently with incorporeal. You roll once because they either ignore the whole sword swing or they don't.

His gloves are different because he's attacking with two different things at the same time - a positive energy spell (beats incorporeal), and a magic item that adds bonus fire damage to a touch attack (doesn't beat incorporeal.)

(Incidentally, this complexity is why I prefer PF's "half damage" to 3.5's "chance to ignore.")

[the_tick_rules]

i forget how would this interact with a flaming sword? would it be 1d6+whatever your charisma bonus is fire damage or rolled separately? it matters for resistances.

[Yogibear41]

I'd say its all 1 attack so a flaming sword with the gloves would be 1d6+cha mod totaled vs resistance. Of course each attack would go differently vs resistance.