Unarmed trip and Improved Unarmed Strike

[John Campbell]

I was just refreshing my memory of how my new guisarme works, and noticed something in the tripping rules:

Make an unarmed melee touch attack against your target. This provokes an attack of opportunity from your target as normal for unarmed attacks.

The highlighted language is unique to Trip... other special attacks like Disarm just flat state that they provoke. Does it mean that unarmed trips provoke only because they're unarmed attacks? (That makes some sense, I guess... tripping with a weapon explicitly doesn't provoke.)

It would then follow that if a character who has Improved Unarmed Strike (and doesn't have Improved Trip), and whose unarmed attacks therefore don't provoke, attempts an unarmed trip, it doesn't provoke. Is that right?

Does it even count as an unarmed trip if you have Improved Unarmed Strike, or is it tripping with a weapon, even though some of those rules obviously don't apply? (I drop my hands to avoid being counter-tripped!)

[Prometheus]

Perhaps the ambiguity would be decreased if it read "as if it were a unarmed attack (without Improved Unarmed Strike)"
Trip attacks provoke attacks of opportunity, with or without a weapon, with or without Improved Unarmed Strike, unless you have Improved Trip.

I believe by RAW, if you had Improved Trip without Improved Unarmed Strike, that you could make an unarmed trip attack without provoking an attack of opportunity, but as a DM I would rule that Improved Trip only applies to unarmed trip attack if you have Improved Unarmed Strike.

[John Campbell]

Perhaps the ambiguity would be decreased if it read "as if it were a unarmed attack (without Improved Unarmed Strike)"
Trip attacks provoke attacks of opportunity, with or without a weapon, with or without Improved Unarmed Strike, unless you have Improved Trip.

Uh, no. Tripping with a weapon does not provoke.

Avoiding Attacks of Opportunity: If you have the Improved Trip feat, or if you are tripping with a weapon (see below), you don't provoke an attack of opportunity for making a trip attack.

Tripping with a Weapon:
Some weapons can be used to make trip attacks. In this case, you make a melee touch attack with the weapon instead of an unarmed melee touch attack, and you don't provoke an attack of opportunity.

I believe by RAW, if you had Improved Trip without Improved Unarmed Strike, that you could make an unarmed trip attack without provoking an attack of opportunity, but as a DM I would rule that Improved Trip only applies to unarmed trip attack if you have Improved Unarmed Strike.

Yes, the rules clearly state (in at least two places!) that Improved Trip allows you to make unarmed trips without provoking, whether you have Improved Unarmed Strike or not. That's not open to interpretation. It is, of course, open to house-ruling, just like everything else, but, well... you're not my DM.

And that's not the case I'm interested in, anyway. I'm wondering about the case where the character has Improved Unarmed Strike, but not Improved Trip, which seems rather less clear to me. (And which actually applies to my PC.)

[Worira]

As far as I can tell, tripping with Improved Unarmed Strike doesn't provoke AoOs.

[Prometheus]

My apologies, I must have been thinking of something else. (My PCs never use trip attacks and I can never understand why)

[Chronos]

Improved Unarmed Strike says that you're considered to be armed, even when unarmed. I see no reason why that would not apply to trip attacks.