Do Tome Combat feat attack abilities stack?

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OgreBattle
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Do Tome Combat feat attack abilities stack?

Post by OgreBattle »

Say I have combat school and Whirlwind attack, can I attack everyone I move past AND force them to make a fortitude save? If I had the monk fighting stance to stun people or slowtheir movement, would I be able to tack that on too?
Red_Rob
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Post by Red_Rob »

It depends on the wording of the feats in question.

Combat school specifically is a bit of a minefield because of the phrasing "with the signature moves of your fighting school". Some people interpret this as purely flavour and allow any attack to count, whereas others say this is a specific type of attack and can't be combined with Combat Maneuvers, other feat actions etc. For reference, in Kaelik's Tome Errata he clarified it as working whenever you are wielding a particular set of weapons and therefore it can be used with Whirlwind Attack.

In general you want to be looking for the phrasing "as an X action" which means you have to dedicate an action to get the effect, as opposed to "whenever you hit with X" which can be combined with other actions. The monk stance references "any opponent struck by your Slam attack" for example and can be combined with any other attack, whilst Subtle Cut states "As a standard action, you can make a weapon attack that also reduces a creature's movement rate" and so couldn't be stacked with other actions.

Due to the various ways you can stack save-or-lose effects onto attacks in Tome (particularly when allowing additional homebrew) a common clarification/house rule is to limit the number of such effects an opponent can be subjected to each round. I've seen people suggest no more than one save can be forced from each effect per round (so hitting an opponent when you have Combat School and a Monk stance will force two saves the first time you hit, but multiple hits won't force multiple saves) or to further limit things by allowing only one save total to be forced per opponent per round. But these are house rules and aren't present in the original texts, so that is something to discuss with your DM.
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