Martial Artist vs Incorporeal


Rules Questions


So the FAQ was updated with a response about what the intent is for a monk's Ki Strike (magic) with respect to incorporeal:

Quote:

Incorporeal Creatures and "Counts as Magic": Say I have an attack that counts as magical for the purpose of bypassing damage reduction, such as from the monk's ki pool (magic). Does that mean I can't harm an incorporeal creature at all, since the attack doesn't count as magical for that purpose?

Such attacks should also be able to harm incorporeal creatures as if the attack was magic. This will be reflected in future errata.

My question now is about the Martial Artist's Exploit Weakness ability. It is (Ex) not (Su) and refers to only bypassing (all) DR (or hardness) nothing specific to magic attacks.

It seems like RAI would imply that the Martial Artist is being provided the benefit of all the DR-bypassing abilities as the Ki-using monk, but at the costs of
1) spending their swift action each round
2) having to succeed in the exploit check
3) only on 1 enemy at a time

Incorporeal is really the only rule that specifies a need for magic that's not phrased as DR X/magic. Has anyone heard anything official about this?
Almost like incorporeal should be updated to worded to use some type of "DR" wording.

Thanks


I dont see how a Martial artists exploit weakness will help him vs. incoporals and i find that quite like the flavor of the ability. But most Martial artist will have a AoMF and this will be a non issue.

Grand Lodge

Incorporeal is explicitly NOT DR.


Yes, all that I know as RAW (hence why I'm asking for a discussion)...
What I'm asking about is since the original Monk says it's considered magic "for the purposes of bypassing DR" -- this would mean that an original monk can't use Ki String(magic) to hurt incorporeal undead either. But it was errata'd because they wanted them to be able to.
All of the Ki Strike (type) as they go up all use the same wording about "for the purposes of bypassing DR".

The MA has the ability to bypass all DR, but it seems missing the one ability that the original monk was also missing (and was errata'd) - to affect incorporeal.
Doesn't seem that far of a stretch to assume the errata might possibly imply exploit weakness can affect incorporeal as well.

And I'm never a big fan of the "well, just get X magic item" - that's not always a possibility depending on the campaign/dm, and doesn't have any bearing on the rules or RAI.


I agree with Cap. and Jeff. Exploit weakness, while a strong ability, would not help in the case of the incorporeal.

Get an Amulet of Might Fists, or something like a potion/oil of magic weapon/magic fang to solve it.


I will point out there are still plenty of incoporeal enemies who still have DR, and as long as you make your check your hits will still get past their DR... if you have magical weapons to actually do the damage.

A weird trade off, but one that is relatively minor imo.

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