Misinterpreting Weapon skill?

[blackstaff67]

In a story from 2016,

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Molly and a Warden are in a fight.  Ramirez is described as using his shield and sword to deflect spell blasts.

Is it because it's a Warden's sword that he can use it to deflect spell blasts or has everyone been allowing melee weapons to do this in their games?  Am I misreading the rules somehow? 

[Tedronai]

Without having more than 'a story from 2016' to go by, it's hard to tell what might have been going on.

[Taran]

You can create blocks with almost any skill.  So a weapons block vs attacks could work. 

[blackstaff67]

Without having more than 'a story from 2016' to go by, it's hard to tell what might have been going on.

My bad.  My mid was drawing a blank, it was Molly's first mission from the anthology "Shadowed Souls."

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She's on a mission with Warden Carlos Ramirez and in a fight, he's blocking blasts of Outsider Magic with both magic Shield and Sword.

My apologies.

[Quantus]

Reading that story I had assumed it was due to the nature of the Warden Swords that can cut (and so presumably block) magic directly.  But in terms of the RAW, it should be allowed in general, as Taran said, but as GM Id want some IC explanation for it.  A vanilla mortal should not be able to deflect immaterial magic with a random trashcan lid; but by contrast any physical object should able to block physical evocation as the normal energy and material dictate (ie any metal object might block/ground a lightning attack; anything can block fire unless the fire overpowe4rs and burns/melts it). 

[blackstaff67]

Reading that story I had assumed it was due to the nature of the Warden Swords that can cut (and so presumably block) magic directly.  But in terms of the RAW, it should be allowed in general, as Taran said, but as GM Id want some IC explanation for it.  A vanilla mortal should not be able to deflect immaterial magic with a random trashcan lid; but by contrast any physical object should able to block physical evocation as the normal energy and material dictate (ie any metal object might block/ground a lightning attack; anything can block fire unless the fire overpowe4rs and burns/melts it).

Yeah, I was thinking Warden sword as well; I just wanted to know what/how the community thought of the idea.  I freely confess I rather treated such attacks as similar to Guns attacks (only defended with Athletics).

[dragoonbuster]

Yeah I would be treating any sort of ranged evocation as Guns for the purposes of defending it, without a stunt. It takes more than a fancy sword to catch and deflect energy moving at the speed of thought. Also yet another instance of "let's give wizards another free cool power!" in my book if you let them do it no problem.

[Taran]

I would allow anyone with the appropriate stunt like footwork to set up a block.  But shields are covered under weapons so I'd probably allow it without a stunt if you have an appropriate weapon that makes sense.   Hell, I'd allow you to use might if you wanted to move a couch between you and the person shooting.

Narratively, it has to make sense. 

[Mr. Death]

Yeah, it's definitely got to be the Warden swords' anti-magic effect. You can't just block magic with a mundane sword.

[Sanctaphrax]

Given that he had a magic shield up, I'd be inclined to call the use of the sword just fancy narration for an evocation block.

That aside, I don't think it's the best idea to use the stories as a guide to the game mechanics. I'm pretty confident that Jim doesn't use the RPG in his writing process, and I doubt he'll ever avoid writing something for fear of contradicting what Evil Hat said in 2010.

[Mr. Death]

I'd rule that if you do use the Warden Sword to deflect a spell, it would take up one of its enchantment uses.

[blackstaff67]

That aside, I don't think it's the best idea to use the stories as a guide to the game mechanics. I'm pretty confident that Jim doesn't use the RPG in his writing process, and I doubt he'll ever avoid writing something for fear of contradicting what Evil Hat said in 2010.

I agree, Jim probably doesn't have a copyu of the rules nearby when he's writing.  It's just the idea of using the Warden's sword in such a manner caught my interest and I wanted to bounce the idea off the community (and see if anybody else had tried it, to be honest). 

Truth be told, using the sword in that manner while burning up an anti-enchantment charge kinda strikes me as the way to go, but I think I'd like to see an affiliated Stunt to go with it.