Cloak vs Ingested Delivery?

Brandon Mintken

Brandon Mintken

Newbie
The Rulebook text is kind of vague about Ingested delivery. Resist is explicitly stated to work against ingested, and a "Return defense" is stated to work as a guard against the Ingested delivery, but that is about it. Bane specifically states it will act as a Cloak when used against the ingested delivery, which implies that it can be used, however Cloak has no such statement. What Cloak does state, is that it will act as though the effect were encountering a shield. Given that ingested specifically states shields spells don't work, can you Cloak an ingested delivery? Since Bane is a Return, and Returns state how they will act for Ingested, does Bane function against Ingested delivery, while a regular Cloak would not?

Relevant Rulebook text below for reference.

Bane states:
Bane
Times Ever. Each time this Smart Defense is selected it provides protection against a single attack from a
specifically chosen Effect Group chosen by the caster; any Effect Group other than “Coating” or “Other” may be
chosen. The Bane will Return the specific effect from among those in its Effect Group back upon the attacker as if it
were an effect encountering a Reflect Spell.
Bane does not alter the delivery type of the effect. An Enfeeble Poison that has been Baned is still considered a
Poison for the purposes of delivery-based defenses such as Poison Shield or Resist Poison.
Bane will act as a Cloak when used against Ingested delivery, a trap, or a Killing Blow.

And Cloak states:
Cloak
Times Ever. Each time this Smart Defense is selected it provides protection against a single attack from a
specifically chosen Effect Group chosen by the caster; any Effect Group other than “Coating” or “Other” may be
chosen.
The Cloak will completely Guard against the specific effect from among those in its Effect Group as if the effect
were encountering a Spell Shield or Weapon Shield.

Ingested (delivery) states:
Ingested: All ingested attacks are delivered by placing a potion or elixir phys rep next to the mouth of the target
or by having the target consume a prepared item. Ingested deliveries always ignore protective spells, even if taken
while unconscious. Only specific defenses can be used against Ingested deliveries; see the Defenses section for
details.
 
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Here's my take on it. You absolutely can Cloak an Ingested effect. The breakdown of how I got to this conclusion follows.

A. Ingested deliveries ignore protective spells, and Cloak is not a protective spell.
B. While Ingested effects state that they have very few defenses, there is no actual list of this that I can find. So I can only assume that it must be a Guard of the applicable qualifier (Poison for alchemy, Spell for potions) that is not a protective spell.
C. Returns used against Ingested delivery are treated as a Guard.

Therefore: Given this, the list of things that should work against the Ingested delivery are as follows. If any other Marshal sees one that I missed, or thinks one of these should not apply, happy to talk it out with you and modify the list if I've made an error.

Resist (qualifier)
Cloak (effect group)
Bane (effect group)
No Effect (qualifier or effect)
Mettle (for non-instantaneous effects)
Resolute (for Ingestibles that would cause damage, typically potions)
 
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The "Resist Abilities" section has this text:
"Resist abilities are special. These defenses represent innate abilities of a creature’s body, not the layered defenses of martial skill, magic, and rituals. Resists may not be used until all applicable Dumb defenses are expended. Unlike most defenses, a Resist can be used against the Ingested delivery. "

This implies to me that one of the special properties of a Resist ability is its ability to be used against the Ingested delivery.

Note that the cloak wording says "as if the effect were encountering a Spell Shield or Weapon Shield." This would imply to me that the cloak would only work if the ingested effect was subject to being blocked by a Spell Shield or a Weapon Shield.


So if you ingested a "Poison Paralysis" elixir, a "Cloak Curse" would not apply since the it is not blocked by a Spell Shield or Weapon Shield. But against an elixir of "Spell Paralysis" the "Cloak Curse" would apply. And a "Resist Curse" would work against both.
 
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The “Poison” and “Spell” portions of the effect are immaterial, for the purpose of the Cloak.

A Cloak Curse will work equally well against any Curse effect, regardless of its origin, poison, spell, weapon, arcane, voice radius, dragon magic, whatever.

The Cloak works based on the effect, not the delivery.

The sentence you are referencing in you last paragraph is providing an example of how it works, not limiting the deliveries it works against.
 
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I agree with Tieran on that's how its been played, but the wording seems to imply that ingested is special cased from working with cloak.

So just to lay out the rules sections that seem to be relevant, and summarizing what they say.
So at least as written, I think Ingested is special cased so that the only way to resist it is with Racial Resists.



The one solid counter document I found is that in Seattle's part of the forums, this question came up before and Polare said: "Yes. You can cloak/bane an ingested elixir. Ritual defenses are their own thing. The "works like a Spell Shield" thing is more for newer players to understand the idea. Cloaks work very differently in a number of ways - they can be used at player's choice, before or after other defenses, etc. etc."

~~~

It does seem like the "works like a spell shield" wording from cloak/bane wording adds more confusion than it addresses. And if it is intended that cloak work against ingested, it should likely be explicitly said in the defenses section -- or that the ingested section should just list what can defend against it if its going to say most things don't work.
 
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Feldor said:
It does seem like the "works like a spell shield" wording from cloak/bane wording adds more confusion than it addresses. And if it is intended that cloak work against ingested, it should likely be explicitly said in the defenses section -- or that the ingested section should just list what can defend against it if its going to say most things don't work.
Click to expand...

I would bet a lot that, that "works like a spell shield" text is old text from long long ago. When cloaks and other non spell based defenses were very uncommon.
 
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So, sort of point by point here @Feldor
Cloak says it works on effect group. It not saying anything regarding delivery I don’t feel provides any particular weight towards it not working against a particular delivery.

Resists say they work against ingested, unlike most others, but again no specific word on what “most others” covers, but Poison Shield does specifically say it does not work against ingested. (Neither Spell Shield nor Reflect Spell make mention of it, however.) Again, I don’t think that the lack of a specific mention of cloak means it’s on the “most others” list.

Bane making specific mention of how it interacts with ingested delivery is, I think, the strongest case for Cloak working against ingested. If Cloak doesn’t work against it, why would it be stated that Bane works as a Cloak?

I completely agree that both the Defenses and Ingested sections could use some work for clarification purposes, but I don’t think there is enough evidence in this case to make the call that Cloak works any differently than it did in 1.3.
 
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So the rational for why it might of changed from 1.3 is that we did a mild reworking of the defense system in 2.0 as part of standardizing attacks. I'm not convinced this is an intended change. But another unintended change (parry not working against physically delivered poison) was specifically added as a special case. We added the concept of Guard, Return, Smart, and Dumb as explicit defining terms in the context of defenses. We tried to standardize the way things worked a bit to make it clearer.

Starting at first principals, we have pretty clear definitions of terms that apply to all defenses:
https://rules.alliancelarp.com/Guard -or- https://rules.alliancelarp.com/Return
https://rules.alliancelarp.com/Smart -or- https://rules.alliancelarp.com/Dumb

And all attacks (except some traps) have 3 things, of which a defense can be keyed off of:

Alliance Larp Rules | Delivery

Alliance Larp Rules
rules.alliancelarp.com rules.alliancelarp.com

Alliance Larp Rules | Qualifiers

Alliance Larp Rules
rules.alliancelarp.com rules.alliancelarp.com

Alliance Larp Rules | Effects

Alliance Larp Rules
rules.alliancelarp.com rules.alliancelarp.com

It seems like if you were trying to state the principal for how Ingested delivery is defended against based on the current wording, you might say "Only specific defenses can be used against Ingested deliveries, and unless specified Guard defenses do not apply against Ingested." This seems to match pretty close to the actual wording. It does have the feature that Resist is the only defense that specifies it works against Ingested.

If we wanted it to work like it did in 1.3, we could state the principal of Ingested as "Dumb defenses can not be used against Ingested. Only applicable Smart defenses can be applied against Ingested."
 
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I suggest since there is not a Marshal Consensus this is now taken to the Marshal Discussion board.
 
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