Fortunately, the player in question has flagged the situation to me prior to next week’s session.
He’s looking at entering a Duel of Wits and Divine Aura’ing.
We’ll start with looking at p68:
“… a character may ignore all wound or other subtracted die penalties while he accomplishes one simple goal.”
p391 (and further references on p398) talk about your Body of Argument in the following terms:
“The purpose of a Duel of Wits is to reduce your opponent’s body of argument to zero dice through use of clever strategy and outright attack.”
His query is whether this would stop him taking damage in a DoW. After all, as he puts it, you can use it to take no wound penalties in a Fight.
This does seem counter to what I would expect, as this would seem to allow a DoW that you can just soldier through to a mutual takedown, regardless of your BoA being 0.
My instinct was that it didn’t work that way, BoA being separate, but I’ve been wrong before!
…
Looking at DoW actions such as Point, Dismiss and Rebuttal, they all refer to subtracting your (Point/Dismiss/Rebuttal Attack) successes from the BoA, rather than imposing penalties.
I’ve always viewed BoA as a “point total / hit points” rather than a “dice pool”, but was hoping wiser heads than mine might help me out.
That’s how I would approach it. When you lose BOA, there are no ‘subtracted die penalties’. You still roll just as many dice for your Oratory/Rhetoric/whatever skill, regardless of how much BOA you’ve lost.
A subtracted die penalty would be something that would result in you rolling fewer dice (like a wound or tax or something like that).
Yeah, reducing BoA is just losing “hit points” not dice. Your Dueling skills don’t lower as you lose the argument. So no, Divine Aura won’t help you in a Duel of Wits in the manner he desires.
You can (and should) read P68 as “wounded dice and similar penalties.” Penalties like wounds. So he could ignore any ongoing wound penalties during the DoW and ignore the effects of the Obfuscate action, but he can’t ignore loss of dice to his BOA.
Also worth noting, Aristeia seems to render you immune to the Lock action! Yikes! Run from Achilles!