The Gaming Den

Jokes about whipped cream aside, this is an actual ambiguity:

Text of Black Pudding Split ability wrote:
Slashing and piercing weapons deal no damage to a black pudding. Instead the creature splits into two identical puddings,.....

Text of Natural Weapons entry in the MM Glossary wrote:
Bite: The creature attacks with its mouth, dealing piercing, slashing and bludgeoning damage

So, if your summoned/called/charmed/created/pokemastered creature bites a black pudding what happens?

Does split trigger as normal, negating all damage, since bite is a "slashing and piercing weapon"?

Does the bite deal damage normally since bite is a bludgeoning weapon?

Does the split trigger off of the slashing & piercing part of the bite, but the bludgeoning damage gets through anyways?

Do you roll 1d3 each attack to determine which damage type matters?

JK wrote:Does the split trigger off of the slashing & piercing part of the bite, but the bludgeoning damage gets through anyways?

Looks like this is the only meaningful way to handle the situation.

Going strictly by the text, a bite deals "piercing, slashing and bludgeoning damage" -- I interpret that to mean it's all three at once. If they had said "piercing, slashing or bludgeoning", you could make a case for either "roll 1d3 every time it comes up" or "person biting gets to pick". If it's all three at once, then it triggers any and all conditionals based on either slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage. This might be problematic if there are conditionals that are mutually exclusive, but the Pudding doesn't look like one.

So a bite does normal damage to the pudding, since it's "bludgeoning" damage. Whether the split triggers would depend on the exact wording of the monster description, but based on what you quote here I would be inclined to say it does, since it's also "piercing and slashing" damage, and the text quoted doesn't specifically say "when it fails to take damage".

--d.

And when does the bludgeoning damage get applied- After the splitting or prior?

Oy.

I'd personally rule that if there is ever bludgeoning damage that it takes a front seat, and the splitting doesn't happen. It's not as close to RAW as saying that they both happen in some ambiguous order, but it does avoid the conundrum of deciding the order of damage dealing and splitting.

I'm not too wild about the imagery of a bite severing a pudding that isn't close to bite-sized either.

In general when something does multiple types of damage, you take the best one. I never thought that multiple types of damage should ever count against you, so I'd say just treat it as a bludgeoning weapon.

The reason that you take the best one is because normally creatures have DR (which works unless it is triggered). Black Puddings actually have a triggered defense.

So yeah, biting them causes them to split by RAW. They take no damage because they take no damage from any weapon that has the trait "slashing" or "piercing".

Similarly, if you had an ability that triggered every time you got hit with fire, it would go off when a flaming sword hit you - even if though it was also a slashing attack.

Interestingly, if you hit a pudding with a flaming sword it splits (negating all the slashing damage), and takes real damage from fire. Also interestingly, a morningstar deals no damage to a pudding. A mace does.

-Username17

Although in 3.5, Bill Cosby still has the ability to turn puddings. Into "pops", of course. Which makes him the most effective weapon versus the damn things.