does Shae's "Blow the man down" spell still do damage on a crit?

[Kalamadea]

Captain Shae's spell Blow the Man Down is a rng 8 pow15 that also does knockdown on a hit. On a critical hit, it says that in place of a normal damage roll it does a slams target d6" away, and collateral damage is pow15. Does the model that is critically hit take a pow15 collateral roll when it is slammed away, or only if it collides with something? Ran in to that situation last night where the Shae player didn't want the slam, he wanted the damage, but he rolled a double and had to do a slam that appears to lose it's damage component on a crit.

[solkan]

Two points of clarification:
1. A slam does three things always: movement, slam damage, and knockdown. So that D6" slam is going to cause slam damage (See 'Being Slammed' and 'Slam Damage' in Primal Mk II or Prime Mk II). So there is still a damage component.
2. Collateral damage is only caused when the slam rules say for it to happen. Saying that the collateral damage is POW 15 just changes the POW of the collateral damage roll, not when or if it happens.

[quindraco]

Captain Shae's spell Blow the Man Down is a rng 8 pow15 that also does knockdown on a hit. On a critical hit, it says that in place of a normal damage roll it does a slams target d6" away, and collateral damage is pow15. Does the model that is critically hit take a pow15 collateral roll when it is slammed away, or only if it collides with something? Ran in to that situation last night where the Shae player didn't want the slam, he wanted the damage, but he rolled a double and had to do a slam that appears to lose it's damage component on a crit.

Slammed models never take collateral damage from the slam, collateral damage is what happens to the model you're slammed into. Slammed models take untyped damage. Shae's spell absolutely does damage on a crit - imagine the model was slammed by a STR 15 model; the slam movement and knockdown is in addition to the damage, not instead of.

[solkan]

Although, looking at the text for Blow the Man Down, is that supposed to be a POW 15 (spell's POW) slam damage roll, or a POW 6 (Shae's STR) slam damage roll?

I didn't see an errata for Blow the Man Down, the slam rules do specify "POW equal to the attacker's current strength", and I thought most of the other slam inducers were careful to specify POW values for both slam damage and collateral damage. In my copy of Mercenaries, Blow the Man Down only says:

When a model is hit by Blow the Man Down, it is knocked down. On a critical hit, instead of suffering a normal damage roll a non-incorporeal model is slammed d6" directly away from the spell's point of origin regardless of its base size. Collateral damage from this slam is POW 15.

Nothing there about changing the slam damage POW.

[Bishop84]

Why would it use Shae's strength? He never touched the model. The model was hit by the POW 15 spell.

[Kalamadea]

Most of these type of abilities explicitly state they are slammed and take a Pow(X) slam damage roll which is where our confusion came from. I'm inclined to think that it does indeed cause a pow15 in addition to the slam, it's just odd that it doesn't state it outright but it does specifically state collateral damage Pow so we weren't sure, nor does any of the errata deal with it. Maybe it's just something so obvious we are blind to it.

[solkan]

There's no doubt that the model that gets slammed D6" takes slam damage. That's in the rules for being slammed. Those models actually end up being knocked down twice, even--Once for being hit by the spell, and a second time for being slammed.

A slammed model is ... and then knocked down. [Skipping a sentence about base sizes reducing that] It then suffers slam damage as described below.

If the rules only intended the model to get moved, it could have said pushed.

The only question is whether that's a POW6 or a POW15.

[Bishop84]

Ok, I do see where you're coming from. Other spells like Tornado do specify the power of throw damage, and this doesn't specify its slam damage. It does specify collateral damage POW though, and since when has collateral damage ever been different than the original POW of the attack?

This is a classic case of "RAW vs RAI". I think it's very clear that the intent is that the POW of the spell is 15 for the purposes of hit, crit hit/slam, and collateral damage. Of course, only RAW matters in competitive environments until an errata or Infernal says otherwise.