Can throwing a bunch of cutting wheels trigger Wind and Fire multiple times?

Question

The benefit of the style feat Wind and Fire says

If you hit the same creature with both of your cutting wheels in the same round, you tear open the wound and cause bleeding. The bleeding creature takes 1 point of damage per round until it receives a DC 15 Heal check or magical healing. Wounds from multiple successful uses of this style cause cumulative bleeding—a creature affected by this style three times takes 3 points of damage per round from bleeding. (Secrets of Sarlona 119)

(The exotic weapon cutting wheel also appears in Secrets on pages 135 and 136.) The feat seems to make some bold assumptions like You only have 2 attacks and You're making melee attacks with your cutting wheels even though they're thrown weapons with a range increment of 10 ft. and You aren't an awakened giant octopus that's wielding 8 cutting wheels.

Anyway, that said, I'm considering having a creature take the feat Wind and Fire and the prestige class master thrower's thrown weapon trick palm throw (Complete Warrior 58) so that the creature, using the feat Quick Draw (Player's Handbook 92), when it takes a full attack can make a total of 10 attacks with its cutting wheels. (That is, 4 from its base attack bonus plus 1 from two-weapon fighting, each attack seeing the creature throw 2 cutting wheels due to the trick palm throw. To be clear, as the DM, I'm tentatively ruling that a cutting wheel—like a dagger—is, in fact, little enough to be used in conjunction with the trick palm throw; another DM would perhaps rule differently.)

When this creature hurls its 10 cutting wheels, do each 2 successful attacks trigger the benefit of the Wind and Fire feat?

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Note: You would think that they wouldn't, but even giants tire of throwing rocks.

Answer 1

As you say, the wording is very weird; a lot of really problematic assumptions went into this feat. The word both makes no sense in a whole lot of situations, and really the only thing I would choose to enforce from that is the notion that two different cutting wheels are somehow involved in a pair of attacks. You could read more into it, but I don’t feel the need to do so.

My ruling would be that a pair of attacks, with separate weapons, are necessary to add the bleed damage. You can re-use a weapon for a separate pair, but you need the pair. So a humanoid with Two-Weapon Fighting, Imp. TWF, and Grt. TWF would deal 3 bleeding damage (three pairs of attacks). Likewise with the raging mongoose boost from Tome of Battle. For your octopus, four pairs. And with palm throw, of course, every attack is paired, so that is pretty efficient. But you couldn’t pair an attack with an attack that’s already in some other pair, nor could you pair an attack with another attack with the same weapon.

I wouldn’t care about melee vs. range (I don’t actually see anything in the feat that suggest melee..?), and I definitely wouldn’t limit it to once per round. Ultimately, I see this as a very weak feat: in a game where combats lasting more than 3 rounds are rare, you just aren’t going to add very much damage this way—and by the time it adds up, the fight’s long over. The only way I see it being much good are in pretty gimmicky situations, say an encounter with several cutting wheel users who manage to stack up a dozen or so points of bleed on each PC, swiftly cut down but followed immediately by more enemies that are tougher, preventing the PCs from stopping to heal and making them deal with the bleeding during a tougher fight (that you perhaps keep extending through new combatants). Done well, it could be a challenging and fun fight, but drawn out too artificially it might start to feel cheap and annoying.

But outside of a very specific set-up like that—which you can set up, as DM—I don’t see the feat having much value.

Answer 2

No.

Isolating the gist of the feat:

If you hit the same creature with both of your cutting wheels in the same round, you tear open the wound and cause bleeding. [...] Wounds from multiple successful uses of this style cause cumulative bleeding [...].

I would argue that the effect can only be triggered once per round, regardless of the number of attacks, number of turns or attacks of opportunity.

I see nothing about successive attacks, but I do see a both here, meaning that if during a round you fail to hit with one of your cutting wheels, the effect is not triggered, regardless of how many other times you hit with the other cutting wheel.

As far as I am concerned, the second part of the feat only clarifies that the effect stacks with itself when it is triggered multiple times on a creature which has not healed in the mean time. I see no indication that it would allow the effect to trigger multiple times in a single round.

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On a pedantic note, the usage of both restricts the feat to a character wielding 2 cutting wheels, not 3 or more. A characters with more arms, or managing to wield more cutting wheels, would not benefit from this feat; the DM would need to create an equivalent and decide whether all cutting wheels or only 2 of them would need to hit to trigger the effect.