How does the "Valorous" enhancement work?

Question

If I have a character with leap attack and Power Attack, I can combine a charge attack with a jump and potentially triple the bonus damage granted by power attack. However, a weapon enchanted with the valorous enhancement deals double damage when used in a charge.

A valorous weapon allows its wielder to make powerful charge attacks. When used in a charge, the valorous weapon deals double damage, much like a mounted warrior with the Spirited Charge feat. More than one doubling of damage increases the damage multiple by one per additional doubling, so double-double damage is triple damage, triple-double damage is quadruple damage, and so on.

Is this bonus applied only to the one attack directly following the charge, or is it also applied to the attacks belonging to the full attack made afterwards?

Answer 1

RAW, no, Valorous Charge applies only to the attack made at the end of a charge. RAW, pounce gives you a full-attack after that attack.

But as described in that answer, basically no one ever plays it that way. Everyone plays pounce as replacing the attack on the end of a charge with a full-attack. And then we get into a conundrum: do all those attacks still count as being “used in a charge” when we pounce?

For the purposes of optimization discussion (which tends to assume favorable DM rulings as part of the optimization game), the answer is yes. This is part of what makes the Übercharger (though many other things are also being used, most of which are sadly pretty explicit). In my experience, most of the D&D-discussing Internet accepts that this is how things work (many of them think it’s RAW), and then simply just choose not to do that and advise others not to do that since it’s bad for the game. Knowing how an Übercharger works can be useful, since you can make a partial-Übercharger with power levels appropriate for your own game.

But for myself, I tend to actually like to run pounce as-written. Yeah, it means an extra attack, but it makes the whole thing a lot cleaner and clearer. If you really dislike that, you can always do something like “the first attack” or “the first successful attack” gets those benefits, and the rest do not.