Artillery
Casters love nothing better than throwing big splashy spells out onto the map. Their bespectacled little faces light up with glee whenever they can transform a battlefield into fire or tentacles or fiery tentacles that shoot smaller tentacles that are also on fire. It’s generally a good idea to let them get it out of their system before you go charging into the blast zone. Of course, waiting doesn’t always work out either.
Just last weak my paladin did the whole, “I must insist. After you,” thing for Laurel’s wizard. I figured that giving her the right of way meant she could lay down some hurt before I went toe-to-toe. I was expecting a lightning bolt or a fireball or some other such fire and forget type spell. Instead she lets out the biggest, wettest, steamiest stinking cloud you’ve ever whiffed, and the friggin’ thing is straight in my charge path. Truth to tell, that’s probably why today’s comic exists. I suffered the indignity of a wasted turn thanks to that silly spell, and I’m still mildly miffed about it. My poor paladin spent her turn circumnavigating a fog bank full of sulfur and cabbage and gag reflex while Farts McMagic cackled with delight.
The worst part though? It was effective. That big fat spell was the right tool for the job, even if it did leave yours truly without anything useful to do. A few rounds later the proverbial clouds lifted to reveal a decimated enemy. We mopped up the remaining cultists with ease, and the wizard got the glory. So as much as I hate to admit it, and even if my paladin is a little bit bitter, the tactics were sound. The party caster got to be a big damn hero. And you know what? Even bookish nerds need that every once in a while.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever experienced friendly fire or an otherwise inconvenient AoE? Tell us your tale in the comments!
GET YOUR SCHWAG ON! Want a piece of Handbook-World to hang on you wall? Then you’ll want to check out the “Hero” reward tier on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Each monthly treasure hall will bring you prints, decals, buttons, bookmarks and more! There’s even talk of a few Handbook-themed mini-dungeons on the horizon. So hit the link, open up that treasure chest, and see what loot awaits!
Often…
In one game, there was this “Clerical Error” who once used channel negaive energy in the vicinity of at least three party members, me included. He shortly after threatened to use it on the party at a time they are at their weakest… Joking or not, the rest of us would have wanted this character’s head in our next life. Fortunately, he met a hillariously untimely demise at the jaws of Mr. Bitey, our residential Megalodon.
In another, lower level game with me playing as a Warpriest of Shelyn, there was a druid in our party, a druid who LOVED using entangle… My initiative was always low and the druid always went before me. Good thing I was trying to go switch hitter….
A bit of errata later, and I am now a Warpriest of Erastil.
On another note, I’ve always wanted to play a “no fucks given” sort of character who’d have no second thoughts on blasting a party member if they were in the way…. Unfortunately, the desired imagery of this infernal, fire wielding “hell knight” (Not the hellknight prestige class) is hard as hell to build properly. Surely I’ve mentioned this one before, a heavy armored, spell slinging, devil of a man who’d face even the biggest, toughest of foes without an ounce of fear.
Wizard with a Fighter level? Paladin/Sorcerer?
I’d go for divine magic since those arcane spell failure chances for heavy armor are ridiculous. Also maybe the Magus class might do it for you?
I did have success with a heavily armored wizard though; I just used lots of enchanted equipment to boost AC. (Amulet of natural armor, bracers of armor, enchanted mithril chain shirt, etc.)
5e doesn’t have that issue. If you are proficient with an armor, you have no chance of spell failure. If you aren’t proficient but wear it anyway, you have no chance of success. Nice and streamlined as always. =)
For earlier editions, just be a Cleric.
My God… The 5e / 3.X edition war is the Mac / Windows war.
“Here’s the overly complicated work around to let you do exactly what you want.”
“We just removed that feature.”
For 3.5, take four levels in Duskblade for the ability to wear mithral full plate while taking no penalty to arcane spell casting, and you also get arcane channeling.
The Beguiler from the same edition takes no penalty to casting in light armor, so if you have medium armor proficiency and mithral medium armor, congrats, you get a very roguish character in “medium” armor.
But given that the guy we’re discussing seems to play Pathfinder, the Magus is probably the best available class for him.
Colin, i’d think of 3.5 more like Linux. There are a bazillion third party distributions for every conceivable circumstance, and you can get it to do whatever you want, as long as you are willing to take absolutely forever fiddling with it.
5e is more like an Apple OS, where it just works. Sure, you wish you had more options sometimes, but the experience is undeniably smooth.
(For the record I prefer Windows when it comes to OS, so I have no idea what this analogy says about me.)
I love watching older edition veterans puzzling over Heavy Armor. They think it has penalties for everything: swimming, climbing, doing a flip, casting a spell, sleeping in it, etc. When you tell them it doesn’t, they grumble about it being overpowered, despite the fact that other characters tend to have comparable AC to heavy armor wearers.
Do you know about the Pathfinder betrayal feats? I feel like you could go high-concept with another PC and have frenemy type characters:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/betrayal-feats/
I DMed LMoP (5e starter adventure) for a group of players who were either new or new to 5e, with the exception of one 5e veteran.
In the first dungeon, Cragmaw Hideout, they got a bad pull. Two of them climbed up and challenged Klarg while the others were forced to run around, drawing half of the other goblins in the process. Klarg knocked out our two reckless melee heroes, leaving our remaining two, both level 1 Wizards, to figure it out.
After a very hard fight, they managed to kill the goblins leading up to Klarg’s section of cave. With few resources left, they needed a solid plan to kill Klarg. They hid well and got the jump on him, and managed to kill his two goblin sentries and Ripper. Klarg was coming in strong, though, and 1st level Wizards are the very definition of “squishy.”
In desperation, one Wizard casts Sleep and rolls high, really high. Too high, in fact, as they were all caught in the radius of the spell and it was powerful enough to put them all to sleep, even the caster. They take a one minute cave nap, then wake up and barely, barely, baaaaarely pull out a victory. It was sheer, utter luck that they survived.
Later on, she suddenly pauses mid-game. “Ffffffffug.”
“What?”
“…. I’m an elf.”
“Huh?”
“I’m immune to Sleep.”
That is amazing. Were they making rolls to “wake up first?”
Hehe, that would have been a good idea. No, I just had the spell expire after a minute, as it normally does. They woke up, sat up, rubbed the sleep from their eyes, blinked, looked around for a moment… then immediately got back to killing each other.
I once almost killed the party alchemist with a fireball because they had been knocked unconcious by some ice golems and I didn’t know where they were. What made it worse is that ice golems explode when they die. The Alchemist only survived because the GM let them use their nanite surge ability(they were an android) after they made their reflex save.
Not to sound bitter or anything(though I am bitter), I am the only person who ever died in that party. Nobody else ever fucking died. Even at a point when I actively tried to kill the other party members(for a little context: they had already tried to kill me) they still wouldn’t die.
Now see, I’m of the opinion that when death is on the line, you slow way the heck down. You look through all your options. You make sure you know exactly what Hero points do, how the death and dying rules work, and ask around the table to see if anyone has any immediate action / reaction / etc. abilities to save the day. However, I think that breaking the rules to let a PC survive is bad form. Sure the GM is allowed to do whatever he wants, and maybe the PC is OK with it. But I once had a wizard bleeding out on the ground, and there were some extremely questionable “I move over there and then take a full turn’s worth of actions” shenanigans to keep me alive. For the rest of that character’s career I felt like there was a big fat asterisk next to his name. I loved the character, but I hated that asterisk.
You know the way the party survived when I tried to kill them? They used two items that summoned an insanely powerful light dragon and a team of immortal demon hunters respectively. These were items that were one use only. The GM had been very specific about that.
So the entirely player made encounter of me versus the rest of the party plus their summoned cheat mode allies went along. I essentially knocked out and nearly killed half the party, but did just below the damage needed to kill any of them, and the light dragon was able to teleport the nearly dead party members away on his turns. They then killed me.
I would’ve been fine with this outcome. The character had been building a growing resentment to the rest of the party because they were keeping secrets and favoring the asshole rogue when said rogue openly and without remorse several times tried to either kill me or frame me for murder. This was the end of the line for my character, a fittingly pointless and violent end that served only to sap the party’s resources.
That is, if the GM didn’t immediately say “Hey, you know those one use items you had to use to survive this grueling encounter that you ultimately caused for being horrible people? TURNS OUT THOSE USES DIDN’T FUCKING COUNT!”
I’m still bitter about it.
Oh, have I. We have a running joke that our cleric only rolls well on fireball damage when I’m in the blast radius. Fortunately, he finally got a taste of his own medicine when he got hit with a cone of cold from a fleeing barbarian.
My favorite is my alchemist pal. If he misses with his flask full of boom, it goes off in a random direction. Every time he throws into combat he shouts, “Do you trust me?”
Everyone else: “NO!”
A Barbarian cast Cone of Cold?
Might have been a Bloodrager. They’re kinda hard to tell apart until they start chucking fireballs at you.
I once had the pleasure of adventuring alongside a fireball-happy wizard. Very handy to have in a fight, but you could see the DM (and, if I’m honest, some of us players) getting pretty annoyed at having some interesting and fun looking encounters disappear in a pyroclastic holocaust as soon as initiative was rolled.
Then we went on an adventure when the enemy had some capable illusionists. We open a door to find a big room just teeming with goblins, dozens of them. Anticipating a huge kill-count, our wizard eagerly steps up to the door and slings his signature spell, whilst some of the more savvy players smell a rat and take cover….
Turns out the goblins were an illusion, as was the whole room. The wizard had just chucked a fireball into a 5x5ft broom cupboard. The resulting blast left us all amused and our wizard chastened. (And a little crispy…)
lol. Very nice.
I once had a fireball sorcerer in my game. A couple of obnoxious wraiths were phasing in and out of the floor, so she was stoked to discover a trap door.
“I throw open the hatch and blast away!”
“Well it’s pretty dark down there.”
“Whatever. I reach my hand down and blast at the spot where they went through.”
She hit the side of the narrow passage. Straight up Daffy Duck.
Cast sleep without realizing the fighter ran into combat at 4hp. He was unconscious next to half a pack of wolves.
lol. Tale as old as time.
In PFS play, it’s actually against the rules to friendly fire without that player’s consent. Considering the pick-up nature of the game, it’s for the best.
But then there’s swarms. I have yet to see a fighty type decline bit of splash damage when he’s waist deep in critters.
That is hilarious.
Melee Dude: “Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me!”
Caster: “I am required by local ordinance to get your signature on this form and in triplicate before I can burning hands your face.”
Melee Dude: “They’re eating me alive!”
Caster: “We will also need to get this notarized.”
I had a druid who was an older Elf, so at level 1 he had something like an 8 Str, 10 Con, 11 Dex…and 22 Int, 20 Wis, 17 Cha or something absurd like that. Our first battle we go up against a group of pirates on an old ship tied up on dock. I cast Entangle and we look it up for some of the details because most of the group of experienced 3.5 players we were…had never really seen it used.
The ship was 90ft Bow to Stern, and 40 ft across.
DM: “Um…ok…what’s the radius of the spell?”
Me: “40ft…so I guess it covers the entire boat.”
DM: “Yeah…so what’s the saving throw?”
Me: “…17”
All of the pirates get stuck in place. As does our resident fighter who had charged up the gang-plank.
Fighter Player: “Ok…how long does this last?”
Me: “Minutes per level…so 10 rounds. You can break out of it with a DC20 Strength Check…which lets you move half-speed…then you have to make another reflex save or be caught again if you’re still in the area.”
Fighter: “. . .Great.”
The cleric, and other ranged damagers and I just plink away at the pirates. and kill them all since they aren’t going anywhere. Thankfully the fighter didn’t get upset that he got to do almost nothing that combat. And it spawned the group rule of ALWAYS bring a back-up ranged weapon…even if just a cross-bow and you never use it…just in case.
I’ve always liked the idea of Entangle in pirate games. I just imagine a bunch of kelp reaching up the sides of the ship to grapple pirates.
We were in a large manufactured underground cavern, about 100 ft from the entrance and on the high ground. A large group of rust monsters came through the door but we were largely unconcerned, we had an archer, a wizard, a monk and the high ground. The archer peppered the first one and killed it, the monk moved forward to defend a bottle neck…
And the wizard dropped a stinking cloud on them to slow their advance…
A turn came and went and nothing left the cloud… that was statistically unlikely… A half turn later we were buffed to the max and still nothing had left the cloud… that was very unlikely. When we all stopped buffing and stopped to listen, we heard it, the quiet munching… and noticed sticking up out of the stinking cloud the iron support columns.
And then the GM got to see an entire adventuring party overcome their basic instincts to rush into a stinking cloud and into a group of rust monsters to prevent a collapse of the entire cavern.
You see? Stinking cloud ruins lives! And let’s not even start on those devious GMs that use wind spells to push stinking clouds onto their casters. >_>
Makes me wonder about the local dungeon ecosystem, though.
Did those rust monsters normally have the run of the place? If so, why were the support columns still standing? Did they just happen, at that moment, to wander into a place they’d never been before? If so, and if the PCs had not been there, was this destined to be the day the entire place would have collapsed in a mysterious industrial accident?
Of if someone released the rust monsters on purpose, were they planning to bring the cavern down on the PCs’ heads, or did they just not think things through?
We sure did. In our RQ game one of the players had the annoying habit of charging at the first sight of any enemy. Which means that he usually blocked the line of sight for most of the others, who had either missile weapons, or spells. So for a good few sessions our tactic became: hit obnoxious charging player who is already in front of us (in the back) until down, proceed to fight the real enemy, heal obnoxious charging player.. After those sessions he eventually leaned his lesson, and became an integrated part of the group tactics. So much so that, when confronted by a Jabberwock once, we were such an integrated fighting machine that we killed the monster in one round, much to the chagrin of our GM.
“First you call me ‘meat shield,’ then you get pissed when I stand between you and the enemy. Make up your mind!”
–Sir Smoldering Pilo Ashe
I was playing a Rogue and was invisible, so of course I was positioning myself for a back-stab on the Ogre-Mage, when the wizard announces that he casts Chain-Lightning. Uh, there were only two targets on that side of the room. Want to guess which one was crispy first??
In later games, they always wondered why my character was BEHIND his!
Don’t you get to select targets with chain lightning? I mean, was he intentionally trying to fry you?
This was First Edition AD&D. Unearthed Arcana says that only the first target is designated. after that, it is nearest object within range.
Besides, the player knew my character was there, he just didn’t care. (He played CN(e), whatever his character’s professed alignment.)
In a Pathfinder game, my wizard used Summon Pit as a battlefield control measure. Then, the ranger walked up to the edge to shoot down at the trapped creature. Turns out, you have to make reflex saves if you end your turn at the edge, or risk falling in.
Also turns out, he didn’t mind falling in. He was primarily melee, so just whumped up on the trapped critter, after using it to break his fall.
Just two weeks ago the ranger in my players’ party shot the darkling chief dead as literally every othrr character – three just resucitated – were crowded around it. Everyone had observed the general explosiveness of an expiring darkling already (the rest of the hunting party having been thus killed notba minute earlier) and the party wete trying to get the injured to safety while loudly insisting they don’t hit the creepy explodey guy.
Then it’s the ranger’s turn, and he says “but you’re all so close together. I can’t not do it.” And boom.
noone risked actual death – this is 5e after all and a popping darkling only does 2d6 damage – but it was gatuitous friendly fire. He has yet to be forgiven.
I suggest the group goes in on purchasing a geas while the dude is sleeping. Seems like a reasonable safety precaution.
When I played some capeshit years ago, I had a not!Hulk superhero who was very tough and regenerated his wounds and conditions given enough time. A battlesuit hero wanted to level the area around my PC, since he was in the middle of a couple dozen mooks.
I gave him the go-ahead and let him essentially bombard a radius of sixty feet all around my PC. It was glorious, standing there in the midst of that blasted crater, only slightly singed.
I once played a sorcerer inspired by Megumin. Enough said.
…well, aside from the fact that he left the party when he misinterpreted their actions as them having killed and looted another party member, and not be because he fireballed them a few times. (Once he was shooting blind, he has an excuse!)
We were playing Fallout, and my party was all murderhobos whose solution to every problem was to charge into it and kill everything that moves. And they were getting away with it because our GM wasn’t comfortable to kill any player. Sometimes that meant that they was captured and I needed to save them. They were really on my nerve for quite some time.
So because of their stupidity they were ambushed by some giant mutant… thing. This thing is kicking their asses. I sigh and jump into my car, which, for all purposes, is a military grade tank (GM realized I wasn’t having fun and gave me a lot means to arm this baby).
Me: I aim a rocket launcher at the monster. What about my team? Are they in blast radius?
GM: You may say they are in dead center.
Me: What, ALL of them?
GM: ALL OF THEM.
Me: FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!