Combat Maneuver
I will never forget it. We were in a Rise of the Runelords campaign. I was playing that generalist barbarian I talked about way back when. And at long last, it was my turn to be the big burly fighter guy in the sawmill.
This was a Core-only Pathfinder 1e game, built to accommodate a buddy’s first time behind the GM screen. Relatively simple mechanics. Relative few options. That meant I could go for all the underpowered-but-fun shenanigans. And as you might have guessed from today’s comic, that meant Strength Surge + Knockback.
Today is one of those days when Fighter’s face reflects my own. Because anyone who’s played RotR knows that there’s a certain sawmill lurking about the vicinity of Magnimar. And boy oh boy is it full of fun things to push NPCs into.
The floor of this room has a thick carpet of sawdust, penetrated by two large log splitters and saws set up over openings in the floor. Another pair of openings is fitted with winches and ropes to raise and lower uncut lumber from below.
Just imagine encountering this scenario when you happened to spec into a reposition-the-bad-guys build. There were friggin’ rainbows bursting out of my character sheet. Any number of creepy mill workers with I’m-a-cultist masks made from human flesh were lining up just waiting to get bull rushed. And I was ecstatic to oblige.
Now imagine the crushing weight of my disappointment when our bard kept making his Charisma checks.
“Sure we’re fellow cultists! Can we have some of your magic items for free? Where’s your boss so I can charm him?”
We took that mill without ever rolling initiative. I believe the local constables eventually wandered up to arrest the baddies we’d captured. In summary, no one was pushed into a working splitter. No one took 6d6 points of dismemberment damage before falling into neatly stacked chunks in the collection bin 10 feet below in area D4. And no one could understand why I’d crumpled my character sheet and tossed it over my shoulder.
All I’m saying is that perfect opportunities only come around once in a while. Know all your rules. Make sure you can seize the opportunity. You never know when it will come around again.
Question of the day then! When have you had the perfect mechanical answer at your fingertips, only to see the story go another way? Was it a spell that relied on subtlety rather than brute force? Maybe a siege weapon that never got fired? A bardic performance you forgot about until the encounter was over? Whatever that perfect-but-unused thing was, tell us about your woes down in the comments!
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Sounds like the moral of your story is ‘don’t have a bard/diplomancer’.
Never have I felt more like Fighter.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diplomacy-check
Opportunities wise, I feel like I haven’t taken advantage of my True Name Arcane Discovery for our final few sessions of a lvl20 game with my Ratfolk Wizard.
I had the True Name of a Deva Archon, making them effectively a cohort / slave to employ for fighting the forces of evil. They weren’t entirely happy about it, but I was fair / not a jerk about the arrangement. Lots of opportunities from having a high CR archon in your employ!
I can’t recall if he was blocked out of the final dungeon or if I simply forgot to summon him. While he was essential in dealing with an archlich, he was mostly a story fluff in the end.
I also missed out on using his Immortality discovery to cheese crafting inside of a time-locked (time doesn’t pass outside the demiplane) demiplane, to craft months of work instantly.
Heh. I think I got a marut with my true name biz back in the day. Mostly flavored it as “phone a friend” for a planar emergencies.
What are the rules for time-locked demiplanes? Not finding much.
Greater demiplane lets you make a demiplane timeless as a planar trait. In the planar rules, this means the time happening in it happens retroactively – if you spend 2 months in a timeless plane, to an outsider observer no time passes, and within it all spells are effectively permanent duration. And when you exit, those two months catch up with you (and you die of thirst/hunger/age if you don’t take precautions).
The rules can be found under the planar traits rules and the description of the demiplane spell (Pathfinder 1e)
I guess I don’t get how those rules…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/environment/the-planes#TOC-Time
…Translate into “time doesn’t pass outside the demiplane.” How can you cheese crafting when the first line is “time still passes, but the effects of time are diminished?”
Given that they were a wizard, Time Stop. In a timeless demiplane, any noninstantaneous spell has a permanent duration until dispelled, and you can still use items as long as they weren’t in another creature’s possession when the time stop was cast.
To me it seems more like they wanted a Flowing Time plane, 1 round on the Material becomes, say, a Year to prep in your Demiplane.
Time still passes within the plane itself, but to anyone outside, you’re effectively in an infinite duration time stop.
ie, send a crafting pal in to make your loot, and although it still might take them months to craft it all, from your perspective they’ll almost instantly pop right back out with armfuls of magic items.
I’m wracking my brain, and I can’t come up with a time where a perfect opportunity passed me by. But I do have a case of the opposite happening, like with delighted Fighter (and presumably Cleric) here.
So no shit there we were. It was a heist mission, and we’d stumbled onto a ‘back door’ (sewer that they dumped their alchemical runoff into). We climb up into the lab, and the alchemists (perhaps a little too high on their own supply) start chucking vials of alchemical reagents and weapons at us, with some of them also chugging down experimental brews for hulk-like transformations. And I go “Huh. I bet we could shoot the vials still on their belts.” A quick look-up of the Sunder rules later (and a quick agreement to ignore the fact that they’re supposed to be melee only), and the fight rapidly began to swing in our favor, as alchemists started going up in flames and getting swamped in their own tanglefoot bags, sometimes setting off chain reactions.
Fun fight.
That is exactly the kind of solution that works for the PCs and not the NPCs. Would I want a GM to allow it if I came up with the idea? Hell yeah. Would I want to be an alchemist wearing a belt of grenades when some halfling thief “pulled the pin” on me? Hell no.
In wonder if there’s a term for that difference? “Inconsistent by design” maybe?
Hmm, “asymmetrical multiplayer”? It definitely falls under that category, but there might be a more specific term as well.
This doesn’t answer your question of when things went awry, but in that same sawmill, our Barbarian/Sorcerer knocked a cultist over the railing at the top floor, sending him plummeting (and screaming all the way) to the ground floor below.
Alerted every mook in the building and made for one heck of a fight, but it was worth it.
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/0a/0a1fff0d4fa5483a3002b024a0394a2d2b060305563ab7384f46393cb8be6e2b.jpg
Rise of the Runelords, me with 3 bear traps in the inventory of our cart…
also me: not dropping them in the shallow lake as preparation for the giant attack.
It was a sad day.
ooh… lake traps. very clever. I mean… it would have been very clever
I blame it on not having the town map on the table that evening.
Maps are shy creatures, we only get short glimpses of them whenever we enter a new area.
One of my weird pet peeves is making Goblins and Orcs warcraft-color. D&D Goblins are the color of spicy mustard, and Orcs are grey.
spmublins. grorks.
Different ethnicities of orcs and goblins
Now to me that room description screams wind spell + fire spell
I once rolled a mesmerist right before the party started fighting a bunch of enemies with high Will saves. Enough said.
Not related to the question at hand, but…for a game family which has so much stock in tabletop inch-grid tactical movement, there’s remarkably little focus on positioning. Flanking pre-5e and attacks of opportunity give you a little reason to worry about positioning, but often as not they encourage extremely static formations (especially in 5e, where there’s not so much as a +2 attack bonus to reward people for risking that attack).
There’s hardly ever a reason to move enemies around if your DM doesn’t build sawblades or pit traps or whatever, since the scarce enemy-movement tools at your disposal almost never move the enemy farther than they can move next turn (and again, formations don’t have that big an impact on anything).
Theater-of-the-mind should absolutely be a viable playstyle—not everyone has access to maps and miniatures. But the fact that you lose so little in TotM makes the tactical movement/positioning rules feel vestigial, like they’ve just stuck around as a reminder of the days when D&D was a wargame with a character-leveling gimmick, without any real purpose.
(Also: 3.5’s Miniatures Handbook should have been called Maps & Miniatures. The fact that it wasn’t is proof that WotC took themselves too seriously.)
The correct answer is always animate dead. Always.
Dear gourd i remember that lumber-mill, was playing a goblin alchemist naturally obsessed with explosions. what better chance for a sawdust explosion? nearly died from the shock-wave. worth it %100.
That was exactly the same thing I thought when I heard the room description
I had one player who had a druid with a “poor old cavalry soldier” backstory, a trained wonderhorse as his companion, and a mounted combat build that made him a nightmare on horseback.
I set up multiple scenarios for the PC to shine, only for the party (druid’s player included) to pick other options to finish a field battle. Years later he *finally* took advantage of an opportunity to hop into the saddle and leave the rest of the table gobsmacked as his druid cleared the encounter in under four rounds.
My inquisitor would liberally use Littany of Sloth to fake having combat maneuver feats. A few disarms, a couple grapples, and he also bull-rushed a proto-lich off a cliff.
I’ve had a bit the reverse of your situation a while back. My 5th level warlock managed to use Suggestion on a young red dragon to convince him that he should just leave us be while we slaughtered his kobold worshippers (the only thing we’d come to his lair for, not even knowing there was a true dragon present!)
Six seconds later our cleric rushes in and smacks the dragon upside the face, because he was evidently an evil to be smote. My warlock, who had neither eldritch blast nor a hexblade, went back to being completely redundant to the party. Needless to say, I was unamused.
I once had a character who spent a spell slot, every day, without fail, to cast Detect Scrying, out of sheer paranoia.
She got scried on, undetected, for a period of SEVERAL in-game weeks despite the fact. Wasn’t happy about that.
Why didn’t the multiple days of casting Detect Scrying help?
My ranger had a necklace of strangulation that she had picked up many sessions ago. The party had infiltrated the invading army and were working our way to the command tent to try and take out the leading general and as many of the upper echelon as possible.
As we were sneaking around we found a well guarded tent and of course had to check it out. Turned out the army had captured a troupe of belly dancers in one of the towns they had overrun and were planning on using them for “entertainment” that night. Ranger immediately got the idea of joining the dancers and giving the general a “lap dance” he’d never forget.
Long story short, all appropriate rolls were made, lap was acquired, necklace “gifted” and strangulation started. The DM, who was one of my players who wanted to run, then decided that there was no way his big bad was going to die, had the various minions grab the necklace and pull it off of him (completely against the rules of course) and try and capture the ranger. He threw out that the general was a half orc and Guurmshes son. After he threw that out the reset of the group just started packing up and asked if I was running the next week. Never saw that kid again.
Oh, we were using “carbon copies” of our regular characters. My ranger was an NPC that ran with the regular group. This was only the third session he had DMed.