Distraction
If you have to ask why Sorcerer wouldn’t just use fireball, then you don’t understand Sorcerer. Dude loves his black powder to an unhealthy degree. (Mostly unhealthy to flammable humanoids in a 100 ft. radius, but still.)
In any case, the subject of today’s comic is not Sorcerer’s pyromania, but his disappointment. Just look at that heart-wrenching, watch-people-die-inside expression on his poor little half-elven mug. Dude had the encounter all planned out. He was gonna rig up a long fuse, set off a pyrotechnic display to rival a goblin in a Paizo module, and sneak through yonder eldritch gate while its gargoyle guardians were all, “Ooh and aah.” Sad to say, but a more straight-forward solution ruined all those sorcerous hopes and dreams.
Here’s the point of the recaptiulation. When you’re GMing, your players will come up with cockamamie schemes from time to time. It is known. They will be overly complex, rely on cartoon logic, and fall through at the slightest narrative nudge. Distractions are one of these scenarios.
“My evil snake cultists aren’t complete idiots,” you might say to yourself. “If they see a bunch of explosions outside their hidden temple, they’ll reason that a caster has discovered their lair. Everyone will go on high alert, and the PCs will be discovered by the alerted patrols before they even make it to the hidden waterfall entrance around back.”
In other words, if you’re not careful you can logic yourself into adversarial GM territory. Sure it might make more sense in your head for the party to try a simple Persuasion check, a straight-forward assault on the gates, or a sneaky passwall to kick off the dungeon crawl. But when players go out of their way to think up more elaborate plans, I think it’s best practice to give them the benefit of the doubt. At the very least the fireworks will be entertaining.
Question of the day then! Have you ever attempted a distraction in a game? Was it a tactically sound plan, or was hurling awakened pigeons at the guards doomed to fail from the outset? And in a more general sense, have you ever encountered a GM that refused to let your more implausible shenanigans succeed? Tell us all about your ruined fireworks displays and hairbrained schemes down in the comments!
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Heh, my party doesn’t play around when it comes to distractions. The close to our elaborate heist scheme (which at this point had gone through some serious improvisational revisions, but had still landed us the loot) was to light the corrupt governor’s mansion on fire (our grappler also took the opportunity to up his intimidation cred by sneaking in and personally terrorizing the guy) thus luring the soldiers away from their ship, take the lift down to the dock, burn the lift, hijack the soldier’s boat if possible because it was faster than ours (if not, burn it to the waterline), and then burn any
other ships capable of both catching us and carrying a significant number of soldiers.
All things considered, it worked like a charm. Not as many soldiers left the boat as we’d hoped, but thanks to 3.5’s surprise round rules the remainders’ ambush didn’t turn my character into a fine red mist (since with only a single action each, several of the guards had to waste theirs opening the doors to spring the attack) and we just barely carried the day.
Of course, at this point we realized that a) the ship belonged to our boss, and b) she was on board, so there would be no blaming this on a third party. We still had all the cards, though, so after some tense negotiations we left her on the dock with her soldiers and the prize of the heist while we sailed off with her ship and ours. (We also neglected to inform her that an insurgency was currently making its move on the island, because my character had promised them a golden opportunity at securing their independence, and while he meant the burning governor’s manse/theft of his powerbase/general disarray, he figured they deserved a fair shot at capturing the crown prince.)
Methinks I’ve spotted the pop cultural reference:
https://c.tenor.com/GKJffZe6YRQAAAAC/thats-got-to-be-the-best-pirate-ive-ever-seen-pirates-of-the-caribbean.gif
Why open with a fireball when you could set up 500 pounds of fireworks… and then fireball? More bigger boom, more bigger better!
And hey, fireball automatically ignites flammable objects, so that’s just saving money on matches right there.
Fireball also acts like a tracer round. And the unfortunate thing about tracer rounds is that they point at your current location.
You see? Questionable GM logic hates explosions!
Invisible Fireball.
/taps forehead
You’ll thank/hate me later.
Okay so what I’ll do is set up a Delayed Blast Fireball, instead—I can set it up at the same time I set up the fireworks and then be conveniently away when it goes off! AND… more bigger boom, since it’s gotten all charged up from sitting there while I sneak back to my friends
Honestly, this is one of my favorite things about being an artillerist artificer. You just take Spell Sniper and then set up your force ballista (preferably ballistae plural) and get in cover 60 feet away. Dig a hole, put fighter in, then cover the hole and sit on the cover, whispering “Shush!” as needed (if your fighter knows how to hide at all, you can skip this step). Open the party by initiating pew pew with the ballista. Once guards come out, Rogue goes in. Guards make their way to source of pew. Once they pass you, get off the cover and let Fighter out. Back Fighter up with some combination of artillery and support (with a ballista, you’re even creating your own crossfire!) then make for the fortress. You don’t need to get in, but you need to get pretty close so you can see Rogue getting caught through the gate. Cast Vortex Warp to get Rogue outside again and leave.
Wait a minute… You’re trying to be stealthy because you don’t want the enemy getting in your grill. So your plan is to, “Dig a hole, put fighter in, then cover the hole.” What are the enemy guards doing during this activity?
Does the “distraction” count if the idea amounts to your Sorcerer making one of the party’s Fighters large, then having him stomp up to the front door of the enemy cult’s lair and make a giant ruckus? The rest of us were trying to find ways to sneak in or otherwise scope the place out. I suppose it’s my fault though; I (or rather, my character) was the one to give him the suggestion to do something. Regardless of its effectiveness, noticeably we have never allowed the Sorcerer to make our plans. The fact that he is in fact a Goblin in a Paizo product probably explains that. Real memorable when throws out the Chain Lightning and roasts enemies for around 100 damage though.
Speaking of Sorcerers and their pyromania, the link regarding black powder reminds me of the upcoming books for PF2e; Guns & Gears as well as Lost Omens: Grand Bazaar. Both of which are somewhat related because they’re introducing a bunch of things like vehicles, prosthetics, firearms, constructs, siege engines, even stuff to play disabled characters like a friggin battle wheelchair. That kind of equipment is bound to give players all kinds of crazy things to indulge with, and honestly I can’t wait to check it out myself.
Given Elf Wizard had such a violent reaction to Alchemist’s attempt at machinery, I can’t help but wonder how she might react to seeing her fantasy setting intermingled with more technology. Paizo’s already got quite the kitchen sink setting with Golarion, but they’re actively going against the grain of what’s expected with (stereo)typical fantasy. Especially proven with the book Lost Omens: Mwangi Expanse. Maybe a good opportunity to explore what happens when players have these kinds of preconceptions challenged or turned on their head. Though I fear Elf Wizard might have a heart attack (or try and free Rovagug) if she ever learned of the Inventor class.
Naw. I’m pretty sure that’s a different trope.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-07
I can’t picture Wizard getting upset over African-flavored fantasy. Other cultures exist in her fantasy world. Planes, trains, and automobiles do not.
For one of my rogues, shouting “look, a distraction” in combat worked far more often than it really should have.
Aside from that, yes… every sneaky character with big noisy friends should appreciate the value of a distraction. The paladin isn’t going to help you break into a house, and you don’t really want them to try — but when you’ve got a friend who’s that good at attracting attention, it’d be a terrible shame if they weren’t attracting all that attention somewhere else.
The friend you really need is a destrachan…
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/destrachan.htm
Wow. That’s a deep cut.
Also, I’d definitely look out behind me if someone said that thing was creeping up.
Heh. Awkwafina rogue. Try singing “Hotel California” next time. Higher chance of success against low-Int enemies.
We just pulled off a successful distraction in the Starfinder: Dead Suns play-by-post I’m in! We’re in the final module of the AP, and we were trying to figure out a way to hijack the dreadnought ship we’d managed to sneak aboard, so we could crash it into the ancient superweapon and save the galaxy.
After rendezvousing with a mole aboard the ship, we started strategizing. We decided the best option would be to conduct enough sabotage to distract the vessel’s undead crew so we could steal a grav-train and get to the command deck. Our sabotage of choice? Steal a bunch of the dreadnought’s own missiles, rig them up in various locations, and detonate them remotely to force the undead to waste time and effort repairing the damage and maybe giving our own fleet an edge against this huge ship! Our GM ran it like a skill challenge, where each of us could roll up to three skill checks, and they could be ANY skills, if we could come up with an interesting narrative rationalization (my Solarian used Mysticism to mentally trace the ship’s artificial gravity and find spots where it could be disrupted!) and then when it was ready, we set it off. Our technomancer even got to be a little like Sorcerer there, as he used Profession: Stage Magician for his final skill to make the explosions EXTRA distracting! It clearly got their attention, as the undead commanding-officer sent a ship-wide message that they wanna parlay with us, and now we’re just a vehicle chase away from the final combat encounter!
Oh man… We just finished Book 5. They got through the entire final dungeon at a go with crazy Disguise checks and bluff. Had the whole level fighting itself by the time the McGuffin arrived for pickup.
Good to hear that the final book lends itself to this sort of thing.
I once tried to alter the course of a war. The course of the full arc was pre-plotted, it seems, and beyond the scope of the players; we were just there to play out adventures within that season’s theme.
That didn’t stop me from trying, though.
There was a supplement with info on the campaign world that included flavor text and minor details about the group that was now our enemy. I data-mined and rules-lawyered the heck out of it.
Every session, a GM politely informed me why my previous plan had failed. I nodded, pushed up my glasses, then forked over about 1,000 coin and a detailed precis of a new scheme that would win the day for our side. In theory, every one was a winner.
-) A barge of “provisions” had “accidentally broken from its moorings and drifted downriver” and conveniently directly into the river bend controlled by the enemy. The cooked meats and alcohol on board had been subtly poisoned to encourage the enemy to be sleeping off their revels when we attacked. [Attack called off: the enemy were now vegetarians and tee-totalers.]
-) A squad of adventurers in detailed replica uniforms sneak into the enemy camp and poison the water supply. [Intel was gathered, but the well was too closely guarded.]
-) False information, rumors, and enemy coins were planted on dead enemy soldiers reclaimed by our foe, indicating that the troops were not being paid equally–an attempt to sow dissent in their ranks. [The ruse was believed, but the attempt failed: The enemy were now religious zealots who fought for a higher cause.]
My favorite successful hairbrained scheme (clearly from a different and more lenient campaign) also involved poisoning evil soldiers.
CLERIC: (upon seeing the entire barracks quarantined with “the flux”) What did you do, poison their food?
ROGUE: Nah, that’s for amateurs. If they suspect mass food poisoning, they’ll cast purify food & drink.
CLERIC: The water supply?
ROGUE: First thing they’d check. No, first I coated their pots & pans and then I poisoned their soap. Now, the cleaner they get, the greener they get.
If you were running such a game, what would the consequences be for these actions? Obviously, “Your genius automatically wins the war,” is a bit much, but “none of your plans work or have any discernable impact on the game world” also sucks. What is the happy medium you’re hoping for with this kind of plan?
To be honest, I can’t even remember what outcome I was hoping for at the time. I think I just had gold to burn and wanted to nudge the fulcrum of game reality to say “I did that.” At the end of the year, my PC was appointed Lord Protector of [inconsequential NPC town resembling New Orleans that no one visits in-game] for his wartime efforts.
If I had been DM, I think I would have kept the impact to the overall war to a minimum, but let the player’s suggestions sculpt the premise of a series of quickie-encounter sessions, maybe even for unnamed “redshirts” whose overall deaths or derring-do have zero impact on the regular PCs.
Yeah, if I was in your position, that’s what I’d be going for.
If the point of the campaign is to play soldiers in a war, I’m fine with the idea that I can’t personally win the war… but I’m not so fine with not being able to influence the outcome of an individual battle, whether through heroics in the field, or skulduggery behind it.
It’s never happened in-game (yet) but one of my players and I get into regular arguments over the usefulness of the Trombone of Invisibility (the instrument that makes you invisible, but only while you’re playing the trombone). She argues that it would make for the ultimate distraction device, because guards would endlessly search for the source of the noise but be unable to find it. I can see several problems with this, but to settle it, I think I’m just going to have to give one of her characters such a trombone and see how it plays out.
Depends on the system and the GM. “They pinpoint you and your dumb footprints immediately you dumb idiot” on the one hand vs. “they tear the camp apart looking for you but you’re invisible” on the other.
As Smaug showed us, however, even regular type invisibility isn’t fool-proof.
The alt text just says “Distraction”, probably an error…
Unless that IS the distraction! Look out for that alt text behind you! :O
Ya know, I straight up forgot to put in alt text today. I think I like this concept though.
The alt-text, whilst distracting, is insufficiently laden with humorous content. I assume you didn’t intend to have it just say ‘distraction’?
I see you’re successfully distracted.
A distraction? Such a foolish notion. That door clearly has a hole that’s perfectly sized to carefully aim rockets through.
We’ll tape the rockets to our feet and ride through. It’s fool-proof!
The best ‘distraction’ I’ve done was when my Street Sammy dropped a beef hamburger during a warehouse heist to distract the corp’s genetically-modified guard dogs from sniffing out our trail before we could make an escape.
Those dogs need a software update.
In my groups most recent session, we needed to get into a guarded prison ship to deactivate a magical crystal so that we could get a prisoner out of a different prison ship. The thing was though we needed around a uninterrupted minute to do it, and the area had a good number of guards, and could call in dozens more as needed. In addition, as we weren’t actually opposed to the prison in general and use wanted to get out a single prisoner, we wanted to do it with minimum disruption and violence. We decided the best strategy was to send in our fast monk with decently high defenses, and just have him pull a bunch of the ships guards. While he ran off, we went in and took down the remaining guy, used sovereign glue to lock the door back in, used clairvoyance to specifically identify the cell of the prisoner we wanted to free, and deactivated the defenses there. He then just jumped into the ocean and swam back to us. We actually have used a lot of distractions to accomplish various tasks on this mission, and it’s been pretty successful so far. For actually getting the prisoner out of his cell though, we decided to just cut the knot and punch our way through the boats wall and grab him as the fastest way to get out.
By took out the guard I meant non lethally, and I was talking about the monk jumping into the ocean, not the prisoner.
I feel like at least half of “distraction” plans are excuses to do something silly and fun that one or more of the players wanted to do anyways. Which is fine, aside from the fact that they’re relegated to “distraction” roles.
Right, for this distraction I’m going to need a Giant, a wheelbarrow, a sword and a Holocaust Cloak…
It might be cliche but it worked 😉
Oh, yes we use distractions several times. One of my favorites is to roll and then scream to our DM: “Look! It’s the Kukla!” and when he turns his head i got a nat 20 on the roll 😀
You will surprised how many times that work 😀
I usually just shout the lyrics of “Hotel California” at my opponents. Stupid people are easily confused.
XD
My distraction story is perhaps one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in D&D.
This was at an Adventurer’s League event – me and my group were a bunch of thieves hired to find and heist out a magical ruby, which could be used to locate a dragon’s treasure hoard. You can guess why we wanted it. What we were doing was intercepting a horse-drawn carriage containing a noble, from whom we were going to extract the rub’s location. We knew the cart’s path, but the city was incredibly crowded. Fortunately, our previous heist had earned us a lot of coin.
Naturally, what we did was buy an elephant.
When the cart moved forward, the elephant was forced out into the street (we had also bought the services of its circus trainer), blocking the cart’s progress, and our charismatic party member performed a complicated dance routine atop it. This naturally attracted quite a lot of attention, and he rolled high enough to cut the cart off from its front guard, as well as the focus of the city guardsmen.
This wasn’t even the most cockamamie part of our scheme, as we forced the cart down another road, and over some road that we had also rigged in advance. Our arcane trickster rogue pickpocketed the cart’s driver with a mage hand, and stole the wand of fear she was going to try on us, while Zhentarim thugs that I had hired attacked and distracted the cart’s rear guard.
We then, in BROAD DAYLIGHT, ziplined down from the rooftops, kicked the driver to the curb, and I went in the card’s window with our other conversationalist, wherein we proceeded to threaten the guard into drinking truth serum with us, and taking the guy’s money so we wouldn’t blackmail him. Our remaining rogues on the outside proceeded to charisma the group of hang-gliding rogues that were also attacking the cart for the same reason, by virtue of happening to be related to the leader, and took their hand gliders. We then all left, after robbing the noble we were interrogating blind.
Somehow, of the six or seven groups in the epic, we had been the first to finish, at an extreme profit, and without a hitch in our plan. We were laughing like bastards, and it was wonderful. Then the DM asked us what we were doing with the elephant.
We pawned him off on Volo and moved on.
The elephant actually ended up coming into play during our final heist of the night – the wand of fear was used on it. This was how our operation’s leader decided to signal to the rest of us that the ruby had been acquired, and we were all able to flee undetected while nobility and guardsmen alike were trampled by a spooked circus elephant.
That was a hell of a D&D game.
I was running Strange Aeons when my party comes across a miniboss exploring a cultist base. She’s perfectly willing to sit down and talk, and they converse for about 10 minutes. Then, one of the party members has the idea to ask “Hey, why are you so up front about talking to us about your plans?”
and then the miniboss smiles at them. “Because you’re wasting your time here talking to me instead of stopping the ritual.”
They just barely got downstairs and to the ritual chamber in time to stop a cultist den from exploding the entire town by summoning a Great Old One directly into the town square. And by that I mean they killed the leader the round before the ritual completed.
See, the trouble here is that most people do distractions that can be ignored.
My distractions are usually things like ‘blow up the enemy’s powder magazine while the rest of the party sneaks in.’
You can’t ignore a massive explosion inside your own base. What do you think Shirts of Sneaking +10 exist for? You get in there, drink your Protection from Fire, toss a few Alchemist Fires, and laugh maniacally in the inferno for one round before making yourself extra scarce.
To me, this is the ideal opportunity to very visibly roll Intelligence for the enemy. That way, a truly wackadoo scheme won’t always or even often work out, but hope will be kept alive.
That said, I haven’t had much experience of this from either side, because both my players and I tend to plan hard.
Incidentally, ever played Dusk City Outlaws? It’s basically a game designed for this sort of incident.
Since my love of Pyrotechnics almost rivals that of Sorcerors, there was a time when we did the “Distraction” method in an official module to effectively clear out an entire town of cultist.
Intro to Eberron, that Emerald Claw in an abandoned mining town we had to sneak through. During it we found some Zombies digging up corpses and piling them into a cart, and at the Paladin’s urging I tossed a bottle onto the Corpses, letting everyone know where we were. We then used more alchemist fire, oil and the terrain to fortify ourselves in the graveyard (Not the original plan, the paladin just wanted to destroy the corpses since they really hated undead)
We didn’t kill the entire town, some people were guarding a building and refused to leave their post (or just didn’t see the fire), but we did kill all the necromancers and most of the guards.
Indeed, acting as player, I have concocted schemes that involve a distraction. However, as you pointed out, a distraction can do more harm than good for the party if it alerts the foes that ‘bad things for them are coming soon’, whatever form that may take. A good distraction distracts without alerting. Whatever out-of-the-ordinary thing/event is used to draw the attention of the foe, it should seem – immediately and after investigation by the foe – to be a normal, though possibly uncommon occurrence. This is a deception, and like any deception it tends to be most effective if it plays into/reinforces something that the foes want to believe. These are things to think about when crafting a good plan.
When I am DMing, I present the PCs with a problem/challenge. I then referee their attempts to meet, solve or overcome that challenge. D&D is, after all, a game of creative problem solving. I try to create challenges that have multiple avenues of approach – usually atleast one that rewards cleverness, perhaps by a reduction in difficulty. I also want to be certain to be a fair and impartial referee. Often times my players find multiple approaches I did not foresee, and that is great – it shows interest and engagement with the game, and that we are all doing our jobs well. Unfortunately, on occasion the plans they come up with, well, they are foreseeably doomed to failure. At times like this, a DM needs to let the chips fall where they may. If a plan relies on unknown variables, then I might assign a probability and roll dice to determine those variables. My job as DM is to referee the attempted solution, not reduce the challenge to fit the attempted solution. I would never ‘fudge the truth’ to enable a doomed plan to work. To do otherwise betrays the game, the players and my job as DM. If every solution to a problem is deemed to work, then there is no reason for the player to try to think of good ideas, nor reward if they do. It all becomes pointless. I would like to see the PCs’ plan work, them rise to meet the challenge at hand, all survive and succeed – but they have to earn their success.
Ohhhh I have to answer this one.
2e. Level 15-ish. We’re looking at a large hall filled with cultists resting and mingling as they prepare for the huge ritual to summon their god that night. We want to take them while they’re unprepared, to try to stop the ritual from happening in the first place. We’re ready. We just need a distraction to give our casters that perfect opening for their best spells.
In sneaks my character. Perfect stealth rolls. She looks around, and decides the best way to distract everyone without exposing herself is to cast Frisky Chest on the communal soup pot. UTTER CHAOS ENSUES! The cultists don’t realize she’s there and everyone is trying to figure out how to stop the boiling cauldron that’s running around in panic, splashing stew on everyone. It finally BURSTS out the front door, fleeing for the hills.
“Is that the signal?” “It’s Aurora. I’m calling that the signal.”
Queue missile multiplied fireball arrows and other various OP nonsense! Aurora, laughing her head off because she’s immune to both natural and magical fire, is flung so hard by the explosion that she gets enough distance enough distance for the paladin to succeed at an attempt to catch her.
It was absolutely glorious.
How can that absolute beauty of a spell not have survived the editions!?