Handicap
You know what’s cool? Defying the odds, standing your ground, and coming out the other side victorious.
You know what’s not cool? Rolling like butts, then getting handed a victory anyway. Ain’t nobody wanna feel patronized.
This can be a tough tightrope to walk when you’re a GM. That’s because the difference between a fair fight and unfun tactics can be little more than a matter of taste. Take the boss fight my PF1e megadungeon group just lived through. The five of them were APL 16, and they were facing off against a CR 20 kraken lich monstrosity. Here are a few of the close calls I had to make as a GM.
- All PCs are in reach. Do you target the squishy caster with all ten of your tentacles, or do you spread the damage out across the party?
- Do you turn on power attack (increasing the likelihood of PC death), or do you leave it off (increasing the likelihood of dramatic but non-damaging grapples)?
- The party’s bard has access to bard’s escape, and can teleport grappled party members out of trouble. Do you stuff your grapple victims beneath the inky waves, cutting off line of sight and blanking the spell?
- You’ve decided to reflavor your lich kraken’s beak attack as an inflict wounds by simply changing the damage type to negative energy. When your player asks for a save to half, do you allow it?
- The wizard casts control water, attempting to lower the water level and leave the kraken high and dry. You didn’t plan out ocean depth ahead of time. Does the wizard’s plan work as intended?
There are a couple of ways to approach these decisions. You can try to play optimally, giving your monster the maximum chance of winning the fight and killing the PCs. Then again, your can play in a characterful way, taking the monster’s psychology into account. Is it arrogant? Is it mindless? Under what circumstances will it choose to retreat? You might even take a mechanics-first angle, showing off as many tricks as possible for the sake of variety.
For my part, I wanted to foreground the multi-grapple aspect of the fight, so I leaned into those mechanics rather than maxing damage. I also like to reward my players for bringing the right tool for the job, so the teleportation and the water control tricks both worked. As for the inflict wounds business, that was just lazy monster building on my part. I can’t very well punish my players for my mistakes, and so the Will saves were summarily saved.
That’s my line of thinking anyway. What about the rest of you though? Is it incumbent on a good GM to play the monsters as tough as possible, or do too-clever tactics get in the way of a good time? Conversely, does it ruin your victory when a GM “plays the villain dumb,” or can that serve to make more interesting fights? Sound off with your monsters’ tactical preferences down in the comments!
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It’s very situation and party dependant (there are players who prefer getting over the combat quickly and get to RP, and there are players who likes challenging battles against intelligent foes); but I have three rules of thumb:
1. warn players ahead (preferably at session 0 at latest) that there will be fights that seem impossible, or where running away is the way; and that intelligent creatures will fight intelligently
2. consider the intelligence and wisdom of the creature. Is it a mindless beast? Then it will go for prey that seem weakest and/or most threatening. Is it an intelligent creature? It will go for the death blow on a downed PC to stop them from getting healed and rejoin the fight. Also let the enemies learn during combat: in the kraken example, the bard’s teleport trick works first 1-3 times, then the Kraken learns that it won’t work when the grappled targets are in the ink.
3. adjust the difficulty to the players. If the players are in their novice levels, either as characters or players, decrease NPC combat intelligence slightly – let them obviously make mistakes (sometimes even pointing it out), and let the enemies “learn”.
As an addendum for 2 and 3, you can also adjust the difficulty to the fights. If things are going bad, maybe the next hit puts the monster’s back out or removes a limb, making things easier for the party. Alternatively, you can take a leaf out of the Power Rangers handbook and have monster pull out all the stops if it looks like it’s losing too fast.
There’s a very strong “know your group” element to this question.
Personally I have a slight preference for having monsters/villains act according to their personality, but to also have that normally not mean they are acting outright stupidly since incompetent villains detract from how credible a threat they are. (with exceptions from time to time of course).
Of-course this also comes with responsibilities to either communicate that some foes are above the PC’s ability to handle straightforwardly, both in general during session 0 and such, and in the specific.
I also have a strong preference for separating my decisions as a GM about the world, from my decisions as a GM on behalf of enemies.
My preference is that the pc’s are fighting the hostile npcs, rather than the players that are opposing a hostile GM.
Therefore I go with what my gut says “makes sense” for the world rather than what makes the fight easier/harder, with a bias towards the PC’s when resolving internal doubt to counteract any subconscious competitive elements left-over from the mental gear-switch.
To use your example for practical analysis my rulings in my average group would be:
1) the kraken wants to win, but it’s also a great grappler and seem like the type to prefer it’s own powerful magical ability to simple physical force, so it’ll divide the strikes a bit to get chances to grab everybody, but focus any extra where they do the most for the Lich’s chance of winning. (this also mean that it stops when the players go down instead of killing them stone death, since a blow on a conscious foe will be better for winning than one on an unconscious one).
2) If it wants to grapple it’ll not power-attack while if it has an easy time hitting it will. depends on the players and how the fight is going, also if whomever it’s currently seeing as the biggest threat has a high AC or not (assuming the lich has a chance to know that).
3)This probably works the first time, but then the lich would start to try to hide it’s captured victims. (I’d remember that it would need an grapple check to actually move them which would be done as part of it’s check to maintain and instead of the basic damage from the tentacle.
4)Inflict wounds normally get will saves and it isn’t the Liches decision so I’d give the players the save just as you did.
5)first I’d compare to my mental image to ask “would 32 ft. be enough to lower the water?” (if my assumptions about your wizards CL is correct, in practice I’d ask the player how much they could lower the water). Based solely on the image I got from your description, I’d probably go with, “there’s still a feet or two of water at the bottom” which isn’t enough for the Lich to swim in, but might be a problem for any halfilings in the group.
One weird point about 3 is this line from the grapple rules:
In practice, that means a pathfinder kraken can move you up to 80 ft. with its initial grapple (60 ft reach, then pulling you to the opposite side of its 20 ft body). But that’s such a wonky interpretation that I felt like my players would murder me for trotting it out.
I must admit I thought it meant “the closest adjacent open space” but, you are correct it doesn’t actually say that.
I think I’ll still interpret it that way through, since it seems more sensible to me and the alternative strikes me as too wonky as well.
I make mu decisions from enemy to enemy. With dumb beasts or mindless undead, it’s very easy for someone to pull aggro. For something more humanoid and intelligent, it’s a bit of a toss up. If they are in melee combat, they are likely going to worry more about getting a sword to the gut than an arrow to the shoulder. But if it’s a group of humanoids, then I pick my targets more strategically.
Having never DMed a game in a long running campaign (just little one shots and a few short lived attempts at something longer), I can only speak to the player side of things, but I was just thinking about this whole concept after a few encounters our own group went through recently, some deadly and some not, but almost all have been “difficult”.
I think for me it boils down to a matter of two outcomes:
– Did the party (and players) make a plan that turned out perfectly?
or
– Did the party’s plan turn to crap within moments and they still managed to win the scene?
If either of those scenarios happens, I think everyone feels good about the victory because everything worked out exactly as intended, or everyone adapted to the situation as it unfolded and everything worked out.
If it is anything in between, where mostly things worked out except that one moment when things almost didn’t go according to plan, but then everything was fine, it feels less epic story telling and more deflated.
That has been my personal experience of enjoying an encounter.
then there is the third scenario where the foe is just so underwhelming that you annihilate them (threw combat or insanely high skill check rolls) and… you still feel good because you are so ridiculously OP that you LOVE IT!!! But not everyone enjoys that. (I do!)
The end goal of a DM is twofold:
1. Make sure the players have a good time.
2. Have a good time yourself. (It’s not like you’re getting paid for this sh*t.)
Sometimes, these goals are served by making an encounter weaker. Sometimes, they’re served by making one more challenging. Sometimes the best strategy is to hide how you’re making the fight easier (or harder).
The only universal advice I can give is to know what your party can take. It’s a lot easier to make these adjustments during the planning phase than hastily adjust monster tactics or statistics once PCs start hitting the floor.
These are stylistic choices, but honestly, the situation as you described it seemed broken from the outset.
But before I forget, tabletop RPGs don’t have execution challenges in the same way that video games do. In Dark Souls, pulling off a no-death run comes down almost entirely to the player’s skill at the game and their ability to pull off the maneuvers they need to make. In many tabletop games, a no-death run against tough opposition comes down to the fall of the dice. And I’m not sure that people take that into account.
Characters in tabletop games are often expected to go into scenarios woefully ignorant of what they’re going to face, and often without a means of figuring it out that doesn’t rely on some help. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if the players have to in effect pretend that their characters have defied the odds, stood their ground and come out the other side victorious, when in fact, the monster was primed to not take advantage of their unpreparedness, they should at least know that it’s a pretense. Letting the players think that the monster was doing its best to kill the characters, when it was deliberately holding back doesn’t seem cool. I’m much better with being handed the win even in the face of rolling like butts, because that’s about not bowing to luck.
But if the players are going to roll the metaphorical dice by going into situations without knowing what they will face, they should be prepared for their characters to be unprepared, and the consequences that may come from that, IF they also want the credit for kicking all the butts and taking all the names.
I think there are a number of principles I would take into account here. First, it depends on the monster’s intelligence and tactical skill. A smart dragon will use the most optimal actions (and have the brainpower to figure them out), while a stupid ogre or berzerking orc will probably just smash whatever’s closest to it. Second, be very careful about using actions that depend (or seem to depend) on information the monster shouldn’t have. In your example, the lich kraken might or might not be smart enough to recognize that the skinny guy in robes is likely a caster and thus a glass cannon, but it certainly shouldn’t have any way of knowing that the bard has that teleport spell until the spell actually gets used.
I don’t have much to add that others haven’t said already: The right mix of challenge and the possibility of victory depends on how your playgroup has fun. I can, however, contemplate the nature of pillow golems:
Immunity to Magic (Ex): A pillow golem is immune to spells or spell-like abilities that allow spell resistance. Certain spells and effects function differently against it, as noted below:
• A pillow golem is affected normally by magical attacks that deal fire or slashing damage.
• A gust of wind spell effects the golem normally and treats it as though it were two size categories smaller than it actually is.
• Any spell that causes sleep (such as sleep, deep slumber, etc.) heals 3 points of damage for each HD it would otherwise effect. If the amount of healing would cause the golem to exceed its full normal hit points, it gains any excess a temporary hit points. The spell has no effect on other creatures if cast on a pillow golem. A pillow golem is affected by these spells as though it weren’t immune to mind-effecting effects or sleep effects.
(Am I thinking too much about a joke monster? Of course. But that’s how I have fun.)
One thing that I find helps in these situations is to give the baddies a goal other than to kill the party. That way, you can lean into harder difficulties without risking an unwanted TPK. They could be trying to steal something, trying to assassinate exactly one person, trying to run away… This doesn’t work every time, but can be useful to create a memorable setpiece battle or introduce an overpowered villain that the PCs have no hope of defeating yet.
A DM I met at some game club told us how he keeps trying to get at least one PC in the negative hit points each game session. Sounds a bit harsh, but it’s not not a bad metric of the difficulty of the game. That is, if the players want some sense of challenge but no death.
Myself, I like to have my monsters open up with a dynamic entry, or something like this. Barbarian will be already raging, spellcasters will have protection spells in effect… And all will immediately use their most damaging attack. Or their signature move (a dragon will breath, a Kraken try to grapple, etc).
And then next turn, I’ll take a step back and if necessary dumb down my monsters. I may be too friendly a GM and do it too much/too far, though.
That is, if there is a next turn. Another reason to have my monsters ready and buffed up is so that they get a chance to show off at least one attack.
Some years ago, I ran the War of the Burning Sky campaign and one thing I enjoyed was the detailed notes about the NPCs tactics. They provided the right pointers, reminding me to use the environment or the special abilities of the monsters. I prefer to use written scenarii for that reason, because someone else did the job already of spicing up encounters.
One encounter I fondly remember was when the party was battling a group of foes which was lead by an ice demon of some type. The demon felt no special loyalty to his summoner and, while still busy trying to eviscerate the PCs, let them know by telepathy that, if they were to accidently drop a few choice gems, he will tell them important things about his masters.
Interestingly, while I was sorta holding back the demon’s attacks (he was quite tough, and he was trying to get bribed, after all), I think the players hold back on attacking him, to get him to talk.
Um. The players were planning on looting the gems back from his corpse. I had to quickly rule that the gems were magically and instantly ported to his native plane. It was within the rules about summoned monsters (they go back to their place upon reaching 0 HP), and a devil’s deal shouldn’t be that easy to circumvent, but I still feel like I somehow cheated.
Throwing a pillow golem at a new party seems like DM malpractice. Golems are immune to most everything a first level party would have, and would eventually grind them down.
The monsters want to win, and they will fight like it. As a DM it is my responsibility to pick monsters who the party has a chance against even while said monsters are pulling every trick at their disposal to kill the party. I explain this to new players, and make a point of rolling in the open so they know that everything is fair.
In the campaign I DM’d I had 3 deaths. One was due to the Hobgoblins I run being the most vicious combatants you’ll ever meet. One was that same player playing like an idiot and getting his characters killed hilariously in the next session. He was asked to leave later due to table conduct. One was in the climactic final battle. In the interim the party had countless close-calls. The closest call being when two PCs were unconscious in lava, and one of them had 2 death saves while also on fire. They managed to get out of that alive too.
As player we insist the combat to be as brutal and painful as posible. Our DM keeps on failing that. There is a reason he is the DM and not a player. He playing and doing math would like this: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/from-hells-heart . Oh, and him leveling up?: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/pencils-and-paychecks 🙁
He can run the game, but him can’t play it quite well. He does a good job and we kinda like him. That is why we keep him even when he is a little dumb, and forgetful and can’t keep a girlfriend 😛
Okay, i might be exaggerating things a little to mess with him when he reads this. He isn’t that bad, but neither that good. He is okay for us, and that is what matters. He wouldn’t do as the old… farmer? Person? Granny?… over there and hand us an easy victory. But he wouldn’t make things unwinnable, he know what is best for us… and his car 😀
A lot of stuff is pretty party dependent, but dealing “deathlblows” to unconcious PCs is something I feel shouldn’t ever be used unless the baddie has a huge grudge against a specific character.
The sad thing here is, Gunslinger will probably have to melt that medal down into bullets to recuperate the money he spent on bullets to kill that golem.
Our DM is on the merciful side. The latest case I recall being given a win / pass is when a Roc picked up a party member and was a round from flying away with them to certain death (either by dropping them or eating them whilst we were 100+ feet away and unable to give chase).
They instead got dropped before that happened as the Roc decided to flee from our repeated ranged shots and flying attacks.
Other times, we found ourselves spared of annoying mechanics or monsters who were way over our CR from just killing us all – e.g. when my Kobold was trapped with a Secuidinar who kept level draining him (I was savvy enough to run once I realized what bullshit creature I was facing at lvl7). Our DM handwaved the fact he was fleeing up stairs at full speed as otherwise he would be dead 100%, being unable to outrun it before it drained him to death. Even with that, and it not using its instant-death spells it had, it was a close call.
And as a third case, a bad guy decided not to use cone of cone to finish off a bleeding-out oracle, letting it hit the active party members only.
Is that Gunslingers mom/grandmmother, or just a exceptionally matronising quest giver?
I think the goal here is to play the monster in the most fun way possible. So in some ways this will depend on the tastes of your group.
But it’s a pretty good rule of thumb that multiattacks all on the squishiest character rather than spreading the damage around is bad form as the only things PCs can do about stuff like that is also always only resort to what seems to be the most optimal strategy.
You’re also pretty guaranteed to make front liners have an unfun time with things like that because conceptually they are supposed to be there to take hits for people in the back. It’s not their fault the game doesn’t give them adequate mechanics to enforce that outcome. (One of the few things 4e did better than all over editions of D&D.)
So the squishies will be upset because they can’t do a lot about taken a half dozen or more attacks at once since they likely have neither the AC or HP to deal with that and the tanks will be sad because their character’s role in combat got completely sidelined in the name of RAW efficiency.
I’d say no to the inflict wounds thing (I mean in something other than 5e where it’s just an attack roll anyway), as there are plenty of monster abilities that are “like X, but use Y to land the hit instead”. No real reason to nerf an attack just because you changed its damage type for flavor reasons.
For the bard’s escape thing, you probably let them use it a few times before the monster catches on and figures to do the thing you’ve realized can avoid it. This also results in something for Control Water to help with other than “instantly win the fight”.
As for the Control Water on its own, I guess it depends on how severely that would impact the fight. I’d probably try to aim for it being helpful but not an overwhelming advantage or instant victory.
And as for the power attack or grapple question, I think the most fun thing to do is half of each. Even if the monster’s stat block doesn’t say it’s allowed to do that. It seems the most interesting and gives the players the most the think about and be able to respond with. Tanks can take blows, escape artists can escape or help others out, healers can heal, etc.
Mixing things up like that avoids the “only one character has a tool that works for this” scenarios or the “this happens to be a trivial issue for the entire party so the monster’s turn was 100% wasted” scenarios.
Gunslinger, the answer here is to team up with Pillow Golem and slay Lawful Patronizing grandmother here. She’s got to be worth more xp. =P
One of the interesting things about Pendragon (at least in my view) is that it rewards careful play, and fighting, by PC’s. As is stated in the rulebook, there are quite a lot of fights in Pendragon that you are not supposed (or even able) to win. And as combat can be, and often is, deadly, the way out by running away, or even looking for an alternative solution for that fight is highly recommended.
Also most enemies in Pendragon are usually other humans, who can, and will, be as sneaky as possible to be able to win. After all, if you get in a fair fight, you did something wrong. Either you make sure that you have the advantage, or the enemy made sure he has it. Which brings me to the question at hand: I probably will play the enemies, either humans or monsters, as challenging as possible. As knights they are supposed to fight to the best of their abilities, and sometimes that means falling on the field of honour, and sometimes that means running away, when the enemy is too strong. And if they do not choose the second option, they better have a son, or other successor, because otherwise they’re out of the game.
My policy on these matters is to play the monster as if it were your character, but always give the players the benefit of the doubt.
Thus, my monsters will always act as efficiently as possible (from their point of view – they can’t read the minds of the players) to accomplish their goals, but anything I haven’t planned for on the part of the players is possible.
Honestly, it ultimately depends on your group and what they like.
Some groups like cruising through combat. Other like having to pull off all of their tricks to win by the skin of their teeth.
Mine is the latter, so I don’t pull punches… when it makes sense. I like to play my bad guys and monsters by taking their psychology into account, as you’ve mentionned. This can be simple as rolling a D20 to let chance decide whether the enraged barbarian will keep attacking the downed PC or move on to another, because honestly both would make sense, or having some monsters show specific bias, or having them retreat when the opportunity presents itself, but also having them act sub optimally when they aren’t in a position to do their best.
The most recent example I have is a particularly grueling fight against a Stone Giant lich and a human necromancer. The lich was old, powerful, and ruthless, but the necromancer was just a woman desperately trying to achieve her goal with what knowledge she had available (necromancy). So when the fighter crossed a pit of petryfying quicksand and came right for her when she was already wounded, she panicked, and instead of using her highest spell slot to cast a Cone of Cold that could very well have knocked out the fighter (but she didn’t know that), she tried – and failed- to cast Blindness on the fighter to shake him off. Which gave him the opportunity to finish her off and take a heavy threat (and recurring enemy) off the map.
Meanwhile the lich was fully abusing his giant (literally) pool of hit points for a caster, teleporting right in the middle of the group when they started using cover to try and break line of sight and avoid the worst of his spells, before paralysing characters and flinging them in the aforementionned pool of petryfying mud. And when the characters brought him dangerously low on HP, he just Dimension Door’d away and rallied the entire stronghold against the PCs, who had to make a quick escape.
This approach allows me to make honestly pretty damn tough combats, which my players enjoy, while at the same time leaving me wiggle room for the few cases were the dices are being really mean (re : the lich fight, I rolled disgustingly good on just about everything for the first half of combat, and if I had played optimally for all of it it would have been a TPK)
Since that line of thinking (Are the monsters tough? Are they too tough? Are they not tough enough? Are they water-soluble? Do they stay crunchy in milk?) is the actual job of the guys behind the Monster Manual (5e), I try to not sweat it.
The monsters behave in the way they’re described there and use all their abilities and spells in the most efficient way, exactly like the PCs would (provided the monsters bio describes them as intelligent/resourceful enough for that. Meaning ogres and unawakened animals/plants are right out).
My players got it into their heads that the red dragon Tzindelor from ToA needed to die. I never touched ground during the fight, blasting them with fire, hiding behind the thick columns of smoke from the nearby volcano, attacking them continously with dozens of firenewts (with 1d8 more arriving every turn).
If the PCs hear the words “Dragon hiding in an active volcano, surrounded by lavaformed sycophants” and decide to just waltz in, well that’s on them. They did manage to win however (with 2 PCs disintegrating in the lava). They managed obscure the dragon’s field of vision and lure it into something that’s best described as Portal Cut Trap.
An overconfident wyrm not noticing or ignoring a portal some funny-looking monkey-people threw up and getting its shit ruined, was the perfect way for that encounter to end. Ingenuity is its own reward, but damn, were my players impressive at that moment.
I usually go for narrative priority, but supported by rationality. I’ll go for whatever creates a dramatic or entertaining visual as long as it makes ANY sense for the NPCs to act in that way and the Mechanics can in any way support that action.
Overall, I generally try to play the monsters to the best of their abilities… with the caveat that if I made the encounter too challenging on accident I’m not going to screw them over. With regards to your questions:
1) it depends on the situation. If I’m a confident kraken lich that can afford to play with its food, spreading out attacks (and grapples) is fine. If I’m a somewhat worried one due to the damage I’m taking, I’d definitely focus fire on the biggest threat.
2) Power attack vs grapple is a hard choice and I could see it go either way. However, if they were constantly getting magicked out of the grapple Id probably switch to power attack.
3) it’s entirely possible the inky water blocking the spell might not occur to it, so I’m not bothered either way on that ruling.
4) I would have modified it to deal additional damage, save for half. That way you get the feel of inflict wounds while still dealing on average the right amount of damage. Depending on their average will save, I’d have probably aimed for about 1.5x normal damage
5) Fully agree on letting them use control water, perfect spell for the job.
That may be the toughest one. It’s a super-intelligent creature. It’s been infected by Mythos stuff. It’s vacillating between ‘crazed frenzy’ and ‘please kill me.’ And somewhere out of that soup you’ve got to take a best guess of “what might occur to it?” At that point, the creature psychology method seems of limited use.