Never Give Up, Never Surrender
I honestly feel bad for the shambling mound in this situation. Dude was enjoying a nice combat, feeling good about his bonuses from an electricity attack, and now gets insulted for his efforts. I’m pretty sure that, “BARRAG, HUUM SCH?” is just Moundese for, “Come on, let’s hug it out.” Dude’s a class act.
Magus, on the other hand, is not. I don’t know if you guys have ever encountered this, but there’s a certain tendency among players to disengage when their primary shtick is ineffective. You’ll see it most often among one-trick pony builds, which includes the classic Pathfinder magus move of spellstrike into shocking grasp. Here’s the usual sequence of events:
GM: You can tell that your spell didn’t do any damage. If anything it seems to have strengthened the beast.
Player: But that was a critical!
GM: Your mind races, trying to produce some alternate avenue of attack. What do you do?
Player: Whatever. I delay.
And that’s a critical moment in the combat. If the phrase “I delay” is in fact Playerese for “I need to look through my spell list real quick,” then all is well. If a more accurate translation is, “This fight is stupid and shambling mounds are dumb and I’m going to play on my phone for the rest of the encounter,” then we’ve got problems. Like the Handbook says, you might not be the star of this particular combat, but that doesn’t mean you should give up and pout in the corner.
If you ever find yourself tempted to make like Magus in such situations, I would remind you that the “aid another” action is always an option. You can get in position for a flank. You can trigger environmental effects. You can taunt your foe, dig through your bags for an item-specific answer, or go HAM with alternative weaponry. Speaking as a GM, my heart breaks a little whenever I hear, “There’s nothing I can do.” That’s the exact opposite of the way I want my players to feel, most especially because it’s never true. There’s always a way to contribute, so get in there and try stuff! Even if it’s a less-effective-than-usual option, it will be more fun than twiddling your thumbs and glowering at your mini.
Question of the day then! Have you ever seen a player give up and disengage? What was the situation? Did they manage to turn it around and overcome adversity, or are they still pouting to this day? Let’s hear your tales of demoralized players down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I realize I’m kinda gonna be ignoring the day’s question here, so: Yes, I’ve seen players pout and disengage. No, they don’t get over it. They sit the mood, complain long after things are done, and forever sour all memory of the moment. I don’t really have any specific funny stories because it’s just no fun when someone does that.
That aside:
I honestly LOVE throwing together a one-trick-pony build and then smashing into a wall that I need to be clever to get around. One of my favorites was Frost Flicker, a sorceress who was actually a literal pony thanks to the Ponyfinder rules. She was extremely focused on the Cone of Cold spell. It’s DCs were something like 8 higher than other spells of its level, she could apply metamagic to it for free, she upped its power to ridiculous degrees.
…And I made sure she knew nothing but cold and utility spells. I had a theme, darn it, and I was determined to stick with it! When my ice sorceress ran into immunities to ice, she couldn’t just switch to fire and carry on with her day. I was there to play an ice mage, so an ice mage was what I played. No compromises!
Hey, wall of ice still says “battlefield control” on it. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that!
I have seen players turn off and disengage, but for me it has only rarely been due to builds, the only time like that I can remember is that there was this one disguise and deception based build that got pissed at the dm for not letting him do everything with it when the dm had already let him get away with some pretty ridiculous stuff with it. The primary times I have seen players disengage is when a combat seems just way to hard for them to do much anything about, or its not that bad for the party as a whole, but their particular character is stuck in a really annoying cc lock, or when there is an annoying puzzle that no one can figure out the answer for even after everyone has already one through everything they can think of for like a half hour to an hour. My old dm from back in my old home used to have a couple of these every now and then, but he was usually good with giving more clues when we struggled, with the exception of the time where it was just my wizard and another guy’s rogue for a murder mystery session, which was a fair bit more realistic. At least by fantasy standards, as the gnome wizard professor sicking his golem on people who mildly irritated him, such as a furniture salesman who didn’t make everything perfectly, isn’t exactly realistic in reality. Unfortunately some of my newer dms here in cali have had a lot bigger problems with giving really hard to solve puzzles or particularly hard combats that require some sudden dm controlled turn of luck or distraction to save us.
I suspect that those GMs were all secretly hoping you’d figure it out and advance the plot, and couldn’t figure out how to give you the information you needed. Those do indeed sound like poorly designed encounters, and a GM nudge is probably the right call on their end. But by the same token, I don’t think that “I can’t figure it out so I’m going to stop participating” makes the game more fun on the player’s end either.
I suggest shifting frames and tackling these situations out-of-character.
“Hey man, is this another one of those ‘there’s only one way to solve this and we have to read your mind’ encounters? Because we talked about those after the last time, and they’re not fun for me.”
You could also ask for some version of the “common sense” feat, where the GM is required to give you information and hints X times per day.
Oh i know the gms and none of them intended them to be somewhat too hard, I know they were just doing their best to give a good, fun, interesting encounter, i just think they need some more experience with these and should be a bit more willing to give out a few more clues then they initially planned. I am well aware how incredibly hard it can be for dms to properly balance puzzle difficulty. I also would bever suggest that just refusing to participate is a good idea, as that tends to just make things worse for everyone, and is particularily rude to the dm. I was just saying what i have found to be the most common causes of player disengagement, I’m definitely not excusing them.
Right on. After reading a great many comments between this comments section and the morning’s reddit thread, I get the sense that I only really addressed half the question today. There are definitely things GMs do that make it easy for players to enter “check out mode.” I wonder how to turn that side of the equation into a comic though….?
This bears further thought.
Maybe a railroading comic as the gm doesn’t give the players any option outside of a path they don’t understand or death? Or one where the characters start taking insanity damage as they bash their brains in trying to solve a puzzle. Maybe something about being cc locked with little to no escape chance or having all of your characters abilities effectively locked away for a big fight while everyone else gets to go whole hog on the enemy. These are probably the big examples I’ve seen or heard of.
I was playing a wizard, and we were fighting an evil flying brain immune to magic. I cast the few buff spells I had prepared, then spent as many rounds as I could distracting it by debating thaumaturgic theory.
Hell yeah. That’s what I’m talking about! When the usual shtick stops working, it’s time to get creative. I’m guessing you didn’t do much more than give minor penalties to the thing, but you kept yourself in the game. And every little bit counts.
I actually keep its undivided attention for a good few rounds while my allies fought its weird shadow griffon monster thing. Then it wised up to what I was doing and was about to murder us all starting with me. So I agreed to forfeit the pit fight we were in rather than get brutally murdered. And got a lot of flak from my allies, who didn’t even have to forfeit with me. It was part of this sort of non-canon fighting arena thing that was happening alongside the campaign. After I got penalized for surrendering rather than dying I realized it wasn’t for me and opted out of that part of the campaign. It was much more about rollplay than roleplay, and I just could not have cared less.
Another time I saw this from the outside. I was playing a Barbarian with all the ‘you think magic is evil nonsense and hate it with all your being’ rage powers, and we ended up fighting something the party Magus couldn’t spell combat against. So he went to the other side of the monster so I could flank it and continually tried to intimidate and bluff it into taking penalties. The player was a real trooper.
Dude… Good magusing right there. 🙂
I’m sorry to say I think I’ve been that player once of twice in the past. Though in those situations I felt like there was genuinely nothing I could do, I know it’s still not ok to drag the table down by pouting about it (and I hope I didn’t at the time).
To turn that question around, here’s the one “impossible” situation I can remember. I’d be interested to hear creative suggestions for actions in this situation.
Playing a sorcerer (level 6ish I think). I, and the rest of the party, are grappled by a gargantuan tentically thing that had ambushed us. I couldn’t beat it’s CMD in any way, meaning I couldn’t escape the grapple and couldn’t make a concentration check to cast a spell. I had wands, but I could only beat the creature’s spell resistance on a nat 20 (and then only because our GM was generous enough to let me use my caster level rather than the wand’s caster level for the check). I had mundane weapons, but I couldn’t beat the creatures AC on any roll, and I would have needed to confirm a crit with a nat 20 to do enough damage to bypass its DR. And remember, grappled so I can’t move.
What I did at the time was to keep poking it with a wand of shocking grasp and failing caster level checks for the whole combat.
It was not a fun encounter for any of us, until our kineticist went nova on it and took something like 85 non-lethal damage to create an almighty fireball. Barely singed the creature, but it was just enough to send it off looking for easier prey.
(I did later learn that we weren’t supposed to be able to win this encounter, but I hate the idea that I can do nothing, even if all I can do is die heroically or run screaming.)
— Aid another to give +2 to someone’s escape attempt.
— Attempt the combat maneuver anyway. You’ve got a 1/20 chance to succeed.
— Knowledge check. You may be able to create an anti-fungal cream from your reagent pouch.
— Tickle the monster or otherwise annoy it. You may be able to “cheat” an escape attempt with goofy shenanigans rather than dice rolls.
— Attempt Diplomacy / Handle Animal / Intimidate. It shouldn’t work in combat, but when a GM throws a “supposed to lose” encounter at you, chances are they’re looking for a reason to let the monster get distracted and run away.
— Ask you GM for a hint. When a combat becomes no fun for anyone, GMs are sometimes thinking ‘I just wish they’d do this one specific thing so I can end this farce.’ That’s a sign of poor encounter design, but in the moment there’s not a lot you can do about that as a player other than give your GM an out.
— Keep a wider array of wands in future. You’ve heard about “the batman wizard.” Same principle. Having a plan for when you’re grappled is a good thing, and liberating command and grease are both options.
“Keep a wider array of wands in future” – You know, I don’t have any wands other than off ones I found, yet I have a billion points in UMD. Time to get some utility spells in there I think! Good call.
“Ask you GM for a hint” – I’m actually a little annoyed I didn’t think of this; it seems so obvious now that you say it. No harm in asking the GM what options I have in that kind of scenario.
Yeah, buff and utility spells are great candidates for wands and scrolls, since the lower (relative to your caster’s own spells) DC and spell penetration numbers don’t matter when you target friends or the environment. If you can’t hurt the tentacle monster, go all-out to empower comeone who can!
And speaking of targeting the environment, maybe those offensive wands could have been put to better use against something other than the monster. Was there anything in the room that, if destroyed, moved, frozen, or otherwise messed with, could have inconvenienced the enemy or helped your friends?
Presumably the GM wants the scene to turn out cool and memorable. So the more constrained your options are, the more likely it is that the GM will reward creative lateral thinking.
I think I have participated in encounters where the entire party pretty much disengaged.
The party:
Tank: Loads of HP, decent AC, but can’t hit or do damage for shit.
Striker: A shapeshifter, whose main shtick is transforming into a large dragon.
Healer/BFC (myself): A plantomancer, whose main shtick is to entangle enemies, plink away enemies hit points with acid rays, and to heal the party.
The encounter:
2 Vile Corruptor demons: high HP, DR, immune to electricity and poison, resistance to acid, cold, and fire; melee attacks that did Con poison, and ranged touch attacks that did paralysis.
Yeah, so regardless of what type of dragon the striker turned into, his breath weapon did next to no damage, the tank sure as hell wasn’t going to get past its DR, and my acid attack was just as useful as the striker’s breath weapon. I ended up entangling the demons and fleeing the encounter.
Disengaging is an appropriate response when it’s a synonym for “retreat.” It can be demoralizing when you have to run away and come up with a better plan, but sometimes that’s the right call. The trick is to look at that as an interesting challenge rather than a cheap trick on the GM’s part.
So full disclosure I have done this and I’m not proud of it. In my defense, it was a little more serious than just one encounter. It was a Savage Worlds Rippers campaign that we’d been playing pretty much all the way through. Our characters were all just about max level and we were closing in on the end. I’d been building a character heavily amplified with rippertech. (taking pieces of defeated monsters and surgically adding them to myself, for the unintiated) I’d also taken a lot of feats that allowed me to make the most use of bennies. So it’s literally the final game of the campaign. We’re in hell, as one is, and what do you know you can’t use bennies in hell. So neat, maybe 1/3 of my gifts are useless. Cool. Ok. I was a little salty and was definitely not going to be happy if we had to fight the final boss here but okay let’s roll with it. Then, due to my own dumbness, I touch an enchanted artifact. Boom, all my carefully collected rippertech is now permanently useless. Forever. All gone. Yeah, I literally asked the GM to just kill my character. It wasn’t his fault, really. The rules were very clear about what that artifact did and I did the dumb move of touching it. I wish I had handled it better, but I’m also not going to pretend that I’m not still a bit annoyed that I had to fight the final boss at like 1/3 my original level with all the stuff I lost on the way there. I mean, sure I struck the final blow but it still kind of sucked…
And so a lesson was learned about butt-touching:
https://media.tenor.com/images/2c032d3505218a6db8bf3db723bc0121/tenor.gif
Did your GM put any last-minute bonus gear in your path or anything? I feel like, if a player’s enjoyment is that bound up in the mechanics, a quick opportunity to sell your soul for power might be in order.
That might be a mistake you made, but… “I touch the thing!” “You lose everything that you’ve built your character with forever.”
…I mean, that seems a little OVERLY punishing, no matter how “clear” everything is about the artifact.
5th Edition Adventurer’s League. DM is running a cutscene encounter in initiative, on a map and with mini’s. We’re fleeing a burning building and it’s 3-4 turns to the exit. This takes an entire hour to act out.
The problem is that the DM gave people their turns with no more fanfare than “it’s your turn, what do you do?”. Now, none of us actually have anything to do (at least none that is obvious), but no one wants to do ‘nothing’ for their turn. So every other party member starts their turn by asking what’s in their environment, what they can do, etc. and generally finessing the DM into telling them what the railroad is so they can follow it. The result is crazy long, crazy boring turns.
I went the other direction from the party and, turn by turn, had nothing better to do that say “I walk towards the exit”. And this took an hour.
The rest of the adventurer kinda followed that pattern, except that I’d had the good sense to tune it out from that point. The DM would dump us in a room with no recap or context and you either knew every detail that had been given in the session (through a noisy room where every fourth word was inaudible) or you had to play a game of 20Q to figure out what you were doing.
I patiently waited for a combat encounter where I didn’t have to ruin the game for everyone else in order to participate and… it took 3 hours, the DM spawned me on the far side of the room and my only option was to… walk towards the fight. Only game I’ve ever escaped with an Irish exit.
The 20Q style of Game Mastering is awful and I hate it.
Today in tautologies: sucky GMs do suck.
If you’re in a truly miserable game, I don’t think there’s any fault in walking away. What I’m really cautioning against in today’s comic is players saying “this combat is dumb and nothing I do matters” because a favorite strategy got shut down. That’s assuming a GM who’s putting in genuine effort though. If “nothing I do matters” over the course of an entire session because a GM can’t be arsed to actually describe the friggin’ game world, then I think that problem is one the other side of the screen.
I had the misfortune of working with a rogue who would never attack an enemy unless she had advantage (yes she indeed played the classic rogue stereotype of always fishing for advantage). Despising being a SWASHBUCKLER rogue and thus never needed advantage or even allies to trigger sneak attack, she would never try to solo engage even a mook if she couldn’t somehow get advantage on her rapier attack. Even if she’s hidden and with cover, she never bothers to ever just try to say, shoot them with her bow or just attack an enemy even without the advantage boost.
One combat was particularly difficult because me and the party where in an arena battle. Five of us vs one big smash troll dude. Easy peasy I thought, we got a wizard and we outnumber the guy 5-to-1, victory ought to be in the bag. But it was not.
Troll one Initiative and managed to smash our healer with a rock. Smart move, so me and the barbarian go in to try and fight em. Barbarian does enough damage to cut off the trolls arm, which ends up becoming its own enemy and we had to fight it. Cool I figured, I’ll fight the arm, barbarian fights the main body, wizard firebolts. What does the rogue do?
Fuck all. There’s no cover to hide behind. All she does is heal the other healer (she has a level in bard) and may occasionally throw out a bardic Inspiration, but she never attacked because she couldn’t get advantage. Nevermind that she doesn’t need it to sneak attack, but because she doesn’t get advantage she didn’t want to risk attacking and missing, things me and the barbarian were doing just fine handling as long as we fought. Hell even the healer fought with crossbow shots, weak and inaccurate as they were. She wouldn’t even use vicious mockery just because she didn’t think it would do enough damage to matter.
Then she has the nerve to pout about it afterwards and complain that there was nothing she could do since she couldn’t sneak attack. So the GM has to add solid obstacles she could hide behind and then move out to sneak attack from, just so she didn’t feel useless in an open, featureless arena. Gives me conniptions.
There is an important distinction to be drawn between “can’t sneak attack” and “refuses to sneak attack.” Conniptions indeed. >:[
I haven’t encountered any pouters, but there have been a few times I myself felt a little useless in combat. I mentioned getting knocked out twice in one combat last comic. There have also been times Irlana wasn’t able to hit the target at all. Those times, I either keep going and hoping for a crit or use one of her AoE spells to get at least a little damage.
Pouters are an APL -1 encounter. Mostly because they give the party an effective -1 player.
happens every time a character kicks the bucket.
till then: even just 1hp damage per round might shorten combat by one round (and several attacks) to increase the chanes of survival.
There’s a reason that this comic has its title. Always shoot the tank, no matter what:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC3IGts3Dyk
Have you seen Dracula: Dead and Loving It? Near the end of the movie Dracula grabs Harker by the throat and gloats about how he is just a mortal and that there is nothing Harker can do to stop him. What Harker does about this? Eyes picket, that is what he does. As long as you can do something to fight there is hope of winning. Which by the way. is the reason why the first thing i kill in a combat encounter with my abyssal exalted is the sense of hope itself in my opponents. While this situation may not be good on the players, on the NPC is just so funny to make them depressed and crush their hopes and souls 🙂
Moe is my sensei!
https://otherealmlife.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/2c6fc1c50199e5cc206e1ade6cee3536.jpg
Mentor: ***** ***** 🙂
One-trick-pony builds seem to only be a thing in 3X, which is the edition(s) I skipped so I haven’t encountered them much I do find the situation you’re describing comes up mostly with Munchkins who are upset that they need to use their brain rather than their main gimmick.
Why is Eldritch Knight so upset? Even if she can’t use one cantrip she’s still a fighter and as such can go ham.
Eldritch blast would like a word.
Only two creatures in the Monster Manual are immune to EB: The Helmed Horror which is immune to force, and the Rakshasa which is immune to all spells of 6th level and lower. (If your party encounters one and they don’t have 7th level spells, your DM is either bad, or telling you to retreat) In those contexts you rely on the fact that a Warlock has other spells. (I know right, who knew that the Warlock could do stuff other than Hex+EB?) Warlocks have a bunch of great unique spells like Armor of Agathys, Arms of Hadar, Hellish Rebuke, Hunger of Hadar, and Shadow of Moil. Any Warlock who “has no options” isn’t paying attention.
Hurrah! You discovered the point of today’s comic!
I’ve seen it a couple of different ways and done it on occasion, though always in an “in character” rather than “out of character” way. My 3.5 Rogues were prone to carrying potions of Hide from Undead specifically because sneak attack didn’t work, Enchanters with wands of fireball, as you do.
There is one time I did it out of character that I’m less happy about, but I do still feel I was justified. I was playing Mutants and Masterminds, and had a character with darkness themed powers based on the Shadow Power Set from X-Men: Destiny. One of my powers was a short range teleport that I literally had to be able to see where I was teleporting to and had a max range of 500 ft. Incredibly tame for Mutants and Masterminds Teleports, it was more stylistic than anything else. The first combat encounter I get into, the GM says “You can feel the floor is interfering with your ability to teleport. That power won’t work in this area.” And I got huffy.
I will admit that I complained more than I probably needed to, given that it didn’t affect my character that much. But from my perspective, it was very targeted (i was the only player with teleport) and pointless. I talked with him about after the game and he was like “I had to make sure you couldn’t just leave the encounter at will”. At which point I pointed out that I have to see where I am teleporting to and School Gyms tend not to have windows. He replied with something about “Teleport being on his list of broken powers” and how he felt my character was really powerful. At which point I fired back that the character with only Rank 8 melee attacks, a mild teleport, and some battlefield control was not even in the same league as the wind controller with rank 12 Lightning bolts, Whirlwind Area attacks, and permanent flight. I was mad because it was the first combat encounter! He hadn’t even seen how my character was going to play.
And to draw this back to the point, that is what I feel is the take-away. Let players play with their toys before you take them away for a bit. If you have an Ice Sorceress, let her freeze a few things solid before the Frost immune critter shows up. Let the fire guy burn some things before people show up with underbarrel fire extinguishers. Let the Magus Shocking Grasp Rapier some stuff before the Shambling Mound shows up.
It really sounds like your GM should have said “no teleportation allowed” during the character creation phase if even such a limited superhero teleportation was too much for him.
I’m surprised your GM didn’t have the conversation before the game, especially if he felt the need to bring the nerf bat down in session 1. If a thorny mechanic is coming up (e.g. how exactly do illusions work?), I like to hash that out with the player in advance.
And if he had, I’d have gone a different direction with it. I’ve seen GMs go “hey, I don’t like X, I really feel it isn’t balanced.” Usually I have a conversation to try and see what they think is unbalanced about it or what they don’t like, see if I can address that, and if can’t I’ll play something else. Mutants and Masterminds in particular is a game system that I’m never hurting for concepts. Though I will concede that if a GM has problems with characters who have power, I might have a bit of an issue as I rarely want to play something in a superhero setting that doesn’t have a niche to shine in.
And the thing is, I get it. Full out I can teleport anywhere without having seen it before and I can go several miles and take up to 1 ton of weight with me is incredibly hard to plan for. There is effectively no way to truly put that character in narrative danger without canceling his teleportation or literally hitting him so hard, so fast he can’t react. That’s not what I had.
Yah. Seems to me like GM overreaction.
You could always just push the earth into the sun instead. I’m pretty sure that’s a M&M first-level character.
This is why one should always have backups. Spare melee weapon of different damage type/s, ditto for ranged, more than one element of spells prepared, buffs and battlefield control, etc.
In related news:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/captain-hindsight
But for serious, a well-stocked utility belt goes a long way. The more options you give yourself, the less likely you are to wind up in this situation.
Speaking of well stocked utility belts, I had a DM convince me to play a Witch in Pathfinder’s Carrion Crown module. Now, contrary to what you might think, the first section of the module features Incorporeal Undead, the second section features Constructs, the third section features Werewolves, and you don’t even encounter that much Carrion like undead til the end. If you know the Witch’s spell list like I do now, you’d now that most of her effects are Fort saves and mind effects, which means you’re dealing with a lot of immunities there.
So my Witch turned into a research paper of preparing various spells that would work around the immunities of my foes the entire game. Ended up going Misfortune Hex and self buff hexes for most of my choices, Mudball, Summon Monster and Heroism became most of my prepared spell list. It was interesting, but not something I recommend.
Public Service Announcement, if you notice that your module is going to include a lot of “immune to X effect” critters, do not actively urge one of your players to play a class dependent on such effects.
Did you guys get a chance to read the player’s guide?
https://paizo.com/products/btpy8j0q
I love those things for exactly this reason.
The only counter-argument I can make to this is low-levels, where resources are too scarce to have the utility belt. Heck, at low-levels sometimes you barely have enough resources for your main ability.
I’ll admit I’ve been this player occasionally, though with me it’s usually not combat encounters (with the exception of my bad-touch Oracle in the game overloaded with melee beefcakes, I really did feel like the only thing I could ever contribute there were Guidance cantrips and healing which while effective was also very feel-bad). Nah, for me it’s usually the social encounters where I find myself disengaging. I’m not a strong social person, and really suck at the social interactions (which is really annoying given I really like the Charisma-based classes and thus frequently wind up being the party face.) Fortunately I do play-by-post so I can take the time to force the issue in my own mind, but I still tend to find myself trying to push through to when I can just make a roll for whatever I’m after.
In contrast though, we do have one player who tends to disengage a lot in combat, particularly when we play Pathfinder. The player in question hates combat just in general, so pretty much the moment whatever their main gimmick is fails they tend to shut down and often start complaining. Sometimes we can bring them around into alternative strategies, but most of the time we just have to kinda work around them either just doing nothing or else defaulting to the bog-standard “spam the attack button” tactics.
Hey, good on ya for trying to make the social stuff work. I don’t win many friends with my hot-takes on that issue…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/strong-silent-type
…but it means the world to me when players make the attempt. Too bad I-hate-combat dude doesn’t return the favor.
I’m pleased to say that the only time when I found myself completely useless, I didn’t run away.
… of course, I couldn’t run away, because what was making me completely useless was 4-5 levels of exhaustion, but hey it still counts.
In my opinion, you’re never truly useless. As long as you can can move, there is still one tactic to attempt: run into combat then insult the monster’s mother and eat damage until the rest of the party kills the monster. This tactic doesn’t have the best mortality rate, though.
You know how every anime protagonist stands up one more time, even in the face of certain death? This is the D&D equivalent. Running at the monster and waving your arms is a far nobler death than pouting in the corner.
Insert every rogue in 3.5 fighting any kind undead, plant, ooze, construct, person with a magic armour or feat here. I’ve never experienced, but it must be terrible to play a rogue then discover that the BBEG is an undead with DR.
or some Aberrations. Don’t forget them. It’s very important to know that the thing that has tentacles, Improved Grab and an insane grapple check might also be immune to your primary source of competitive damage. Oh, and the odd Prestige Class would occasionally also do it.
Oof. That immunity to sneak attack damage stings a lot. Seems like solving that business…
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?213736-Sneak-Attack-Undead
…Ought to be the first to-do on every 3.5 rogue’s list.
I’ve been in that checked-out place a few times, though not in situations like Magus’s here – a fight at level 1 where we were very outmatched, a fight that the DM later admitted she intentionally made too hard for us, and one time i got stunlocked for five rounds in a row.
Having since stunlocked a lone boss for the entire fight with a Monk, I think that kind of CC can really take the fun out of things on both sides.
As far as hopeless situations where it didn’t feel unfair and I managed to turn things around, though, I do have one of those!
So no shit there we were, fighting a gargantuan demon prince in the climax of our campaign. She had just been summoned onto the prime material; our level 10 party couldn’t realistically hope to beat her in a straight-up fight, but we did have the cliff notes for a binding ritual and the focus object we’d need for it.
My fighter/paladin had finished her role in the binding ritual, and so tried to distract the demon’s attention away from the rest of the party. I sure did get her attention, but then got snatched up and Devoured alive.
On my turn, I dropped to 4HP, and was pretty much out of options. Attacking would do nothing useful if it was even possible while restrained like that; my one strong magical item was out of charges; my half-orc resilience had already been used in this battle; my piddly level-4-paladin spells couldn’t do anything useful at this point; I was out of pretty much every expendable resource you could think of.
As a player, I was at peace with this. It was a good death, an earned death (as long as the party still won in the end, though that was still up in the air).
But I did come up with one last wild, hail-mary option. My character had taken up cooking like her parents, and the very first time we set foot in a magical item shop, she’d picked up her most treasured possession – a Heward’s Handy Spice Pouch (XGtE). A few times a day, this allows you to name an herb or seasoning, reach into the bag, and pull out a pinch which is ‘just enough to season a meal.’
So, my character seasoned the demon queen’s meal – herself – with ipecac.
Now, it’s already a stretch to say that an herb that makes you throw up counts as a ‘seasoning’, and demon princes are immune to poison even when they’re half-bound and increasingly resembling a shambling mound of meat rather than an avatar of unholy glory. But once she finished laughing, our DM decided to roll for it, and my character wound up spat out and alive.
(Both of my characters she’s DMed for have very nearly been vored to death, though in fairness, it was entirely my own fault due to recklessness the other time too.)
Anyway I guess this has been an advertisement for magic spice pouches. Check them out, they’re great in a pinch.
Always a good start. Somebody start the popcorn machines!
Love it. LOVE IT! This kind of business is why we play the game. And on a related note:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dig-deep
I may have been guilty of this in one campaign. I was playing a mind-focused mage who drained enemy health to heal his allies, and after I did really well the first two sessions, we started encountering undead, constructs and oozes. Also the occasional vermin or swarm. The one thing all of these fights had in common was enemies immune to my powers. I was relegated to the role of party band-aid. It was frustrating, and I didn’t totally give up, but I sympathize with magus. Especially if it is more than a single encounter.
One thing that every “how do I challenge this build?” thread has in common is this advice: “Don’t make every enemy immune to that PC’s shtick all the time.”
Suppose you decide to go into the “Temple of Magic-Immune Golems.” Halfway through that adventure, you can bet I’d drop some scrolls of create pit in my hypothetical mage’s path. The idea is to occasionally force alternate strategies, not to blank an entire build.
The cartoon appropriately references what is possibly the greatest film ever made. Mathesar the Thermian, with no appreciable skills or attributes other than engineering and innocence, whacking “Ol’ lobster-head” Sarris with his crutch to end the warlike, tyrannical threat to the galaxy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V5Eqg6C34E
I want access to Dream’s library so that I can watch the Galaxy Quest TV series:
http://www.strangehistory.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/sandman21clip.jpg
Poor Rickman. What a loss! 🙁
Actually,…. somtimes you really can’t do anything.
5e: I was playing a Barbarian, we were Fighting an Evil Wizard in his Tower. At the beginning of the Fight i was promptly put into a Force Cage.
The Cage:
– The Cage can’t be destroyed/left by Mundane means.
– It’s Immune to Dispel Magic.
The only way to Leave the Cage, is by Teleporting out, or someone Disintegrating it. I had no Teleport(s) (Items). None of my Caster Buddies had a Spell that could get me out or destroy the Cage.
So i did what Barbarians do: I trashed against the Cage, screaming Insults at the Evil Wizard. He ignored me, since i posed no more Threat.
The Party beat him in the End, but i sat out the Entire Combat. So: What could i possibly have done in this Situation to affect Combat even a little?
You push up your glasses when you “um actually” me!
Other instances of “character lock” include paralysis, magical sleep, and the “dead” condition. These mechanics tend to be unfun for players because they take away all agency rather than perceived agency agency. As a GM, I’d be hesitant to use the 5e version of force cage against players for that reason. In any case, such mechanics are a slightly different animal than “one of my abilities doesn’t work against this particular monster so I’m going to pout.” That reaction is what I’m describing in today’s comic.
Even so, force cage is a “soft lock.” You smacked the bars dramatically and then taunted the enemy, and that’s something. Assuming you don’t have any items that can help in this situation, the only other tactic that springs to mind is the “help” action. Shouting battlefield advice isn’t a barbarian’s forte, but it’s a contribution. As a GM, I’d be inclined to let “social” contributions have a mechanical impact in that scenario.
Not as I’m trying to poke holes in things here, but is it a CAGE, implying bars and gaps between bars, or a FULLY SEALED GLOBE?
‘Cuz my Barbarians ALWAYS carry around a compound bow, and nothing is more cheeky than knocking an arrow and preparing an action to shoot the wizard when his hands next make with the glow effects.
I have to disagree with the OP. The goal of an RPG is to have fun. If a player isn’t having fun, something is wrong. If the player’s not having fun fighting monsters immune to their character’s stick, why force them to do it? If my players tell me “I don’t like this monster”, I don’t use it. Same for plots, NPCs etc. If it gets to the point where I don’t have fun anymore, we’ll have to talk or change games, characters or groups, but I don’t see the need to force players into situations they don’t find fun.
Not everyone has fun the same way. Some players like to be challenged, having to improvise, find ways to contribute. Other players hate that. They want to play a fireballing wizard and burn stuff down. Both are right.
I think you’re imagining a campaign-long issue. “I’m an enchanter. This is an undead campaign, and they’re immune to all my spells. This sucks.” If the GM didn’t explain that kind of campaign theme up front, I can see where you’re coming from. But by the same token, if the enchanter demands that you NEVER fight undead under any circumstances ever, I think that might be on the player rather than the GM.
I’m imagining that ‘shish-ka-bob, shish-ka-joe, shish-ka-larry’ joke from the Secret of Monkey Island, but with Magus’ (ex-)boyfriends and/or girlfriends…
That reminds me… Is there a reason that bags of holding can’t come in the form of pants of holding? I can’t think of reason that would be broken….
To be fair to Magus, it would be nice if Paizo had published any good spells for Spellstrike other than shocking grasp ever.
Aye. Corrosive grasp is nice to keep in your back pocket, but it also feels like a downgrade in most situations.
I wish there was a full list of magus options. I know vampiric touch and arcane mark off the top of my head, but that’s all I’ve got.
I mean. I’ve played one-trick ponys, with the full knowledge and expectation of hitting that wall. Case in point, my mesmerist. I LOVE my mesmerist. Against elementals/undead, well. So I buff where I can, which isn’t much, and otherwise check my FB or something. No pouting, no huffiness, just ”Sorry guys, I’m not gonna be much help here.”
I was right there with ya until “check FB.” I’ve got opinions on such about scrying devices:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/scryingdevice
I talk about it a little bit on this one…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/waiting-your-turn
…But being an engaged audience member is, I think, an under-appreciated art form. In fact, it might be the most important thing you can do when your build happens to be ineffective.
In our homebrew, one player was playing a goblin chaos warlock, and the thing with the subclass is they get a random effect after every long rest. In this instance he got blindsight but he was blind beyond 5 feet, and he shrunk down to tiny. During combat he was obviously next to useless so what did he do? He cast disguise self on himself as my hat (I was playing a sun soul monk) and did the help action every round. Long story short, you can always find ways to be useful to the party. =)
If I’m a one-trick pony that meets a match I’m not good against, I’ll fight anyway. It’s a forth time in this situation when I’ll become annoyed and complain loudly.
I managed to put all my party in such disadvantage two days ago. They were hunting a wizard, and at the time they got to him, he ascended to Godhood. So he could no sell all their attacks, with exception of God’s weapons. And let’s just say there wasn’t a lot of them here. So how did I manage to make the party think this was the most epic fight in the whole campaign? The wizard had henchmen that were evil twins of the party’s previous characters (including those that no one liked). So they took a great joy fighting those evil twins.
I do not understand this sentence.
It’s occasionally hard to distinguish between “feeling targeted” and “being targeted.” I was playing a chain pact warlock when I met my first helmed horror in 5e. I damn near had an apoplexy.
“Eldritch blast!”
“It’s immune to force damage.”
“What about the necrotic damage from hex?”
“That too.”
“OK then. For my next turn I’ll order my imp to sting it.”
“Immune to poison damage.”
“Fuck it! Fireball!”
“It’s specifically immune to fireball.”
“I WILL BLUDGEON YOU WITH MY DICE BAG!”
“Hmmm… That appears to get through its defenses.”
“ARGHLBRGLE!”
Apparently that really is the default helmed horror though. I just happened to get stupidly unlucky with my choice of actions.