Overconfidence
Thief and Fighter learned this lesson some time ago. Barbarian is about to get a crash course in the same principle. But for all the rest of you eager young gamers out there, the moral of this story is simple: It ain’t wise to tempt the GM. What follows is a tale from one of my long-ago Exalted 2e campaigns. One of my players thought he was invincible. Turns out that weren’t the case. Ahem:
So no shit there they were, a bunch of primordial shapeshifting masters of Creation freshly empowered and ready to rumble. They’d just finished kicking the crap out of the Abyssal anti-party, had spent half a session pouring over the source books, and were ready to cash in their XP for a fresh batch of superpowers. After the mandatory training montage, everyone was eager to share their toys.
“Check out these sweet new mutations. My war form is sick!”
“Who’s got two thumbs and Relentless Lunar Fury? This guy.”
“Essence 4, bitches! Finally.”
“I can’t be killed.”
*record scratch. freeze frame.*
My ST ears had definitely perked up at that. I wasn’t the only one either. The rest of the pack wanted the details too.
“OK,” says our full moon. “You know how I haven’t spent much XP yet? I’ve been saving up for this combo.” It was an interesting strategy, I’ll give him that. Dude wanted to toss Might-Bolstering Blow and Halting the Scarlet Flow onto Unstoppable Juggernaut Incarnation. “Basically, as long as I continue fighting, I won’t ever die! It’s pretty much impossible to defeat me in combat.”
Looking back on those charms years later, I’m not sure it works exactly like he hoped. But at the time, the more important detail seemed to be the arrogance. The challenge burning in his eyes. The certainty that he’d broken the game, and that nothing in Creation could touch him. As a mature and completely dispassionate ST, I naturally couldn’t let that stand.
By some crazy random happenstance, the pack’s next combat was against a Sidereal martial artist. His weapon of choice was a page-long monstrosity of a charm called Meditative Battlefield Escalation. Ima quote the first few lines here just to give you a taste.
Creation is a mundane place to do battle and one that does not allow for true expression of a warrior’s soul. This Charm creates a separate realm. Some claim the character forges it in Elsewhere. Others insist that it exists only in the mind. Regardless, the character appears in a battlefield that is completely of his devising. Scale is usually unimaginably enormous. Range after range of mountains might contain dozes of Imperial Mountains each. The roots of a giant tree might separate several warring cites. The interior of a First Age mechanistic god could stand replete with economically competing nations and heroic god-machines. The battlefield might even lie inside an enormous human body that is failing due to disease. Anything is possible.
Concise language isn’t Exalted’s strong suit. But the TLRD is that the martial artist and his opponents all becomes the mountains or the warring cities or the germs in the body. You transform into conceptual incarnations of conflict. Then, rather than fighting with martial arts, you get to nominate which stats replace attack and defense. That’s the fun bit.
In my version, everyone had been incarnated as obscure departments within the Celestial Bureaucracy. That meant they had to do battle with Socialize and Bureaucracy. Announcing that little detail felt a bit like unveiling the secret ingredient in Iron Chef. Instead of a fighting a sweet kung-fu duel, they had to make sure their departments survived an audit.
The social characters in the party were thrilled. The full moon somewhat less so. As it turns out, ‘unstoppable juggernauts’ aren’t so good in an office setting. If you’ve ever put all your PC’s eggs into the “hit stuff harder” basket, you know how rough it can be when the game tilts toward the talky scenes. The effect compounds when your epic martial arts duel becomes an exercise in filing Heaven’s TPS reports.
Question of the day then! Have you ever seen a “perfect strategy” or an “invincible build” fall on its face? What was the gimmick, and what turned out to be its kryptonite? Tell us your tale of overconfidence and bruised egos down in the comments!
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Hehe. Bear trap. Guess what’s gonna be unleashed on my players now?
(I bring the puns upon myself.)
I’ve never made an “invincible” build, so instead I have an answer to the previous discussion, which I missed. The one about patronizing, and whether the DM should be playing hardball, or letting the players win a little bit.
My pride would once have said hardball. Then I played with a DM who did nothing but that, and it was exhausting. I slowly started losing the drive to roleplay as his constant barrage of entire dungeons coming at us at once, and constantly being stalked and hunted by powerful enemies who always had the best counter to our every move started wearing us down.
The fights were often really cool, but it became less about the cool fun we were having, and more about survival. There was never a moment to celebrate. Stopping to congratulate yourselves on doing well got everyone killed by the next enemy plot, which was already brewing. Roleplay felt pointless, because there was no room for what your character wanted to do. It was make the optimal decision in every situation, or die.
…Nowadays I’m fine with the goblins choosing bad tactics, or whatever else. I’m done with a fun scene where yes, we won partly because our enemies were dumb, but it was fun. I’m fine with not being 100% challenged at all times.
I always think of it in terms of musical dynamics. If it’s all fortissimo all the time, you lose out on the build towards the climax.
I think it’s best to run things (semi) realistically. The BBEdit is smart, but not omniscient. The world is dangerous, but parts are safe. Enemies adapt to fight you, but only based on what they’ve learned. Actions have consequences, but the people/things delivering karmic justice have to figure out the culprit first.
BBEG*
One wise guy of a player devised the “heal-in-a-box.” It was a tiny box “trapped” to cast cure light wounds every time it opened. To give you some idea of what they guy was like, he also had a similar one that cast inflict light wounds and made sure they were identical save for a tiny detail only he knew about.
(To be clear, he spent most of his money at character generation to make both.)
I allowed this, on the basis that at-will gates to the Positive and Negative Energy Planes without any divine oversight were going to get noticed. Possibly including an angry phoenix-person stabbing their spear through the thing. Sadly, that campaign fell apart due to logistical complications before I could pull that trigger. No amount of power-building can overcome one of the players starting college.
Aren’t “trapped” items the basis of the Tippyverse economy?
They are, or rather they are the bit on top that really makes the whole thing take off.
Technically only permanent Teleportation Circles are necessary, but the traps increase the quality of life a whole lot.
As a side note I have kinda wanted to play a game about a magical industrial revolution based around beneficial traps for a long time.
I even have an idea for a inventional myth as an equivalent to the idea of the inventor of the steam engine looking at a kettle boiling and moving the little whistle-flap.
The idea would be some magical trap crafter adventuring due to desperation and coming across a tomb where some intelligent undead had taken to using a reseting inflict X wounds trap they found for healing their wounds and then the light-bulb going off.
Hey, I’d play in that. Sounds like a blast.
Regarding Exalted and bureaucratic combat, I would remind you that one of the canonical Sidereal characters has a name that basically means “red tape cutter”, and that one of his peers is a Chosen of Serenity who likes hitting things with an oversized morningstar.
So there’s probably room in Heaven for an unstoppable juggernaut, if only because every office needs a shredder.
I never got to play a full-on Sidereal game. I always wanted to run a campaign where centuries passed between every session, and the PCs got to watch their fate-crafting slowly take shape over time.
Your story is a helluva lot more unique, but it does remind me of a time our own GM tried to up the ante. This is in 5e.
To this point in the game, our party had been shredding most combats. Our party consists of a Divine Aasimar Warlock, a Warlock/Totem Barbarian Half-Elf, a horrifyingly low-Con Dragon Sorcerer Half-Elf who is always on the edge of death, and myself, a Dwarf Smith Cleric (I like the classics).
By and large, most things we go up against would go down in a pretty heavy barrage of Eldritch Blasts, Ice Knives, an the occasional Spirit Guardians. By an large, unless it was obvious that it was a bad idea, there aren’t any opponents we aren’t willing to fight. We’ve got enough magical firepower to level a small town between all of us put together.
Here comes the Dire Troll random encounter.
It’s already a tough creature; usually on par with Adult Dragons and has five attacks, plus an AoE of death to lay down. The GM deigned to give it what seemed to immunity from all forms of non-magical attack and plus 100HP.
It took the session to take down. The entire session. We began with a direction to move and ended knee deep in troll blood. Somehow, we didn’t end up losing anyone but everyone came close to dying at some point.
You need one of those every once in a while, especially when it’s been all-easy-street-all-the-time up to that point. It sounds like you guys had a strong party, but it’s also possible that the dice just happened to be kind to you up to that point. Play long enough, and it’s amazing which random monsters will seem invincible just because someone finally failed a save or the monster finally crit at the right time.
Still, GJ surviving the killer encounter. I hope you got some sweet trollskin boots out of the deal.
“I don’t think I can be beaten in combat”
“Oh? Well, uh… here’s an encounter with a weird enemy that doesn’t let you use your normal combat mechanics!”
I don’t think you actually proved anything with that, dude.
Yeah, I know the combo.. and it’s pretty cool. It doesn’t make you win a fight though.. winning a fight doesn’t always mean killing your enemies (indeed, if roleplaying is done right, it often shouldn’t). If you focus heavily on survivability, you will be behind on offense comparatively potentially
It actually felt more a little mean that he’d been saving up for ages and they immediately threw a weird social thingy so that he couldn’t use it. Poor lunar
But yeah, it’s exalted, scale is a bit larger.. if a player wants their character to be practically unkillable in a long slog fight.. that’s pretty reasonable. It only keeps you alive while you’re fighting, too.. you could hold off an army forever.. but when they surrender and retreat.. all those wounds might suddenly leave you dead or at least dying
Maybe they just want cool stuff like that
On the contrary. I successfully proved that I am a petty tyrant who is not to be trifled with.
For real though, dude was hyper-focused on combat and ignoring all other elements of the campaign. I was gently encouraging him to diversify.
I also wanted to give a chance for other PCs to shine in combat since he’d been dominating the recent fights at that point.
Chortle
Fair enough.
Player – “My AC is so high nothing can hit me!”
DM – “Cool. Go ahead and roll your opposed grapple check against the raging barbarian dracotaur.”
Player – “the what now?”
Cue Hulk slinging around Loki. . . . Ahh, good times.
ah i see you’re a man of culture as well
I’ve got a somewhat relevant story. In a game I’m in, we were trying to take a siren (homebrew version) to a castle to get healed. The town we had to pass through though did not like them, and it was common to hunt them. In order to insure that the siren wouldn’t wreck havoc, the towns people had a special collar put on her that would nullify her abilities. I was fine with this as my character had proficiency in thieves tools and could pick the lock (I think I had a +7). We left town and I went to pick it and failed miserably. I was pretty urked and we pushed on up the mountain. When we got to the top I tried again, and succeeded. As soon as it came off some magical alarm went off that, had I been successful when picking the lock at the base of the mountain, would have alerted the whole town. So failing actually helped us out.
You see? Character flaws are a good thing, lol.
I’m not sure rolling low is a character flaw
I’m running a Jojo campaign at the moment and my players breezed through the first few encounters. Until one enemy got a good chunk on the party’s hard CC before he went down. Last night they fought that PCs mother (with dad as support) and I got to introduce what the previous generation (parents, grandparents and older siblings) can do while being built through the exact same system as the PCs. Mom wrecked face, they just managed to win and I cannot wait for them to meet the people who actually want to kill them. It was a nice humbler.
Sounds like you’re hitting that Jojo tone pretty well. What system are you using?
https://www.patreon.com/ChristianSibbitt/posts
A custom system that this person posted for free on their patreon, actually. It’s pretty fun and free form. I got to drop a road roller on someone that popped out of a googly eye last night.
With the current version they’ve got official mechanics for Jojo-Supportive-Yelling(TM) labeled as Hype Man, Hamon, Spin Users, Vampires and cyborgs as well as mechanics for balancing stands for tabletop fights.
Villains get built the same way as players but they get a bizarre field that lets them cheat a little bit (extra turns, players don’t get to know what stats they’re using to roll or what numbers they get, only the end result, can burn the field to take extra turns and force rerolls of any dice in a contested roll, including the player’s dice.) That helps them not get action economied to hell along with villainous actions and villainous plots which are like conditional legendary actions they get if the players set them off and a roll to make a PC panic and force them to roll something they’re worse at in the next contested roll.
My favorite part, though, is clashing. When two people contesting one another roll the same thing both characters roll again. If the roll was for damage a multiplier is added that increases for each clash (so it goes from x2 to x3 to x4 and so on) and then gets applied to the winner’s result once they stop clashing. It can turn a devastating blow into a one hit knockout or a regular strike into a hail Mary that shifts the fight real quick on one side’s favor. If the roll ISN’T for damage, though, the GM gets to decide how the multiplier affects the result. It can take a simple lie and make it super successful or a theatrical over the top nightmare in a social encounter.
There’s more that I’m forgetting, but it’s been a fun step away from my regular 5e game while I get ready for a new campaign. (I also got to make an evil soda corporation with its
co-presidents effectively in a civil war using stand users, so that’s fun)
I hope that both parties shout at the top of their lungs for the entire process of a clash, redoubling their volume on each tie.
In Exalted’s defense there is a strong wuxia tradition of arranging so the best techniques are unavailable and the hero’s honor makes him vulnerable. Just have to let the PCs cheat back occasionally
Ah! You have stolen my chi!? No matter. I will beat you anyway.
wuxia noises
Bear traps aren’t a threat because of the damage, they’re a threat because they impede mobility, making it possible for the enemy to destroy you in other novel ways.
Naw man. Bear traps will maul the shit out of you.
Back in D&D 3.0, I had a friend who boasted that his minotaur with a polearm was undefeatable. Because of some combinations of feats, any opponent that attempt to approach him would be tripped up while he calmly moved out of the way.
It was a nice build. But as he soon learned to his character’s peril, it didn’t work so well against the dire wolf riding gnolls. Apparently four legged critters are a lot harder to trip up in D&D. Who knew? 😉
And then he was all like…
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/d0/7d/50/d07d508a4e59a176abfa14de16a61d8e.jpg
One time, my dad ran a simple PvP game for me and my brother. He described it as being “like the Hunger Games,” so I built my character to be a wilderness survival expert, expecting my brother to make a simple combat machine like he normally does. I was going to use my superior noncombat skills to avoid a straight fight, screw with his supplies, and just survive in the wilderness longer than he could.
It was a series of fights in weird arenas. I lost every single one.
In retrospect, I don’t think my dad ever actually read the books.
Sometimes, having a common cultural touchpoint isn’t quite so useful as it seams. lol
I had one event like that, but not on purpose.
We were playing PF1E, and I was playing a Witch. Now, I tend to be a powergamer, so I always made sure that my DM knew he could veto any part of my build if he wanted to. But instead he preferred to try and think of all the stupid stuff I could come up with, and find something to counter it. It was a sort of powergaming arms race, all done in good fun.
Anyway, after I had completely neutered one of his big encounter (a powerful martial assassin character, that I promptly hit with a Ray of Exhaustion, cutting a third of his Dex and removing his ability to go for the backline), he bragged that he had came up with a boss concept that I wouldn’t be able to completely neutralize.
Some time later, we encounter the boss in question, which turn out to be a vampire blood mage of sort, meaning the guy attacked by casting and biting. At which point I burst out laughing and cast Lipstitch, that I had just learned.
He pouted for a while after that. But again, it was all in good fun.
Heh. Lipstitch. I never fail to flash back to the zombie from Hocus Pocus:
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/dc/fd/37/dcfd37dd580d55b79de364cbee53d501.jpg
I’ve done judging on some DnD 3.5 optimization competitions from time to time, and there’s often at least one build that seems incredibly powerful, but is built on very shaky RAW at best. I remember one recently where someone had made this really funny and interesting build based on having an ability that always forced a save if anyone wanted to attack them, and on a failure they had to attack someone else instead. They then got a weapon that, when a command word was spoken, inflicted a critical hit on its wielder. So they reasoned they could activate the ability (for free, as speaking is a free action), then voluntarily fail the safe to transfer the crit to someone else instead. Funny concept, but in my opinion as a judge it stretched well past the limits of RAW.
In a more general case of overconfidence, there was the 1-20 DnD 5e campaign I played in as a paladin. We where level 13 or 14, and where busy killing the 4 ancient dragons of the dragon mountains. Inf act, we’d alreayd killed three, and where going after the fourth one, a blue. We’d stealthed our way to its lair, and had just finished butchering its bodyguards. We where feeling rather confident, having gotten there without any incident (except for the 2-round slaughter of the bodyguards). So we healed up, made sure to be standing in a badass V formation, my paladin at the tip, and the rest fanning out behind, and I used thaumathrgy to slam the door open.
The DM, at this point, was facepalming. The conversation that followed went something like this:
DM: You sure?
Me: Yeah, of course I’m sure, we’ve killed three of tis peers already! I cast thaumathurgy to slam open the doors and then I yell…
DM: Okay, all of you roll a dex save.
Party: wait, what!?
DM: You just killed this dragons bodyguards, rather noisily I might add.
Party: So?
DM: This blue dragon, he isn’t stupid.
Party: Ummm…
DM: He isn’t deaf either.
party: Oops…
Dm: So please roll me a dex save as he breathes lightning all over you the moment the doors slam open.
What followed was a really close fight, and it was only some clutch throwing of an entire barrel of alchemist’s fire that allowed us to eke out a win.
Of course, we learned our lesson, and when next we faced a big-ass dragon god-emperor we…. challenged him to honorable combat two weeks from the meeting, giving it all the time in the world to prepare shenanigans.
You remember that one time Wulfgar woke up Icingdeath so they could have an honorable combat? Don’t be like Wulfgar. 😛
Ah, the demon foot dude. I actually remember that entry.
I allowed one wizard player to find a spell scroll that allowed the casting of a ‘Greater Demiplane.’ This was effectively a 9th-level version of Demiplane which could create up to 100 square feet and apply up to two planear traits. This was intended to provide the player in question with a cool base which he could customize a little – a chance, as you put it, to be a sub-DM. Traditional D&D fare. Instead, he very nearly became the DM wholesale.
See, he saved the thing until he was 17th level, and then he learned it. One of the planear traits was ‘time dilation.’ In the spell I’d cribbed it from, that was unlimited, but I’d ‘limited’ it to a max of 1 inside second=1 outside day or vice versa.
“Can I stack those?”
DM thinking noises
“Of course, but don’t forget the material costs!” (130, 000 gp in various materials – enough for him to cast it once with his wealth at the time.)
The player went away and, when I next gave them down-time, cast one td Greater Demiplane.
There are 86400 seconds in a day. When each of those BECAME a day, the player suddenly had more than enough time to craft an item which should’ve taken months in just minutes. With his absurdly high Arcana, he passed his checks and a legendary item was made… the Staff of Greater Demiplane. D3 charges per day, 3 max, breaks when the last is expended on a d20 roll of 1… you know the 5e drill.
“OK,” said I, “this isn’t a problem. Sure, the player now has unlimited time, but they ARE high-level. They can craft fast, but they still need components, and they can’t get THOSE in their Demiplane, oh no!”
Famous last words, inevitably. Not because they COULD – because they didn’t need to.
Turns out, True Polymorph can turn an object into a creature. A person, for example. The player stacked dilated Demiplanes 20 deep, so that each material second was (according to my calculator) 5.37371772E+98 years in the deepest Demiplane, because each one’s time was relative to the one from which it was created (as I foolishly ruled). In this lowest Demiplane, where a material second was over one trigintillion MILENNIA, which he repeatedly enlarged with the spell (another option I had foolishly added) until it was a little smaller in surface area than earth, he conjured in various plants ECT., added one-way portals to the plane of water to provide seas, before creating with t. Polymorph two raptors. Let’s call them Raptam and Reve.
Over billions of years, he watches these creatures and guides them to sentience, mostly dwelling in the “higher” demiplanes and intervening only occasionally. From there, he creates a civilization devoted to his worship… I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say that if one of his lower-level PC allies/minions hadn’t been invited in for some time-share gloating and suddenly developed chronic backstabbing disorder, things could have ended rather more deifically. In fact, in just over one five-hundred-octovigintillionth of a second, he’d have had enough raptorfolk worshippers assuming continual population growth to not only overrun a sizeable area of the earth, but also promote him to greater deity levels of power (1 billion worshippers+) instantly as soon as they were released. From there… well, suffice it to say that with my low-magic world, he’d have been sitting down behind the screen pretty shortly.
Nice, that is how you do magic 😀
This player also came up with a plan to create a space-bound orb of vampiric mist larger than Jupiter, but that’s another story entirely…
Nice XD
Ah… This reminds me of one of my first encounters as a DM, the good ol’ “barn floor covered in bear traps and hay while an archer shoots at you from the other side.” Good times. (The Paladin/Swashbuckler ended up parrying a bear trap, which was great, except his morningstar got stuck.)
I do possess a PC build I refer to as “Edam the Invincible Swordsman” (Order of the Eastern Star Daring Champion Cavalier with Slashing Grace and Crane Style). Basically, he has MASSIVE boosts to AC (and some DR) from fighting defensively, AND Dex-to-damage AND adds his level to his damage AND has a limited-daily power that adds his level to damage again against a specific foe AND can spend panache points (which he recovers on a kil or critl) to add his level to damage AGAIN for one attack AND he’s a full BAB/d10 HD martial character. In short, his defenses and damage output are insane, at no real sacrifice to his accuracy or health. I once ran a test fight, pitting a Level 10 Edam against another tank of mine (Deathblade Soulstyyl/Carl the Antipaladin Oradin). Carl won initiative, scored one hit, took off a third of Edam’s health and then went fourteen rounds without another hit (even with Smite Good active) as the AC 40 Edam did 338 damage vs Carl’s fast heal 3 and swift action 4d6 heals. Carl literally ran out of Lay on Hands/Touch of Corruption before he went down. Edam also has some out-of-combat usefulness. In addition to his DEX skills, he has decent CHA or INT (depending on the exact build version) and can uncover plot points using psychometry once a day. He can also buff allies with Tactician, and as a single guy with a sword, he’d still be relying on allies to clear out SOME of the enemy, rather than stealing the entire spotlight.
Despite the title, however, I don’t consider Edam to be truly invincible. As Carl demonstrated, when Edam is flat-footed and hasn’t turned on Crane Style, he’s moderately vulnerable to attack. He also always needs to attack to fight defensively or spend his standard action on total defense to keep his AC up, which can cause some problems in combat. Nat 20s will still get through (though crits are unlikely to be confirmed). Like most Slashing Grace users, he is weakened if he does not have the exact type of weapon he normally uses in his hand (in this case, a longsword or machete, depending on the exact build), but unlike them, all his level-to-damage powers still work as long as he has a light or one-handed piercing melee weapon, like a dagger. So probably a bad guy to swallow, giant monsters (though they would at least be getting some damage past his AC). His CMD is fine, but area-of-effect attacks will chip away at his health. His main weakness is likely magic – the Level 10 version’s Will save was only +7. (Though almost all of his ludicrous AC is touch AC, so he can evade most anything with an attack roll, ranged touch attack or not.) The title “the Invincible Swordsman” is only really meant to apply specifically to sword/melee combat (though he should be able to give archers and even gunslingers a real workout).
Unfortunately, Edam’s career has been dogged by starts and stops that can not be resolved by parrying and stabbing things. He was originally created for an Iron Gods campaign (where high touch AC and extreme single-strike damage are vital), but GM scheduling meant that ended at Level 2. (Edam did get blinded for an hour by a blindheim, but still contributed with his Tactician ability.) He spent a while as a backup character for my Magus, who survived her campaign. He was drafted, along with many of my theorycrafted builds, as an NPC in the semi-serious Suicide Squad campaign “The Dreddening”, where he served as the leader of the mercenary Notginyu Force (composed of five of my unused PC builds), which so intimidated the players that they negotiated rather than fight. (Which means Edam HAS defeated a party of PCs, but without stabbing anything.) He was strongly in the running to be my character for a just-starting Carrion Crown campaign, but lost out to Koko the snarky-ex-bard-who-hits-things-with-a-hammer-and-transforms-into-a-winged-four-armed-battle-form-with-six-natural-attacks-(and sneak attack!)-courtesy-of-a-psychopomp-she’s-bonded-with. (Sorry, bro! She was just a perfect fit for the position!) Edam returned again in consideration for a proposed high-level just-go-nuts campaign, but right now he appears sidelined by the rule that all players must make character at odds with their normal habits (which for me indicates that a full caster). But at least Edam HAS made it onto the roster of main characters for the D&D-inspired fantasy novel that I may write… eventually.
I guess what I’m really saying here is that the invincible build’s kryptonite is scheduling.
Heh. I gather that post-nerf Crane Wing is still worth it.
I have seen several of them, usually they fall short of things like FAQs or a proper understanding of English 🙂
Lots of RPG books are made in English, and the ones that not… lets not discuss that. Anyway, since English is our second language sometimes there are conflicted and bad readings from our part. Well, not from me, i know the lungage quite welsh. But some other people may have some problems. They don’t read well the rules, or don’t understand them or got conflicting interpretations. Surely nothing no one here have not seen or do when people is playing some obscure and forgotten bad translated Polish game. In fact Meditative Battlefield Escalation is an example of something we were discussing for more than two hours over the text of the charm. It’s also a good example of why our DM don’t like i play Sidereals. Combining Sidereal martial arts with me is a recipe for disaster 🙂
Let’s put that to the test. Propose a Meditative Battlefield Escalation encounter for me. I wanna see how crazy you can get.
We are Chaos and Law. Always struggling against the other. There, an empire, its citizens fearful of my actions and my effect on them. You are they gods, you must defend them. Here my hordes, i am their gods and will consume this world and win. You must defend them and their world for me to lose.
Or what about this one? We are what we are. I say what i am, then you choose something to defeat me, i counter by being something other that counters you, then you do the same until one of us can’t choose more. A game of being 😀
And this without using other charms 🙂
Can I just start by being Hope and win?
https://static0.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/goodcomics/2008/12/battle26.jpg?dpr=1.5
I suppose you could.
While i write m comment i was thinking of that scene.I suppose you would win then. For what can even dream of defeat hope…
Colin… i… am… Love
https://media1.tenor.com/images/589f15c0c0d8e664dc9cbf6993552d8f/tenor.gif?itemid=13998983 😀
Well… well… well…
After two days is fair to say that i defeated Morpheus the dream lord, a demon from hell, Neil Gaiman and Colin Stricklin at the same time 😛
Internet, who is the best? 🙂
I am the best 😀
That last possibility reminds me of the wizard’s duel between Merlin and Madam Mim in Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone.”
Same game 🙂
I ran a campaign Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and one of my players made a droid specializing in unarmed combat.
He threw every scrap of XP I gave into increasing Brawn, Melee, Brawl, or straight damage. Every credit I gave him went towards cybernetic limbs to do the same, or armor to increase his damage reduction. By the end of the campaign his fists did more damage than some heavy turrets, and he had enough unignorable damage reduction that snipers rifles and lightsabers alike just bounced off. He was UNSTOPPABLE.
You know, aside from the tiny detail that an ion blaster (which you could pretty much buy with the coins you find in your couch) immediately shuts down all cybernetics in the person hit. This droid War God had replaced both arms and both legs, so anyone who happened to drop a couple bucks on an ion blaster could turn him into a particularly swole pile of spare parts.
Luckily the entire party, including him, found that hilarious, so there were no hard feelings about him having such a hard counter.
The most fun I’ve had with a one-trick pony build lately was with a 5e rogue. The setting was Grimhollow with a wilderness survival feel, so naturally I played a party face. The premise was simple: get an 18 for charisma, take variant human for a 1 point cha boost, then for the starting feat take “actor” for another point of charisma as well as advantage on bluff and perform checks to impersonate someone else. With the rogue skill boosts this ends up being +9 with advantage on bluff and perform to impersonate people at level 2. The problem remained using this awesome power when our primay enemies were wild animals. Fortunately, our first encounter was against some shipwrecked vikings. The exchange went something like this:
Vikings: “The prisoners are escaping, get them!”
Scrawny rogue: “Stop brigands, for I am the legendary paladin flips furiously through notes Garren Ulfhart!” *Rolls a 27 on bluff and 25 on intimidate
Vikings: …… *slowly backing away
Needless to say, that was the high point. One of the things I enjoyed about this build was that while it was powerful, yes, it also very much relied on the rest of the party playing along to make it work. In my view, this is one of the hallmarks of a fun optimized build in that it pulls the party in rather than trying to leave them behind.
Hehe, bear trap. I love pun based comics.
And I love stupid traps. Like my favorite, the gelatinous cube pit trap.
I have a similar idea in the “trapdoor.” A door mimic on the ground.
Whenever I hear about some crazy multiclass option in 5e that can devastate your local BBEG so hard your DM has to homebrew a baddy just to counter it, I’ve noticed two things that everyone seems to neglect: a lot of these builds are melee or conversely rarely do any of them take account for silence.
A lot of powerful melee builds I’ve used and played against could be countered simply by being slightly faster and utilizing some common items smartly, such as alchemist fires or whips. For Mage builds casting silence or having a more mundane means to cause silence tends to also shut them down pretty fast, especially if you can afford to burn their higher slots and reactions to constantly counterspell.
I personally never like making homebrew stuff up to counter specific play style s because it adds too much uncertainty at any given moment that can and will warp the balance on ways that are unfun. I can’t imagine players like it when suddenly every mob and boss can counterspell or just trigger an antimagic field just so they don’t get CC’s by the player Mages, or for every enemy to have an AC in the mid twenties just because the Barbarian/Archer Fighter is really good at hitting things. That sort of escalating rocket rage bullshit is why I couldn’t stomach Pathfinder once power creep set in.
Understandably tactics can be hard to think up of an no plan survives first contact. Not to mention homebrew can be as specific as making up a whole new world from scratch, and just giving a goblin a whip to use instead of a scimitar. But what I mean to say is that I always believe that the system in which you, as a DM, can deal with a player cheesing the system is also built into the system to allow you some legal leeway to counteract without explicitly introducing third party content.
Or you can just create a copy of said broken character, make em a bad guy, and send them after the party so they too can taste the might of the munchkin’s build. And if they survive, said munchkin gets to loot his copycat. And if they don’t now they know the difficulties of countering said build.
If I was set upon by the same situation as Barbarian, my thoughts would not be ‘Oh crap, a bear!’.
It would be ‘Where did they find a polar bear in this non-polar region?’ and ‘How do they keep it from starving or suffocating in that hidey-hole?’, moments before getting mauled by the bear and then a frustrated DM.
So… I don’t set out to make invincible characters.
When I used to play in the Palladium Chat Room, GM’s were veto-happy with character concepts. Color outside the lines too much, and you weren’t playing in a game. I’d like to take a moment to mention how monumentally screwed up of RIFTS GM’s to be like that, but that is how it was.
So generally… my strategy to make a PC has become to make a fairly normal character and just play it to the nines. That said, a well played, basic character is very hard to take down. It’s a good exercise for anyone; I highly recommend it.
These days I’m not surrounded by people who knee jerk character vetoes at the sight of anything weird on a character sheet, so I’m trying more things. I also go the extra mile to show a lot of respect to the GM and not over play my hand.
Knowing what I do about Exalted, I’m surprised there isn’t some opposite move the warrior could have pulled out to beat the paperwork into submission or something like that
I got to Run the Shadows alongside a (shifter? Lycanthrope? Whatever) with regeneration. Watched them laugh off a whole mess of attacks and traps over several sessions. Come the finale, a vendetta/ full frontal assault against a rogue Lone Star special ops team, our shifter just strolled across the street-wide gunfight, sure in her invincibility.
Then the enemy mage spotted her. Turns out regeneration doesn’t apply to magical damage. One power-bolt later, and she got to spend the rest of the run writhing on the tarmac whilst the other runners got to claim that sweet, sweet vengeance against Lone Star.
I’ve had it go both ways. I played a War Mage/Cleric with Plate Armor a shield, and a shield spell that put his AC out the Wazoo. We were going up against enemies that had some NASTY effects on a hit, but my AC was so high, they could only hit on a crit.
Which they did, 3 times in a row. He survived, but the effects were… interesting.
That campaign seemed to have a crap ton of Dex saves too. which he sucked at. Easily 75-90% of all of the saves we encountered were dex.
Another similar case was my Swashbuckler/Hexblade, who could opt between Uncanny Dodge or Shield via Staff of Defense. Somehow he just could not make the saves he needed to avoid paralysis, which completely screwed over his reactions and solid dex saves against semi-instant death attacks that followed. He survived, but lady luck was taking out interest on some of those.
However interestingly enough, I’ve also had it go the other way. My Arcane Trickster/Knowledge Cleric Wood Elf had a movement speed of 105 while double dashing (would become 135 once mobility kicked in) and the DM was annoyed that she kept kiting battles and not even being available to choose as a target.
He decided to introduce Giant Hyenas that he had especially given 80ft of base movement, in a bid to specifically kill my character. Shame that she had already gotten used to carrying around an immovable rod with a rope tied around it. Mage Hand lifts it 30ft in the air and Ledgerdemain activates the button to make it immobile, then she climbs up the rope and draws it up after her. Giant Hyenas may be fast, but they still can’t get 30ft off the ground. (more like 45ish, since she started from standing on top of a cart)
From there I just shot at them over and over again, slowly whittling them down while they impotently snarled down below me, having nothing but a melee bite attack to not be able to reach me with. Eventually, the DM just told us that there was a “boss” Hyena that I could identify, so that he could justify the others running away when it died.