Pool Rules
The underwater fight is a sweet action movie trope. You’ve got stuff like the trash compactor scene in A New Hope, the squid monster in Fire and Ice, and even the delicious ’60s cheese of Thunderball. Screenwriters and game masters alike can play with that creeping sense of thalassophobia; the dramatic ticking clock of a dwindling air supply; the hostile, alien environment where the hero can’t apply his full prowess. In theory, this should all translate perfectly into a game. In practice, it becomes a big muddled mess.
Just last session I forgot that there were rules for “walk along the bottom” in Pathfinder. I’ve seen games grind to a halt while water clarity/visibility charts were consulted. On one memorable occasion, I watched my players stand on the deck of a ship as a single PC tried to fight off a giant crab beneath the waves. Everybody else was peering into the murky depths like, “I’m not going in there. There’s rules in there!” In fairness, it was a pretty sweet wrestling match between the ranger and the crab, but come on! When the only critter willing to risk its neck is the badger companion (It goes into a rage! It dives off the ship! It fails its swim check! It bites the water for 1d6!) you know you’ve got some issues.
Now all that said, I actually like the idea of complex rules for underwater combat. A complex system is better able to support a full aquatic campaign, and that means aquatic goblins and weresharks; submarine battles and harpoon guns; shark cages, sonar fights, and all kinds of unconventional gaming goodness. But if robust rules are a plus in the Cerulean Seas, busting out this kind of complexity in a conventional game is rough. When the underwater rules come up just once in fifteen sessions it means that they’re always going to be unfamiliar. Players and GMs alike will have trouble memorizing and applying them correctly, and you run the risk of stopping to ask the local angler fish for his opinion on underwater grappling while the rest of the table builds dice towers and plays on their phones. In my opinion, this is a good time to apply handwavium, but your mileage may vary.
So here’s the question of the day: what was your most memorable underwater encounter? Did you release the kraken? Hold an underwater intrigue in the court of the Marlin King? Mistake a dragon turtle for a tropical hideaway? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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current campaign* retrieving super ossim rings of elements, so of course, OF COURSE, we have an underwater dungeon, complete with fight Nessie to get in, lots of areas once we enter the pocket dimension dungeon that go underwater… the whole 20 fathoms. We pride ourselves on unfairly ganging up on the DM’s plots. Including one: scary something at the bottom of a remarkably large well, super dark, all the bonus horror of you can’t quite tell what it is… but this well is just over 20 foot on a side, natural stone not being perfectly cut and all, and I just happened to still have this odd little box, (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Instant_Fortress) that i drop into the well, crushing the eldritch horror without fanfare. (I get lots of mileage outta that thing, once attempting to burst a monster from the inside by getting it to swallow me with said instant fortress.) I still Have a Nessie Skin cape. it does nothing, but considering the area’s iunhabitants (goblin sometyhings, I dunno, it’s been months now) worshiped Nessie, well, I’m either their God now, or there’s a warrant out for me in the middle of the lands.
*current campaign, which runs in fits and starts, because work is a thing that happens, and when work for the DM is military, sometimes, stretches of 12-18 hour days or unexpected 3rd shifts happen.
Does an underwater instant fortress count as swamp property?
I have actually never once had an encounter with any system’s underwater combat rules. I’ve had fights on docks and ships and on top of the water or with characters who had features that let them circumvent the normal underwater combat rules. Apparently everyone just knows that this is just a thing to be avoided at all costs. Kind of like grappling, but nobody’s sense of cool overrides their sense of common on this one apparently. =P
Complicated subsystems make a lot of sense intuitively. Harpoons work better underwater because stabbing works better than chopping. If you can’t steady yourself by passing a swim check, you can’t fight effectively. Etc. etc. The problems come in when you take all the “what ifs” that one step too far and begin wondering how well you can fight in muddy water that has a current when you’re braced against the monster’s carapace. I think that’s when the GM just throws up his hands, ignores the systems, and says, “Screw it! You’re at a -2. Fight as normal otherwise”
There was one time in PFS where our party had to face a ghost while underwater. Never before have I seen such a marriage of Monster and Environment create such a troubling situation for a party. A mid-combat Pearl of Power, two castings of Ghostbane Dirge, and Fighter with an enchanted sword allowed us to pull through.
I’ve done ghost + spring attack, hiding in the walls, and even 5′ stepping down into the floor. I have yet to try this combination. My players are in the middle of this monstrosity…
http://dungeonaday.live.subhub.com/
…and I have no doubt I’ll get to try it somewhere before the end. I have a feeling that the hard part will be dodging the dice and the PHBs.
I think I played that adventure luckily it was at a lower lvl so we only had to fight ghouls but our gm also forgot the walk on the bottom stuff until my budding rules lawyer skills found the rule that said you can if you have X weight and since we all had armor above this we went from floating only five feet a round to flanking the gouhls and stabbing them all in there ugly webbed appendages
Every time I manage to save the day via rules lawyering, I imagine Cleric nodding in dwarfy approval.
Never really had what I’d call a good underwater encounter, for many of the reasons you outlined here. When it was absolutely unavoidable, I think we mostly treated it like flying, but slower. Tabletop games are capable of a lot of good things, but IMO simulating combat in 3 dimensions is not one of them.
Yup. When you have to apply swimming rules, the trick is to make them just different enough from normal combat to *feel* different. Unless it’s an underwater campaign, anything else is a waste of rules lookups.
5e player / scuba diver here. Our DM recently made us do some underwater exploring (little to no fighting) as part of a naval adventure. It’s kinda fun but at the same time tedious, if you got things like “Maximum Operating Depth” or “Decompression Sickness” lurking in the back of your head when using spells like “Water Breathing” or some magical air bubble that lets you breathe underwater for some 30 minutes.
I know he fit that in because I’ve been talking about diving for quite some time, so I knew he expected me to take some care of these aspects. It’s also no small feat to consider the question of “How are we going to get thos treasure to the surface?” in a more creative way than “I stuff it in my bag of holding.”. You’ll need hundreds of pounds worth of lift, after all… and that bag of holding would get flooded if opened underwater…
Yeah, fun times….
So did you actually have to invent mechanics for the scenario as the “expert player?”
Well, we actually handled it by limiting our ascension rate to roughly 30ft./min. (ignoring decompression stops). Concerning loot, we simply didn’t take that much with us and handled the rest with a bit of good old fashioned handwavium (“Yeah, this would totally be covered by a solid casting of Water Breathing!”) a.k.a. “Don’t make the game so complex you can’t enjoy it anymore.”
We had an instance in the 5e campaign I’m running where the players were trying to get across a river so they could go kill some ettercaps in a particularly deep part of a forest. Said forest was perpetually shrouded in fog, so visibility is low — low enough that players can only see out to about 30ft (which I mostly succeeded in remembering throughout their time there).
Essentially, the players are standing on the edge of this river in a 60ft wide bubble of visibility. No sign of the other bank, they can’t tell how deep the river is because of fog and murky river water, etc. The Warforged decides they’ll walk out along the river bottom to see if they can at least learn more about the river’s dimensions (they’re not waterproof, but at least they don’t need to breathe and have enough Constitution to “hold their breath” long enough to appreciably get somewhere while traveling at wading speed). Showing a modicum of prudence, the group decide to tie all their ropes together, attach said tether to the warforged, and agree to all start pulling if something bad happens.
Warforged wanders into the river and makes it a good 100ft in (far enough to tell that the river’s at least bottoming out, so it’s not super huge) before running afoul of a water elemental, which is camouflaged by virtue of being made of water while swimming in water. Unable to determine what the heck is battering at him, Warforged decides to turn around. Rest of party notices rope go slack after feeling a couple of vibrations and starts hauling. What ensues is a series of rounds where all the Warforged does is move at full speed back to shore, the elemental tries its darndest to turn the Warforged into scrap, and the rest of the party hauls on the rope for all they’re worth while occasionally sneaking nervous glances at the surrounding fog, which is now beginning to make ominous teakettle noises.
Eventually the battle spills onto the shore with the Warforged, very crumpled and barely holding together, followed by a big blob of angry river and several nearly-invisible long-nosed steam clouds. I guess it’s technically not underwater combat, but it’s the closest my group’s ever gotten to it. That fight did result in one of those lines you only ever find yourself saying in D&D games, though. (“You successfully pee in the water elemental. It seems very cross with you.”)
Funnily enough, there was a ford maybe a few hours downriver from where the party was, but they never ended up finding it. They would’ve had to fight the water elemental and mephits while hip-deep in river, though, so maybe it’s just as well.
Mad props for “nearly-invisible long-nosed steam clouds.”
Do… Do warforged need to pee?
Hey, a PC got attacked by a monster while underwater. That sounds like underwater combat to me!
Regarding #2: No, that was our ranger. He brings many shenanigans to the table, like Spider Climbing the city’s main government building in broad daylight because he decided he wanted a better view of the city, gluing himself to an angry displacer beast with Web so he couldn’t fall off while riding it, and attempting to tell if things are magical by licking them.
To be fair, the first time he did that last one was with a magic mushroom that acted as a potion of growth, and the rules say you can identify potions by taste-testing them. He just keeps trying it in hopes that it will work with other stuff.
Ah. The “I push the big red button” type. I know that ranger well: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/areyousure
Our Fighter refuses to go near large bodies of water. And it’s not because of rules. He was swallowed by a sea monster. Twice. The first time it happened, we were on a boat and got attacked by basically a dinosaur shark. Think Jaws the size of Godzilla. We had cannons, but when it got too close to the boat, we couldn’t aim them to hit it. So Fighter grabbed a cannon, yanked it up, and fired. The GM had him roll a ranged attack, then a Reflex save. He nailed the attack but not the save. He and the cannon both fell into the water and got swallowed by the understandably angry shark. Luckily the shot had done enough damage that we were able to kill it 3 turns later and pull him out of its stomach. The second time, we were on a boat for an entirely different reason and were attacked by a kraken. Fighter managed to hit one of the tentacles hard enough that it basically disappeared. The kraken then proceeds to grab him with another and yank him into its maw. About 5 turns later, the kraken was getting pretty badly hurt so it spat him out to distract us so it could get away. As you can imagine, Fighter is now paranoid about the ocean and won’t go near it.
Your Fighter in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-7UwvyVzG4&t=4m45s
lol
Wait, wizard? I thought he was a sorcerer – based on the fact that his background is filled with instantaneous magic. Maybe he is multiclass sorcerer/wizard? I don’t know anymore.
Some helpful reading: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/role-call
My group played the Skull and Shackles adventure path, which had some underwater encounters. Unfortunately, the abovewater ones were usually more memorable. Like the time half of the party got eaten by mosquitoes while the other half ran away*, followed by all but one of the other players dying to ghouls. Or the time half the party was eaten by a giant plant dangling over the bay.†
*Aside from one guy with low hit points, the ones who died were the ones who tried to fight the swarm with their AoE spells. Which basically amounted to burning Hands and my kineticist’s blasts, since this was still at first level.
†The first two to die were the one that were the flying one and the one he carried. The third was my suspiciously similar kineticist (who was not replaced by a third kineticist—I made a caecelian mesmerist). The rest of the party didn’t have any ranged attacks effective enough to stick their heads above the water
In retrospect, we struggled with anything that didn’t allow melee combat. Probably because the most mechanically-proficient players were playing a rogue and a grappling build designed to support the rogue.