Too Much Confusion
I trust that you guys recognize that symbol. I also hope you made your save, because there’s nothing quite like confusion to ruin a party dynamic.
As of this writing, today’s tale from the table is only a few hours old. It comes courtesy of my Pathfinder 1e gestalt game, where our intrepid duo of slayer/urban barbarian and cabalist vigilante/aether kineticist just ran face-first into this horrifying thing. I knew going into the encounter that a fiendish seugathi would mess with my players’ minds. It’s a hideous spawn of madness after all. I just didn’t expect it to mess with mine as well.
Here’s how things broke down. The PCs made their saves vs the creature’s confusion aura in round 1, dropping the gruesome thing to a quarter of its hp almost immediately. I figured that, as a mini-boss, the seugathi should give a good showing before its inevitable defeat in round 2. So when its initiative came up, I opted for the optimal play. It cast the actual confusion spell dead center on a group of clustered characters. Two allied NPCs failed the save, and one of them happened to be a powerful magus cohort. If you’re familiar with the magus class, you know how spikey their damage can be.
Here’s where the relevant conundrum comes in. Because the seugathi gets to pick an option from the confusion behavior table, it chose to inflict the “attacks nearest creature” result. That meant the magus had to spend his turn beating up on Team Good Guy. And since I wanted to scare my players a bit, I once again opted for optimal. The magus unloaded the standard shocking grasp spellstrike into his rapier. I figured that turning a 1d6+6 pointy poke into a 6d6+6 electro-wallop would make for a suitably scary moment. One confirmed crit later, and I had a 12d6+12 death stab on my hands. At 6th level, the average of 54 points of damage from that attack was more or less an insta-kill.
We talked about this sort of moment back in “Handicap,” where I had to make a number of decisions that could subtly affect the difficulty of a fight. The phrase “attacks nearest creature” is one of these moments. That wording is vague enough to mean “attempts a non-proficient unarmed strike,” “unleashes a deadly spell,” or simply “strikes with weapon.” But when you’ve got options like power attack and arcane strike and (as in my example), spellstrike to play with, even the simple “strikes with weapon” begins to get complicated. For my money, it feels like dirty pool for a player to say, “I make a non-lethal slap attack.” But by the same token, I’d be pretty irate if my GM insisted that I had to “make my strongest attack,” firing off a meteor swarm centered on an adjacent ally.
Feeling that I’d backed myself into a “the GM needlessly chose to kill my character” situation, I resorted to some narrative shenanigans to save the dead’d character. But I wonder how you guys think about these questions. When there’s wiggle-room in the rules, how do you decide which call to make? Is it the one that benefits the players most? The one that ramps up narrative tension? Or do you try to hew closely to that mythical beast known as RAI? Sound off with your own approaches and thought processes down in the comments!
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I recall seeing that madness worm before in an AP. Luckily, our encounter with it was mostly confusion-free, we got lucky with our saves and burned it down fast, treating the fight as if it was a turn away from killing us all. Because with that aura, it very much.
As far as friendly PC smacking goes, confusion is the lesser evil compared to dominate person.
For one, confusion has the randomness effect, usually resulting in a wasted turn, or nothing at all. Second, the ‘attack’ element usually allows for a basic melee slap rather than your best killspells (dangerous on certain PCs, mind you).
Domination, on the other hand, is brutal. Apart from the single save on being given an order like ‘kill them all’, you’re effectively stuck for hours or days trying to mindlessly and relentlessly kill your party. If you lack dispel magic options at that point, you effectively have to KO/kill that PC until it wears off, even if you kill the caster controlling it (we rule that the victim continues its last command).
Domination almost killed two of my characters as my Wizard got critted by a fighter, and my gunslinger got focused by an optimized barbarian.
I suppose this is an example of what Colin was talking about, but when ran a whole cat-and-mouse arc against a vampire, I ran into a situation where two of the present PCs were Dominated and fighting the third. The third PC, a Kineticist, actually had a decent chance of being able to disable both of them (the vampire had already backed off because the Kineticist had taken off half her health in one shot, and he can automatically do nonlethal damage with his powerful attack, while having better AC and more HP than either Dominated target – he also couldn’t be Dominated because he was a leshy and so not a “person”). But because a vampire’s Dominate RAW lasts for TWELVE DAYS, I decided to interpret the line “any subject forced to take actions against its nature receives a new saving throw with a +2 bonus” to apply every ROUND the subject is forced to do such actions. This seemed fair to me – the spell remains extremely useful outside of combat and decently useful in combat if you target it right, but the save right after an attack order is no longer a die roll upon which all else hinges (something I greatly dislike). So that’s how we run Dominate Person/Monster in my group now, for both enemies and PCs. (I also houseruled that the vampire’s Dominate power has a “if the target resists, it is immune for 24 hours” limitation and usually requires eye contact to establish, because a vampire spamming that from hiding and repeatedly mindjacking PCs doesn’t strike me as a fun battle, especially when vampires have so many other abilities to use.) And the players still very much feared Domination, especially after they learned that one PC had been Dominated off-screen (the player had sneaked off to do something private and got ambushed) and had been feeding the enemy intel the entire time. Great fun without slaughtering any PCs.
That is exactly the interpretability I’m talking about. It’d be tough to say that “spying on my allies and reporting to the evil dude” isn’t “against my nature,” but that’s a scenario where saving every round would make the cool story beat meaningless. By the same token, if you’red dealing with a “kill them all” order, then 12 days of “I guess we tie ’em up and wait for the duration to elapse” is lame. It makes for a slightly inconsistent experience, but making these calls in different situations is very much part of a GM’s job.
Great example!
Actually, that PC kept so many secrets and took so many actions behind the rest of the party’s back (she got Dominated while secretly meeting solo with an NPC) that I would argue that spying for the enemy actually WAS consistent with her nature. Even beyond that, Dominate allows the caster to see through the target’s eyes and communicate with them telepathically, so the “spying” order was actually “act normally and stand by for further instructions.” No saving throw against that. This has the added bonus, in my interpretation, of negating the “Sense Motive check reveals the subject is Dominated” thing, because they are behaving naturally under their own control until they receive new orders. I think I did give the PC a single roll to resist forging a clue and then “finding” it so the party would walk into an ambush, since that was overt action against allies. (She failed the save.)
During the ambush when she was ordered to attack the party, this PC did use her not-that-useful spell Boneshaker to attack rather than her more powerful sword attacks, but in fairness she does that to enemies too, so it wasn’t exactly holding back.
REFLEX: Prevent damage.
FORTITUDE: Prevent your death.
WILL: Prevent TPK.
AC: Prevent rolling a save to begin with
HP: Prevent a re-roll
CHA: Prevent you, your rogue or your bard from getting hanged/executed.
„confusion“ doesn’t have to mean „confuses friend with enemy“ (and tried to kill friend) it can also mean „confuses enemy with friend“ (and tries to stop party members from attacking this friend (grappling is so annoying))
or they think the allies are attacked by bees: https://rustyandco.com/comic/level-6-45/
Well the mechanics in pf1e do imply you can’t tell friend from enemy – as you refuse to accept spells (even friendly ones) and other friendly effects. There’s also the berserk rule, where if attqcked whilst confused, you HAVE to attack the attacker instead of rolling on a table. This is why confusing a group of monsters leads to an all-out brawl.
not so much imply as right out state „cannot tell the difference between ally and foe, treating all creatures as enemies.“
but passing a note to a player „your friend is covered in snakes, go stab them“ gives a good excuse to forfeit critical hits.
This is interesting to me as it goes a step beyond “interpreting the wiggle room” in a role. This is full-on homebrew, which is also a viable way to play.
I almost mistook Mr. Stabby’s ominous aura for a fiery breath attack from an offs-screen monster.
Naw. It’s just Mr. Stabby’s natural joie de vivre.
… Isn’t it a sobering thought that all this time, either Mr. Stabby or else Fighter’s own lack of mental focus was preventing him from slaughtering his fellow party-members for XP…
It makes sense for Mr. Stabby to reign him in, once it realized working with the party gave it more opportunities to kill high-leveled prey.
Maybe casting insanity on someone already insane cancels it out? Or it makes them ‘Joker sane’.
The monomaniacal murder sword is a voice of reason.
Is the insanity symbol a generic creation of Laurels, or is there an “official’ artwork for it (and other symbols) somewhere, like with the runes of sin for Pathfinder?
If she found it somewhere, she didn’t mention anything. Pretty sure it’s an original.
The only semi-official “sign” I know of is the elder sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elder_Sign.svg
This game also has some fun somatic components: https://www.amazon.com/WizKids-72789-Rock-Paper-Wizard/dp/B01LW2INHK
As far as I know, the Elder Sign is a Cthulhu mythos element, a protective ward from the Eldritch horrors. I guess that’s why it’s in 5e.
Another ‘official’ symbol (at least in Pathfinder) is the Yellow Sign (associated with the King in Yellow, Hastur).
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/lovecraft/images/a/a6/The_Yellow_Sign.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161006134025
I appreciate that the Yellow Sign goes to a dead page.
Must be those pesky investigators at work.
In my opinion, A good narrative always takes precedence over playing the rules strictly as written, especially when it comes to monsters with potential instant kills, like Ghouls. Nothing feels worse than coming up with a good backstory, building a sheet you like, only to get paralyzed and coup de grace’d on round 2.
Example; There’s a boss in war for the crown that the party fights at level 9. If you’re a barbarian with plenty of constitution, you MIGHT have a good 90 hp on you, 99 if you’ve been putting your favored class bonus into hp.
This boss has an absolute minimum damage of 124 on his critical hits, because paizo gave him an x4 crit weapon.
Naturally, every time I’ve run that encounter he’s crit on round 1.
While there’s plenty of room for pc death in tabletop, I’ve always been of the mind that getting randomly one-shot from full hp is an awful story moment and should be quietly swept aside in favor of a nearly lethal wound that leaves the party member reeling, possibly unconscious, but alive.
Have you looked at the dramatic deaths system in 7th Sea? I think you’d dig it.
I haven’t, no, I’ll definitely have to take a look!
I’ve been a fan of the 5e ruleset for a ‘last stand’ which is on dmsguild (https://www.dmsguild.com/product/242601/Last-Stand-A-Worthy-Death#:~:text=Last%20Stand%3A%20A%20Worthy%20Death%20is%20a%20character%20option%20supplement,RE%20DAMN%20RIGHT%20IT%20SHOULD!%22)
they went as far as to make multiple options for each class’s final moments, which I think is really neat. I understand why pathfinder doesn’t have something similar but I kind of wish they did, especially now that 2e removed the ‘you either drop to 0 exactly or die because of overkill’ stuff that plagued mid-to-lategame 1e
Generally for confusion and dominate style effects we go for whatever our normal attacks are, for the specific character and rough situation.
So stuff like power attack and arcane strike, probably get’s added since those are done all the time, while spell-strike and other expendable resources depends on how many of them you have and how much you’d normally hold those back when fighting.
That seems more fair to us than either the slap or the “your most powerful attack no matter what that is” too.
So if I’m hearing you right, it’s mostly a decision made from the character’s POV rather than the player’s.
oof, this is why I am glad I rarely DM.
I think this is also the reason dice rolls are made behind a screen for the DM.
Having been in a few “I am totally going to die now” situations, I can say I think I personally prefer to let the dice roll how they fall so to speak and just play out the situation as it happens.
In the case of being the DM in these kinds of situations, I think that by the time you are using these kinds of tactics, you and your players know each other pretty well (unless you are playing high level one shots with a group of people you just met?), so I would say trust the player to decide.
When you tell them their character chooses to attack “the nearest creature”, if they start making the least optimal attack, maybe “remind them” that they see everything as an enemy now and ask if that is really what their character would do. Or if they start “going for the jugular” on their own party and you can see the Xs in the eyes about to happen, remind them that while everything is their enemy, they can still play tactically and do not have to unleash everything at max level for this one moment… unless they really feel that would be their characters decision to make.
I suppose it all depends on how much the confusion “takes control” of the character. If they are out of their minds and not in control at all, then maybe it is best to fully DM control them. If it is a temporary effect, or they still retain themselves to a degree, let the player decide things?
Again, glad I am not the DM 🙂
Indeed. I’m less concerned about players abusing this business. Most of the time they’ll fall somewhere in the middle, going for an “average attack,” whatever that might be. It gets a bit harder when you’ve got to weigh GM responsibilities like encounter balance, dramatic tension, and fairness.
We’re playing a game; if RaW and RaI indicate a character should die, they’re dead. If not then why even bother with dice and rules.
It’s the DM’s responsibility to make sure situations beyond the character’s capabilities don’t pop up without fair-warning.
I always give characters various int-checks to know how to circumvent effects. Most mind-whammies can be solved by whacking the guy over the head.
The point is that RaW and RaI are occasionally silent on the subject. GMing is what happens in these moments.
There was that one time where a player of mine made a Swashbuckler Rogue / Hexblade Warlock multiclass that did crazy amounts of spike damage with Hexblade’s Curse Sneak Attack Eldritch Smite. That character got his brain devoured and replaced by an Intellect Devourer, and I had so much sadistic joy in saying, “Make a Hexblade’s Curse Sneak Attack Booming Blade Eldritch Smite against the Wizard.”
How’d the wizard fare?
About 2 HP away from being instantly killed, if I remember correctly. Intellect devourers are downright unfair, man.
This strikes me as one of those things that’s made difficult by players not being upfront about what they want. There’s a good population of players who want a “haunted house” experience. It LOOKS scary, but, in reality, is designed with effective safeguards against serious injury or death. Like a real-world Haunted House or horror movie, it’s a safe place to be frightened for a bit. This validates the choice to write, and become highly emotionally invested in, long backstories and narrative character arcs. It also tends to mean the role of the monsters is, effectively, to be little more than self-propelled bags of experience points and upgrades (loot and gear). But, sometimes (well, okay, maybe more than sometimes), players are uncomfortable with narrative-oriented games, because the inevitable march towards a happy ending pushes them to feel that they’re simply being given something that they want to be able to say they’ve “earned.” So they opt for the game to more resemble a genuine “encounter with deadly danger” experience. In effect, they want things to be nerfed; they just don’t want to know about it.
In my games, I kind of force the players to own, and be open about, what they want. If someone shows up with a lovingly-crafted backstory, I’ll straight up tell them, “Hey, you realize that at first level, if your characters walk into an ambush, your character might not make it, right?” Or sometimes, I’ll just flat out go for a read of the room and say, “Hey, it looks like everyone is really angling for a character-driven game. The world will accommodate you in this, and your characters will never genuinely be threatened. Are you okay with this?” And if someone says they want their characters to be in genuine danger and then sulks or becomes upset if said character dies, they aren’t invited back. Because I’m an old man, and I don’t have time for people who aren’t in touch enough with themselves to be comfortable owning and telling me what they want.
In the end, if the monsters are going to be deliberately ineffective, that’s fine, but I don’t really want to run games that are about the players telling themselves how good they are at gaming, because their characters trounced a bunch of monsters that they were hamstrung from the jump. It feels too much like junior high school. For some people, they’re willing to allow the players that self-deceptive fantasy. But I don’t find it an enjoyable way to run games.
My players happened to be pretty up front on this one. They like their characters, and permadeath is off the table. Figuring out how to make that work moment-to-moment remains a challenge, but I’ll take a narrative Band-Aid over a crushed player any day.
Fair cop. But telling the difference cam be hard sometimes. Consider the old “does the monster use coup de grace” conundrum. The hard mode GM might choose to take a turn off from combat to make sure a downed fighter stays down. But there are plausible arguments for why a bugbear or whatever would continue fighting the enemies that are still standing. These are both valid choices, even if they’re different styles. But more to the point, I’m not sure the “easier” version somehow gives the dreaded asterisk to the PCs.
“Figuring out how to make that work moment-to-moment remains a challenge, […]”
Why? If permadeath if off the table, and everyone knows it, then everyone should agree that things like monsters using coup de grace or mind-controlled PCs using their most effective attacks are party fouls that will be rolled back as necessary, if there isn’t a good in-game way to undo them. I don’t opt for the optimal play when the monsters are basically just practice dummies. The challenge of the game then has to lie in other areas.
Figuring out how to do that gracefully is the problem. The Haunted House only works when it still seems dangerous. So even if you agree to find a way to “roll it back,” that’s not always easy to execute in an elegant way.
I think that “this thing can kill me” is a pretty narrow way to look at risk and reward. I find that players are just as scared of performing poorly or looking weak. In other words, the tactical challenge doesn’t go out of the game just because “I’m not going to have to roll up a new dude if I lose.”
Agreed, which is why I noted that the challenge of the game needs to lie in other areas. I’m a huge fan of time pressure to impart a need to be tactically smart about things, even when it’s a given that death isn’t on the line. There are a number of ways to make the game challenging that don’t involve threatening characters’ lives. (But I don’t have to tell you that.) I guess I’m just much more willing to be let the players see the workings of the Haunted House.
…unless I “accidentally” caught the enemy caster in the blast radius, that could be pretty funny.
The only good solution to the general problem is to know how much effort will make the players worried about their characters’ survival, without actually killing them. And that is not a skill I have. Confusion is the bane of my party’s existence whenever I make the mistake of using it.
This is exactly the sort of layer initiative that I appreciate. Turning to your buddy and whacking ’em for standard damage is all well and good. But creatively interpreting a vague effect for lolsy moments is the reason I come to the table.
True that. This was more or less my goal as a GM in the OP. However, I REALLY should have rolled it behind the screen.
I don’t mind mind whammy spells that end up causing pseudo PVP. Teaches parties the important of Protection from Good/Evil spells and why you don’t dump your wis saves. What I dislike is when the GM insist that “attack the nearest creature” means “Blow all your resources in this one turn like a young virgin blows their load in their first sexual encounter” or the marginally worse “I’m just going to straight up control your character”.
Yes I understand a GM doesn’t appreciate a player trying to weasel out of a mind whammy affect by having their raging barbarian with a +2 Greataxe decide this is the best moment to pretend to be a rogue and stab with a finesse dagger, but at the same time I feel that unless the character and the player are actively wanting to kill whoever is nearest to them, they’re still actively trying to fight against the mind whammy.
Tangibly related, when I run confusion I prefer to keep the result of the confusion roll a secret. Characters are confused after all, they DONT know what they’re doing. They might not know that their next attack isn’t in fact going towards the BBEG, but their team cleric. Gives them conniptions. And enables the BBEG to lay down the hurt.
That’s interesting. So your approach is to produce an in-game reason to allow for the less-deadly option. Solid.
How does that work with positioning? I mean, wouldn’t you know that you’re attacking your buddy the Cleric if you didn’t move adjacent to the enemy you meant to charge?
I don’t play D&D and GURPS lives and breathes by the “Law of It’s All Optional Rules” (kinda) so I’m more of a “what’s good for the game”. And by ‘game’ I mean group.
Some groups roll hard on the “as the dice fall”, “player versus environment (I.E. GM)” and so they expected the maximized expanded enhanced quickened lengthened ribbed gigachaded Fireball to drop when the party Wizzie gets confused*, and you know what? That’s the way they want it, so they get it. No failure to communicate.
Some groups are “story first”, and in those sitchy-ations it’s maybe best to scale back the hurt. Maybe. Maybe the story calls for the Wizzard to fry the hapless Quest NPC (along with the party). Maybe it calls for him to fry the wrong baddie, or right baddie in the wrong way. Or to cast something weird that has no overall effect (other than blow a spell slot). In a Needs of the Story sitch, the GM has to really know the Story the PCs think they’re telling and their expectations. And how to crush those expectatio- err, how best to proceed.
Mentioned above, I run GURPS, and * Confused works differently, in GURPS Confused means you Do Nothing (you stand around trying to figure out what to do, you can defend yourself normally, but you can’t attack or move). So I roll out Hallucinating to simulate what DND calls “confused”. I describe the weirdness that Character is seeing and let the PC decide how to react (with penalties, unless they are sued to operating under weird hallucinatory situations). Often they will end up attacking random figures, or just stand around in a defensive state. If the Character also suffers from phobias, that’s when Hallucinations can really pay off narratively…
I wish it was an easy binary. In most of my groups (and even in some of my individual players) there’s a mixed bag on this point. Figuring out how to split that difference can be rough.
I like to describe the hallucination as well. My go-to is, “Your friends are gone… That thing must have teleported them! In their place are monsters.” Elaborating on that basic shell can be a lot of fun.
My favorite example of that is when I was a Player, that GM generally liked mind-bending my characters because I always rolled with it well. 100% no meta, I stayed firmly in what the character knew and tried not to telegraph to the other Players my character was now working for the Other Side.
So it was an ‘Aliens’ game and we were Colonial Marines investigating a colony that had cut contact. We found the remaining colonists hold up in the mines, and they claimed the other colonists had been killed by weird alien wolf things that came out of nowhere (it was supposed to be an uninhabited planet before Weland-Yutani started terraforming it).
It was worse, but we didn’t figure it out until after I was bitten by an “alien wolf-thing”. It was alien were-wolfs…
The GM passed me a note that said “You’re infected and turning into a were-wolf, I’ll describe how you experience the world, but you still react as you wish. The Mission is “Survive, Escape, Regroup with the Pack, Obey the Alpha”, but ignore this until I tell you to follow the Mission.”
So the GM starts describing how things are getting weird for me right out in front of everyone else, hallucinations, suddenly heightened sense, etc. I actually sense two attacks before they occur and we manage to drive the wolves off without any casualties. But the group think it’s just a bad infection, so they leave me alone with the medic. The GM has me wake up in the middle of the night after a feverish nap, feeling a lot better . The medic PC starts asking me questions (like “How do you feel, are you okay?”, “Are you still seeing, hearing, smelling weird things?”) and the GM says to me, “The pink thing is jabbering at you, it’s hard but you can understand it if try you, but it’s annoying thinking like it causes pain. You know what the Mission is.”
So I say, “I try understand the pink thing?” GM: “Roll IQ and Will.”
I succeeded. GM: “You can understand the pink thing, the pain is moderate but endurable.”
Me: “Let’s sweep the perimeter, I’ve got a bad feeling.” The medic just nods and we do a quick check of the exits, during which time I acquire a pair of bolt cutters. The whole time the medic keeps asking me questions and I’m just giving non-committal grunts as responses (GM: “The pink thing is jabbering at you, it’s starting to hurt your head”, I keep barely making IQ checks, but I’ve been failing some Will checks and the headache is becoming unbearable). We get to the last secured mine entrance, which is guarded by dark skinned colonist ‘guard’ (“a dark brown thing”) and remote sentry guns (“oily metal smelling thing”). I give the gun a look over, check the chained and locked ‘cage style’ entrance doors, and then I roll IQ and Will (success by a large margin) and tell the guard “You can take five, we got this for ya.” The guard steps away and the medic is suddenly thinking my Character must be feeling a lot better, “You said a whole sentence, great! How do you feel?”
I say “I choke the pink thing into blessed mental silence.”
The GM turns to the medic’s Player and says “Suddenly [evileeyore’s character] grabs you and starts to slip you into a choke hold, what do you do?”
Medic: “I’m the pink thing?!?!?”
Suffice to say the Navy medic folded to the Marine, got bit, I disabled the sentry gun, cut the chains, and slipped off into the wilds to join the pack and make a new character…. I made a new character every single mission, it was one of those games. The medic was actually cured of the alien retro-virus, but while that was occurring The Pack managed to secure a shuttle and slip off world and escape into the warp… all thanks to the knowledge the newest Pack Member brought to them.
“I’m the pink thing?!” became an in group rallying cry for whenever things went in the opposite direction that we thought it was going. We’d signal this by saying “Guys, we’re being Pink Thinged” or “Hang on, I think we’re chasing the Pink Thing” or something like that.
This whole story I was wondering if you guys were playing via text, lol. Nice to see that the “pink thing” actually got fooled by the weird verbal shenanigans.
For Confusion in particular, I read “attacks nearest creature” as doing so in the simplest, most straightforward way possible. My Watsonian reasoning is that a confused creature isn’t thinking clearly enough to pick optimal spells or flashy manoeuvrers; my Doylist reasoning is to save trouble for the GM and avoid frustrating the players by wasting their powerful limited-use abilities.
For other mind control, how I handle it depends on the effect. Generally for charms, I let the player handle it and only step in if they’d clearly harm their new “friend”; they choose whether they attack their allies, protect and support the charmer in nonviolent ways, try to negotiate a truce, or whatever. For compulsions like Dominate Person, the one who cast the spell is in control, but what they can make the character do is limited by their knowledge of said character’s abilities, so while they can direct them to, say, “use your most powerful attack on this person”, they can’t specifically pick a powerful combo unless they know somehow that the character can use it.
Defer to the player.
Defer to the fiction.
I honestly need to find an article I read a million years ago about decision making processes in RPGs. Deciding how to approach a question is almost more interesting than the outcome.
Excuse me, but since when your friends aren’t XP bags? >_>
You get XP for overcoming challenges. The other party members are not a chal…lenge…
…
Wait a minute!
If you’re the groups min maxer, you might be right about your initial line of thought there.
In the case of confusion, I think I’d stick to the standard attack, without including any special spell attacks like arcane strike or spellstrike (power attack is fine though). If it’s dominate person though… In that case the magus is gonna be doing a shitload of damage. My thought on this is that the character in question isn’t in the right state of mind while confused to be able to cast a spell unless they’ve already got it cast and are just holding it, while during dominate person, they’re going to be doing their best to obey the instructions.
It sounds to me like the basic strat is to go back to the spell descriptions, read them closely, and figure out what they’re actually doing in the fiction. Is that about right?
That’s exactly it. I think it’s best to follow the intent and flavor of the spell if possible.
Had this literally happen. A vampire dominated my character, but the GM was too busy running the encounter. So the first thing the vampire orders me to do is ‘get away from him.’ So I took a double move away. He didn’t give me any orders the next round (GM forgot), so I double moved away again. Then he called for my help, so I spent a round getting back into the fight… He specifically told me to protect him.
‘Protect me’ is kinda’ vague. I was a gunslinger rogue, so I decided, based on the situation, the best way I could protect my new boss was to dash into to melee and use my gunslinger stuff to attack everyone I could and debuff their to-hits. So rather than focus firing one person down, I spread my attacks around…. at which point, going in to round five, my party decided it was time for the vampire to die before I got another round of that.
But in a two player scenario, mind control of any kind is devastating. Might want to avoid that.
There’s a reason NPC cohorts were present.
My apologies, thought they were multiclass, not with cohorts.
Personally I’d go with “attack what you’re most familiar with”. You are confused after all, unable to think clearly. So you’d most likely rely on your go-to. So I think in your example it would have gone exactly like you played it, I haven’t really played (or played with) a Magus but I assume that shocking grasp thingy is done fairly often. But in the case of say, a high level wizard, they’d probably resort to a spell they use often, like Magic Missile or somesuch. Depends on the character and how they’re played.
5e makes this a bit more precise by making it a melee attack only (so no spells, no ranged attacks, no extra attacks), but there’s still room for interpretation (does the barbarian uses Great Weapon Master and Reckless Attack or no?).
Which is why as a GM confusion is typically a tool I like to leave to the players.
Safe assumption. It’s more or less the “consecutive normal punches” of magi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnbq7f2CcxE
It just occurred to me that, since this was an allied NPC cohort, I could have asked the PCs how he ought to react. I usually pilot the NPC, but this specific decision might have been improved by group input.
Just had this situation actually. Running a PF2 adventure for a group, and a cultist (actually a succubus in disguise) was written as trying to stay at a distance and use their spells… with their only combat spell being dominate. Of course, the barbarian fails their save (luckily not a crit fail) and receives the command “Kill your friends.” At which point the barbarian asks, “do I have to rage?” Considering the barbarian commonly saved rage for only special situations rather than as a common tactic, I ruled that he didn’t have rage – just perform his “normal” attack routine.
Thankfully, a normal failure against dominate allows a new save each round and the barbarian rolled high immediately attacking his highest HP party member, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been [during the playtest, the same player TPK’d the party because of a round 1 dominate spell.] What ended up worse that encounter was once the succubus managed to lock lips and repeatedly stack the drained condition on a PC as they kept failing Will saves against an auto-suggestion to stay put and just accept it.
I honestly wonder what percentage of all TPKs involve barbarian + dominate person. It seems like a real concern.
Statistically, probably a high degree. Barbs have sucky will saves even with rage (and they don’t always have it on), are the typical ‘dumb muscle’ a domination caster would immediately identify and target, and they provide good results when it works, with crits being truly devestating. Heck, they might not even fight the orders if worded cleverly.
My favorite Pathfinder fight of all time had Confusion in it. Also had Stinking Cloud and a bunch of pit spells. It was the finale of Rise of the Runelords’s Fort Rannick, and, long story short, we locked ourselves in the bosses’ room and both sides laid into each other with disabling spells. The combat went something like 15 rounds because there was this point in the middle where everyone on both sides just had to sit there and wait for some of the debilitating conditions to wear off.
The Barbarian/Brawler got hit with confusion and in a moment of lucidity ran into a side room away from everyone else… where he proceeded to spend several rounds rolling “You act normally” on the confusion table and then not doing anything because there was nothing to do. Meanwhile, my Magus was also confused and kept rolling “You hit yourself for 1d8+STR damage.” She took like 38 points of damage slamming her face into the floor. (That was actually the only damage she took the whole fight, because she is one heck of a tank.) The opposing ogres didn’t have it any easier, as their reinforcements got hit with our own Confusion, and they all kept falling into the Create Pit spam.
Good times.
…Also realized afterwards that my familiar’s 3/day Calm Emotions spell-like ability could end confusion. The more you know!
When the whole “you skip your turn” thing isn’t obnoxious, it can be hilarious.
My groups have always ruled it simply as make a normal weapon attack (no power attack or anything similar). Given that the confusion is already making you lose your turn, the weapon attack is just adding insult to injury (barring bad crits, of course). To get the magus to do the full on spellstrike would require dominate person or the like.