Making an encounter

>Making an encounter
>Party is Lv3, has no magic weapons yet, this is an important detail.
>Enemy is a single Lv5 with dr 10/magic because of a mighty suit of armor stolen from a noble warrior. Also wields a +1 flaming longspear, obviously he's near impervious to the party's damage output and dangerous to get close to.
>Think this would be a decent encounter
>They get thrashed
>And the sweaty mantits come STRAIGHT out about how it's "unfair" and "bullshit" and "how were we meant to hurt him"

I don't fucking know, disarm the cunt, take his weapon, and kill him with it? This is why I gave up d20 in the first place. It's only played by brain-damaged idiots.

People are so used to being denied the ability to disarm an enemy of their weapon that they don't think the DM will actually allow it when the opportunity arises, or that if they try it the DM is going to make the game hell by having EVERY enemy try to disarm/make called shots to interrupt casting.
It's the reason nobody uses the severing rules: because it's much more painful to be on the receiving end of them in D&D. You cut off one goblin's arms, and it's one goblin's arm. You cut off the wizard's arms, and the party's down a spellcaster.

We'd need more info to judge the situation but usually, if your players are inexperienced, then you shouldn't throw in stuff that will require use of some really specific mechanics or too much luck with the die with the consequences being a party wipe.
Also, it's a that GM move to make things have only one solution.
With that said, if the encounter was reasonable and they had a somewhat fair chance of succeeding, even if just by running away, then I'd say your players were quite stupid indeed. Did they have some kind of caster or something to stun/debuff the enemy that they didn't use? Maybe a something from the environment to use against the guy?
You suggested disarming, had you considered what rolls would be needed to do it? Was it viable? How much was the average enemy hit? And how much HP the party's tank had?
You should absolutely avoid making things too easy, but throwing unreasonably hard/unbeatable stuff at the players usually results in no fun for everybody.

>disarm
>provoke AoO

>calls himself a wizard
>can't grow a new arm

>Only make one specific way to defeat an enemy and don't hint at how to do it at all.
>Player's get stumped because they can't figure out the one and only one solution you tried to railroad them into.
>"MY PLAYERS ARE RETARDS AND SO IS EVERYONE WHO PLAYS D20 REEEEE!"

Good, quit the hobby, nobody will miss you.

So basically you're throwing a fit because you and your players wern't on the same page, then instead of talking to them about it like a mature adult with actual friends you start insulting them and by extension everyone else who plays D20 games?

Grow the fuck up, seriously. And be thankful you have any friends at all, because you sure as fuck don't sound like you deserve them.

My gm gets annoyed when we disarm, rend, feint, grapple, etc because it slows combat down but will sometimes expect us to do it or say the fight would have been easier if we did it.

>see a guy wielding a polearm
>a magic, flaming polearm
>first instinct should be to run up to him and disarm him

Did you not have a wizard? Spells ignore DR

>disarm
>dnd

Also remember the enemy had magic armor too...
Against a party of level 3s...
With no magic items of their own....

Like holy fuck, if a DM did this to me I'd be looking for a new game that same night, lest I have rocks drop on my new character next session and get bitched at for not making an intimidation roll against the boulders or something.

Disarming is super rare as a thing that people do in D&D because people rarely use combat maneuvers that they're not heavily specialized in, what with it automatically provoking an AoO and not having a great chance of success.

Here's the thing, you created a puzzle disguised as a fight, except this puzzle is actively killing the party. Here's the thing though, generally people are more used to GMs being fucking idiots who don't know how to balance a fight than them trying to create puzzle encounters. You have to make this clear to people because this is a goddamn game and when you suddenly dramatically change the state of play it just looks like you're a moron who doesn't know what he's doing.

On top of that he's described by the DM himself as "dangerous to get close to", and the party is supposed to be able to disarm someone stronger than them who's also obviously using magic items that could be boosting any number of skills or stats.

>Tank
Pardon me sir but you appear to have mistaken this board for a videogame discussion board.

>Enemy is impervious to non-magical weapons.
>Wielding a VERY obvious FLAMING magical weapon.
>hurf durf i need muh hints
The fact that he had a massive stick of fire is a pretty big fucking hint to people with functioning brains.

A hint to do what exactly? Run the fuck away? Because disarming the guy in magic armor with VERY OBVIOUS flaming magical weapon seems kinda suicidal.

But no, go ahead and keep trying to play damage control and pretend you're not a retard on an anonymous image board, it's fucking hilarious.

I'm assuming 3.pf
Did the players have any feats that would allow them to do so without getting their shit smacked in?
Because I believe getting hit by AoO causes the disarm to auto fail.

>Function brains
>Expects the players to know they're supposed to wrestle with something almost twice their level wielding a legendary hero's magic weapon.

>Wow all you had to do was try to use a rule nobody uses or even knows about that has a low chance of working and actively hurts you for using it unless you wasted a bunch of feats to make it not shit.
>Which more often then not also resulted in your character being worse off as a consequence because you are now lacking some other crucial shit in order to pull off your one gimmick move half decently.

Stop playing D&D.

>Disarm him
>Ok I run up to him
>AoO for moving in his threaten square
>I try to disarm him
>AoO (if he had combat reflexs) and if successful his weapon falls to the ground
>your turn ends and his begins he 5foot steps back picks up his weapon and attacks dealing 1d8+10/12 damage +1d6 flaming
>or drop something so that you're doing this with an empty hand with -2 to your roll making it fair less likely that you'll get the weapon
Either way OP you were putting them into a tough situation where you only give your players 2 possible options to beat your encounter also was it clear that the enemy's DR was from magic because otherwise they would have no reason to take these options which are downright suicidal.

Actually. Yeah, sometimes people do.

My Zelda experience was: NES Zelda, Zelda 2.
And then, nostalgia fit, I got a semi-modern Zelda on 3DS... Link between worlds.

And I cruised through that, because it made sense and taught me everything g I needed... UNTIL, I got to a very late game boss fight where two enemies shoot a homing ball 'o death at you, while playing keep away in a section of the screen you cannot reach.

So, the things this game taught me to do: arrows, bombs, boomerang... All of these were dodged or had no effect.

I died. And died. And died. And died. And died. And died. And got frustrated, and went to google.

And Google said "it's a tennis match, knock their projectile back."

...

Literally zero other enemies in the game have this mechanic. You don't get taught to do this, or even that it is an option.

But it's a very old, established LoZ boss mechanic.

One I did not know, because it started in a time I had not played LoZ.

So. Yeah, sometimes, you need hints. Because problems happen out of context.

You can circumvent AOOs on reach weapons with tumble or 5FS.

Actually yes, the swordsage had improved disarm

Both you and your players are retards.


They are retards who didn't think of ranged combat options for their characters.

You are a retard who doesn't know how to present an enemy or drop a hint.
And i'm a retard who has 5 players who all play Variant Human Sun soul monks... Imagine the shit i have to deal with when they get to lvl 11...

They allready defended against a near impossible siege when they were at lvl 7.
I now doubt any setting where a sun soul monastery would come under attack.

Picking up obviously magic weapons that are on fire when you know nothing about them is probably a good idea.

Tumbling restricts you only half your move speed and to 5FS next to him requires you to already start your turn already within his threaten square.
Okay that player was retarded for getting that feat and not using but if your hinging an encounter being successful based on the actions of one player then you've failed as GM.

Assuming this isn't bait, OP is a prime example of a god awful DM who shouldn't ever be allowed to run a game again.

Look at him, laugh and learn.

Sun Soul monks are meh, you dumb dumb.

> Imagine the shit i have to deal with when they get to lvl 11...

Oh no, they can fire small blasts of 2d6 damage!

That's five players who can AOE the shit out of most things from 150ft away and it's RADIANT damage which barely anything resists.

And the worst part is you need a save or suck spell to even catch them.
Projectiles are almost ineffective.
Their mobility i don't have to talk about either.
And they are pretty capable in melee too.

So homebrew some enemies that resist radiant damage? You don't have to worship the DMG.

Get them out of their element with a few non-combat adventures in-between the fighting ones. Make sure that fighting would have bad consequences for other people than themselves or something to make sure they won't try to blunt force their way though these small scenarios.

Maybe something involving detective work, or saving a possessed person from whatever is possessing them without hurting them?

Oh i've given them a lot of social encounters but they RP it far too well so i can't ruin that part they are actually good at.

The main problem is that i've let them play the same class.
Healing also isn't an issue cause two of them took the healer feat and one always brews enough healing potions.

Hmm... you could give them NPC allies that they would have to heal at some point, but I guess they would just brew more potions.

Up the level of the bad guys, maybe? It's risky though, I've had TPKs because I did that a few times in the past when my players were too powerful and it backfired even though I didn't up the levels by that much.

>d20
>disarming
>unless you have specced into it(which you shouldn't since most enemies past shank-town won't use actual weapons you can take away)

>social encounters
>in a game with no social mechanics
>""encounters""

Why didn't they run away if they thought he was invincible?

>autism

>What is roleplaying?


All i can do is to kill of a few players by splitting them and making them re-roll. However i'll make sure each one has a chance to survive so it'll be up to luck.

Maybe they tried but he had magic boots that increased his move speed a bunch? I mean seriously, if the dude has access to DR 10/magic armor and a legendary weapon why not assume he has a combat mobility magic item?

>Needing explicit ludicrously in-depth rules to have any sort of challenge

if you need mechanics for social encounters, this hobby isnt for you

Sure you could do that, if you want to be a huge fucking faggot like holy shit. Why are you trying to kill off half the party "but it's fine since it's random"?
>Okay your character gets raped 1d10 times
>It's okay because it's random

Dude it's simple.

>Lead players into a position they may have to split up.
>Solo adventures for each of them should be challenging but passable.
>The ones that survive (most will cause i'm not a prick) will get rewards.

Thanks to vidya (primarily), people have a concept of fights they're supposed to lose. They probably assumed that this was one of those, so they would keep going until the GM sprung whatever he had planned to save them.

Turn 1 - Move to 10 ft range, total defense. One or two guys eat a regular attack on enemy turn, maybe.

Turn 2 - 5 foot step in, disarm/ grapple. If first attempt succeeds, next person should just trip. No AoO with a reach weapon in 5 foot range.

Unless the enemy's got obscenely high stats (there's no reason a level 5 should have more than 18 str unless it's some kind of a monstrous race) or your team is full of low str ninnies, he's done for.

Although throwing a DR 10 might have been an overkill. Why not DR 5? At level 3, it would still take a while for players to chew through it.

I am not very familiar with tg terminology, but I believe everyone can understand what the tank is supposed to be. If not, I apologize. Is there a more appropriate name for the character with high defence/health that is supposed to take the blows and attract the enemies damage?

You got baited.
Also, you ask the wrong question since fa/tg/uys only play magic users in editions where they solo the entire encounter.

Shame on me. Still, is there another name? It got me curious. Hahaha

>there is a stat and multiple skills for resolving social encounters
>they don't actually do anything
>but it's okay because i love my daddy's thick d&d cock

imma assume this is bait because i choose to believe nobody could be this autistic

>game makes a pretense of having social mechanics
>there actually aren't any
>bringing this up has people claiming that you don't need them
D&D shitters should just stay quiet, it's embarrassing.

Polearms are the easiest to disarm.

>He thinks social mechanics are necessary
Even non-D&D systems are laughing at you at this point sonny jim

Memery

Except non-D&D systems actually have those nowadays. Try playing something that isn't D&D or a shitty d20 derivative of it, senpai.

What is the point of CHA stat then?

Charisma is still an important stat if you're playing a Bard, Sorcerer, or Paladin though.
Social mechanics are only important for people who lack the charisma to carry a basic conversation IRL. If you need to roll dice just to roleplay then I'd like to point you to where you'd find yourself among like-minded individuals.

To determine spell DC for CHA based casters like Bard or Sorcerer. It's not rocket science.

Make sure you tell your players to dump charisma unless they're charisma-based spellcasters, or you're a shitty GM for tricking them.

Last time this scenario happened in our campaign I dropped my weapon and grapple/pinned the arrogant bastard who thought he could one-man-army us, while every took turns ventilating his major organs through his damage reduction.

I agree with OP. If you can't think beyond "I attack" you are in the wrong hobby. If they felt they couldn't hurt him, they should have run and thought about countermeasures.

Nice try OP, but I see right through your tricks.

I'm not OP, but I really like your Tsukihime bait picture so I am temporary ok with how this played out.

What is a reason to have cha based casters?

No they actually aren't

Sounds like bad GMing.
If the players start having trouble give them hints.
>Make a [intelligence or strategy whatever the system uses] roll
>If only you could get his weapon away from him.

Although to be honest, I'd try to have more than one "solution" like a nearby cliff or pit to push him into.

Yes,they are

You say as if CHA isn't already a dump stat for classes that don't use them anyway. Besides, most people who pump CHA up are usually diplomancer builds who treat CHA as some sort of low-key mind control, rather than your ability to persuade people who otherwise have no reason to trust you.
Because they're classes whose magic is innate and is based off of their force of will, rather than years of study (INT) or faith (WIS).

>literally hand-holding your players

How so?

Literally TTRPG for mental invalids and people so used to modern video games they can't develop their own strategies anymore and need a fairy or narrator to tell them how to win, and the game presupposes they will win because everyone knows they must always win.

>fluff as a proof of mechanics functionality

Disarm is a horrible mechanic in 3.5

Unless you have a feat you eat an attack of opportunity just for trying. If that attack hits, you autofail. Then you need to try to hit him and then actually succeed on disarming.

Building an encounter around needing that mechanic failing isn't really surprising.

>Make a [intelligence or strategy whatever the system uses] roll
>d&d

I think that if you saw a warlock your head would implode

Because only thing that can hurt you is a pointed end.
And unlike blunt weapons,they have an entire pole for you to pull.

It's not handholding to give the player hints based off of an INT roll and if your solution is based off of something that the players had no clue about, you're a shitty GM.

To take an example from vidya for a moment, it's like how at the end of Metroid: Other M, when you fight a Metroid Queen, the solution is to grapple beam inside of its mouth and detonate a Power Bomb inside its stomach. At no point during the game are you aware that Power Bombs are authorized and if you didn't realize this, you'd just get eaten and die.

It's one thing if it's information that locks them out of optional shit, like finding heart pieces in Zelda, but if it's something that's required to progress through the game, you need to drop hints so the players know what to watch out for, especially when it has never been relevant in any other part of the game and likely will never be relevant past this particular instance again.

Mechanically no.
Real life even more so considering he'll be holding onto it using two hands.

How about giving them level appropriate encounters. Most CR 9 things should be pretty difficult for the party to overcome.

This is like the "just shoot them in the leg" of polearms.

As far as 3.PF are concerned, there isn't really a whole lot of mechanical differences between mages aside from whether or not the spells you have are prepared from a list of spells that you know (INT), prepared from a complete list of spells (WIS), or just always available but only from a list of spells that you know (CHA).

Nobody ITT claims that 3.PF is necessarily functional mind, because if it was then the situation in the OP probably wouldn't have happened.

Is throwing him off a nearby hill not an option?

>Bitch about how martials are nullified by casters
>Bitch about how things are "dumbed down"
>Bitch about how things are "too easy"
>OP gives an encounter where the martial can do something to greatly influence the fight
>OP gives an encounter where average knowledge of the rules is needed
>OP gives an encounter where invoking this rule
>OP is the bad guy because he expected his players to know the rules and to use abilities they had

Faggots, all of you.

>people so used to modern video games they can't develop their own strategies anymore
>To take an example from vidya for a moment
???

>expecting level 3 characters to have the disarm feat tree
Wizards would have actually solved this encounter better.

If you wanna be technical, a rapier is can only hurt you if the pointed end strikes you as well, it doesn't fucking mean that it wasn't an effective weapon that changed the face of combat when it was introduced.

Either way, you're not going to disarm a spear user unless they're dumb enough to keep their spear out long enough for you to grab it and if they are, they're probably being flanked by a phalanx.

Yes, I, the only other person on Veeky Forums, am a massive hypocrite, and you, the only person on Veeky Forums who is not me, have seen right through me.

Okay but consider the fact that OP didn't want creativity, he wanted the problem solved in his own very specific way.

Plus OPs way was fucking stupid that hinged entirely on the success of a single party member while the others just watched, and was also incredibly risky in general, and that's IF they thought of it

Disarming a gun is easier than disarming a sword. Why?
Because the only thing that can hurt you is at the barrel end.
And unlike a blade you can't get hurt by the sides of the gun.

>>OP gives an encounter where the martial can do something to greatly influence the fight

Well, less than the mage would. DR 10/magic means that any magic blows right through it. A single casting of magic weapon would have solved it all.

>this post
>filename
OP is a faggot

Using modern video games as your example literally underlines what I said.

And also you walk into a scenario like OPs KNOWING you can a lot more than attack. You can push, disarm, grapple, use a torch for fire damage, and many many other solutions.

If you need to stop and tell your players "hey guys you're not inflicting but 1 or 2 damage past his reduction maybe you should change it up" then they're fucking stupid people, just like I said: Mental invalids or had the creativity burned out of their brains by gag-worthy hand-holding in modern games.

The only way to make games fun for retards like those is to do what games have done, subtly or not subtly direct them to win. That's not a game. That's a foregone conclusion.

You are amputating loss, defeat, and real strategy in favor of mindless satisfaction of "winning" if you lean down from the heavens and suggest a course of action.

It is handholding. It's the definition of handholding. Players play the PCs, GM plays the world and everything else in it. Never ever has a world suddenly conspiratorially taken the protagonists aside and said "hey buddy, why don't you toss this guy off a cliff?".

That's the sort of thing the players should be figuring out and trying for themselves. But they can't and now they're probably trained not to because they can they can get advice from the heavens in case plan A: "rush in and spam attack" doesn't work.

Go hit yourself in the head with a mop handle as hard as you can and come back. Then you can tell me the tip is the only thing that can hurt you

>marials need to have the disarm feat tree
>the wizard can just need grease/sleep/create pit any damage dealing spell to bypass his DR magic

>Have single solution to an otherwise unfair encounter
>Players are idiots for not thinking exactly like i do
>Veeky Forums faggots think i'm the bad guy
fuck this gay earth

OP here.

I ban all core classes because they are fucked beyond all repair. Especially wizards.

This is actual advice from this exact board.

If your players are new to the point they can't figure out solutions other than "I attack" you need to hand hold them until they can. It shouldn't take more then a couple encounters like that to get your players to think outside the box.

If you have to do it for more then a session or two, it's probably time to find new players.

>If you need to stop and tell your players "hey guys you're not inflicting but 1 or 2 damage past his reduction maybe you should change it up" then they're fucking stupid people

Well, if they know about the damage reduction. It's far from uncommon for GMs to not really mention how much damage reduction a foe has and 'Takes a greatsword to the face without slowing' is a level 5 character trait even without damage reduction so that wouldn't be much of an indication.

There are plenty of non-core spellcasters/partial casters.