A gentle nerf to grappling

[Pielorinho]

As we've discovered in our games, if you're a large brawny guy, it's almost always to your advantage to engage in grapples when you fight humanoids: although you might lessen your own damage output, you'll probably come close to negating the humanoid's damage output by grappling him and preventing him from using his own weapon effectively. This holds true for large elementals, large demons, large giants, large beasts, etc, and ends up making most creatures with any intelligence fight very similarly.

One good tactic for such big creatures to use is to make multiple grapple attempts against an opponent. The opponent will use an AoO to negate the first attempt, but won't have an AoO left over to negate the second attempt, and presto! Grapple happy.

I'm thinking of instituting the following changes to grappling, to make it not such a great tactic for everyone:
* Absent the Improved Grab special ability, attempting to initiate a grapple is a standard action, not an attack action. This means you can only attempt to initiate a grapple once in a round.
* Size differences give a +/-2 bonus/penalty, not +/-4.

What do y'all think?
Daniel

 

[hong]

I allow the Close-Quarters Fighting feat from S&F (allows AoO even against improved grab; add damage to your grapple check to avoid the grapple). Both the main frontline fighters have taken it, after a few nasty encounters with big beasties.

 

[Pielorinho]

I allow the Close-Quarters Fighting feat from S&F (allows AoO even against improved grab; add damage to your grapple check to avoid the grapple). Both the main frontline fighters have taken it, after a few nasty encounters with big beasties.

While that's a great feat, I'm not so much worried about nerfing grappling for monsters with improved grab: I figure those are the creatures that OUGHT to be grappling. It's the other creatures I'm wanting to change. Currently, just about every large-sized creature with a strength above 20 ought to be giving up all melee attacks in favor of grappling: medium-sized opponents are generally unable to make grapple checks, and they lose the ability to use their cool weapons and spells when grappled.

I'd like for elementals, giants, magical beasts, devils, etc. to have a rules-based motive for using their natural and manufactured weapons; giving the nerfs to grappling I suggested would make grappling a less obvious tactic for them.

Daniel

 

[seasong]

Gloves enchanted with poison. If you've got an 18 WIS druid in the party at 5th level, you can make a pair of gloves that can poison once per day with a save DC of 17 for 3,000 gp and 240 XP. Charge the party wizard 4,200 gp (the cost to make + 5 gp per 1 XP), and you're both happy. At later levels, you can always upgrade the caster level, or just give it more uses per day. At later levels, dimension door and high-damage shocking grasp also start to come into their own.

In general, except for grapple smackdown characters, I've found that you can make the prospect riskier than casual grapplers are willing to deal with.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I don't like your current proposals, because I think it makes it ridiculously easy for large and huge creatures to be grappled.

The supposed drawback to grappling someone is normally that you are denied your Dex bonus to AC - this is a real disadvantage if there are any rogues present, but (IMO) one of the failings of the game is that if you are big and there are no rogues around you don't care. (the failing being that nobody other than rogues can get in an attack against a foe whose guard is down).

So, if I wanted to discourage grappling willy-nilly by large creatures who don't have improved grab, this is the way I'd do it.

any creature which is grappling will incur AoO from non-grappled enemies if it is in their threatened area

The effect of this is that if the giant chooses to pay all it's attention to grappling thrud the barbarian, Thruds' mates Conan and Thongor get to smack hell out of the giant because he is not paying proper attention.

Of course, if Thrud is accompanying Flimsy and Whimsy the weedy wizards, he might not care about that.

- Basically I'm suggesting that you keep the existing mechanics unchanged, but add an additional mechanic to penalise the monster who tries this (in IT terms that would be like object inheritance!)

Cheers

 

[Trainz]

Grapples by huge critters has always been a pain in the butt to our PC's in our campaigns. That and the fear ability of some monsters to the fighter types.


With the changes to the freedom of movement spell, the ring of freedom of movement is a must now. Totally immune to all grapples. Now that's a PC booster.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What I really hate in the current rules is not that grapple generally is a viable tactic for larger foes (though it becomes boring if everybody of them does it). I hate that small size characters are effectively uselss in Grapple, unless they happen to maxed out Escape Artist.
I think the size penalty for Grapple Checks should become a bonus to Escape Artist Checks for this single purpose.
(By the way, small characters are penalized anyway with their size - in 3.5, they can also forget intimidating...)

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Norfleet]

double

 

[Norfleet]

The supposed drawback to grappling someone is normally that you are denied your Dex bonus to AC - this is a real disadvantage if there are any rogues present, but (IMO) one of the failings of the game is that if you are big and there are no rogues around you don't care. (the failing being that nobody other than rogues can get in an attack against a foe whose guard is down).

If there are rogues around, then you're grappling with those rogues.

As we've discovered in our games, if you're a large brawny guy, it's almost always to your advantage to engage in grapples when you fight humanoids: although you might lessen your own damage output, you'll probably come close to negating the humanoid's damage output by grappling him and preventing him from using his own weapon effectively. This holds true for large elementals, large demons, large giants, large beasts, etc, and ends up making most creatures with any intelligence fight very similarly.

The reason grapple-fu works so well is because of the denial-of-service mode of operation and the fact that it's unconventional: It forces the opponent to operate out of his preferred mode of fighting, which is generally conventional fighting. It reminds me of one spaceship game I played, where weapons were so woefully ineffective vs. other ships that, in blatant contravention of what the people at the time considered "conventional" tactics, I adopted the doctrine of ramming and boarding.

 

[Red Baron]

I'm with ya 50%, Pielorinho, and with Plane Sailing the other half of the way: +2/-2 to grapple for each size, and allow AoOs on grappling creatures.

Big grapplers are definitely one thorn in the side of most games I've played recently...

Edit: Oops! Plane Sailing, not Plain Sailing...