Attacking a held light source

[mlund]

One possibility that occurs to me is using Action Points to power stunts. The player describes the action he wants to take, and if the DM considers it reasonable, he assigns the player an appropriate check or attack to make, and chooses an appropriate defense for him to make it against. To activate the stunt, the player spends an Action Point without gaining an extra action, then makes the check or attack as a standard action.

I really like this idea.

Sometimes an idea is appropriate to the narrative drama, but would become a royal pain if it were spammed all over an encounter (like Disarm / Sunder). The cost of using an Action Point puts a hard limit on these sorts of tricks. It also helps balance the one-sided nature of these kind of techniques and reserves them for the Heroes and maybe the Elite Villains.

Aside from the nature of the results, the normal rules for spending Action Points apply.

That sounds really solid.

I still think that for this particular DM's encounter, though, he should just use a monster template that can inflict Magical Darkness / Concealment on the area. It is a lot less messy that snatching items out of the PCs' hands.

- Marty Lund

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I agree it is fine in the case of the OP's question, just give the monster an ability. The general approach though seemed like an interesting thing to consider. I also agree on the action point thing. It is a pretty good way to let someone do something 'potentially abusive'. It could still be used to cause problems in certain types of encounters, but at least the PC has now sacrificed something pretty worthwhile for the privilege, and if you just plain don't want your Solo BBEG disarmed, then give him a spare weapon. The PC will either notice it, or pull the stunt only to discover that all he cost boss guy was a minor action to draw a new sword!

 

[Black Knight Irios]

One possibility that occurs to me is using Action Points to power stunts. The player describes the action he wants to take, and if the DM considers it reasonable, he assigns the player an appropriate check or attack to make, and chooses an appropriate defense for him to make it against. To activate the stunt, the player spends an Action Point without gaining an extra action, then makes the check or attack as a standard action.

I let him keep the action granted by the action point but require that the granted action must be used for the disarm/sunder action.

It would be still limited to 1/encounter per char. Actually it would be less than 1/enc...