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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4674065" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I'm not sure I 100% agree with all this sentiment. Yes, PCs should not be regularly disarming monsters, etc, but there ARE times when a "William Tell" IS a very sensible tactic and thus there WILL inevitably have to be some sort of rule for it. The BBEG is about to place the gem in the statue's forehead and activate the golem. The PCs probably should have, and certainly will WANT to have, the ability to do something about that, and they will want to use a William Tell of some type to do it. As for just routine ordinary monsters being disarmed, there are plenty of ways to deal with that. For one thing nothing says that a disarmed monster is helpless. It can grapple, it can use non-weapon powers, it can just plain draw its backup sword or pick up a weapon lying around on the battlefield that one of its allies dropped when it died. Plus you can always rule that a trick like that provokes an OA. Given that it is certainly not an automatic success that alone will usually deter most players from constantly abusing the option. If the monster is so weak that a disarm is pretty certain to succeed then well the monster wasn't a lot of threat to start with, and probably just bashing it with your sword is at least as good an option.So, given that the option cannot be excluded without also excluding all sorts of interesting things the PCs should be able to do, you just have to deal with the possibility that at some point the PCs will think to try a William Tell at a time and place when you haven't considered it and that might actually give them an advantage that is worthwhile for them to have. This IMHO is the heart of the game, making the players THINK and come up with clever ways to beat the enemy. Who wants to play in a game where the ONLY things you can do come from some recipe book? Don't crush your player's creativity and sacrifice it at the altar of 'game balance'. Balance overall is important, but fun is that which must be served by all else in a game.The same arguments can be made in favor of monsters being able to William Tell as well. They won't do it often, and your garden variety Orc or whatnot is unlikely to try it, they know that their weapons are effective in general and they won't usually risk doing something weird when they have a tried and true tactic (bashing you with a melee attack) that has always worked for them. The case you describe, or a few other situations like it may be ones where it is interesting to employ a tactic like that, but it should be quite rare. It can add to the fun when players are suddenly confronted with a situation they haven't anticipated. It may also get them thinking about what else the DM might pull out of his bag of tricks! Maybe they'll carry an extra light source around next time. It makes them get a bit more creative, and that too is fun.</blockquote>

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