Cleave and AOO: What is the problem?

[Tumbler]

My only problem with cleave is that there is no point for me to design an NPC with it as a DM. If I ever got to use it, that would mean dropping one or more party members in a round, which isn't much fun for anyone.

 

[Scion]

I disagree. I like cleave.

Then you would be outside of the 'most'. You can like cleave and also dislike the aoo, I went out of my way to say most.

Some people dont like the 5' step, some people like cleave but dont like the aoo, some like aoo but dont like cleave, whatever.

It just seems to me that most people who dont like this combo effectively just dont like cleave. Exactly for the reasons that rkanodia pointed out. His entire arguement simply sounds like, 'I dont like cleave'. Hence the point I made. (I know rkanodia came back and said he likes cleave, however, his initial post still sounds like a 'I dont like cleave because of this' type of response because cleave does the same thing in either circumstance in the case he made, it just so happens that someone got an extra attack in somewhere ::shrugs:: effectively the same though)

Someone did something dumb and someones else, who is very good at taking advantage of these situations, was able to benefit from it. Fine.

Just like if someone fireballs the guy next to you but you were invisible and they didnt know you were there. The fireball guy got an extra target in and he wouldnt have hit you at all if the other guy hadnt been there, in effect him being there caused you to be at a disadvantage. Fine. It happens. Sometimes the world around you puts you in a bad situation through no fault of your own.

Yeah, well, depends on how much damage the PC does in one stroke, doesn't it? As well as a lot of other factors.

Not really. It doesnt really have a useful amount of bearing here. If one is level 20 and useing level 5 grunts then you expect them to do little to nothing (except get lucky now and then) and provide you with extra weaknesses (easy to infiltrate, might set you up in a bad situation, can be fooled into various bad manuevers fairly easily, etc).

That is the problem with useing bad help, sometimes it will hurt you, especially when the other character has a few feats to take advantage of it (and in this situation these feats take advantage of this sort of situation directly, nothing wrong with that).

I think that low level minions aren't the best help, but they aren't bad help. Bad help is when you ask for help guarding your treasure and the help takes half the treasure when they leave.

They are a weakness that can be exploited in the proper circumstances.

Hiring someone who then backstabs you is a bit beyond the 'bad help' line. Bad help is someone letting the pc's in because they said they really needed to deliver this important letter to the boss and no one else could touch it and no, he shouldnt bother to let anyone know ahead of time.

The line you are drawing there is someone fooling 'you' into hiring them and then them getting off with your stuff. Completely seperate issues.

Well, I don't like, that you are then punished for something you havn't done.

::shrugs:: that is the way the game works sometimes. Someone else does something that will hinder you, someone makes a bad move that puts you in a bad position (much like chess, if you move one piece such that another is sacrificed that second piece didnt do anything wrong, it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when some other piece got out of the way), or any number of other cirumstances.

In this instance it isnt completely about you being punished for someone else so much as someone else having the skill to pull off a heroic stunt. It takes a lot of training and sacrifice to get that to work properly (I feel that the cleave tree is pretty weak generally, not too bad at lower levels but at higher levels it hardly ever comes up in a useful situation) and even then it is pretty circumstantial.

But, to go back again to the 'punishment even though you did nothing wrong' the environment around you changed and put you in a bad situation. It happens and it happens all of the time in nearly every aspect of the game.

It is a fairly marginal ability (you have to be in melee range with a big bad, someone has to provoke an aoo, you have to hit them, take them down, and then you can get an extra attack on the big guy, and you have to have all of the appropriate feats plus not have used your aoo on something else that round) and getting a little extra bang out of it every now and then seems all right.

They might not be a big advantage, but they definitely should not be a disadvantage. They should at least give a marginal or even irrelevant advantage, but not a disadvantage.

Definately not true. Anyone can be a disadvantage for you, and having fairly weak minion guys running around can easily cause problems for either side.

With the examples of the poor door man (which can be very hindersome indeed) to them stepping on your toes at inappropriate times they can indeed be a disadvantage. Sometimes a major one.

In this case it is a pretty small disadvantage since it is not likely to come up except with pretty unintelligent (but not nonintelligent generally) minions.

If you believe that guys on your side can never put you in a disadvantage then we are not only not playing the same game but not living in the same universe (as a business associate of mine is a prime example.. he did something that he thought would be good, but wound up costing us quite a bit of money.. I didnt do anything wrong, but had to pay the price anyway.. in this case I guess someone else had the appropriate bluff bonus vs him )


Trying to draw fire away from yourself? dont keep your minions near you.. it will attact area of effect spells and keep you from being able to do whatever you want to do properly.

In this case it will also help you keep away from stray shots as the other team takes down your guys. That is exactly how cleave works anyway.

 

[Crothian]

I disagree that the BBEG is being punished. His mook got attacked for leaving himself opened, and through that attack a cleave was made. At worse this is a AoO problem since they allow more attacks then usual then a cleave issue.

 

[sfedi]

Maybe the issue is not much the Cleave attack, but what the AoO is.
Once you define what an AoO is, you can see if a Cleave is aproppiate or not.

Personally, I find a Cleave during an AoO highly inconsistent.

I invite you to this thread:
Rationalization of an AoO

 

[rkanodia]

Hi!

It may be the other way around: It's not Bennie's "absolute" weakness that allows Fred to cleave, but it's Fred's "absolute" strength that allows him to cleave, and that results in Bennies "relative" weakness.

Cleave allows you to do something you otherwise aren't allowed to do. If Fred had learned the proper way to bend his strike after downing the first opponent/enemy it is not more than fair to interpret this "skill" as a "absolute" strength that results in somebody other's "weakness".

So, don't let the weak minions stay to close to the BiBEL (Big Bad Evil Lady). Weak minions do have a habit to stay around in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kind regards

I can see what you mean, but consider what happens if Michael the Mook isn't in the scenario at all: Fred doesn't get a Cleave attack. He can't say "I'm taking my attack from Cleave against Bennie" unless he has something to drop first.

It's an interesting property that Cleave/Great Cleave (AOOs excepted) never lets you attack a specific target more times than if you had just taken a full attack against them. That is to say, a fighter with 3 attacks and Great Cleave could very well take out 3 minions and cleave at the BBEG (or BBEL) 3 times in one round. However, he also could have just attacked the BBEG 3 times directly. He got more hits total, but none of his targets are individually worse off than if they were going up against the hero one-on-one.

From a flavor standpoint, the way I've interpreted this is that Cleaving isn't so much 'You attack, and then attack again' as much as 'You were really aiming for that guy over there, and this wimpy guy got in the way' (which is why Cleaving on an AOO makes no sense, sense the guy over there wasn't open to attack) but I guess everyone has their own opinion.

 

[Bobbert]

I disagree that the BBEG is being punished. His mook got attacked for leaving himself opened, and through that attack a cleave was made. At worse this is a AoO problem since they allow more attacks then usual then a cleave issue.

I also don't see how the BBEG is punished for having mooks...from his point of view, don't the mooks pretty much exist to buy him a few rounds for casting buffing/protection spells or drinking potions, when faced against equally matched opposition (i.e. the PC's)? In this case, Cleave would do what it's supposed to do for the PC's: get through the wall of meat that much quicker so that the characters can get to the baddie sorceror before he puts up his full arsenal of protection spells.
Granted, it's more than a bit cliched for the bad guys to be preoccupied with their own protections while their mooks get slaughtered, but it's always worked for me in my campaigns.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

It seems to me that most people who get upset about cleave on aoo mainly just dont like cleave to begin with and so place a lot of extra hate on anything dealing with cleave.

I have participated in a number of heated discussion on this topic and IMO your generalization is baseless. As I see it, the real problem is a fundamental disagreement about what is an AoO.

Personally, I think Cleave and Great Cleave are very cool. Just not with AoOs (or Whirlwind in 3.0).

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I disagree that the BBEG is being punished. His mook got attacked for leaving himself opened, and through that attack a cleave was made. At worse this is a AoO problem since they allow more attacks then usual then a cleave issue.

Yes, it is an AoO issue. To my mind, the question is should an AoO be exactly like any other attack in every way?

 

[rkanodia]

I disagree that the BBEG is being punished. His mook got attacked for leaving himself opened, and through that attack a cleave was made. At worse this is a AoO problem since they allow more attacks then usual then a cleave issue.

Actually, the BBEG is being punished.

Let me run through a round of combat in each of the scenarios I originally mentioned.

Scenario A (Fred vs Bennie):
Fred attacks Bennie.
Bennie attacks Fred.
(next round starts)
Bennie has taken one attack from Fred.

Scenario B (Fred vs Bennie and Mike):
Fred attacks Bennie.
Bennie attacks Fred.
Mike attempts to disarm Fred; Fred's attack of opportunity kills Mike, and he makes a cleave attack against Fred.
(next round starts)
Bennie has taken two attacks from Fred.

Yes, Mike was stupid. He should have known better than to try and disarm Fred without the Improved Disarm feat, and he got killed for it. But forget about Mike. Look at Bennie: in Scenario B he's taken two attacks, but in Scenario A he's only taken one attack. Bennie is suffering because Mike made a careless attack.

I'm not trying to say that teammates should never be able to hurt you; certainly, if Bennie brought along Eva Evoker and she dropped a fireball right into the fight, I'd have Bennie roll his save like anyone else. I just think that Cleaving on Attacks of Opportunity in particular is pretty unfair.

 

[hero4hire]

I allow Cleave attempts after an AoO but it uses up another AoO in my game. Hence no Combat Reflexes....No Cleave! This seems to work well in my Game, Balance-Wise.

I really don't mind that the sorry bloke getting Cleaved didn't do anything to deserve an attack. In my mind Cleave is following through with a momentum of a blow..Chopping someone in half an your blade keeps on going (or whatever), but I don't like giving away something for nothing.