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<blockquote data-quote="Empirate" data-source="post: 5886553" data-attributes="member: 78958">Quite a few creatures have areas that can be targeted separately. The most well-known is the Hydra. It's not a huge problem to say &quot;THIS creature has a heart that can be targeted separately, and to do this, you must do the following...&quot;. Make sure that the option to attack the heart is interesting, but not automatically superior to just whacking the creature in a more general way. That way, it will be an interesting encounter instead of a &quot;this monster is actually not as tough as it looks at first&quot; encounter.The Hydra gets weakened when you kill its heads (in that it loses a bite attack, and damage done to a head deals a little bit of damage to the rest of the body, too), but it's quite feasible to just go for the body instead. If you have lots of attacks, attacking the heads might be better, as each one of them is easy to get rid of - but if you have just a single, powerful attack, it's better to kill the body. Try and come up with something similar here.For example, let's model it this way: when either the creature as a whole OR the heart reach 0 HP, the creature dies. Furthermore, the heart has as many HP as the creature itself -&nbsp; specifically damaging the heart inflicts half damage on the creature as a&nbsp; whole, and full damage to the heart itself.&nbsp; The heart gets some DR x/piercing (since only piercing weapons can easily reach the heart, which is presumably encased in a body cavity), while the rest of the body has no DR. Also, the heart has a higher AC (for size) than the rest of the body.So far, hitting the heart instead of the body sounds like a bad idea. But if each hit on the heart ALSO inflicts a negative level on the creature, or deals some Str damage or other cumulative debuff, specifically attacking the heart is an interesting alternative to just pummeling the body.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Empirate, post: 5886553, member: 78958"] Quite a few creatures have areas that can be targeted separately. The most well-known is the Hydra. It's not a huge problem to say "THIS creature has a heart that can be targeted separately, and to do this, you must do the following...". Make sure that the option to attack the heart is interesting, but not automatically superior to just whacking the creature in a more general way. That way, it will be an interesting encounter instead of a "this monster is actually not as tough as it looks at first" encounter. The Hydra gets weakened when you kill its heads (in that it loses a bite attack, and damage done to a head deals a little bit of damage to the rest of the body, too), but it's quite feasible to just go for the body instead. If you have lots of attacks, attacking the heads might be better, as each one of them is easy to get rid of - but if you have just a single, powerful attack, it's better to kill the body. Try and come up with something similar here. For example, let's model it this way: when either the creature as a whole OR the heart reach 0 HP, the creature dies. Furthermore, the heart has as many HP as the creature itself - specifically damaging the heart inflicts half damage on the creature as a whole, and full damage to the heart itself. The heart gets some DR x/piercing (since only piercing weapons can easily reach the heart, which is presumably encased in a body cavity), while the rest of the body has no DR. Also, the heart has a higher AC (for size) than the rest of the body. So far, hitting the heart instead of the body sounds like a bad idea. But if each hit on the heart ALSO inflicts a negative level on the creature, or deals some Str damage or other cumulative debuff, specifically attacking the heart is an interesting alternative to just pummeling the body. [/QUOTE]

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