Excerpt: Swarms

[Plane Sailing]

So if I understand right....

The drake swarm moves up to the wizard, trips him and hits him for 14.5 damage on average. Then on the wizard's turn before he can take an action he gets hit for 14.5 again (and probably goes down if he is level 1-2). Meanwhile everyone else is taking damage pulses and hitting it for half damage.

My emphasis added. Why do you think that? Because of the aura effect? I think it is only ongoing damage which affects you before you take any actions.

 

[hong]

My emphasis added. Why do you think that? Because of the aura effect? I think it is only ongoing damage which affects you before you take any actions.

Is there a difference?

 

[DeusExMachina]

Yes, there is.

The ongoing damage would be at the start of the wizard's turn, the aura attack is at the start of the swarm's turn. Big difference, I'd say because in the second case the wizard gets to move out of the aura range if he wants to...

 

[hong]

Yes, there is.

The ongoing damage would be at the start of the wizard's turn, the aura attack is at the start of the swarm's turn. Big difference, I'd say because in the second case the wizard gets to move out of the aura range if he wants to...

No, what FadedC was saying is that the aura attack is at the start of the wizard's turn.

Which makes sense. Otherwise you can have the situation where you start your turn in the swarm's aura, then you run away, then on ITS turn, you take damage even though you're nowhere near the swarm. This doesn't make sense.

 

[duke_Qa]

i think people are thinking about the pit fiend aura, which i think worked in such a fashion that it did damage twice(when entered(/pit fiends turn) and when it was your turn).

i don't have time to check the differences on the auras, but this might be interesting from a exception-based game-design standpoint. its good that aura's can have exceptions to them imo, makes for easier modifications.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I see we're back to WotC's favorite 4E marketing tactic: telling us how much 3.X sucks.

This time it has the additional problem of 3.5's swarm rules being clearly superior to these. They seriously think those rules are "evocative"?

I wondered when someone would finally call upon that in the article I might have done it myself, but the article start was just way to funny to complain about it. At least now we have a solid example of 3.5 bashing, instead of just the vague stuff where they compare how things differ and they think their version is better. (They are usually right on that stuff, in my opinion. )

Well, I happen to like the idea of the Swarm rules of 3.5, and I don't think the implementation was that bad, either. They were a pain to fight, since they were hard to damage.
But the new one really looks better. The "take it off of me" really comes off better, especially with the Swarm Aura...

 

[Byronic]

Head spolder: To mock up a large battle, could you have swarms of minions?

For some reason this made me thing of fluffy cute chiwawa minion swarms. I could imagine that, I mean they're fragile enough to break easily and you could hit multiple of them so that the swarm goes down with one hit point. Pity the damage doesn't work out right though. Maybe if they were zombie chiwawas?

One thing I am wondering, does this mean that if I would hit a Swarm with a melee attack (let's say a sword), would I get +5 damage because of the vulnerability to close attacks and then have it halved because of their "half damage to melee"?

 

[Jack99]

For some reason this made me thing of fluffy cute chiwawa minion swarms. I could imagine that, I mean they're fragile enough to break easily and you could hit multiple of them so that the swarm goes down with one hit point. Pity the damage doesn't work out right though. Maybe if they were zombie chiwawas?

One thing I am wondering, does this mean that if I would hit a Swarm with a melee attack (let's say a sword), would I get +5 damage because of the vulnerability to close attacks and then have it halved because of their "half damage to melee"?

Sword is a melee attack, not a close attack. Close attacks are mostly magical area spells.

 

[Voss]

Well.
*pauses, clears throat*

Very, very nice. I like the medium-but-not angle the aura provides, and that if you want to attempt to battle a swarm in melee, you have to effectively get inside it to do so. This is abstraction that works.

The stirge swarm damage isn't that bad. It can drop a striker or controller in roughly 4 rounds if it gets lucky, and deal damage to that characters friends at the same time.

Scariest thing about the drake swarm: speed 7. Most of the party isn't getting away.

Multiple swarms are truly, truly frightening. Thats a lot of attacks if multiple swarms get next to you.

 

[Ragnar69]

Now all we need is for the swarm of locusts to be able to drop full plate mail as treasure and we can play some Diablo II...

Anyway, like the swarm rules, simple and effective and it does give me a cool idea about an encounter where a whole cavern or chasm is filled with a huge swarm of bugsa and they'll need to blast (or run) their way through it somehow...

Hmm, a magic plate mail on a corpse and when the PCs investigate it, a swarm busrts out of it ^^