Favorite combat tactics? (2nd attempt)

[Lord Zardoz]

Mounts and battlefield manipulation

Hussar makes a great point about Mounts. The use of a mount can acheive the same result as battlefield control spells. You get to dictate exactly how and when you want to attack, and often render any counter attack ineffective.

The Death from Above tactic is essentially a battle field control combination that for the user, redefines what the battlefield consists of. By extension, the Teleport Hulk combination allows the users to ignore the battlefield.

Every battlefied consists of spaces that have an affect as you occupy or move from them. Most spaces do nothing. Some cost more movement than others, some can harm you, some can protect you. Most spaces can be attacked or occupied, some cannot. Using mounts or certain mobility enhancing spells allow you to redefine the battlefield for yourself. Spider climb makes spaces on walls and ceilings occupiable by you. Reach and range weapons allow you to attack or theaten more squares. Spells and mounts basically redefine the effects of certain spaces for you.

Ideal battlefield manipulation should have the following effects:

- Allow you attack someone from a space they cannot attack
- Cause automatic harm to your opponent
- Grant you a bonus to attack, damage, spells, or saves

(note: Some might argue that Fireball is a battlefield manipulation spell since it makes a huge number of spaces on the battleground cause harm to your opponent. It is not a battlefield manipulation spells. Such spells, in my mind, have a duration or permanant effect. The only persistant effect Fireball can have on a battlefield is to leave a bunch of corpses on the ground).

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[Hussar]

The only persistant effect Fireball can have on a battlefield is to leave a bunch of corpses on the ground

ROTFLMAO.

 

[ceratitis]

what about the smell of burning corpses? surely it acounts for some battle field control
Z

 

[Stormrunner]

2) Cut their legs off.

BWAHHAHAHAHA! OK, that one made my day.

That's not a mimic, it's a house hunter...and they come in villages.

Actually, I believe the original Appalachian legend calls them "gardinels". Not a shapeshifting mimic, but a plant/fungus more akin to a pitcher plant. You walk in the door of the "house", the "floor" drops out from under you, and you're in a slippery-walled pit full of acid. Luminescent patches in the "windows" and inside the door give the illusion of occupancy at night.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

The Tactical use of Hostages

Taking hostages, as a strategic consideration, usually works out poorly. Your opponents will only have an impetus to co-operate as long as you keep them alive and under your control. Once you surrender that control, your opponent no longer has any reason not to kill you. And as a reversed situation, giving into a hostage taker never really works either. If you give the opponent what he wants, he will still have the hostage under his power, allowing him to try to make more demands, or to go ahead and kill the hostage anyway. So as a rule, never negotiate when hostages are involved.

But this is a tactical thread, not a strategic one. And there are cirumstances where having a hostage on the battlefield is advantageous.

But the one thing you have to be certain of is that your opponent will care about the fate of the hostages. If your opponents are chaotic evil, or just supremely cold hearted and calculating, hostages wont be much of a deterrant. But aside from that, one of the strongest benefits of hostages is that the threat scales with level. It does not matter if the opponent is level 1 or level 20, if they care about the hostage, they will at least give you a chance to speak rather than risk having you kill the hostage.

First, there is the ever popular human shield technique. You hold the hostage in front of you and use them to intercept attacks. According to the rules-as-written, this gives you a 4 point AC bonus, and if an attack misses by 4, it hits the hostage. (I am too lazy to look this up right now so if I am wrong, go ahead and correct me). Pulling this off is usually not easy, since your probably going to be unable to attack while controling the hostage.

A variant of this would be the Breastplate of Babies, where you strap an infant onto your shield or chest. Infants are light weight, and it takes alot of balls to be wiling to risk killing an infant just to inflict damage on a villian.

If you can force close proximity to your hostages, you can prevent your opponents from using spells with areas of effects, (except for spells such as sleep and other non-lethals). This works with human shields but you can also acheive this effect by having prisoners chained to the ground out in the open.

The threat of killing a hostage is best carried out by preparing a readied action for a coup-de-grace on someone who is currently helpless. Ready the action, make your demand, and carry it out if the opponents do not comply. If you can get away with it, have a mook do the dirty work some distance away from yourself. It prevents the players from trying to do something clever like a quickened spell to stop you before you carry out the threat. You can even make it clear to the players that if you do not return, someone dear to them will be killed.

Also of use is the notion of Hostages as a Diversion. Basically, you put your hostages in imminent harm and run away. If the plaeyrs try to catch you, the hostage will die. This usually means doing something like tying weighted chains to someone and tossing them in the water, or tying them down to a stake in the ground and setting them on fire. The players should have enough time to intervene and save the hostages, but it should also give you the chance to escape. This option is less useful for escape purposes if you have Teleport or a similar ability. But for retreats that rely on movement, the head start will pay off. You do not need to use this to escape, you can also just buy time for some step in your convoluted plan.

Most of the above is only really usable with encounters prepared in advance. However, you can pull this off on the spot. All you need to do is drop one of the players to 0 HP, or otherwise render them helpless. Once attained, prepare to go with the coup-de-grace and make your demand. At high levels, they may settle for a ressurection of the soon to be deceased, but at lower levels, this can give most players pause. You can even threaten to maim a character, "One move and I cut his eye's out!" will probably get better results then a threat to kill.

WARNING: Only go for a coup-de-grace on players very rarely. For some reason, they really dont like it, and may end up chasing you from the room.

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[Darmanicus]

Trip
Tanglefoot bag
Web
Entangle
Retard's Black Tentacles
Net

Just to be sure

Seriously though, nets are awesome, check 'em out sometime!!!

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Trip
Tanglefoot bag
Web
Entangle
Retard's Black Tentacles
Net

Just to be sure

Seriously though, nets are awesome, check 'em out sometime!!!

While those do sound like a nice selection of assets, I am not quite sure that they amount to an actual tactic. Its not really much of a tactic to say 'use this', and not provide any frame of reference or context, or even any advice on how to get the most use out of one of those items.

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[KenM]

I forgot the other favourite combat tactic (albeit I've never actually had the heart to use this) - the collossal mimic, disguised as an inn.

You just gave me a great idea on how to kick off a game. "You all meet at an inn........"

 

[Lord Zardoz]

The Tactical considerations of Doors and Doorways

DM's are already well aware that most partys will regard any doorway with an un-natural level of caution and suspicion. They will listen, search, scry, and prepare for any number of possibilities to be on the otherside of a door. They will not enter any doorway until they know it is safe to enter. Doors essentially exist to provide some measure of privacy and security to a room that needs to be entered and exited. They create natural choke points, and are excellent places to place traps, guards, and ambushes.

But once combat has started, how does the presence of a doorway affect a battle? That depends on the nature of the door, and why it is there to begin with.

Obviously, a door can provide a way to pick off players who try to enter one at a time. This is best accomplished by readied actions taken by combatants who cannot be seen or attacked from the other side of the door. Given a large enough room, you could have 20 or more attackers with ranged weapons with readied actions to shoot the next person who passes through a doorway. You can also put some heavily armoured, high HP thugs near the door do keep people who enter the door from getting very far inside the room.

This tactic is so obvious that it borders on sub-optimal. As I noted, players are very suspicious of doors. They probably wont enter until they are sure its safe, and will pile on every buf they can. They could also just put a fireball in the room ahead of them.

The best tactic is to arrange to have as much control as possible over who enters through a door and when. Rather then use the door as a choke point, you should use it as a tool to isolate and slow down the opponents. Maintaining control over whether the door is open or closed will allow you to use the door to either divide and conquer the players who try to get through, or to stall for time as you retreat. You can also use doors to guarantee that the opponents can only be within an area you control.

Controling the door is not the easiest thing to arrange in most cases. If you have a typical door, you need to be on the side of the door that the door opens to, and to have someone behind the door ready to slam and bar it shut. The person behind the door does have some measure of cover, but probably not enough to guarantee their safety.

If you wish to make a door a tactical feature of the battlefield, you want that door to be as durable as possible. This means heavy and thick doors, possibly metal. A plain wooden door is not going to standup to a determined group of opponents who want to get to the otherside. Vertical portculis set into the doorway are ideal for trapping people, but are a pain in the ass to open again. Barred doors are a two edged sword. They let you attack outward from the door, but they also let other attack inward.

Divide and conquer tactics do not work so well against mid level spell casters. Lightningbolt will open many doors that Knock cannot, and once you get to spells like dimension door, you cannot really use normal doors to control the movement of spell casters. Despite this, you can usually isolate the front line melee combatants. In addition to being able to control the door, you need to be able to guarantee access to either side of the door way.

From an architecture point of view, this means that you want to be able to seal a room without having to be in it, and you want to be able to seal a room without it preventing you and / or your forces from entering or leaving the area. This means you want rooms with multiple doorways combined with alternate routes around that room. Alternatively, you will want to have doorways that cannot impede you personally.

If you have the ability to turn insubstantial, squeeze through narrow gaps, or teleport short distances at will, then doorway control tactics can be devastatingly effective.

On a marginally related note, you can probably really mess with a group of players by having a door that looks real but is really part of a wall, keyed with an illusion that allows someone to appear to have entered the door. The players will spend hours trying to open a door that is not a door, allowing you to gather your forces and smash them.

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[Particle_Man]

"Elaborate Description": I had a dragon use Silent Image to place a minurature castle around itself. The party spent time discussing what tiny people might live in such a castle, and conveniently got into a cone formation for the dragon's breath.