Good Uses for Bull Rush, Overrun, Grappling, and Trip

[Zen]

I have a player using a fighter/barbarian who uses improved Trip on anything with two legs and does pretty well with it. +4 to the opposed roll and a free attack at +4 if the trip succeeds, then the AoO when the tripped tries to get up is pretty sweet.

Like most techniques, however, it doesn't work on everything. Recent combat with a giant mimic proved that.

 

[Shin Okada]

The usefulness of those special attacks depend on what kind of opponents will show up in your campaign. If your campaign is full of two-legged-middle-sized villains, those tactics can be useful. But those moves are really ineffective against bigger or multiple-legged creatures. That is why those special attacks are rarely used by PCs (assuming they are core race).

But as a nasty DM, I often let monsters use those tactics. Improved Grabs are one of the most feared special attack. A cloud giant fighter with Improved Trip feat is something very hard for a human fighter to win. I am not so sure about overrun or bull rush, though.

 

[Victim]

Grappling: Spellcasters hate it when you grapple them. Also, if you can force a 1 v 1 situation, then a grappler uses his check for defense and offense in a grapple. So you can greatly reduce the damage that greatsword guy dishes out if you can match his grapple check.

Bullrush works better in large groups. The movement from Bullrush provokes attacks of opportunity, so if you push a guy back a square when you have 2 allies next to him, then your team gets 2 free attacks. Also, no attack roll is involved, so you could trade off one of your lower iterative attacks in that situation, since it'd probably miss anyway (especially if you used power attack).

 

[F5]

Ditto what others have said: in the right set of circumstances, these tricks can be very useful.

Our group was recently in a big fight with a BBEG godlike melee monster, and both grapple and bull rush factored significantly.

The BBEG was hitting regularly with 3 of his 4 iterative attacks, and doing over 30 points on most hits. Plus DR that not all of us could beat, and regeneration. And a decent AC and monstrous SR. Plus surrounded by countless minions, ranging from Ogres to advanced Fire Giants with class levels. Our plan was to teleport in, do as much damage as we could in the short time before we started getting our butts handed to us, then TP away. We had disregarded a bunch of dominated centaur mooks, until in the 1st round one of them (familiar with our hit-and-run tactics) decided to charge into the middle of the party, heedless of AoOs, and bull rushed our cleric out from under us. All of a suden, we couldn't teleport away as a group (have to be touching), and our healer was gone. Then the BBEG teleported into the space the cleric was standing in a moment before, and handed us a whole dumpster fulla' whoop-arse.

We had done some damage, but even with battlefield-control spells keeping the mooks away we woud have been dead meat soon, except I managed to get a Dimensional Anchor spell to stick on him. Next round, I Summoned 3 Huge Fiendish Consrictors to try and Grapple him. Our spells were boucing off, but I figured you don't get spell resistance against a grapple, and pinned is as good as Held, at the end of the day. One snake succeeded, and I knew it wouldn't take long for the Beast to break out of the grapple, but that was a few rounds that he wasn't wailing on us. In those few rounds, we took him down. Our DM did NOT expect us to be able to do that.

So, on one hand, a well-placed bull-rush really ruined our day. On the other hand, a well-placed grapple saved our butts.

 

[Chaldfont]

We nearly lost our gnome cleric to a punk mercenary who simply grabbed him, pinned him, and just started dealing nonlethal damage to him with grapple checks. The gnome was low-level, and had a 10 strength. He just couldn't escape. The rest of the party was kept at bay by other foes and the poor gnome was choked into unconsciousness.

I haven't seen this in a game yet, but I've also wanted to grapple a foe and pin him with his head underwater.

Pinning a foe is a good way to tie him up.

Improved trip is great for a monk-rogue pair. If they are flanking the foe, the rogue gets a sneak attack with a +4 bonus since his opponent is prone. Plus you get an AOO when he stands back up.

Bull rushing foes into dangerous places or their allies is great fun. See if you can convince your DM to let you pick up a table or bench to gain a bonus. I did that in a bar fight and pinned a couple of goblins against the wall with a bar table.

 

[azmodean]

The usefulness of those special attacks depend on what kind of opponents will show up in your campaign. If your campaign is full of two-legged-middle-sized villains, those tactics can be useful. But those moves are really ineffective against bigger or multiple-legged creatures. That is why those special attacks are rarely used by PCs (assuming they are core race).

Heh, that last little bit is so true(assuming they are core classes), I have a weretiger in the game I am running. He's large when in were-form, and he still counts as humanoid, so he has the sorceror cast enlarge person on him which makes him huge. Luckily that's as far as it goes, no way to get any bigger (no way that I'm allowing anyway)

Last session he started off a fight with an adult blue dragon by pouncing on it and tripping it with his first attack, one very suprised dragon. Then the 4 remaining attacks against a prone opponent, ow. What suprised the dragon even more was when it tried to grapple him and failed (really bad roll on the dragon's part). After being taken out of combat for the first two rounds, it was pretty much all over.

You might be questioning my sanity in allowing this character, but weretiger is an ECL 9 race, including the +3 LA, so he is somewhat deficient in other areas.

As far as bull rush is concerned, making your opponent provoke AoOs is probably the most useful thing to do with it. (unless your DM puts you in rooms with lava pits often)

 

[Plane Sailing]

I understand that he would get an AoO, but what allows this to also be a sneak attack?

Doh! I was mixing up bull rushing and grappling.

Bull rush them past your beefiest fighter so he can get a might AoO against them.

Grapple them so your rogue buddy can waltz up and sneak attack away to his hearts content.

That's what I meant to say

 

[kjenks]

Oh and remember attacking into a grapple has an even chance of hitting the bad guy as the people grappling him.

That's only with ranged weapons.

Grapple is astoundingly useful against spellcasters. Against high level casters, it forces the caster to use up a Dimension Door, Teleport or Contingency (Blink) to get out of it -- then you can go get him again.

Bull Rush is great when two or three of your buddies are already in melee with a foe. You bull rush the bad guy, everyone gets AoOs. They usually hurt the bad guy more than you.

I haven't seen overrun used in many, many games.

Trip gets used all the time at low levels; it's great for wasting time, but not much else. It seems to disappear at high levels.

 

[azmodean]

The great thing about trip is that if you have the feat and you're pretty sure it is going to work, it's free to try it. On the other hand if you don't have improved trip at med-to-high levels, you can use your last attack as a trip attempt, it's probably going to miss if you use it as a regular attack anyway

Tripping an opponent gives you two benefits, they're prone, and they're prone.

They're prone, so subsequent melee attacks are at +4
They're prone, so they have to either stand up and miss out on their full attack, or suffer the prone penalties for another round.

 

[Shin Okada]

The great thing about trip is that if you have the feat and you're pretty sure it is going to work, it's free to try it. On the other hand if you don't have improved trip at med-to-high levels, you can use your last attack as a trip attempt, it's probably going to miss if you use it as a regular attack anyway

+4 bonus on opposed strength check (defender can use dex if higher) is far from "pretty sure it is going to work". That is the opposed roll of d20s and that is only +4.

And, unless you are playing a really big monster race, you will often meat begger, stronger monsters. Large monsters get +4, huge monsters get +8. And opponents are not always bipedals. For example, an ogre has +4 (from size) +5 (from strength) = +9 bonus. A Dire Lion has +4 (from Size) +7 (from Str) +4 (4 legs) = +15 bonus. And you cannot trip ooze or worms at all.

And if you fail, you have a chance to be tripped yourself.

IMHO, usually, tripping is not a good choce for a medium-sized adventurer.