Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9422097" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 100/159: July 2003part 5/10Critical Threats 2: Despite 3e being built around “fair” fights, there are a lot of rules exploits you can pull to make them very unfair indeed. Jonathan Tweet decides to demonstrate one of the easier ways to cheese your opponents using only stuff from the corebooks. Hungash is a hobgoblin wizard who specialises in fly & fry attacks. He becomes invisible, casts ghost sound to create ominous drums that cover his incantations and make it harder for the PC’s to pinpoint him, then rains fireballs & ice storms down until he runs out of spells, at which point he teleports away, still invisible. Unless you have something to counter invisibility and either flight or long range attacks of your own, you won’t even be able to touch him, and he can deal several hundred points of damage over the course of a minute and then be back the next day fresh as a daisy if that wasn’t enough. Scattering and diving for cover may save some of you, but any survivors will need to up their game fast if they want to have a chance long term. He’s not completely optimal - given how much his build revolves around memorising multiple copies of the same spells he’d be even better as a sorcerer or specialist wizard, but he could still TPK a whole party of the same level as him if they don’t have the right gear or tactics to cope with this kind of surprise attack. So this is pretty interesting because it’s one of the designers of the game showing you how to break the game. A reminder that 3e was designed by people who also worked on CCG’s, and they brought the same mentality of encouraging optimisation and including some deliberately bad “trap” options in the class and feat selections. Subsequent editions would crack down on these kind of things quite a bit, making building a character around stacking powers in this way a lot harder. The usability of this article will obviously depend heavily on if you’re the kind of DM who likes putting sadistic and unfair encounters in every now & then and letting the PC’s die if they aren’t sufficiently paranoid & prepared.Beast of Burden: We finally have a full-length adventure that isn’t a sequel. It is following current trends though, as it’s another giant monster one. You go years without any at all and suddenly several turn up within a few months of each other. Your basic vaguely saurian kaiju has been captured by gnolls who’ve built a bunch of howdahs on its back. Like the recent giant golem adventure, you’re nowhere near powerful enough to fight it head-on so you need to figure out how to get close and then on top of the beast without being swatted and beat its handlers to get the situation under control. Now with extra balance checks because a giant lizard is considerably less stable in motion than a giant robot and you’re still on the outside. (unless you were swallowed, which probably won’t go well as a way of stopping it) So this is the kind of adventure which is basically one massive extended action scene with very few opportunities to rest up between fights, as unless you managed to get on there stealthily the enemy will be constantly pressing the attack and trying to get you off the creature where you can be stomped. People used to delving puzzle dungeons and pulling 15 minute workdays will have a tough time of this. If you like a more action movie style of play this does look pretty cool though as long as you aren’t having to create a custom battlemat to move your minis three-dimensionally. The kind of thing that got Mike Mearls to write Iron Heroes specifically to make tweaked rules & classes that handle this playstyle better. Not an all-time classic, but another adventure that’s very interesting in a thought-provoking way.</blockquote>

Verification