FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Watch your tone, please. Your quarrel is not with me, and if you think I'm not "getting it", you've lost track of what we're talking about, which is not about criticizing your DM. I'm not KarinsDad and I'm not attacking you.
D&D 5E Low Level Wizards Really Do Suck in 5E
- Thread starter KarinsDad
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Watch your tone, please. Your quarrel is not with me, and if you think I'm not "getting it", you've lost track of what we're talking about, which is not about criticizing your DM. I'm not KarinsDad and I'm not attacking you.
Yep. Pack tactics is way better than Rampage.
It's extremely difficult to explain a complex battle in posts on a message board. I'll try to sum up certain key points:
1. You send forward snipers to kill gnolls in rooms that separate leaving a couple alive to send on to the next room to pull the crowd. We killed or wounded quite a few gnolls before their chief came charging up with the remainder of his tribe.
2. You choose a choke point you can hold near a corner. Not in an open long hallway. Why do you choose corner? I'll post this in bold for Karinsdad: limited visibility of what is occurring in the front line. So the majority of gnolls don't know what is going on from one to the next to coordinate the conga line can't mass force for the overrun crowd in a straight line. The corner we used was approximately 15 feet long with. We choked it out of visible range.
3. You focus fire the leader because once he dies, the coordination dies with him. He died in two rounds. His sons by round three or four.
4. The flaming sphere is still solid. It occupies a space. It choked the hallway behind the gnoll leaders to 5 feet wide. It did additional damage striking into gnolls while doing so. The damage advantage was vastly in our favor.
5. It was a very long, continuous fight that culminated in the hallway sequence.
Not sure why so many think this fight is so out of hand. It wasn't very hard. Shoving isn't so easy when you can't see what you're doing and you're trying to apply a large group around a corner squeezed to five foot wide by a flaming sphere that damages you if you stay in there for a round. They certainly didn't want to get hit by it.
Is the Fang gnoll leader really going to think the party is going to kill him in 12 seconds? This guy who leads his tribe through force? With his two sons with glaives at his back? Doubtful.
The battle was well done by us. If the gnolls had more time, maybe they mass and push us back. They didn't have time. We didn't play them thinking that quickly on their feet. Nor did we play them wanting to run into a fiery sphere that burned them up. What if they don't make it past the party? Then they burn. It gave us the rounds we needed to finish their leaders. Once their leaders were down, they were easy pickings.
I keep hearing Karinsdad talking about 23 attacks. 23 arrows at +3 to hit against any AC of 18 is 25% chance to hit. That's 6 arrow hits for an average of 5.5 an arrow. 2.5 against the warlock. If they had massed their fire in that fashion, they would have done 18 points to the warlock if all 23 fire at the same guy. Even if they split their arrows, that is less damage to the warlock and more damage to the monk. He'll remove one with Deflect Arrows. We had plenty of means of slowing their damage down substantially and we did way more ranged damage.
Gnolls are not that tough. It is more surprising to me that anyone would have considered this a tough win.
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I adjusted my post above. I was writing quickly. I noticed it was the wrong tone for our conversation. Sorry.
You are right. It is a bit annoying having someone armchair DM a battle they weren't there for expecting an explanation for something that took a lot of rounds, a lot of set up, and patient, coordinated play. It's not like we ran down the hall, shot a gnoll, and waited for them all to come. We were using guerilla warfare with our high mobility ranged attackers to get the pack moving into the buzzsaw. It took some work. It was a good set of tactics the gnolls couldn't quickly and easily counter. Even a gnoll chieftain of average intelligence isn't going to make perfect decisions in a 12 second period.
Irks me a bit. This fight is minor compared to many far more difficult fights we've overcome. It's hard to believe it is being questioned. I imagine it's pointless to worry about some guy's doubt on a message board.
I'll move along as I don't see the conversation moving in a productive direction. I've offered my tactics for low level wizards. I've seen them work quite well. I expect they will continue to work quite well.
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FormerlyHemlock
Hero
There's two things going on here:
* Some people (KarinsDad apparently) assume that fighting 23 gnolls means you're basically in an arena with 23 gnolls at the same time. They do the simple math and discover that the gnolls should inflict roughly 40 HP per round (50 HP in melee) even against AC 18, which means means that if you have a party of four they're degrading roughly 25% of your combat power per turn, while you degrade only 10% of their combat power even if you inflict 40 HP of damage and kill two gnolls every turn (unlikely at level 3). Since you didn't explicitly say "we defeated them in detail", these people think it was one big melee. They would probably describe defeating someone in detail as multiple separate encounters of 8 gnolls here, 12 gnolls there, etc., instead of saying "23 gnolls". So partly it's miscommunication.
BTW, your math is a tiny bit off due to neglecting crits: if everyone fired at the warlock he'd be taking 6/20 * 2.5 * 23 + 23/20 * 3.5 = 21 points of damage per round, not 18. (If they shoot the monk or a backline squishy instead, it's 44-ish points of damage per round after the monk deflects one missile.) Which brings us to the second factor:
* Armchair quarterbacks are speculating to themselves about how they could defeat your party using 23 gnolls, and are baffled that the gnolls didn't play the way they would have. Part of your strategy was to disrupt and surprise the gnolls, use morale against them, have a hidden advantage (heavy armor mastery) which the gnolls can't avoid because they don't know about it, etc., etc. From a pure numbers perspective, there is an optimum strategy (focus fire, warlock last, killing one to two PCs per round[1]), but from a RP perspective there is no reason the gnolls would know to use that optimum strategy. I salute your DM for playing the gnolls as gnolls and not as miniature tactical computers. In my opinion, that's what makes D&D fun.
So, there you go: miscommunication and a different playstyle. Some of us got it right off the bat though--I said in post #829:
I know this because that's exactly how my PCs win similar fights. It turns out that you did defeat them in detail, and leveraged range/mobility and cover, and you also degraded morale by attacking the leaders. Good job. That's what makes this game fun.
-Max
[1] Actually, the goblin conga line is even more optimal and would do 32 points of damage per round even to your warlock, or 56 to any other AC 18 character--but you've stated that your group views it as unaesthetic so I'm excluding it from analysis.
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FormerlyHemlock
Hero
One more point here, about the speed of combat in 5E:
12 seconds isn't a lot of time to think. Sure, you are physically capable of swinging a sword lots of times in twelve seconds, but as far as thinking goes... did you ever see Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier? There's a scene at the beginning where he runs along the outside of the ship, swiftly taking out opposition and clearing the decks. It seems really quick and abrupt to most people watching the movie, but if you time it, most of his engagements take place in D&D time. That is, any given group of guards is usually incapacitated in 6 or 12 seconds, though the last group takes about 20. When Natasha secures the engine room, she takes out three guards in a fantastic action scene vignette which takes 18 seconds. In D&D terms, she's killing about one mook per round, which is pretty standard for a mid-level fighter. Lesson: D&D combat is as rapid and chaotic as the opening scenes in Captain America.
It's not unrealistic at all for monsters to make poor tactical choices given only 12 seconds to react. In fact, it's totally expected, realistic, and normal. If anything, what's surprising is how rapidly PCs adapt. Of course, that's largely because PC decisions happen in bullet time, where the players have two minutes or even longer to think...
This is one of the reasons why, when in doubt, I play my monsters dumb. (I.e. reactive and straightforward, and prone to morale breakage at around the 40-50% casualty mark.) There are some monsters (hobgoblins, drow, scro) which I will not only play smart, I will design battle drills for them in advance, and they can then unleash those battle drills when combat starts. But most monsters are not that smart or that well-trained, even if they have a high CR.
12 seconds isn't a lot of time to think. Sure, you are physically capable of swinging a sword lots of times in twelve seconds, but as far as thinking goes... did you ever see Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier? There's a scene at the beginning where he runs along the outside of the ship, swiftly taking out opposition and clearing the decks. It seems really quick and abrupt to most people watching the movie, but if you time it, most of his engagements take place in D&D time. That is, any given group of guards is usually incapacitated in 6 or 12 seconds, though the last group takes about 20. When Natasha secures the engine room, she takes out three guards in a fantastic action scene vignette which takes 18 seconds. In D&D terms, she's killing about one mook per round, which is pretty standard for a mid-level fighter. Lesson: D&D combat is as rapid and chaotic as the opening scenes in Captain America.
It's not unrealistic at all for monsters to make poor tactical choices given only 12 seconds to react. In fact, it's totally expected, realistic, and normal. If anything, what's surprising is how rapidly PCs adapt. Of course, that's largely because PC decisions happen in bullet time, where the players have two minutes or even longer to think...
This is one of the reasons why, when in doubt, I play my monsters dumb. (I.e. reactive and straightforward, and prone to morale breakage at around the 40-50% casualty mark.) There are some monsters (hobgoblins, drow, scro) which I will not only play smart, I will design battle drills for them in advance, and they can then unleash those battle drills when combat starts. But most monsters are not that smart or that well-trained, even if they have a high CR.
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You seem to talk a good game, but when someone questions you on it, you refuse to give them the exact layout and you refuse to admit that a different DM might do something different that busts your super tactics. Personally, I think the burden of proof is on the guy making the outrageous claims.
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It's not so much thinking that the 23 gnolls are in an arena, it's thinking that there are a ton of things that a DM can do to make the unexpected happen. As a DM, I like challenging my PCs. If the players use similar tactics over and over (which with the limits of 3rd level spells and abilities, they would have to), I would sometimes throw something new at them.
It just takes a single secret corridor to mess up this entire attack, or alternatively, just other ways around to that first room.
A Shove that works opens the flood gates to a lot of attacks per round.
A successful Grapple and then pull the PC 15 feet around the corner so that this one PC is separated from the group while a flood of gnolls stream by. Grapple movement is automatic, the enemy just has to win the check. Bless doesn't help against this.
And why are the NPCs fighting in such a disadvantageous setting? The Fang is just as smart as some PCs in most games.
There are so many options. The claim was that the party is so optimized and so stealthy and so capable that the DM often makes the challenges tougher then normal CR. That isn't necessary. Just do the unexpected. The gnolls don't know about some things, so they should not use the optimal tactics, but then again, there should be some things the PCs do not know so that they cannot use optimal tactics. They use the tactics they know. They might not work (at least in my game).
When someone claims that the PCs mostly control where and when combat takes place, I have to wonder. How the heck does that happen?
In our game, sometimes the PCs are in control, but often, the monsters are in control. The monsters know their terrain and their homes, not the PCs. Yup, a bat could fly in and scout out the territory. A bat can also get shot because some gnolls likes bat meat. For all the PCs know, the gnolls have scouts out in the wilderness that spot them as they approaching from miles away and report back about intruders. For all the PCs know, the Gnolls have a Shaman who throws a Flaming Sphere back at them.
This combat worked out for him. Cool. Glad he had fun. It just seems odd that it worked out so perfect against such a vastly superior force and that he claims that this is typical for his group. Almost as if someone was helping the players manage this.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Bolded for emphasis. Yes, this is exactly what makes it fun. It might not work, because there might be factors you don't know about. Maybe these gnolls are smarter than the usual gnolls. Maybe there is a secret door. Maybe one of them is actually an Oni. Maybe there's a dam that the gnolls will just unplug. Maybe the gnolls saw you coming, and they're going to turn your little ambush right on its head. Maybe the gnolls have a black pudding in a cage that they will unleash. Maybe you're still being stalked by that group of vampire spawn you met earlier, and they're ready to jump you from behind as soon as you're engaged from the front. Etc., etc. You just don't know, and so even a "perfect plan" is a little bit nervous in execution. Even if the gnolls are bog-standard and die in great whacking lots in your corridor, you don't know in advance that that's how it is actually going to work out.
In my opinion, the fun of D&D doesn't come from rolling dice in combat. It's about exploring and resolving these larger kinds of uncertainties: "unknown unknowns" as some people like to call it. That's why I love scro, for instance. They look almost exactly like normal orcs, but their equipment is better-maintained, and then when battle starts you realize that they are taunting you in elvish and using sophisticated tactics and they have spellcasters and trained fighters and... uh-oh, these are not normal orcs! But it doesn't have to happen that way every time, and in fact if every group of orcs turns out to be scro, you lose the whole effect.
At the risk of talking too much about myself and going off on a tangent, let me illustrate. For my next game I've got several encounters prepped for my party (one level 1, two level 9s). They could see one or more of:
* An underground lake that they have to wade across. In reality, this is a combat encounter with a black pudding, which they can't see underwater.
* Three black-clad drow warriors. (In reality, a trivial encounter, worth 300 XP. The drow might get lucky and poison somebody with a crossbow bolt, but there is no chance of them killing anyone, and officially it's not even Easy. The PCs won't know that in advance though, since they don't have a Battlemaster, and due to the law of Conservation of Ninjitsu they may assume that these three drow are pretty powerful.)
* Six scrawny-looking humanoids in partial or full armor, carrying greatswords, one of which shines with an inner light. (Githyanki Knight and Warriors. In reality a triple-deadly encounter worth 15,000 XP. Because I'm not a complete jerk, the gith will treat with the party in the same way they treat with drow elves when they meet them: single combat between lieutenants for spoils, instead of all-out war, unless the gith feel they have the advantage and can win with negligible losses. If the PCs get cocky and attack, they will regret it greatly because the gith are far tougher than their numbers suggest. But if they bluff well and beat the lone gith, they may win some gemstones as spoils, as well as gaining some important knowledge about their own backstories.)
* A full drow war party (21 drow, 1 elite warrior, 1 priestess). Probably won't happen unless the PCs miff it with the three drow warriors above. Also, probably broken into two separate groups barely within earshot of each other. Not really intended as a combat encounter, will probably rely on dueling protocol like the gith do and for similar reasons, but if the PCs start a fight it will probably be the toughest fight they've ever had unless they've already met the githyanki. My PCs aren't really used to fighting disciplined military troops, and they've never before met a full spellcaster as powerful as a drow priestess.
* A lone githyanki. Intended as a warmup for the full githyanki party above, and also to telegraph about how tough githyanki are if you pick a fight with them.
* An Iron Golem guarding a biomedical facility. (Could be deadly or trivial depending upon how smart the monk is about fighting it--he's the only party member who is actually capable of taking this challenge on. I figure this iron golem has an enhanced tactical package due to its origin, so I'll play it smart, which means it's about 80% likely to be a deadly challenge.)
* The "ooze demon" which they are ostensibly supposed to be fighting. From Quests of Doom (the Noble Rot), scaled up by a factor of four. This should be a hard but straightforward fight, and it's mostly just a reward (free XP) for closing a minor story arc so we can get on to more interesting stuff that doesn't come from a pre-packaged module. This is the one potential fight they could get into which is actually a level-appropriate combat level per DMG guidelines.
So I've got seven stationary/wandering encounters prepped, only two of which are actually supposed to be combat encounters per se. The others are social encounters with some combat potential mixed in, but if combat takes place it will be under conditions of high uncertainty. In the case of the githyanki and drow I'm giving the players a chance to reduce the uncertainty by encountering small parties before the big ones (because I am nice that way), but there will still be large uncertainty remaining. And frankly, if they do directly engage either large enemy group I anticipate a TPK, although given the enemy motivations that probably means "captured and enslaved" instead of "killed and eaten," so it's incumbent upon me to telegraph the danger in advance.
Anyway, that's how I play the game. The combats aren't the interesting parts.
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Now that I'm not coming off a 16 hour day and feeling irritated, I'll comment a bit more. Sorry if I was a bit curt and snarky earlier. I'll explain some of the encounter I remember. It's been a few weeks and my memory isn't perfect. I'm not interested in an argument. Use the tactics as you wish.
There were 23 total gnolls in the gnoll area. A Fang, two packlords (his sons), and twenty regular gnolls (his small tribe including his mates that could fight).
1. We scouted the area with stealth noting the layout. Rogue/Monk, Eldritch Knight Archer, and Deep Gnome wizard (yeah, wizard's can stealth without magic pretty well in this edition).
2. We decided to take out a room. Five gnolls. We killed four and let one run. (23 to 19 gnolls).
3. We set up near the entrance to the cave. It was an L-shaped hallway/corridor. The short perpendicular area of the hallway leading into the entrance room was 20 feet on the long half and 10 feet on the short half leading to a 10 foot wide passage. The rogue/monk and warlock/fighter set up 5 feet inside the passage leaving about 15 feet of space for the gnolls.
4. Gnome wizard hid at the corner and watched for the gnolls giving us advance warning so we can start buffing.
5. Gnolls are a coming with their Fang leader and his sons in front.
6. Archer fires at front wounding gnoll leader, falls back.
7. Gnome sets up flaming sphere on corner point of the L. That means any gnoll standing in the 10 foot area at the back of the passage including around the corner is going to get burned. This requires the gnolls to make a choice. We purposefully left a space that wouldn't burn them to encourage some of the Chaotic Evil gnolls to step up and fight away from the fire.
8. The DM determined the gnoll leader and his sons being the alpha were going to prove their strength, so they stepped up and took the space. I don't see this as a out of character for gnolls.
9. The conga line: We actually did have the conga line of archers give firing a shot moving back and forth. But they could not all move back and forth. Page 191 of the PHB makes it difficult terrain to move through the space of another creature whether friendly or hostile. So moving back and forth through each other would half their movement.
Also who sacrifices themselves to get burned when their movement ends near the flaming sphere? After a few rounds of getting burned, the gnolls did retreat hoping their leaders would kill the front line and call for the advance.
10. We focus fired the leader including the warlock using Hellish Rebuke when he was hit bringing him down in two rounds. The cleric focused on healing the monk and used aid on the frontline martials and archer to keep them up. The warlock was able to withstand the assault. The monk flurried on the Fang. We took him out fairly quickly.
11. Once the leader was down we wore the gnolls down in a prolonged fight. The wizard used more spells. I don't remember them all. The Eldritch Knight archer threw in a thunderwave at a key time when the warlock fell for a round. He was the one that I know received at least one cure wounds and some potions (yes, did we use potions).
Overall, a good fun fight that took quite a while. If some find it the tactics by the gnolls poor, I can only say I disagree. I don't think gnolls would have pushed past their leader in the initial fight. It was two rounds of battle. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't give their leaders a couple of rounds to take out the frontline. I don't think they would have ran into a flaming sphere taking the fire damage to mass into an area they couldn't see what lay there. Giving up a damaging attack to do a Shove that may or may not work didn't seem like the most intelligent use of the Fang and his sons actions considering they wanted to kill the party members. I feel we did an excellent job of stopping them from massing into a jostling mob that would have pushed us out of the way. Flaming Sphere is extremely effective at shutting down a hallway and forcing the creatures to choose to take damage or stay back. That's all we needed it to do to get the job done.
In this particular instance, the low level wizard was highly useful.
There were 23 total gnolls in the gnoll area. A Fang, two packlords (his sons), and twenty regular gnolls (his small tribe including his mates that could fight).
1. We scouted the area with stealth noting the layout. Rogue/Monk, Eldritch Knight Archer, and Deep Gnome wizard (yeah, wizard's can stealth without magic pretty well in this edition).
2. We decided to take out a room. Five gnolls. We killed four and let one run. (23 to 19 gnolls).
3. We set up near the entrance to the cave. It was an L-shaped hallway/corridor. The short perpendicular area of the hallway leading into the entrance room was 20 feet on the long half and 10 feet on the short half leading to a 10 foot wide passage. The rogue/monk and warlock/fighter set up 5 feet inside the passage leaving about 15 feet of space for the gnolls.
4. Gnome wizard hid at the corner and watched for the gnolls giving us advance warning so we can start buffing.
5. Gnolls are a coming with their Fang leader and his sons in front.
6. Archer fires at front wounding gnoll leader, falls back.
7. Gnome sets up flaming sphere on corner point of the L. That means any gnoll standing in the 10 foot area at the back of the passage including around the corner is going to get burned. This requires the gnolls to make a choice. We purposefully left a space that wouldn't burn them to encourage some of the Chaotic Evil gnolls to step up and fight away from the fire.
8. The DM determined the gnoll leader and his sons being the alpha were going to prove their strength, so they stepped up and took the space. I don't see this as a out of character for gnolls.
9. The conga line: We actually did have the conga line of archers give firing a shot moving back and forth. But they could not all move back and forth. Page 191 of the PHB makes it difficult terrain to move through the space of another creature whether friendly or hostile. So moving back and forth through each other would half their movement.
Also who sacrifices themselves to get burned when their movement ends near the flaming sphere? After a few rounds of getting burned, the gnolls did retreat hoping their leaders would kill the front line and call for the advance.
10. We focus fired the leader including the warlock using Hellish Rebuke when he was hit bringing him down in two rounds. The cleric focused on healing the monk and used aid on the frontline martials and archer to keep them up. The warlock was able to withstand the assault. The monk flurried on the Fang. We took him out fairly quickly.
11. Once the leader was down we wore the gnolls down in a prolonged fight. The wizard used more spells. I don't remember them all. The Eldritch Knight archer threw in a thunderwave at a key time when the warlock fell for a round. He was the one that I know received at least one cure wounds and some potions (yes, did we use potions).
Overall, a good fun fight that took quite a while. If some find it the tactics by the gnolls poor, I can only say I disagree. I don't think gnolls would have pushed past their leader in the initial fight. It was two rounds of battle. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't give their leaders a couple of rounds to take out the frontline. I don't think they would have ran into a flaming sphere taking the fire damage to mass into an area they couldn't see what lay there. Giving up a damaging attack to do a Shove that may or may not work didn't seem like the most intelligent use of the Fang and his sons actions considering they wanted to kill the party members. I feel we did an excellent job of stopping them from massing into a jostling mob that would have pushed us out of the way. Flaming Sphere is extremely effective at shutting down a hallway and forcing the creatures to choose to take damage or stay back. That's all we needed it to do to get the job done.
In this particular instance, the low level wizard was highly useful.
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