Spiked Chain + Great Cleave = DM's Nightmare

[Lord Zardoz]

I do not want to remove the weapon from my game, I only want to tone it down, and only just a little. (Yes, some of you here will see that as "nerfing".) Otherwise, I'll have to quit using so many "mooks" in my campaign encounters, which my other players and myself have long since come to enjoy.

Your game, your call. Just be aware that players generally revolt at any hint of trying to nerf or modify something you already let into the game. If your looking for ways to work around it within the rules as written, plenty of suggestions have been made. If your looking for a justification to nerf the weapon, I suspect you will find (as I did in a similar thread I posted a year ago), that most of the responses here will be unsympathetic.

Regardless of the game type, the players tend to adapt to the DM style and build to be effective within it pretty quickly. If you like Mooks, your players will go for things like the Spiked Chain, High AC, and Fireball type AoE spells. If you like using human NPC's, you can expect your players to discover the joys of Hold Person, Hideous Laughter, and Disarm spells. If you like using 'Giants' and other durable heavy hitters, your players will show you how much fun maxed out Power Attack's by raging barbarians can be if the AC is low. And if you like spell casters, your players will discover Grapple.

If you try to Nerf the Chain, I suspect one of two things will happen. First, you will not nerf it enough, and the player will discover a work around, and drop you back to square one. Second, you will nerf it too much and render a character concept that a player has been running with for a while useless. This will result in you having arguements with the player, or outright losing the player (and probably his wife it it comes to that).

Essentially, players will view any attempt to nerf a spell, feat, or item you let into your game as a punishment for actually being successful within the game you are running.

As has been mentioned, this is a thread topic that tends to reoccur with some frequency. There are really only two solutions to this.

1) Use the work arounds suggested above and try to get around the problems.

2) Speak with the player, tell him you did not realize how much of an impact the spiked chain would have on the kind of game you like to run. Ask him to retire the character so you can in turn retire the spiked chain. Then let the player introduce a new character.

If your not willing to go with solution 1, then solution 2 is your only real option. And I suspect that even then, the player may choose a different character type that can still render your Mook Swarms ineffective, like a Sor / Fighter that uses Enlarge to get the same threat area as a normal sized character using a Spiked Chain.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[frankthedm]

Your game, your call. Just be aware that players generally revolt at any hint of trying to nerf or modify something you already let into the game.

Bad players generally revolt at such things. Good players have meaningful converstions on such subjects and look at the rules set with an unbiased eye to see how things do work, could work and should work.

 

[cheshire_grin]

Speak with the player, tell him you did not realize how much of an impact the spiked chain would have on the kind of game you like to run. Ask him to retire the character so you can in turn retire the spiked chain. Then let the player introduce a new character.

Or allow the player to rework or retrain the character, which is a little less drastic.

To be honest, I think all you really need to do is vary your monster types a bit more. Sure, your players have gotten accustomed to beating up gangs of monsters below their level, but surely that's going to have some kind of consequence. Either the monsters start identifying them and making concerted efforts to take down the threat (or some deity does on their behalf, or something), or their fame and evident prowess is going to lead somehow to other larger threats.

A whole game predicated on regularly beating the crap out of bunches of goblins and orcs honestly seems like it would get kind of old anyway, I bet if you take the game in a new direction your players will have just as much fun.

 

[frankthedm]

A whole game predicated on regularly beating the crap out of bunches of goblins and orcs honestly seems like it would get kind of old anyway, I bet if you take the game in a new direction your players will have just as much fun.

Some folks really like mopping up mooks and are very glad when encountering huge groups of foes rather than a few foes that seem to be earning XP at the same rate the players are. I know i'd be inquiring if the OP had any spare room in his group if I lived nearby.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I agree with what frankthedm said. As long as the fights are reasonably balanced for difficulty, fighting Mobs of Mooks can be pretty fun. For the players, they get to totally annihilate some opponents and revel in their awesomeness. The Dm gets a convenient buffer to fine tune difficulty. With mooks, you can use sub optimal tactics if you realized you inadvertantly set up a TPK. With a larger monster, it is trickier to pull off without being obvious. And conversely, the DM can run the mooks as being out for blood. The DM does not get many chances to pull out all the stops without doing a TPK, but with typical mook types, you can usually do so without forcing a TPK.

That is why I like that style of game, and why I disallowed the Spiked Chain to begin with. I was up front with my players about why I wanted to remove it from the game. No one had a problem, and everyone has been happy.

Regardless, a DM must adapt his game to his players at some point. You do not need to min / max every encounter, but Orcs and Goblins are not totally retarded. If someone drops a quarter of your forces in one attack, they should fall back, re-enforce, regroup, and try again. Orcs and Goblins are often cowards for a reason. It is a good survival instinct. Even if you stick to Mook Mobs, you should have a wider tactical repetoire than "Enter melee, die". By about 6th level, you should be using terrain, hit and run tactics, and readied actions to pincushion easy spell caster targets at a minimum. I will often justify such tactics by having dedicated observers who simply watch the fight and hide so they can report back. If the PC's prevent opponents from fleeing and reporting back, then they get the reward of being able to use the same trick more than once.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[mvincent]

I disallowed the Spiked Chain to begin with.

Ditto. Or more accurately, my house rule (of which there are very few) reads:
"Spike chains and spiked armor are best avoided."

Although I'm a rules purist (and could even accomodate such), it's just easier to avoid the whole thing. Still, spiked chains exist even my my games (chain devils and such would be pretty useless without them), but my players understand that I won't abuse something if they don't.

Much can be avoid by ruling that spiked chains and spiked armor simply don't threaten (but again, I'm a rules purist, so I avoid actually changing the rules for my games).

 

[sfedi]

Hmm. After reading these replies, it seems like the best thing for me to do, to keep things interesting and challenging for all the players in my group, is quit using so many bands of opponents against my group. And thus, make Great Cleave the "not so great" feat that it is, in most other mid- to high-level campaigns.

Oh, well. :\

You don´t have to stop sending hordes to them.
You have to stop sending hordes only to them.

Give that horde a spellcaster, an elite archer and/or a big brute. Or all three of them.

Now all the party have a fight.

In fact, a horde should always be at least with a leader.

 

[Azlan]

Some folks really like mopping up mooks and are very glad when encountering huge groups of foes rather than a few foes that seem to be earning XP at the same rate the players are. I know i'd be inquiring if the OP had any spare room in his group if I lived nearby.

I agree with what frankthedm said. As long as the fights are reasonably balanced for difficulty, fighting Mobs of Mooks can be pretty fun. For the players, they get to totally annihilate some opponents and revel in their awesomeness. The Dm gets a convenient buffer to fine tune difficulty. With mooks, you can use sub optimal tactics if you realized you inadvertantly set up a TPK. With a larger monster, it is trickier to pull off without being obvious. And conversely, the DM can run the mooks as being out for blood. The DM does not get many chances to pull out all the stops without doing a TPK, but with typical mook types, you can usually do so without forcing a TPK.

That is why I like that style of game...

Most of the players in my present campaign are relatively new to D&D. In this campaign, they began with 1st level "nobodies" characters. Many game session later, when their characters reached 6th level and were becoming adventurers of renown and impact within the campaign world, one of the first things I presented them with was an encounter against a mob of 30 goblins, 20 hobgoblins, and 5 bugbears, scattered chaotically across a poster-size battle map of a medieval town center. (I forget where I got this battle map from. An issue of Dungeon, maybe?) A motley army of goblinoids had taken over a small town, and when the army had moved on, several bands of goblinoids had remained behind to hold the town and revel in the spoils. (BTW: We use cardboard counters, not miniatures. I could not afford as many miniatures as it would have taken to represent these goblinoids.) That's where the PC's came in.

I presented the players with this encounter, at 6th level, because I wanted to show them how heroically powerful their characters had become. They had fought many mobs of goblinoids in the past, but never this many, at once. It took us nearly two hours to play out this mass-scale encounter, which was to prove dramatic and pivotal within the scope of the campaign. The players ended up greatly enjoying themselves with this encounter, as they marvelled over how many bunches of goblinoids they could take on and slay, left and right. (Midway through the encounter, one of the players who was also playing in another campaign, on the alternating weekends, remarked, "This is so cool! My other DM never throws this kind of encounter against us.")

At 6th level, the group's ranger and paladin started getting two attacks per round, and the group's wizard started getting 2+1 hard-hitting lightning bolt spells per day. And one of them, the paladin, did have Cleave (though not Great Cleave), and thus was dropping 2-3 goblinoids per round; while the ranger was wielding a double weapon, and thus was getting three attacks per round. Even so, it was still a challenge for the entire group of PC's.

But that was just before the spiked chain wielding fighter joined our group. :\ If she had been there, that encounter would've been a cake walk for the group, with the spiked chain wielding fighter being responsible for 3/4 of the kills. The other players would have found that amusing, I'm sure, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fun for them all (or for me, the DM).

 

[azhrei_fje]

But this fighter PC is wielding a +2 spiked chain, which she is specialized with, and she has Str 18. So, the damage this fighter dishes out, per attack with her spiked chain, is d6+10. Which means, she drops a standard mook with a single hit, 5 out of 6 times. (And that's provided she's not buffed, which she usually is.)

(First of all, how did she get a +2 spiked chain? I don't think that has ever come up as random treasure in one of my games... Oops, of course hasn't! I don't use random treasure! )

So you don't like the fact that this character can take out so many mooks so quickly? Well, what can be done?

You can increase the hp of the mooks (give them a single level of barbarian, perhaps?).

Use mooks with some kind of DR that the fighter can't get through (at least, cannot get through completely).

Use entangle, grease, obscuring mist, grappling, or other techniques on the fighter.

Keep the mooks out of range of the fighter. This can be done with other mooks (so that the fighter still has something to do) or it can be done with terrain. Plan surprises for the fighter when he chases a mook. I'm picturing something like the battle scene of the Ewoks in Empire Strikes Back (is that the right one?).

Give the mooks a dire wolf that they've raised since it was a cub. Provide a few warthog mounts. Let a shaman use summon monster or similar. Create a new spell (only available to followers of the orc deity) that creates quicksand on a specially prepared area ... and lure the fighter to that area.

Just how often has this spiked chain wielder been a problem? I can't imagine that a PC built like that could be a problem after two or three sessions, since the GM should have a good idea of what the PC is capable of by then. And obviously these 1HD mooks are not a challenge. Do you feel a sense of achievement when you succeed at something that took no effort? Maybe you feel some satisfaction the first time or the second time, but it quickly becomes boring. Perhaps you could heighten that feeling of boredom among the PC party so that the rest of the party will want to move on to bigger and badder enemies and not mess with low-level nothings...

 

[nittanytbone]

Sounds like a great encounter! But even a great encounter, repeated identically over and over, will be boring.

Next time mix it up some:

- Add "elites." The monster manual suggests levels for sergeants and chieftiens. They should accompany any large band to provide C2. This will improve the tactics of the monsters significantly. Adding a spellcaster (cleric/shaman, wizard/sorcerer/adept, etc) also changes things quite a bit. What's that spiked chain tripper's will save? Probably about +2, making them highly vulnerable to a spellcaster.

- Add "specialty troops." A squad of hobgoblin archers with PBS + Rapid Shot, some goblin wolf/worg riders, or bugbear berserkers (add a level or barbarian and perhaps the Mad Foam Rager feat so they're harder to drop).

- In 1E many humanoids had animals as guards/pets. Hobgoblins have Carnivorous Apes, Goblins the Wolf/Worg, etc. Some of these animals could present a much different challenge to your spiked chain tripper (four legs + large size).

- Add equipment. How about four hobgoblins working a ballista? Or teams of two with heavy crossbows, alternating fire each round while taking cover in an abandoned church tower? Or even just tower shields or reach weapons? What about goblins with poison for their arrows? Alchemical items are also appropriate.

- Add an elite monster. "They have a cave troll" - LOTR. Or maybe they have a LE Blue Dragon, a raving mad manticore kept chained up in a wagon, or the shaman has a scroll of summon monster III or accompanying undead.

- Add terrain. A ruined bell tower with snipers, a bridge chokepoint where the baddies have a flying monster, or a burning building all present very difficult tactical challenges. Changing the weather can also affect the battle a lot.

Sure, the chain tripper may be able to hold off the swarms of footsoldiers. That's fine - each character should have chances to shine. Adding something else to the scenario gives the rest of the party something to do. Plus, not every scenario will play to the chain tripper's weakness.