Stupidity or Genius?

[Noumenon]

How did your party win the battle?

 

[Wolv0rine]

See, now maybe it's the method of knocking yourself out that's so objectionable to people. Perhaps if you'd done something like... take a step back and 'oops' fall over, knocking your head against the floor and knocking yourself out... maybe that'd be more palatable. I don't know.

I do know it was a clever idea in the face of certain death.

 

[Voadam]

But why? What was the logic and reason behind taking multiple attacks to kill something of no threat? For that matter why did he take multiple attacks of opportunity to charge at me just because I was the first person to hit, and do a whopping 2 damage. My max by the way.

I told him I wasn’t upset. I just wanted to hear his logic. The creature had to have some logical thought process for doing the things he did, but I cant get the DM to answer what that is. And this isn’t a new thing. In ¾ of the battles this monsters seem to act in ways that don’t follow any sense of logic whatsoever.

Why cant anyone give me the “why” to anything?

to quote the srd

Vrocks are vicious fighters who like to fly down into the enemy and cause as much damage as possible. They prance about in battle, taking briefly to the air and bringing their clawed feet into play. Despite their advantage in mobility, the vrocks’ deep love of battle frequently leads them into melee combats against heavy odds.

A vrock is a demon, a creature of literal elemental Chaos and Evil. Unpredictably targeting the first person to hit it even though they are not the biggest threat does not seem out of line for such a creature. Your spellcaster is not likely to breach his SR, and it has elemental resistances and immunities if the mage does plus all strong saves. Its DR is strong against the whole party and it outclassed your party by a mile. It could intelligently gauge that it could afford to ignore everyone else, focus on you, then soak up multiple AoOs to spectacularly kill you with a CDG instead of a cleaving single attack from its full attack or even with its lowly spores.

The demon was being cocky and petty in targetting you the way it did, revelling in the combat and the misery it was inflicting.

 

[Jack99]

In which cases surely it would go for the spell caster first as it can bypass DR.

It has a SR of 17, and a host of resistances to various elements. It should not fear a 4th level caster much.

 

[Mallus]

Considered as a real-world tactic? Stupidity.

Considered as a D&D-world tactic? Sheer genius.

 

[Moff_Tarkin]

As far as the battle being too tough, its just something this guy does. The week after this, two party members (level 4) were going to harass some low level vampire that we had defeated. The DM didn’t want this players going in that direction for whatever reason, so he attacked them with a dread wraith.

As far as the Vrocks motivation. The DM claimed they were hungry so when I went down he bit my head. But that raised so many questions.

If you put food in front of a staving dog, obviously he will go at it. But does his hunger cause him to continue eating while you punch and kick him. I assume he would take the time to bite you before going back to his meal.

Even so, the motivation of the Vrock being hungry didn’t make sense. He didn’t eat me, he did a coup de grace by biting my head. Then he went on to kill, and coup, one more character. If he were that desperate for food, why didn’t he just sit there and eat me, for grab me and fly off. Either way, I would have been dead, but at least it would have made sense.

 

[Moff_Tarkin]

We might be getting off base here. We have turned to asking the question of why the Vrock attacked me. I'll admit that I am guilty of steering the tread in that direction. The original question was if the punch to the head was a good idea.

Although, the Vrock's motivation for killing me could be an important factor. Seeing as the result of my action was to remove the vrocks motivation for attacking me.

 

[Delta]

I call "genius", I like it. As DM I'd take the opportunity to attack other PCs, sounds like a likely TPK.

 

[Set]

Anyway, the Vrock takes attacks of opportunity from everyone on him so that he can coup de grace me. The second time he took multiple attack of opportunity just to slaughter the guy who could only do 1 or 2 points of damage, if he was lucky.

If the Vrock went on to take a AoO from everybody in the party, you just effectively sacrificed your 1 remaining hit point to cast Mass Snake's Swiftness on the group, spending your single (and likely to be ineffectual) action to give everyone else an action.

Seems clever enough to me.

Meta-gamey? Meh, if the DM doesn't care enough about the game that he'll throw CR 9 stuff at you, I think that you're perfectly justified to not take his game any more seriously than he does.

 

[Mallus]

Another thing... regardless of whether punching yourself out was stupidity or genius, it was certainly entertaining. And being entertaining should count for something in RPG play. On those grounds alone I would have had that stunt succeed.