The Cleave Zombie

[Korgoth]

Maybe I'm the odd bird here if no one even has a problem with it but me.

I was thinking along the lines of amending Cleave to say that the extra damage is dealt to a legal target that you could have hit with your initial attack roll. Thus you're not rewarded for always using Cleave against the guy with the lowest AC.

 

[hong]

Maybe I'm the odd bird here if no one even has a problem with it but me.

I was thinking along the lines of amending Cleave to say that the extra damage is dealt to a legal target that you could have hit with your initial attack roll. Thus you're not rewarded for always using Cleave against the guy with the lowest AC.

I think it's more a case that other people have played lots of 3E, have encountered discussion of the bag o' rats, and so have become inured to its presence. You're coming to it basically new, and so haven't seen the bag o' rats before. Because of this, it looks fearful and ominous.

 

[Fifth Element]

I was thinking along the lines of amending Cleave to say that the extra damage is dealt to a legal target that you could have hit with your initial attack roll. Thus you're not rewarded for always using Cleave against the guy with the lowest AC.

That would be fine, I'm sure, but it's really not necessary. You have to set up a very specific scenario for Cleave to be "broken" here, and the idea that only a credible threat can activate a power (I don't know how it's worded, I haven't seen the DMG yet) would nullify it anway.

 

[tomBitonti]

Bleh ... "meaningful threat" ...

What does that mean?

I suppose, "could hurt you if they tried to hit you, or cast a spell on you".

But, what a lvl 1 threatening to pull a level that would open a pit beneath a bound prisoner?

I'm thinking the guideline is, really, "don't put in any opponents that aren't at a suitable level range against the party".

(Heh, what if I create a straw scarecrow and move it via telekinesis, and bluff someone into attacking it ... that is not even a real opponent, but that other someone might think that it is. Do _they_ get a cleave?)

 

[hong]

Bleh ... "meaningful threat" ...

What does that mean?

I suppose, "could hurt you if they tried to hit you, or cast a spell on you".

But, what a lvl 1 threatening to pull a level that would open a pit beneath a bound prisoner? Against any level opponent?

These kinds of special cases are undoubtedly why they left it as a general guideline, as opposed to a strict numerical rule.

 

[Korgoth]

I think it's more a case that other people have played lots of 3E, have encountered discussion of the bag o' rats, and so have become inured to its presence. You're coming to it basically new, and so haven't seen the bag o' rats before. Because of this, it looks fearful and ominous.

Fair enough.

Obviously I wouldn't let a player get away with it in any case.

 

[Dausuul]

Maybe I'm the odd bird here if no one even has a problem with it but me.

I was thinking along the lines of amending Cleave to say that the extra damage is dealt to a legal target that you could have hit with your initial attack roll. Thus you're not rewarded for always using Cleave against the guy with the lowest AC.

The way I plan to handle it is to announce to my players, "We're using Cleave as written unless somebody tries to pull bag o' rats cheese. In that case, I will start enforcing a rule that your attack has to be able to hit the AC of the second target."

 

[SweeneyTodd]

The bag o' rats quote in the DMG totally applies to the "bring a zombie" plan in the first post -- it's the same thing. So by RAW the DM says "Um, the zombie you just let out of a bag isn't a credible threat, pick another target."

Apart from all that, if you're fighting legion devils you're probably fighting a lot of them -- trying to set up a lengthy out-of-combat contrivance so that you could skip your AC check on one of them is obviously a waste of time. Even if it did work, which again by the RAW it doesn't, it's more effective to just attack your real enemies.

I do have to say that fighting a small army of legion devils on a desolate plain full of shambling lost souls sounds pretty cool. I'd treat those "zombies" as either pure flavor, or maybe difficult terrain if you had to knock over a whole pile of them to get a good position.

 

[Jer]

You are going to face some high level minions, like a legion devil. So you get yourself a zombie minion (you either create one to serve you, or you just go on a zombie roundup and hogtie the thing). So you have a zombie minion in the square next to you (still hogtied, perhaps) when the netherworldly minion (or whatever minion) steps up to rumble. You then use Cleave on the hapless AC 13 zombie and instantly slay the mega-minion.

If I had a player pull this in a game, two things would happen:

1 - I would congratulate him on his careful reading of the rules and his ability to come up with a combo like this. My players usually don't get that tactical, so it would be worth a hearty "attaboy tiger".

2 - I'd ask him to tell me how he's going to tell a minion Legion Devil from a non-minion Legion Devil to know when his trick is going to work and when it's going to get him squashed by a non-minion.

3 - If he tells me that all Legion Devils in the Monster Manual are minions (don't know if that's true or not, but if it is), I'll just smile and point to the section on "building your own creatures."

You can't look at a minion and go "oh, that's a minion". Well, you CAN, but it's only because the DM has specifically allowed you to believe it's a minion. On top of that, minions are either supposed to go down easy (for dramatic effect) OR dogpile you and give you a challenge against overwhelming numbers. Because of that the minion killing Cleave attack outlined here is mostly useless except as a "let's see how far we can bend the rules" construct. If minions are going down like Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie, then you don't need anything as elaborate as a Zombie Cleave to take them out. OTOH, if they're coming at you in massive numbers to overwhelm you, then the Zombie Cleave is going to be little more than a nuisance to them.

The only way this combo would be of any use at all is if you had some low-level characters who were attempting to take on a challenge much higher than their level - and the books apparently warn you that you're supposed to use minions scaled to the appropriate "threat level" of the party. I would read that to mean that until the party reaches an appropriate level, those Legion Devils guarding the Gates of Hell are not minions at all and don't go down on one hit - it's only once the party passes a certain level of expertise that the Legion Devils become a minion to them.

(I would also not allow a helpless target to count for the Cleave power at my table - but that's probably a style preference and not specifically outlined in the rules - so the Zombie would have to be untied and able to physically attack the character in question before I'd allow Cleave to be used anyway).

 

[robertliguori]

I like the meaningful threat thing. It means that due to the movement rules, you can lock down a monster, cease to engage it, and prevent it from using anything other than basic attacks on the characters hedging it in while the credible threats blast it into oblivion.

The problem is that you really can't make a rule that says "No cleverness with the rules!" because cleverness with the rules is a concept external to the rules.