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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oryan77" data-source="post: 3476924" data-attributes="member: 18701">Wow, this has been one of the best threads I think I've ever had on Enworld. Every single reply you guys have written me has been really good stuff. I'm getting a lot of good advice here. Thanks!Exactly. That's a good idea that I might need to talk over with the group. Even if I completely screw up a ruling, at least during the game I would still get the enjoyment I was looking for and made the encounter as terrifying as I could. I'm always good at not wrongfully screwing players over. If I don't know the sunder rule exactly, then I'm not actually going to sunder the weapon even if I was legally able to. I'll just damage it bad so that I can get the rule right next time and it will be fair if I do sunder it later on. My motto is, if I'm using a pre-statted out NPC, I'm not going to insert specific abilities just so he can screw over the players more. Disarming & tripping...yes, I gotta start doing that more often also. Like I said, I don't have a lot of time to preplan my tactics. So usually when I'm doing things like that it's a spurt of the moment idea. I tend not to sporatically give an NPC a feat or skill just so he won't receive an AoO for doing a tactic I just thought of. I've had DMs do that and it's annoying when NPCs always seem to be perfectly built & ready for every situation.I think that is sort of how it is. The players come up with character builds that eliminate any downside affect they might receive for performing an action. So then I also look for ways to exploit their character build every so often so they don't feel invinsible (which is what they are shooting for when optimizing their PC's). I don't constantly exploit their weaknesses or else it would be lame, so don't jump on that point & criticize me  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> . But I'm realizing they may be thinking I'm 'picking' on their character personally now. Maybe it's the fact that I am finding weaknesses and trying to exploit them (with no success); perhaps that comes off as me picking on them & being adversarial. Other people here have said that I'm still accomplishing my task of using challenging encounters and my players say that also. I think the problem is that I like the strategic part of combat as much as the players, but my strategies fall short due to things like what happened with sunder. The only reason an encounter is challenging is due to good rolls on my part, bad rolls on their part, & straight out brute force on my end. Anytime I try to be creative and have NPC's perform tactics, I fail for whatever reason. So it's not that I'm trying to be adversarial by exploiting weaknesses, it's that I'm bored of the same old boring encounter brute-force routine and I'm trying to have fun myself by coming up with ways that I can use tactics like being able to get off a few AoO's, flanks, covers, concealments, compulsions, sunders, disarms, terrain advantages, ect ect (like the players get to do). And these darn players always have some rule that I didn't know about, spell, or feat that makes it so I can't pull off my brilliant tactic  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Maybe that is adversarial...but I'm doing it so I can have fun also, not to obliterate their characters.Ya know, I understand gamers like to be critical on a DMs ability to DM, so all I can say to the comments that are targetting my DMing skills is that you'll just have to give me the benefit of the doubt that I'm not a complete goon.It was a Kyton doing a sunder attempt with his chains. Magic items are rare in my campaign and they rarely encounter NPC's with even +1 weapons. That makes it pretty obvious that he's not wielding +2 chains so I was not worried about the players knowing that his chains aren't magical.Nope, I wasn't happy. It was a pale reaction. I was trying to get that player really involved in the scenario. It would have been more memorable to her if round after round she's nervously working with her teammates trying to play at the top of her game so her bow isn't destroyed. Then when they win the battle, they can high-five each other and talk about how she came close to losing something dear to her.Instead, she gets scared for less time than it took for her to finish an action because a player finds the (errated) rule. Everyone smiles and she sighs and I'm left looking like an idiot and running another typical 'brute-force' encounter. It was still a fun encounter for everyone...I'm just failing at my attempts to make it more flavorful and fun for myself.</blockquote>

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