Whirlwind and Cleave?

[IceBear]

Ok I did a little more thinking on this.

Cleave and great cleave give you extra attacks when you drop a foe. Pretty simple. Those extra attacks have to be made on foes as close as possible to the foe you just dropped. So if you kill rat #1 you get a cleave attack on either the rat to his right or left. It is completely illogical to let the figher to use the cleave to hit a foe completely on the other side of him since the cleave idea is you just continue the swing into another foe.

Now of course if the only foe available is on the other side of you then that is a different story. You would attack him as the only option.

Exactly how I see it too. I don't have any concerns about the fighter being unbalanced or too powerful if I allow this. That's not what it's about. What it's about is how I visualize these feats working, and with the fact that it's generally to your advantage to have numerical superiority. Allowing so many extra attacks against a powerful creature just because there are mooks around just seems....wrong....to me. Yes, the fighter is trained to fight in these situations, and even if I only allow one cleave per oppoent, he does outperform someone who isn't trained for that situation...nothing wrong there.

As Ywain and I have said the reality situation is one where you are probably only going to get one or two cleave attacks from the WWA anyway. I'm cool with that. It's the situation were somehow or another a pile of mooks are mixed into the situation I'm not. The fighter can quickly chop down the mooks with his feats and level the playing field, that's fine. I wouldn't want him to be able to use these mooks to get tons of extra FREE damage on the big bad boss and turn a tough, exciting battle into a breeze just because there were mooks around.

IceBear

 

[Ywain]

Re: Re: Thought...

2) I get that back everytime. The thing is, if the mooks are interfering with the big bad boss' fighting style that bad that he suffers 7 additional attacks, shouldn't he also suffer some sort of penalty even if the fighter doesn't have WWA and GC? If the big bad boss stood directly in front of the fighter and was totally defensive and there were three mooks behind the fighter I can hardly see how these three mooks interfer with the big bad boss to the point that he suffers an additional three attacks.

IceBear

Yeah, I avoided that one. It is obvious, but flawed.

On the other hand (and I have a lot of hands) I do think that complaining that circumstances outside of the BBB's control force him to endure extra attacks doesn't sit well with D&D. You can be a 20th level fighter, but if you drink a potion a 1st level fighter will get an AoO on you and there's nothing you can do about it. The defender can *never* control how many attacks he endures. The number of attacks are always a function of the relationship of the circumstances to the Attacker. The only thing that the defender can control is AC and, to a lesser degree, HP, making it less likely that an attack will hit. There's no sense complaining about it, the game has been based on that assumption for 25 years.

A simple example. Two 20th level fighters (one severely wounded, the other at full) are ambushed by a 1st level human barbarian (feats: power attack, cleave). The wounded fighter quaffs a potion and the barbarian takes an AoO and rolls a 20 (no critical of course) and drops him. The barbarian then cleaves the other fighter who is in the prime of health and at the top of his abilities. The Barbarian probably misses, but the fact that there was a wounded comrade nearby forced the 20th level fighter to submit to an extra attack from the Barbarian. The barbarian dies on the fighter's initiative, of course.

Cleave always causes the problem you are complaining about -- it is just more obvious in cases where there are a hoard of mooks and an attacker with WWA/Great Cleave.

Anyhoo. That's about all I can say on the subject...

 

[IceBear]

Yeah, which is also why I have the house rule of no cleaving off of an AoO - why should you suffer for someone else's stupidity

I know we will disagree here (you'll say something about it's the force of the first blow that allows the cleave and you wouldn't be wrong), but since I have the first house rule I have to have this one too for continuity

As for the BBB not being able to control the number of attacks against him, well he could choose to not do something that would draw an AoO. If he lowered his guard then that's his own fault and should suffer the extra attack. The fact that the fighter killed seven mooks that were surrounding him and thus getting 7 additional attacks on the BBB isn't even close to the same thing.

Anyway, I do think we agree that 99% of the time WWA+GC is a non-issue. The Big Bad Boss + hordes of mooks situation doesn't come up enough for it to be a real issue.

IceBear

 

[Enkhidu]

Yeah, which is also why I have the house rule of no cleaving off of an AoO - why should you suffer for someone else's stupidity ...

Actually, suffering from an allies mistake can happen quite frequently in combat - for one, you count on your allies for a degree of protection just by them being there - if they are suddenly not there (like having been dropped from an AOO) you really are at a huge disadvantage - and one that would (at least in my opinion) allow for Cleave off of an AOO.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Actually, suffering from an allies mistake can happen quite frequently in combat - for one, you count on your allies for a degree of protection just by them being there - if they are suddenly not there (like having been dropped from an AOO) you really are at a huge disadvantage - and one that would (at least in my opinion) allow for Cleave off of an AOO.

In a game system where you actually gain bonuses for having an ally stand next to you, this argument would make sense. Since we are talking about D&D, I would have to disagree.

 

[Enkhidu]

Point noted, and addressed in the tangent AOO/Cleave thread.