Although (as usual) a Cleric can do it better - Harm, Quicken Inflict Light Wounds (which does a minimum of 4 damage even if saved against). Seeya, Any_Creature.
Though I guess undead (and constructs ?) would be unaffected. All the DM had to do was reveal that his half-dragon dwarven defender warlord was really a *vampire *half-dragon dwarven defender warlord ! 
Would have saved him from the Rapier, too.
And can be saved against now, too.
My personal opinion is that games that lend themselves to this sort of rules lawyering/immersion breaking/ needing someone to say “My rule is law because I say so because rule 0 even though rule 0 isn’t actually in the book” stuff are…bad games. Or at least, bad games for certain types of players (Players who find the aforementioned sorts of things disruptive and unpleasant) And people who find these sorts of things disruptive should avoid them.
This ties into something RPGs are super bad at - actually telling people what game they are playing. No one sits down to play poker and then gets into an argument about whether someone is allowed to go fish or not, but you get things that are just as disruptive in RPGs because of the combination of Rule Zero and all the rules companies make in some sort of bizarre effort to get people to not need/use rule zero.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that this is a niche hobby.
My experience is that it has a lot to do with the players maturity, experience at this kind of gaming, friendship with the other players, a common framework for playing and the like. In my game group, we may argue briefly about things like this, then someone says “It’s the DM’s call”, we all shut up and let him make the call. Then we move on. We don’t let our sessions devolve into rules arguments and we definitely don’t carry them on for weeks like we did when I was in my 20’s or with groups I hardly know.
My take on rules-lawyering vs. roleplaying: there’s not necessarily a divide between them.
If I’m playing yer average D&D adventurer, I’m playing a professional soldier of fortune. My understanding of real world SoF is that they tend to be gearheads: they know the specifications of their weaponry, the reach of their communication systems, several effective tactical approaches, and so on. THeir lives depend on making optimal choices.
So if I’m playing a druid who wants to cast giant vermin, of course I’m going to make a knowledge (nature) check to know which insect has the most potent venom, and I’ll choose a hornet over a honeybee every day.
Now, as a player, I’ve got tools to simulate my character’s knowledge. My character knows a lot about different species of insects, the effects of their venoms on their prey, etc. All I the player know are save DCs and damage dice. My choosing the vermin with the highest save DC/damage dice is how I simulate my character choosing the insect with the most potent venom, based on observations of caterpillar paralysis or whatever.
In general, I come up with a character idea first: a lonely dwarf, exiled from the mines because of his beliefs about the living heartbeat of the earth and his druidic proclivities? A smartass bird-spirit bard? A mousy stubborn girl who despises pretention, is cripplingly shy, and is a deadshot with a longbow? A scarred and profoundly cynical half-orc cleric of a trickster god? I come up with the concept with one eye on mechanics, because I want the character to have fun effects during the inevitable combats; but the other eye is on an interesting concept, and I try to find the mechanics that will make the concept effective.
But once I have the concept, I make choices about equipment, spells, feats, and tactics as though the character is desperate to stay alive. The character is unlikely to make a lousy choice, and I try not to, either.
And then I try to roleplay in a way that’s fun for people: the druid grumbles and has affairs with wolves, the bard spins elaborate stories to precede suggestions, the fidgety archer goes and does something whenever the scene is bogging down in too much talking, the trickster cleric bullshits everybody in a genial/cynical fashion.
The roleplaying and the rules-lawyering can complement one another, if done correctly.
Since most people have been posting player tricks, I thought I might share a gamemaster tricks.
First, you have to play fair as GM, you don’t need to play with the same rules. These are not the same thing at all. If a payer really changes things up and comes out with a cunning plan you didn’t expect, that’s OK. If you really just can’t stand to have the ultimate boss fight end anticlimactically, then don’t give your villain hit points in the first place. DnD tends to be finicky with exact values, but as GM, you don’t need to be that precise. I like to give my villains a certain number of hits instead of Hit Points. A regular attack or a good spell or whatever just removes one hit or so. If a player has a super-huge attack or a super-deadly tactic, then it removes several hits. And if they come up with some incredible explodey tactic that utterly blows the villain away, that’s alright, too - but it probably brings down the fortress and/or the villain’s corpse gets teleported away. Both fun.
*Although when something like that happens, it’s usually FAR more memorable.
Interesting idea!
From the GM perspective, the ideal big boss battle is one where PCs win by the skin of their teeth: several PCs down or in single digits, most of their most powerful abilities used. Bonus points if they win with a critical roll. Your technique might work in taht regard. I like to have contingencies: things that will happen if the battle is going too well for the PCs, but not if they’re struggling. Allies might burst into the room; a battlefield-changing magical effect might be used (or just occur). THat kind of thing.
Trick n°1 : “Dice are there to make noise behind the screen”. Players can’t cheat, but you can. That doesn’t mean you have to, but a good GM needs to recognize that he can - in either direction (either screwing the PCs for narrative profit, or giving them a discrete nudge when you realize the elder lichdragon you threw at them isn’t really CR 3 after all).
Of course, as LHoD says, cheating doesn’t have to involve dice : schrödinger’s encounters/plots (where you have several scenarios lined up and reveal one depending on what’s going on) are a more meta way to cheat. How are they to know that the prince only became a traitor like 5 seconds ago (but as of 5 seconds ago he’s been a traitor the entire time) ?
It’s a lot harder to throw things in the players favor when they know they are sucking though.
Player One: Swing… and Miss again
Player Two: Firing arrow… and critical miss
Player Three: using my wand of fireball…
Player One: He’s impervious to fire, You know that, we learned that last fight, plus he cackled" Go ahead and use fire, I’m impervious"
Player Three: Ohh shit I bought a useless wand. I guess I’ll just attack and miss
Player 4… Miss
Player 5. Still silenced so I’ll throw another rock.
Player 6… make it unanimous for another round
GM:Hmm any reasonable attack I make is going to kill at least 2 of them, and I’ve already churned through every possible ally who could show up. I guess it’s time for another spell of “make sure the oven is turned off” “The Big Bad wizard casts a spell, that has no immediate, obvious effect”
That’s where the bad guy starts laughing at their incompetence and doing non-lethal damage to knock them out and take them prisoner.
While the DM can, in principle, cheat to his heart’s content, I think it’s usually best if he doesn’t. See, the DM has a set of things that he expects to happen… but the moments that players remember, that get told about years after the fact, are usually the ones that the DM didn’t remotely expect to work. Railroad too much, and you remove the possibility for that spontaneity of luck.
This is not good general advice. Frankly, I would say it’s not good advice for D&D at all, except I suppose there may be some groups who do well with it. However, most who I have ever played with would be outraged to find the DM cheating in this manner if they weren’t told about it beforehand.
There’s no point in bothering to roll dice and play the game if the DM is going to ignore the effects of spells, ignore the game mechanics, and everything else the players may have put a lot of careful thought and effort into, in order to railroad the fight into being as long as ‘seems right’.
As for taking it easy on the players, that can be a touchy subject. Some players expect it and don’t have fun if you don’t. Others would much prefer to lose fairly than be helped along by DM fiat, or the DM suddenly deciding to play the 30 int archvillain wizard stupidly. Neither way is wrong, but if everyone in the group isn’t on the same page there’s likely to be some level of disappointment or frustration.
In the end, the trick with D&D and most tabletop roleplaying games is to talk, a lot, in the beginning, to establish that the entire group has similar expectations and understanding of how the game will be played.
On the topic of the thread, though, here’s something fun and relatively mild: Alphorns. An alphorn can be heard for 1d10 miles, and any ally that can hear the bard’s music can be affected by it. If you have a situation where there’s going to be an army battle, have a pair of bards in the back perform inspire courage and dragonfire inspiration. With the right equipment and buffs, every soldier in the army can wind up with a bonus to hit up to +9 or so, and their attacks with weapons will deal +9d6 extra damage. Those level 1 npc-class mooks are suddenly semi-credible threats to even high level characters - and should easily wipe out any normal army, orc horde, etc, and could even pose a problem to an invasion of fiends or undead masses. Also, the +9d6 is elemental damage, so if I remember correctly it would even allow them to affect incorporeal creatures.
Also, it’s pretty well known, but I’ll mention it here anyway. Acorn of Far Travel. Level…2, I think it was, druid spell. Whoever is in possession of the acorn is considered to be underneath a particular oak tree, no matter where they are. Has a lot of uses, from the simple (a ranger would always be considered in natural terrain for the purpose of their 13th level class ability camouflage) to the exotic and absurdly powerful (a Hathran from Rashemen is always considered to be beneath the oak tree, which is within the borders of Rashemen, for the purpose of her Rashemi Spirit Magic ability).
Like others have mentioned, I’ve never understood why some people seem to think that rules-lawyers/number crunchers/min-maxers are somehow lower quality role-players than those who don’t crunch the numbers.
There’s nothing wrong with giving your character the best chance to survive. Why intentionally cripple him when there’s no good reason to? Disadvantages are great things and make for interesting characters, but there’s no good reason to disadvantage your character if it’s not part of the concept in the first place.
I utterly disagree with you. Every single one of your conclusions is wrong, in my experience.
Clerics ain’t as sneaky as some sorts, even if they do gets the tricksiest spells.
And if he’d have been a vampire, that would’ve changed the calculus considerably - we’d have had to kill him like we did his army, with the earthquake spell that took down the rusted iron pyramid they were holed up in on Acheron. Hell, he might’ve survived that, too, but he wouldn’t have felt too good.
[QUOTE=Kobol2]
And can be saved against now, too.
[/QUOTE]
Yup, Harm got double-nerfed.
That’s awesome. “We need artillery to take out their support bards!”
Here’s something that’s less of a ‘hack’, and more of just… damn useful. The Dervish Dancer archetype for Bards in Pathfinder is amazing. The campaign I was playing one in got put on hold due to DM relocation, but we’d gotten to 4th or 5th level, and I was already able to jump such absurd distances that terrain control and enemy battle lines had become irrelevant. “We need to get to that guy behind the others? I’m there.” “Spike stones? I jump the affected area.”
Mobility, mobility, mobility. Totally changes low to mid level combat. And it’s cinematic as hell. I joked that I was an ‘ATB’ - an All-Terrain Bard.
Portal Gun, similar effects, Transposition…
Ok, we were mid to high Paragon (14th-19th level 4e), but for example, walking into a large area in a LFR Mod where we have to get past the brutal monsters, collect stuff on the other side of them and get out. “Ok, we establish a gate from this square to this square.” Then everyone runs through it to the other side of the bad guys, do our stuff and then gate back out. Of course, the smart DM has a monster STAND on the portal square so you can’t get through, but that’s where the controller (or my Bard) comes in and moves them off it.
One of the things about 2e and 3e in the old days was you’d see unimaginative DMs trying to nerf jumping, flying, etc so they could set up barriers and chasms to keep you in one area or limit your movement. It’s gone so far the other way now with movement that DMs like that may as well completely hang it up.
Oh, and the transposition thing - our Ranger had that as a daily on a bow. So we’re in an ice cave (Frost Giant Jarl mod) with a Frost giant well above us shooting us with a ballista. Ranger transposes him right down to the middle of us and him up by the ballista. We immediately gank the unfortunate sot and the Ranger starts pegging the crap out of the one on the other side of the cavern.
If the game is about “winning” and “survival” then you have a point. Many people want their games to be about something else, but the presence of a numbers driven player pushes it back into being about those sorts of things, or the numbers driven player gets cranky.
Also, there’s a difference between “building a strong character” and most of the nonsense in this thread, and this thread is actually pretty mild on the scale of “stupid D&D tricks”. So if you’re more interested in exploiting the “clever” loopholes you’ve found in the rules than in playing the game the way the rest of the table wants to play the game (as, perhaps, a fantasy adventure?) then it should be fairly obvious why people find you disruptive.
Unfortunately, the idea having conversations about expectations is often considered taboo in the RPG space.
QFT. I always thought such players would be happier shooting craps. Then their calculations might have actually made them some real world money.
Ah, but that’s why you have players who massively cheat, like “Steve” who finally got kicked out of our LFR group, or my old friend “Bruce” who I had to kick out of a game 15 years ago because of the same.
If you always hit and always do massive damage and nothing can ever hit you, you’re just playing a game on God Mode and while it may be fun for you, it isn’t fun for anyone else at the table.