DMing with Charisma

Last night in our 3.5E campaign, we fought an entomber, from Libris Mortis, the Book of Bad Latin (also undead). The entomber’s primary mechanic is, shock of shocks, entombing. Every time it connects with an attack, the target has to make a non-trivial Reflex save or become buried in a shallow grave. Escape requires the assistance of allies (which requires two turns and provokes attacks of opportunity) or two successful grapple checks. It’s actually a pretty neat monster with a pretty neat mechanic, and its Challenge Rating was only two higher than the party level, which makes it a difficult encounter where a character might go unconscious but where nobody should die.

The problem is specifically how the numbers worked in the fight. The creature hit the party’s defender on a 13 and the party’s striker on an 8, which is pretty reasonable. Its damage could knock out a player in three hits, or two hits if the monster rolled well for damage, which is fine for a brute. But the Reflex save against its entomb ability is fairly difficult, and the grapple check to escape was worse. The party rogue could avoid being entombed by rolling a 9 or higher, but needed a natural 20 to escape the grapple (which, recall, had to be done twice). The barbarian could escape the grapple on a mere 14. So with one hit, the monster gave a player a 50% chance to not participate in the encounter for a minimum of two rounds, most likely five rounds or more. We all got knocked underground, lost the combat, and the cleric had to dig everybody out and heal them before the monster came back to finish us off.

I think it’s important that every DM realize that monster levels and Challenge Ratings are a suggestion rather than a hard and fast rule. Monster CRs are designed for a theoretical perfect party of a healer, a defender, a damage-dealer, and a caster (specifically, Jozan the cleric, Tordek the fighter, Lidda the rogue, and Mialee the wizard). Any variance in this party creates a different situation that can lead to a different combat. Switching the rogue to a barbarian makes it easier to fight undead but makes the party more susceptible to spells that target Reflex, switching the cleric for a druid increases versatility at the expense of some healing, and so forth.

Consider the entombed. For the playtest party, Jozan could turn this undead creature on a difficult but possible roll of 19 on 1d20+Cha. Mialee can use single-target damage spells to hurt it or control spells to limit its reach. Lidda is largely irrelevant, but she can spend turns digging out entombed allies and is very likely to make her Reflex save. Tordek is pretty much unchanged, unless he has a silver weapon, which is unlikely but incredibly handy.

Now consider our party of three melee characters: a cleric, a barbarian, and a rogue(-like thing). We had nobody who could stay away from melee combat against the terrifying melee specialist. It was impossible for our cleric to turn it. Its DR ruined the two-weapon fighting of the barbarian and made the rogue almost incapable of dealing damage except with magical powers. And we had one fewer person to save entombed allies. On paper, this was a great monster, and it was still a fun fight. But it was a bad match with this party and its current capabilities.

Here’s a story I promised to tell. Also in Libris Mortis, there’s a creature called the entropic reaper. It has fast healing, damage reduction beaten only by cold iron and lawful, spell resistance, normal undead resistances, and the ability to deal an average of 100 damage on a critical hit (which my sorcerer took). These alone are pretty scary for a CR 12 creature, but its namesake ability is its entropic blade.

If entropic blade hits you, you make a Fortitude save. If you fail, you’re done in the fight. You are unable to cast spells, take a -4 penalty to attack rolls and a 50% miss chance besides, and have a random chance of targeting allies since you can no longer tell who your enemies are. But each round you’re in this state, you take 1 Wisdom drain, which kills you if your Wisdom reaches 0. The only way to stop this effect is the application of sufficiently powerful healing magic (restoration or heal, which only clerics have at level 12), so if you want to survive, you need a cleric who has one of these spells prepared or an ability to cast one of them spontaneously, such as from a scroll. You can delay the effect, but only for one minute with a DC 21 Charisma check as a standard action, which requires a Charisma of 30 to get to a 50% chance of success. A character with a good Charisma can stave this off almost forever by doing nothing but making this check, but it means they can’t affect the fight in any way.

When we fought this creature, we had a sorcerer, a rogue, a fighter/bard, a druid, and a cohort cleric who used wands. The only chance we had to survive entropic blade was if the cohort entered combat (which he generally hadn’t done yet in the campaign) and cast restoration. But even with a perfect team, the initial Fortitude save is essentially a save-or-die mechanic unless the cleric happened to choose the correct spells at the beginning of the day.

Is the entropic reaper a bad creature? Probably. I don’t think it should have been published, and I can’t imagine why it was included at CR 12. But that doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable. The right party with the right preparation, a sufficiently high-level party that can resist many of its powers, or an appropriate ability to retreat and strategize can all make the fight balanced if not easy. But the lesson here isn’t that some creatures are bad (that’s a different lesson). It’s that CRs aren’t hard and fast representations of the difficulty of fighting a creature. Every monster, challenge, story, and part of a campaign needs to be measured against the capabilities of the characters and the players to challenge them but keep each side of the table from invalidating the other.

This is a lot easier in 4th Edition with its stranglehold on monster attacks, damage, and defenses. But there’s still a lot of room for bad decisions in power design, especially custom power design, and any variance from the expected formula can have hilarious consequences. And any of the non-numeric aspects of a monster can be trouble too; a fire specialist can expect to be sad when a fire elemental comes to a fight, but sending the players on an extended story in the City of Brass is just malicious.

So what does it mean to have roles that aren’t defined by the system? In 4th Edition, a fighter is a defender. Though you can build one with striking or controlling, it’s a rare fighter that doesn’t function at all as a defender. Rogues are always strikers and never defenders. Wizards are always controllers and very rarely strikers. None of these classes are ever leaders. 4th Edition is designed so that almost everybody of the same class serves the same role in slightly different ways, and everybody with the same role does similar things in similar ways (there’s a reason every leader gets two minor action bursts at first level that grant a healing surge).

3rd Edition and Pathfinder don’t have explicit roles assigned to classes, so what classes are good at what roles? This is where I really like the freedom of these systems, because just about any class can be just about any role. Some are certainly better than others, but any character can do almost anything (except healing). As an example, let’s look at the druid, one of the most versatile classes in the game, to see how well they work:

• Control — At 1st level, druids gain the spell entangle, which is probably the strongest low-level control effect in the game. As they level, they continue gaining area effects that change the battlefield, slowing or damaging enemies and keeping their allies safe. They can also convert their spells into summoning, to put large walls of meat anywhere on the field.
• Damage — A druid has no limit on the number of creatures it can summon or control, and five magical allies can do a startling amount of damage each turn. A druid can also transform into an animal and attack enemies directly, and they get the occasional spell like flame strike that rivals sorcerers for sheer damage.
• Defense — They have an armor restriction and no class bonuses, so the average druid isn’t fantastic at defense. They do, however, have a fantastic amount of buffing spells, probably second only to the cleric, and a prepared or smart druid can protect themselves perfectly in almost any situation. Then add the defense bonuses from wild shape.
• Diplomacy — Druids have some difficulty here, because they lack interaction skills as class skills and Charisma is not one of their primary ability scores. However, Pathfinder has no restriction on how players are allowed to spend their skills. A druid can put all of their skill points into Diplomacy, Sense Motive, and Bluff, and all they lose is the +3 class skill bonus, which they can counter with the feat Skill Focus. They also gain wild empathy, giving them the rare ability to engage in diplomacy with unintelligent beasts.
• Healing — Druids gain cure spells more slowly than a cleric, because they have cure moderate wounds as a 3rd-level spell rather than 2nd, and all later cures are similarly delayed. But this only sets them back about 4.5 hit points per cure, and a high-level druid isn’t all that harmed by this. They also have the effect-healing spells one would expect, like neutralize poison, remove disease, and restoration.
• Nature — Druids are nature specialists. Their class skills are based on nature, their spells manipulate nature, their class abilities make them better in nature, and their summons and wild shape simulate nature.
• Stealth — Druids have something like the same problem here as with Diplomacy, since stealth skills are not class skills for them. But their wild shape allows them to change into creatures better suited for stealth, including animals that can fly, and their spells are better suited to hiding than interaction. At 3rd level, a druid is even immune to being tracked in natural environments.

Notably, few of these roles are mutually exclusive. A druid can’t put all of their skills into diplomacy, nature, and stealth, but they can certainly put their skills into stealth, prepare spells for healing or control, and use wild shape to deal damage. Most characters can and should handle multiple roles.

This is all well and good for a versatile class, but what about others? Let’s look at the barbarian, the greatest one-trick pony in the cole rules:

• Control — There’s no reason a barbarian can’t wield a reach weapon, giving them better control over nearby enemies. Add the feat Combat Reflexes and proficiency with the spiked chain, and a barbarian can deal a terrifying amount of damage to anybody that walks nearby. Large barbarians, like ones under the effect of the spell enlarge person, are even scarier.
• Damage — Barbarians rage, which is second only to sneak attack for a class ability capable of dealing tons of damage. Most barbarians are perfectly happy taking a defense penalty to hit scary things hard with large weapons.
• Defense — It seems weird to play a barbarian that explicitly never uses their rage power, though in 3rd Edition that’s the best way to be a defender. Luckily, Pathfinder includes a number of rage abilities that make barbarians capable defenders, like beast totem, boasting taunt, and guarded stance. They also have a staggering number of hit points, letting them stay standing for far longer than they should be.
• Diplomacy — Playing a diplomat barbarian is hard, for largely the same reasons as druids. Barbarians are also likely to make Charisma and Intelligence their lowest scores, so they aren’t good at talking and don’t have many skill points to make up for it. But a sufficiently dedicated player can make a barbarian who can talk, even if their preferred method of talking is shouting intimidatingly.
• Healing — Barbarians can’t heal. Most classes, in fact, can’t. They can take ranks in Heal, carry potions, and keep magic items that allow limited healing, but they’ll never cast a healing spell. This is the only role that not every class can fill, and this is why.
• Nature — Barbarians are about as good at nature as any class can be without class abilities that focus on it. Though they often prefer to use their skill points on mobility and shouting, a barbarian with Int 6 can still have good Knowledge (nature), great Survival, and the Track feat at 1st level.
• Stealth — To be stealthy, barbarians have to spend skill points they rarely have on skills that don’t like them very much. Dexterity is also a non-primary ability score for barbarians, and they can’t transform like the druid. It is, however, possible, and there’s little more satisfying than seeing the seven-foot-tall musclebound berserker quietly sneaking his way into a hilarious location before starting to rage.

I’ll admit that this does make building a party a bit hard. In 4th Edition, you can say “we have two strikers, a controller, and a leader”, and everybody knew what was missing. In Pathfinder, saying “we have a druid, a fighter, and a monk” doesn’t tell the whole story. I’ve personally been burned on this, when I heard that a party had a druid and thus didn’t consider playing a healer. After the second time I died in three months, I switched to a real healer, letting the druid continue dealing damage and controlling.

Generally, I’ve been happiest letting players play whatever they want, pointing out at the end which roles were missing and seeing which characters could cover them best. I have no idea how this will work in a Delve Night setting. It’s probably best to bring whatever makes sense and just deal with missing a role or two in the first few weeks.

One of the campaigns in which I’m playing has managed to step into a problem I’ve seen a lot since it was first brought to my attention years ago. A friend of mine was playing a character who couldn’t take very many hits before dying, and he realized that the best strategy was to not take hits at all. He raised his Armor Class to a ridiculous level, far beyond the capacity of the monsters he expected to fight, so that he could adventure without worrying about every stray arrow. The DM, however, looked at the character and asked that he pull back on his AC, reasoning that it made encounter design too difficult, either making that character too powerful or making the rest of the party too weak. That is, any monster that could reliably hit this character would be too good against other characters in the party.

As an example, let’s say his Armor Class was 55. A monster would need an attack bonus of +44 to hit him half the time on a primary attack, even higher to hit reliably on secondary and later attacks. A decent AC for a level 20 character can be around 45 (the highest AC among the level 18 characters in one of my campaigns was 41), so a monster that hits AC 55 half the time with a primary attack will hit a normal character half the time on a tertiary attack, with the primary attack almost a guaranteed hit. More hilariously, the feat Power Attack lets a monster reduce their attack bonus to gain a bonus to damage. A monster with an attack bonus of +44 can take a -10 penalty on attack rolls and still hit AC 45 half the time, but each hit will deal 20 extra damage. So any monster that can deal with AC 55 can ruin a character with AC 45.

This swings the other way too. A character with an especially low AC has the same problem in reverse, because a normal monster can expect to hit them most of the time. It’s a bit different because this is usually intentional. Characters who have low ACs are typically aware of it and choose low ACs because having a high AC requires them to sacrifice something else. Wizards have their spellcasting reduced for wearing armor, and the advantages of plate aren’t worth the penalties it gives. Rangers, rogues, and other classes also have some features that can’t be used in medium or heavy armor. Monks are right out. As long as they’re not begging to get stabbed, most characters are able to deal with having a somewhat low AC, and having a good front line helps a lot.

It also helps to have a DM who understands party roles. Even though it’s smart, it’s not very fun to have every monster blow through the characters in front of them to reach the wizard. Maybe after a round or two, most monsters will redirect efforts to the scariest characters, and it helps to have multiple monsters that can split the front line and the available healing, but in general a DM shouldn’t spend every fight leveraging the party’s greatest vulnerabilities.

The problem we have in our campaign actually hits all of these buttons for maximum hilarity. We have one character with a spectacularly low AC, a barbarian who put all of their energy into dealing damage. We have another character with a spectacularly high AC, largely to counteract the barbarian and draw attacks. When the second character, a healer, is really going, his AC is 20 higher than the barbarian’s. Further, the DM is sending monsters that are able to hit the healer, mostly because those are the only monsters able to stand up to more than one hit from the barbarian. So we have a situation where the monsters are drastically outpacing the damage of the party, and the only reason it hasn’t resulted in a few party wipes is because the DM isn’t using Power Attack out of the goodness of his heart.

We haven’t died yet, so there is a balance here, precarious though it may be. It’s also nobody’s fault, because everybody’s just doing the best they can to play their characters and balance the game, respectively. However, I get the impression that nobody’s really happy about it. The DM has mentioned a few times that the sheer damage output of the barbarian is making encounter design difficult, and missing one player on a 17 isn’t helping. The barbarian doesn’t like ending half of our fights unconscious, because time not playing is time, you know, not playing. Our wizard has given up on being missed and being near combat at all, and he’s spending his resources just making sure the barbarian stays alive. Even I, with what I thought was a decent AC, have gotten used to being hit more often than not. And all of us are feeling the pain of dealing with these high-level creatures, which limit everybody’s offensive usefulness (well, except for the cleric, whose offensive usefulness is a spiked gauntlet and harsh words).

The problem with a situation like this is that there are so many parts to it, so there isn’t a simple solution. If the barbarian tones down the damage, the monsters outpace us and we die, which isn’t fun. If the healer tones down the defenses, the monsters kill him and we die, which isn’t fun. If the DM tones down the monsters, we cleave through them with no effort, which isn’t fun. And if everybody changes at once, we’re not sure what we’ll lose in the characters or the general play experience. The only idea I can come up with is mixing up combat a bit, but we’ve created a wacky situation there too. Most monsters that target touch AC, bypassing the healer’s armor, are immune to my character as a whole. Most spellcasters can be shut down by our wizard before they can get off a single spell. And any group of monsters that we can deal with one at a time will have small, squishy individual monsters that can’t last a round with us. We’ve tried a few different ideas, but we always seem to end up back at the single giant enemy that can take a hit, deal tons of damage, and stand upright for four or five rounds.

Rather than a mark or some artificial defense bonus, the defense role in 3rd Edition parities is best served by the character able to gain the highest AC, so it’s not always the responsibility of other characters to keep up. But without 4th Edition’s well-controlled limits (read: stranglehold) on defenses and attacks, there’s the chance that a player can specialize in just about anything, creating a real good chance of breaking the game wide open. Whether it’s a spellcaster who can kill every enemy in the first round, the diplomat who can blink their way through every NPC interaction, or the half-man half-refrigerator capable of wading nonchalantly through half of D&D, the freedoms in 3rd Edition are balanced only by the players’ reluctance to exploit them.