DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 29A: Wraiths and Wards
The pedestal was made of stone and carved with a variety of tiny symbols. Atop the crystal, clutched in a claw-like sculpture of brass, was a purple-red crystal, glistening ever so slightly with its own inner light.
Tee crossed the chamber. She quickly estimated the value of the jewel-like crystal to be several thousand gold pieces at the very least. She set to work meticulously inspecting the claw-like sculpture and quickly discovered a pressure-operated trigger, designed to activate some device within the pedestal if the weight of the crystal was removed.
She had only barely started to disable the pressure trigger when a second wraith came screaming out of the crystal. As it passed over the top of Tee’s head it struck her twice – once on each shoulder – chilling her entire body and leaving flaming lacerations in its wake.
In this session, the PCs have an encounter with a malignant crystal which sustains purple wraiths: Whenever a wraith is slain, it is regenerated by the crystal. The only way for the PCs to “defeat” the encounter is to figure out where the wraiths are coming from and then destroy the crystal. If they don’t destroy the crystal, the wraiths will just keep coming.
Let’s call this clever combat. It refers to any combat encounter that the PCs can’t win (or can’t easily win) unless they do something clever. For example:
- There are stormtroopers firing through a one way forcefield. The PCs will need to figure out how to shut off the forcefield before they can defeat the stormtroopers.
- The goblins have a large crystal that can project a death ray guarding the entrance of their fortress. A frontal assault is technically possible, but it’ll probably be easier to figure out another way in, use an invisibility spell, or find some other clever bypass.
- It’ll be a tough fight against these cerberus spawn… unless the PCs realize they can break the dam and wash the hounds into the river.
D&D trolls are actually the OG clever encounter: Until you figure out that they need to be damaged with fire, they are absolutely terrifying. (This has been largely blunted in these latter days, where it seems this lore has seeped pretty thoroughly into the popular consciousness.)
Not every encounter needs to be a clever combat. In fact, they almost certainly SHOULDN’T be. It’s far better to deploy this sort of thing as a way of spicing things up from time to time.
The greatest thing about using a clever combat from time-to-time, though, is that it will condition your players to get clever in every encounter, even — perhaps especially! — the ones where you didn’t prep anything clever.
The only thing you need to do to encourage this is to not get in their way: If they come up with some clever way to upset the odds or peremptorily sweep an entire combat encounter off the board without breaking a sweat… For the love of the gods, LET THEM. The result will be far more memorable than slogging through another vanilla fight, and it will encourage them to keep coming up with more clever ideas in the future.
On the other hand, you can also flip this around: A typical group of PCs is a formidable foe. What clever ways can their enemies find to make handling them easier?
(The really great thing is that this tends to reflect into an infinite loop: A clever foe creates a threat that the PCs will, in turn, have to be clever to overcome.)
Campaign Journal: Session 29B – Running the Campaign: Abandoned Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
>If they come up with some clever way to upset the odds or peremptorily sweep an entire combat encounter off the board without breaking a sweat… For the love of the gods, LET THEM. The result will be far more memorable than slogging through another vanilla fight, and it will encourage them to keep coming up with more clever ideas in the future.
I agree with this in principle, but I won’t deny in d&d it can become rote and problematic in short order.
A perfect example is a player wanting to shoot and blind a creature. Great thinking, but then when it works it means the player constantly does it, because it is quite a powerful move, and any challenge you wanted to have in the combat is taken away.
I find that anything that allows players to sweep the board as it is then gets used as a constant button to try to push every time, making it boring and hard to Gm (because you’ve already told them that it’s possible)
@ Xercies
I think a simple way to deal with that issue is to make it an explicit rule that, under normal circumstances, a regular attack roll represents a player making their best effort to disable or kill the opponent. So if a player wants to do something clever, he has to justify it by pointing to some special circumstance that lets them do something beyond the normal rules limits.
Also, there’s an idea the AngryGM proposed, what he called “Gambling on Actions”. Basically, if the player wants to do something that sounds really cool and clever but that would totally bypass the normal mechanics for combat, it can often be balanced by introducing a serious penalty for failure. So for example, if a player wants to jump off a cliff and impale the dragon flying below with his charging spear attack, you could rule that if it works the player auto-kills the dragon, but if it fails then he falls to his death. So if the player tries to spam their auto-win action, then sooner or later (and probably sooner), they’re going to get themselves killed.
I love this. Too many DMs are allergic to clever. I love it.