Halt it there! Our crossbowmen have you right in their sights!


Homebrew and House Rules

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Star Wars handled this rather well. Vitality and wounds. You used Vit. as per normal and that was your "lucky misses" or "minor scratches" and what not. If you ran out of wounds, then you were dead. And you started going into wounds after you ran out of Vit. Crits didn't do anymore damage than normal, they applied diretly to wounds.
Vit raised with level like HP, wounds were pretty much always = Con iirc.

I liked that system.


Darklord Morius wrote:


SURRENDERED

A creature gains the surrendered condition when a opponent catches it flat-footed but readies a action instead of attacking and reveals itself to the creature.

A successfully surrendered creature its considered helpless and flat footed against the opponent (or opponents) that surrendered it. Opponents of a surrendered creature can reay a coup de grace against it.

(snip)

LOW GUARD

A creature has the low guard condition when:

- It has the surrendered condition and make a hostile action.

- Purposefully puts himself in an obvious self inflicting condition, like jump into a chasm, walk in lava or ignore a weapon pointed in its face and fail to describe plausibly his intentions or actions to do so.

A creature with the low guard condition is considered helpless and flat footed and take damage directly into the vital points.

This condition idea has merits. I might look into that.


I've been considering a variety of alternative HP systems. A modified of the strain/injury system is generally what I use. I have considered possibilities where serious injury does Constitution damage instead of HP damage. You could also go with the dead to rights situation causing auto-crits, which aren't to bad, add on location damage/penalties it gets better, and lower massive damage threshold to something like Constitution and the guards having you dead to rights gets pretty scary.

Silver Crusade

I sympathasize with the dilemma the current system presents. Imagine a 15th level warrior with 200 hit points and a Fort Save of +20 goes to sleep. A 1st level nobody sneaks in and slits his throat (coup de grace) with a dagger. He takes the crit (let's say full damage, 4+4) and has to make a DC 18 Fort check or die. Barring an absurd 1, he lives.

A character just lived having his throat slit in the middle of the night! With 200 hit points, barely a knick to him. He could go back to sleep and invite another chance at slitting his throat (another 8 damage, another DC 18 Fort check). That's two, maybe he opens his eyes and shrugs, saying to the killer "third time's a charm, please, by all means try again once I've fallen back to dreaming." Maybe the killer will get lucky and the warrior rolls a "1" on the save, but not likely...

So really? But it fits with the rules, just as much as "I'm going to leap off this 50' cliff to the sharp rocks below because I know I can take the hit." While a vitality system that rewards crits seems iffy given the numerous crit builds (maybe only a natural 20 bypasses to vitality?), I agree if we want versimilitude a home-brew fix is in order. If we're fine with the "superhero" concept, then leave it as-is.

If you're old-school, 1st or 2nd edition, just declare the character dead. ("No, you had 10 steel-tipped crossbows trained on you. You're dead, dead dead dead.")


If one wants crossbows to be a weapon respected by all, would augmenting the damage by a certain number of points per level be a viable solution? This way, a single heavy bolt will do 1d8+7, +14, or even +21 to a Medium-sized 7th level character. That'll get just about anyone's attention. Suddenly, all mooks with crossbows—especially repeating crossbows—are dangerous.

Perhaps that's too simplistic, though.

Grand Lodge

Laurefindel wrote:
Darklord Morius wrote:


SURRENDERED

A creature gains the surrendered condition when a opponent catches it flat-footed but readies a action instead of attacking and reveals itself to the creature.

A successfully surrendered creature its considered helpless and flat footed against the opponent (or opponents) that surrendered it. Opponents of a surrendered creature can reay a coup de grace against it.

(snip)

LOW GUARD

A creature has the low guard condition when:

- It has the surrendered condition and make a hostile action.

- Purposefully puts himself in an obvious self inflicting condition, like jump into a chasm, walk in lava or ignore a weapon pointed in its face and fail to describe plausibly his intentions or actions to do so.

A creature with the low guard condition is considered helpless and flat footed and take damage directly into the vital points.

This condition idea has merits. I might look into that.

Let me know if you used it, and how it fared!

Touc wrote:

I sympathasize with the dilemma the current system presents. Imagine a 15th level warrior with 200 hit points and a Fort Save of +20 goes to sleep. A 1st level nobody sneaks in and slits his throat (coup de grace) with a dagger. He takes the crit (let's say full damage, 4+4) and has to make a DC 18 Fort check or die. Barring an absurd 1, he lives.

A character just lived having his throat slit in the middle of the night! With 200 hit points, barely a knick to him. He could go back to sleep and invite another chance at slitting his throat (another 8 damage, another DC 18 Fort check). That's two, maybe he opens his eyes and shrugs, saying to the killer "third time's a charm, please, by all means try again once I've fallen back to dreaming." Maybe the killer will get lucky and the warrior rolls a "1" on the save, but not likely...

So really? But it fits with the rules, just as much as "I'm going to leap off this 50' cliff to the sharp rocks below because I know I can take the hit." While a vitality system that rewards crits seems iffy given the numerous crit builds (maybe only a natural 20 bypasses to vitality?), I agree if we want versimilitude a home-brew fix is in order. If we're fine with the "superhero" concept, then leave it as-is.

If you're old-school, 1st or 2nd edition, just declare the character dead. ("No, you had 10 steel-tipped crossbows trained on you. You're dead, dead dead dead.")

That made me laugh!

Silver Crusade

This spurred me to chat with my players that there's a difference (which they know) between Role playing and Roll playing. A character knows their hit points (roll playing) but realistically, would they ever just lay there and let someone cut their throat repeatedly because they knew the numbers would bear out? Surely not (hence the role play).

I have to rely on my players to keep the disparity of the numbers in check with what a character would do. I like the Surrender concept. Would give even high level characters pause, not because of the damage but the threat of a d8 + d8 + 10 Fortitude check coming for each bolt.

Curious as well to hear feedback, with vitality systems or regular Pathfinder rules.


Jaelithe wrote:
If one wants crossbows to be a weapon respected by all, would augmenting the damage by a certain number of points per level be a viable solution?

The crossbow itself is fine (well, no its not, but that's for another thread...)

Remove the word crossbow from the title and replace it with bow, musket, sword, bagful of poisonous snakes, lever releasing the big rock above your head etc and the trope is still valid; there are situations where the heroes have been cornered and must surrender.

The villains (or antagonists of some sort) order the heroes to halt. They show (or bluff) that they have the means to kill them if they don't comply, and the heroes surrender.

In a movie (or book) this usually lead to some sort of plot exposition from the villain, perhaps a monologue or a demonstration of power. At worst the heroes will spend time in prison where they will make useful contact/learn skills they wouldn't have otherwise but ultimately, this surrender serves the story (usually to the benefits of the heroes).

In RPG, surrendering = defeat in the head of the players, because few RPGs states that being defeated is at best a mean for the villain to brag while the heroes wake up tied up to a chain dandling above a pool filled with sharks. In D&D, defeat usually mean "roll-up a new PC".

After some thoughts, I think I'll leave it up to the players to decide and metagame* "for the benefit of the story", rather than looking for a mean to force them to do so.

Thanks for all the suggestions, it might turn into something some day.

'findel


Late, but here's an idea:
Do the surrender or we shoot when the characters are alredy with low HP.
The villain puts them hrough the ringer, waves of mooks and a couple of sub boss monsters, and when the players are low on hit points, with their resources mostly spent, when they're thinking about breaking camp and sleep for eight hours, that is the time the villain shows up with his crossbowman. The players will surrender without the metagame because their characters know they're exhasted, weakened and wounded and wouldn't be able to take down the villain much less all the henchmen without too much risk.
No need to create new messy rules to frak the players, just a BBEG smart enough to only confront supermen after he gets dosed with kryptonite.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Rambo is like 6th level. A party of PCs that level or higher have no plausible reason to unduly fear crossbowmen. You know that scene in the Incredibles when the bad guy mooks surround the family? You remember what happens next? That's what happens when you surround a party of 7th level adventurers with crossbowman.


Laurefindel wrote:
Remove the word crossbow from the title and replace it with bow, musket, sword, bagful of poisonous snakes, lever releasing the big rock above your head etc and the trope is still valid; there are situations where the heroes have been cornered and must surrender.

See, the way you phrased it, I inferred "crossbow" was more important than "surrounded"—that you wanted crossbows to have a special status other weapons lack.

For years, in my campaign, crossbows were, indeed, a super-weapon. Only dwarves had the technology, and they did a lot more damage than conventional bows. The players had fun with it.

"Holy $h!+, they've got crossbows!"

Lantern Lodge

Have crossbows work exactly like firearms in Ultimate Combat (This assumes firearms and gunslingers aren't a part of your game). Targeting Touch AC represents the armor piercing ability of a crossbow and is easily balanced by the fact bows can deal far more damage.


Jaelithe wrote:
See, the way you phrased it, I inferred "crossbow" was more important than "surrounded"—that you wanted crossbows to have a special status other weapons lack.

I probably did phrase it like that, but only because its the easiest pseudo-medieval equivalent to cops drawing their weapons yelling "freeze!".

This is going a bit off-tread, but my "fix" to crossbow damage was to make them mechanical device with an inherent STR rating of their own.

Spoiler:
Basically, crossbows are portable "traps" with a manual trigger. A light crossbow deals 1d4+4 points of damage, while a heavy crossbow deal 1d6+6 points of damage. Low base damage because in D&D, the bigger the weapon, the bigger the damage die. A heavy crossbow has prongs that are roughly the size of a short bow, so it made sense to me that the base damage was the same. This brings light crossbow down to 1d4, and hand crossbow to 1d3. I then gave them inherent Strength ratings of 14, 18 and 22 respectively, with the appropriate STR bonus to damage.

With their x3 damage on critical hits, a situation granting crossbowmen to auto-crit (more or less were I was going in a "dead to right" scenario) would make them scary weapons indeed.


RJGrady wrote:
Rambo is like 6th level.

But according to who? I've read the Alexandrian article on Calibrating your Expectations; it's a wonderful article than has though me much, but I don't agree with everything in it.

There's always going to be a dissonance between RPG and literature/movie/other media, regardless of system or level of power your character has attained.

As much as I love and respect E6, I also see that there are things that D&D/Pathfinder does great, and other that it doesn't do that good. One of D&D's greatest strength always was it malleability. TSR, WotC and Paizo all published book full of additional, variants and alternative rules to fit certain themes/genre/settings.


I like doing this to my players at the end of a hard Day. If they are down on resources or pehaps just after the battle with the orc army just at the barbarian goes out of rage and the wizard turn of greater invis.


Laurefindel wrote:
Jaelithe wrote:
If one wants crossbows to be a weapon respected by all, would augmenting the damage by a certain number of points per level be a viable solution?

The crossbow itself is fine (well, no its not, but that's for another thread...)

Remove the word crossbow from the title and replace it with bow, musket, sword, bagful of poisonous snakes, lever releasing the big rock above your head etc and the trope is still valid; there are situations where the heroes have been cornered and must surrender.

The villains (or antagonists of some sort) order the heroes to halt. They show (or bluff) that they have the means to kill them if they don't comply, and the heroes surrender.

In a movie (or book) this usually lead to some sort of plot exposition from the villain, perhaps a monologue or a demonstration of power. At worst the heroes will spend time in prison where they will make useful contact/learn skills they wouldn't have otherwise but ultimately, this surrender serves the story (usually to the benefits of the heroes).

In RPG, surrendering = defeat in the head of the players, because few RPGs states that being defeated is at best a mean for the villain to brag while the heroes wake up tied up to a chain dandling above a pool filled with sharks. In D&D, defeat usually mean "roll-up a new PC".

After some thoughts, I think I'll leave it up to the players to decide and metagame* "for the benefit of the story", rather than looking for a mean to force them to do so.

This is the real problem: You're trying to railroad your players somewhere they don't want to go. By and large players hate prison scenarios.

A book or movie can restrict the protagonist without impacting audience enjoyment, but a game cannot. Stop trying to drag in tropes that don't work in your medium.

If you're going to run a railroad make sure it goes through places your players will enjoy so they don't have an incentive to hijack the train. And if you absolutely 100% must have a prison scenario start with it so the prickly parts happen in backstory and you never have to interrupt the players' sense of progress by taking away their toys.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Laurefindel wrote:
RJGrady wrote:
Rambo is like 6th level.
But according to who?

At that level, all you have to do is count the bodies. Your standard action hero can get off between one and three attacks per turn, depending on their options, and can take on a half dozen fairly serious opponents at a time with some risk but little sweat. If you do the math, you find out that works out to between 5th and 7th level. It's trickier with spellcasters, since every medium has its own assumptions about how spells work. For martial characters, all you need to do is determine their opponents Hit Dice (1 HD warriors for your usual rubbish, 2 HD for veterans and pirates, up to about 4 HD for opponents who are forces in their own right) and run a couple of sample combats. Legolas, in the LOTR films, is a terrifying force -- but we don't see him kill three orcs in one frame, it's always two (if he did one or two times, it was probably with Rapid Shot). Still, he's otherwise nearly invincible. So I don't think it's a stretch to say, "Legolas is almost definitely 10th level."

Lantern Lodge

RJGrady wrote:
Rambo is like 6th level.

I'd argue Rambo can't be depicted accurately in a d20 system. It's too balanced between hit points and abilities. Rambo is like a character with 6 Hit Die but 20 BAB.


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Atarlost wrote:

This is the real problem: You're trying to railroad your players somewhere they don't want to go. (snip)

Stop trying to drag in tropes that don't work in your medium.

Snarky tone aside, the players must remain masters of their own choices off course. Even if their choice is to ride the train.

But the game is full of thing that players don't like, like being killed, charmed/dominated, held, grappled, paralyzed, level drained etc. The point is to make clear rules with clear conditions and clear consequences.

Unlike in a movie, I wouldn't expect the players to make it to the jail, or bad guy's lair or whatever. There will always be opportunities to rebel, and I can trust my players to jump on any of these. The point of this rule (well hypothetical rule since I've already said I wouldn't make any) was to give the DM another storytelling tools, not locks on doors of the passenger's wagon.


Forget crossbows entirely, just go with wands or scrolls - "we've got 5 wands pointed at you" or "the guards look at you and put down their crossbows and draw scrolls." With UMD, a magic mart economy & the threat power monsters have it just makes sense for groups to have access to heavy magical artillery. The thought of being hit by 5 simultaneous fireballs should make even high level parties hesitate and at least do some math. The great thing is that just using generic wands and scrolls doesn't give enough information for the threatened to make an accurate assessment, is that a wand of magic missile with 2 charges left or a fully charged wand of black tentacles, and scrolls are even worse since they don't stop with level 4 spells.

Mind you from a financial point of view it doesn't make sense to have 1st level city guards use scrolls of disintegrate on goblins, and they should use those crossbows on threats which can be met with crossbows, but replacing a dozen high-level scrolls is cheaper than repairing the damage a gang of fire giants can inflict on the city until the swarms of crossbowmen can take them out.


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Touc wrote:

I sympathasize with the dilemma the current system presents. Imagine a 15th level warrior with 200 hit points and a Fort Save of +20 goes to sleep. A 1st level nobody sneaks in and slits his throat (coup de grace) with a dagger. He takes the crit (let's say full damage, 4+4) and has to make a DC 18 Fort check or die. Barring an absurd 1, he lives.

A character just lived having his throat slit in the middle of the night! With 200 hit points, barely a knick to him. He could go back to sleep and invite another chance at slitting his throat (another 8 damage, another DC 18 Fort check). That's two, maybe he opens his eyes and shrugs, saying to the killer "third time's a charm, please, by all means try again once I've fallen back to dreaming." Maybe the killer will get lucky and the warrior rolls a "1" on the save, but not likely...

So really? But it fits with the rules, just as much as "I'm going to leap off this 50' cliff to the sharp rocks below because I know I can take the hit." While a vitality system that rewards crits seems iffy given the numerous crit builds (maybe only a natural 20 bypasses to vitality?), I agree if we want versimilitude a home-brew fix is in order. If we're fine with the "superhero" concept, then leave it as-is.

If you're old-school, 1st or 2nd edition, just declare the character dead. ("No, you had 10 steel-tipped crossbows trained on you. You're dead, dead dead dead.")

Reminds me of a story a dm told about a new player who worked out as a 1st level fighter he had more hp than a swortshord could do and had the brilliant idea of sheathing it in his head and hiding it under a hat as a hidden weapon. The GM's response was "I don't care how many hp you have if you shove that sword into your head your going to kill yourself."

Although with your story I have the image of the cutpad slitting the fighters throat and then watching in sheer unadultarated horror as the "monster" absently slaps the cut and rolls over muttering about how bad the mosquito's are tonight.

You're right though there's basically two views you can take with HP one is that they reflect a mixture of things (training, luck etc) and rather than being hurt are blows missing you (the movie enemies fire a hail of bullets and only inflict a few light scratch's on the hero) till they run low (or out) and you start getting sliced and beaten. The other is the superhero trope where as you go up in level you become progressively tougher and able to have dozens of arrows impaled in you while you keep fighting.


Actually put it in real world terms, if you and your buddies from the Seals are walking around Fayetteville and the local police pull up and jump out with their guns drawn you will probably surrender, because even though you know you could probably take them down you aren't really threatened. On the other hand if you and your Seal team buddies are in downtown Beirut when several mujaheddin jump out and cover you with weapons you are probably going to fight back, because you know the alternative is torture and death. Most players don't think in movie terms about bad guys they think in real world terms. In real life your bad guys don't capture you and start monologueing, they capture and torture you or kill you. They only reason that you would surrender would be if you believe that you have a better chance of surviving that way. So your Paladin might surrender to someone that they knew was Lawful and would therefore abide by an agreed code of treatment it is very unlikely that the same Paladin would surrender to someone chaotic. A member of the military in an untenable situation may surrender, but he will only do so if he has a reasonable expectation that he is going to get decent treatment. Even then he might not surrender. Remember the Alamo, 186 men surrounded by 3 to 5000 troops who had more ammunition and artillery chose to fight to the death rather than surrender, and they did this before they found out that Santa Anna's men were frequently killing the prisoners they took (Goliad 400 killed). The Spartans at Thermopylae were outnumber buy a minimum of 10 to 1 (including their auxiliary troops they had around 1000 men) by the Persian Army that numbered a minimum of 10,000 men, they even had a route of retreat until the last day, but they refused and fought to the death. Soldiers and mercenaries which is what adventurers are frequently decide to fight rather than surrender. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but to say that your players aren't responding correctly because they choose to fight is not the right answer. The correct answer is adapt and overcome. My players frequently come up with ways out of a situation that I didn't foresee or plan for and sometimes they bull through what I consider a no win situation, because that's what they choose to do. At that point I make any necessary changes and get on with the game, it's about everyone having fun. If they think it's fun to slaughter a few low level minions so be it, if they happen to think it's fun to slaughter the town guard then so be it. Of course if they slaughter the town guard they may have to deal with me describing the crying widows and orphans before the Duke calls out the heavy artillery to deal with these miscreants but that's the nature of the game. Make them see that all actions in game have consequences just like real life.


Laurefindel wrote:

Has anyone thought of a way to make the "don't move, we've got five crossbows pointed at you" trope* work in Pathfinder/D&D. Like, past level 2nd?

*or any situations where the player usually just goes "pff, with the hp I have, I can afford the hit"?

Works with tanglefoot bags use those to threaten - no level character wants

–2 penalty on attack rolls
–4 penalty to Dexterity ( -2 AC, initiative and maybe to hit)
AND
DC 15 Reflex save or be glued to the floor, unable to move.
Even on a successful save, it can move only at half speed.

all for 2d4 rounds.

Or try

TANGLE BOLT
Price 226 gp; Aura strong conjuration; CL 12th; Weight —
Often etched with images of spider webs or swampy vines, this sickly green +1 seeking bolt transforms into sticky goo when it hits, entangling its target and becoming tough and resilient upon exposure to air. In addition to the bolt's damage, the target is entangled as if it had been hit by a tanglefoot bag.

CONSTRUCTION REQUIREMENTS
Cost 113 gp
Craft Magic Arms and Armor, true seeing, and either web or creator must have 5 ranks in Craft (alchemy)

Vital Strike can always add to their nasty surprise - elite guards should be human hating 6th level crossbow wielding rangers with gravity bow cast.
4d8+5 with point blank shot and an entangle effect should give them
cause to pause..

Aspect of the falcon adds +1 to hit and 19-20/x3 crits
Deadly Aim adds +2 damage, +2 every 4 levels.


Betsy wrote:
Soldiers and mercenaries which is what adventurers are frequently decide to fight rather than surrender.

You're missing the purpose of the thread. If the PCs are surrounded by a ring of crossbowmen, the situation should be "oh crap, we're most going to die if we fight right now." But due to the way the game mechanics work, PCs are superheroes as compared to regular soldiers.

So the question is, how do you recapture that "oh crap, we're going to die" scenario?

In real life, regardless if we're talking about police officers or soldiers or whatever, if they find themselves ambushed and surrounded by enemies who are all prepared and drawn on them, they're not going to survive. They may not surrender, but they're not going to win.

In Pathfinder, a level 10 fighter can literally let level 1 soldiers fire crossbows on him potentially hundreds of times without suffering much damage.

There's no mechanical way to represent that the level 10 fighter that is surprised and ambushed by prepared ranged fighters should be at a severe mechanical disadvantage.

Thus, the thread is asking how to model that situation with mechanics.

Personally, I'd give the crossbowmen a +1 to hit and a +1 to damage for each soldier that is ready and prepared to fire, and treat all hits as critical threats. The crossbowmen should automatically win initiative and all fire at the same time.

This doesn't totally fix the problem, but does make such situations much more deadly.


Tormsskull wrote:

Personally, I'd give the crossbowmen a +1 to hit and a +1 to damage for each soldier that is ready and prepared to fire, and treat all hits as critical threats. The crossbowmen should automatically win initiative and all fire at the same time.

This doesn't totally fix the problem, but does make such situations much more deadly.

So long as the players know that the mechanics have been changed on them, this seems kosher.

Otherwise they are in for a rude surprise.

Silver Crusade

I remember the Cowled Wizards of Amn, they made an absolutely terrifying force to face when you broke the law.
If you started stabbing the guards, and proved too much, they called for the cowls.

They convince the second game's main villain to surrender simply because they just kept coming, and the level 20-mythic wizard realized he can't fight an order of wizards that is thousands strong.

Wave after wave of level 13-15 wizards teleporting in at a large distance, and spamming high level spells, then teleporting away when out of spells, proved a very deadly group to enforce the law.


Crossbows? You meant ballistas. Huge heavy crossbows that do 3d8 damage. And ignore the usual -4 attack penalty since they have had time to carefully aim the weapon. And there are several. Per PC.

The Exchange

have your murder hobos travel with friends they care about. who are not adventurers. Escorts, trainees, new prized horse, or have the bowmen use ranged sunder attacks some how....

if they are to powerful for that then why are you telling the wrong story?


Ballistic would seem to be the logical choice.

Verdant Wheel

any new developments?

I'd love to have something ready to pull out for my players.

also this idea may bland well with this one


GeneticDrift wrote:

have your murder hobos travel with friends they care about. who are not adventurers. Escorts, trainees, new prized horse, or have the bowmen use ranged sunder attacks some how....

if they are to powerful for that then why are you telling the wrong story?

A murderhobo's only loved ones are his fellow murderhobos you silly, silly man.

RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16

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Halt! You're in the general area of our alchemists!


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Pathfinder Maps Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

"It's only a flesh wound! I've had worse... come on, you panzy! Black Knights always win!"


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Petty Alchemy wrote:
Halt! You're in the general area of our alchemists!

...and for you citizen who are witnessing the arrest, we'd like to remind you that the yellow seats are situated in the splash zone!

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Laurefindel wrote:

Has anyone thought of a way to make the "don't move, we've got five crossbows pointed at you" trope* work in Pathfinder/D&D. Like, past level 2nd?

*or any situations where the player usually just goes "pff, with the hp I have, I can afford the hit"?

Simple... aim those crossbows at the player who CAN'T afford the hit, like your wizard. Or the Zen Archer. I've noticed in PFS scenarios, Zen Archers do tend to face plant a lot when they are focused fired upon by the ranged opposition.


aegrisomnia wrote:
Crossbows? You meant ballistas. Huge heavy crossbows that do 3d8 damage. And ignore the usual -4 attack penalty since they have had time to carefully aim the weapon. And there are several. Per PC.

Yeah. Cuz that always works. ;)


just make sure your crossbowmen are using wind lances.

Verdant Wheel

Unawares (new condition)

Spoiler:

Unawares is a more severe condition than flat-footed.
A creature who is caught unawares by an opponent is considered flat-footed and helpless with respect to her until he acts on his initiative.
An attacker who catches her foe unawares may ready a belayed attack against her target. So long as she concentrates on no other action than threatening her for, she continues to treat him as unawares until she attacks him as an immediate action. This attack may be resolved as a coup de gras.
Using Stealth to take a foe unawares requires a +10 margin of success. Using a Disguise ploy to take a foe unawares requires both a successful Disguise check followed by a Bluff check with a +10 margin to success.
A creature who has been taken unawares by an attacker may be silenced for 1 round by her if she succeeds on a Grapple check.
If a creature with Uncanny Dodge is taken unawares, treat him as flat-footed instead, unless his attacker's level exceeds his by four or greater.


rainzax wrote:

Unawares (new condition)

** spoiler omitted **

Not sure if I like that since it only allows the DM to better kill players without a warning. The OP was on the contrary about causing a reaction from the characters based on a distinct warning akin to the "no point to run, we've got snipers on every roof" trope we see all the time in movies/TV.

In that regard, your previous post was more pertinent. Start with rolling to hit. Then offer to surrender. If target refuses, deal damage. The thread was about rogues and sneak-attack, but it could be applied here as well.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

It is the downside to level based RPG games. PCs with lots of hit points can ignore damage that would likely be fatal to any human being out there.

Five low level crossbowmen are not likely a threat, some warriors can survive full immersion in lava for a few rounds (20d6 damage, I can swim a few rounds), fall from any height, etc.

There are other RPG systems that do not allow someone to gain hundreds of hit points, yet the downside is that they are lethal games and could drop PCs very easily (GURPs fantasy, for example).

Another alternative is high level crossbowmen with magical weapons / ammo and focused feats for such fighting.

Magical crossbow ammo might include Bane: human (and a few other common races), flaming, frost, shock (for potential of 1d8 + 5d6 each hit, minus any immunities or resistances to the respective elements).
Bane does not stack, yet elemental damage can be added, even if it seems counter intuitive. (There's already a frost & flaming weapon in a Paizo module somewhere).

Verdant Wheel

the level-based nature of the game is not a downside as much as it is a feature to be worked with.

a higher level character should indeed not be threatened by a bunch of mooks with crossbows near as much as someone of equal standing to them. it goes without saying that this stuff happens all the time in dramatic action narratives!

i guess i think that either there must be a more difficult die roll or an additional die roll (or both!) for skipping right past flat-footed to 'considered helpless' - whether that is knife-to-the-throat or gun-to-the-head (that is, melee or ranged)

also, there should room for an incredible Bluff check to slick past either scenario.

how about this:

1) first the attacker must win an opposed skill check by a margin of +5
2) then the attacker must succeed on an attack roll by a margin of +5
3) succeeding at both allows the attacker to treat their target as 'considered helpless' (rather than merely flat-footed)
4) if the attack roll is instead staged as a CMB check, and beats CMD by +5, the attacker may belay the damage roll
5) a belayed damage roll may triggered later as an immediate action - go straight to rolling damage, using the CdG rules at the attacker's option (unless see below)
6) if before then the defender can throw a diversion (roll Bluff as a standard action) and beat the initial CMB roll by +5, this negates both the 'considered helpless' condition and the belayed damage roll
7) however, an attempted diversion triggers an AoO after the fact, pass or fail

Steps 1-3 is running a quick Bushwack scenario
Steps 1-7 is running a full Surrender! scenario
and all you gotta remember is your common sense and 'beat it by 5'

is this a good ratio or gamism, realism, and simplicity?


kaisc006 wrote:
RJGrady wrote:
Rambo is like 6th level.
I'd argue Rambo can't be depicted accurately in a d20 system. It's too balanced between hit points and abilities. Rambo is like a character with 6 Hit Die but 20 BAB.

I can't imagine why Rambo would need 20 bab. At that point he could shoot several gnats out of the air over 100' away with a bow like it was nothing.

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