One thiing I do for demons and other big nasty outsiders is switch around their damage reduction so players dont know for sure what their weakness is. After all no demon or devil is going to come out and say, hi im Bob and I am weak agains fire and cold iron.
Do your players not make knowledge checks or do you not allow them to work with regard to identifying DR?
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One thiing I do for demons and other big nasty outsiders is switch around their damage reduction so players dont know for sure what their weakness is. After all no demon or devil is going to come out and say, hi im Bob and I am weak agains fire and cold iron.
I don't like that idea. I think it's good that broad creature types like Demon and Devil actually mean something; you can count on anything from Hell being immune to fire for example, but to be vulnerable to Good. It's not like those devils got a choice of what DR to select; they have certain traits that are a result of being what they are.
So if a party is engaged in a sustained campaign against devils, are they all going to pick up mithril Good weapons? Well, duh. So the devils' DR becomes a bit meaningless. So what? You as a GM can take that into account when you estimate how hard the next encounter is going to be; just don't give the devils "CR credit" for having DR.
I expect a party to grow more effective at whatever they specialize in. If they're engaging in a long-term war on devils, then when they invest in just the right weapons for professional devil-slaying, that should work out. So after a while, the devil-slaying adventurers really will be better at it than a bunch of generic adventurers of the same level. That's fine; means that you can challenge them with bigger devils that would normally be too powerful for a fun challenge.
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One thiing I do for demons and other big nasty outsiders is switch around their damage reduction so players dont know for sure what their weakness is. After all no demon or devil is going to come out and say, hi im Bob and I am weak agains fire and cold iron.
If players metagame this information and know to pull out their silver good aligned weapon without having any knowledge about what their opponent is, that is one issue. But a knowledge check is all that is required to tell them that a devil has DR/good or good/silver or some such combinaiton.
If players metagame the information that is a problem, but switching up DR and not letting players know what it is with the proper knowledge check is advesarial GM'ing.
Devil hunters are going to know the devils DR involves either good or silver, or both. And they're going to buy weapons to defeat that if they have an extended campaign against them. It just makes sense. Like buying a bane(outsider(evil)) evil weapon would.
Hm, the demon/devil things reminds me about that. In a game setting where both OOC player knowledge has to be contended with (not so much OOC badness, but realistically any playergroup will eventually start showing patterns of behavior and unless they're playing characters that are complete lumps of wood in the mental department, those characters will tend to approach things in similar patterned ways.) as well as PCs with various Knowledge check abilities,
if you know what type of foe you're going to be running into its kinda easy to set up at least a pattern of 3 things that will be useful. PF kinda encourages prep, heck, look at the undeadslayer/demonslayer books they've come out with. Its within game setting that people figure out how to deal with the threats. Just (like worldwound) sometimes those threats come out in such OMFG numbers that having the right weapon for your troops is less helpful when being swarmed plus beat on by high CR threats.
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Why not just change DR for monsters and such into something that is harder to over come by convention sources.
Lets use a Clay Golem for example.
Give it something like Creature takes 1/2 dmg from all sources execpt Water (this slows the Golems movement by 1/2), Fire does full dmg but hardens the golem increasing its over all dmg by +2. Then you can have earth to flesh and such such do their regular thing to the golem.
Maybe trade offs.
The half dmg will effect ALL damage sources even spells that don't do the specific type of elemental dmg
Cool.
Now martial characters are even MORE reliant on casters.
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I was saying even spells deal half damage. No just melee/ranged attacks.
You don't have to like it or use it, just some input into how to make DR relevant to creature stat blocks.
I know the point of the game is to have the PCs win, I don't want them to feel like they can't do anything and are hopeless, just give a few creatures something more than DR 5/ cold iron. It just doesn't make a creature feel truly as powerful to me.
I was saying even spells deal half damage. No just melee/ranged attacks.
Spells except for ones that deal damage with water or whatever.
Which a martial can't do.
I was saying even spells deal half damage. No just melee/ranged attacks.
Right, but a typical caster can choose to do water damage (along with any other element she sees fit). A typical martial can't do elemental damage of any sort, with the possible exception of fire.
So by making something vulnerable only to elemental damage, you are essentially making it vulnerable only to casters.
Ditto for many other damage types like 'force damage' or 'damage from ethereal sources' or 'holy damage.' Any fighter can make a wooden stake, but only a caster can make electricity.