Hello everyone,
So I am running a game with some friends and I have a player that I'm having trouble restraining. As a GM, one of my favorite things is to make players feel nervous about an encounter. The player is an Oread 8th level Monk with a burrow speed 50ft and tremorsense 30ft. He is currently separated from the party and playing solo sessions. The problem is that with his new abilities he just burrows and bypasses most enemies that he feels he wants to avoid. Does anyone have any suggestions to prevent him from doing this? Good monsters that could keep up with him underground? Thanks for any ideas.
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Just let him burrow on out of your gaming sessions and come back when he creates a character that participates in your adventure.
How does he have tremorsense? If he's using the Oread Earthsense ability it's very limited use, probably not enough for what he's doing. As, while he's underground he's otherwise blind.
Remember tremorsense literally only tells him the locations (and maybe relative size) of things in contact with the ground. Flying or swimming creatures wouldn't be noticed by him.
The other thing is, he burrow speed is probably granted by the Oread racial feats, which don't allow him to burrow through stone. And actully, if he's only 8th level he can't even have the feat yet. So how is he doing it?
So yeah, use stone or worked stone and he can't burrow through (until higher levels). Enforce the fact that he probably can't see (most of the time). He'll want to go back to the party.
I could be wrong about the powers he's using to do these things, but I genuinely don't think the player has quite the abilities they think they do.
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The best answer- is have something cast Levitate on him. He'll lose tremor sense and you could be mean and have him make a fly check to get back down to ground.
Alternatively, have something with Burrow chase after him.
If you feel like being creative, transport him to Elemental Plane of Earth. Where he is like everyone else...
or to the Elemental Plane of Water. "You can burrow, how cute. How long can you tread water?"
OR you can play the psychological game. If he runs from enough goblin hordes, they start talking about the big rock man as a coward. And since Mr Scaredy Rockman isn't fighting them, they step up their assaults on neighboring towns.
Likewise, challenge his character's intelligence and wisdom- put him in an encounter where violence has worse repercussions than dealing with the situation non-violently.
Incorporeal. Can't feel them, and they can follow him underground. Preferably something with lifesense or the like.
Hazards like iron bars, magma, fungal infestations, other burrowers, tunnels filled with various fluids (water, acid, green slime), vents of poisonous gas, and cursed burial plots.
Conversation. Have one.
I recently had need to run a second character in our Hell's Rebels campaign. There were certain roles to fill, and I ultimately ended up creating a ghost (per Ghostwalk) sorcerer "cohort" (in the sense that she's two levels lower than the PCs).
Being incorporeal has been... beneficial. Admittedly, she's floating around with half the hitpoints of the shaman, but she's durable in a lot of ways. I recognize that the character has a bunch of invulnerabilities, and I'm not interested in breaking the game, so I voluntarily run her less than optimally.
I don't hide in walls. I don't hide at all... in fact, she happily casts in melee and provokes as need be. Basically, I make sure that she's a participant in combat that can be impacted by the enemies.
That's the trick to playing a strong-to-verging-on-overpowered character... make sure the DM has opportunities to challenge the build.
Sounds like this oread isn't doing that. Time to have a conversation.
Remember folks, it's not out of the ordinary for a Druid to have Tremorsense and Burrow (Earth Glide, even!) at level 6, and the Druid is generally stronger than a monk.
Advice?
1. He avoids encounters. Great. Let him avoid trash encounters and only encounter important enemies. You can make a stealth-style adventure and make some encounters a race-against-the-clock until the people he avoided come back in.
2. Sometimes people just don't leave. So, he needs to retrieve something, and he's waiting until the guards go away. Unfortunately, they're guards and they're stuck there guarding until more guards show up to relieve them.
3. Burrow isn't Earth Glide. He's not going to burrow through solid stone, if memory serves me correctly.
4. He has Tremorsense. He's an experienced adventurer with supernatural senses and he's a Monk. That seems like every single martial arts movie ever. There's really no reason that he shouldn't thwart ambush attempts. If you need an exception, remember that Tremorsense is contiguous. If someone is 10 feet away and up a 25 foot wall, he won't sense them. If someone is shooting a bow from 60 feet away, he won't sense them. Tremorsense is part of what makes his character special, though (and he invested resources acquiring it), so it's a jerk move to take it away constantly.
5. This is basically a repeat of 1, but it's important. He's avoiding encounters because he can. If you give him a reason to not avoid an encounter, he'll be more likely to not avoid the encounter. If that means that you can't use the standard "Troll Bridge" style encounters, so be it.
Thanks for the ideas everyone! Lots of stuff I haven't considered!
To clarify to those curious about how he has these abilities; he was empowered by a minor Earth deity to accomplish a task, gaining the benefits of the Element Infused Creature template(Earth).
This allows him to burrow through solid rock at half speed(25ft).
I don't want to punish him for being smart, avoiding an Ogre Spider was certainly in his best interest. I just want some ideas as insurance should I need to put him in check or humble him if need be. I suspect that he won't run from fights that matter, especially once he rejoins the party. I simply realized that I didn't know how to maintain his fear of losing his character... which I want him to retain.
Maybe use the carrot instead of the stick? Give him reasons to want to do an encounter instead of reasons to avoid them?
I have little patience for players that avoid the adventure being presented. There's a time to sandbox and a time to follow the clues and leads being offered. If you feel your player is just being creative and not disruptive, then you need to make sure they are using these abilities properly.
I had a player with a druid that kept trying to earth glide and cast spells from inside of walls. I had to develop an entire earthglide FAQ just to deal with the situations that would arise. Make sure your player understands that if they are going to burrow all the time, that they are preventing themselves from establishing the "line of effect" required to make most spells effective. Burrowing is for movement, but if they want to cast spells, they need to come up out of the ground.
I'm all for players using their abilities creatively. Sometimes that means avoiding the encounter, but the initial post makes this player sound more disruptive than creative. Make sure you don't let someone waste your time and energy by avoiding your adventure. If they're having "solo encounters" while the rest of the group works together, it sounds like it's already too late.
If he is diggin' past all the mooks that's pretty clever- but why is there just mooks in his way? Shouldn't they be hanging around the mcguffin/hostage/special key that he wants to get? Remember that he can't burrow into worked flagstone (mostly what makes up a dungeon these days) but feel free to make enviroments where burrowing would be more dangerous than he cares to interact- like some sort of weird glowy green metal in the ground that makes you feel like you're being microwaved
Abysium: This glowing, blue-green substance can be a source of great energy. It also causes those who spend extended amounts of time near it to grow ill and die unless proper precautions are taken. Abysium functions as steel when used for weapons and armor, but those who carry or wear abysium arms or armor become sickened for as long as the gear is carried or worn. Likewise, those in an area with heavy concentrations of abysium become sickened for as long as they remain in the area. This is a poison effect.
Weapons and armor made from abysium glow with an intensity equal to that of a candle. Abysium can also be powdered and alchemically distilled with other rare catalysts and chemicals to form a much more potent toxin. A pound of Abysium is enough to make 1 dose of abysium powder.
Abysium Powder: Poison—ingested; Save Fortitude DC 18; Onset 10 minutes; Frequency 1/minute for 6 minutes; Effect 1d4 Con damage plus nausea; Cure 2 saves; Cost 900 gp.
There's a difference between walking around and encounter and cleverly bypassing it. One gets EXP and treasure. The other doesn't
I (a mid-to-high level 3.5 druid wildshaped into a Large Earth Elemental) once earthglided up a wall, into a ceiling, and dropped one or two hundred feet onto the BBEG, then used earthglide and a decent Swim check to dive into the stone beneath the BBEG.
The DM let me do it once.
Doing it once is fun and neat and clever. Doing something like that all the time is just a bad way to ruin the DM's fun.
That same druid summoned a thoqqua (a 3.5 monster that melts its way through stone) to open the way through a stone door that needed 4 gems that were hidden throughout a dungeon to open. Again, it was a trick I used once because it made sense in the story (we had to rescue someone before they were tortured to death), but didn't use all the time because dungeons are supposed to be a series of encounters in a bounded space of some kind, not a zigzag path to the BBEG or a missile strike from space (which my druid kinda-sorta also did once by wildshaping into a wren and blasting an army with called lightning and flamestrikes. It helped the story, but we got very little XP since there was no risk involved).
That's just disrespectful to the DM's time and effort. I also DM a lot, so I know how much time and effort are involved.
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The DM let me do it once.
That's actually a great point, from a great anecdote.
My (player) group, we're notorious from having some BBEG-destroying plan up our sleeves. We usually do. The DM doesn't try too hard to see it coming, and as long as we've got something new, unique, and amusing, he rolls with it and lets us have our fun. But if we tried the same tactic repeatedly, it'd likely get negated.
Our Wrath campaign, we literally one-shotted the end-of-campaign boss before he got to go. It involved a couple mythic abilities and a wish spell ("make PC X's next hit a critical threat"), but three PCs working together did the deed. It was fun.
Me as DM, I put an addendum on Slumbering Tsar, wherein the PCs got to actually fight Orcus. On his turf. He got stun-locked to death. It was fun.
Good DMs let players do things. Good players help the DM.
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Normally I build Rival characters or even a few LT. Henchmen that are on par with the PC's. Could have your own take on such a character attack him now that he's all alone. Showing him how someone with such abilities without morals could.
I had a group of people that all played evil one evening in a high level game. So I had to change the enemy from some drow to something worse. Monsters that only had the goal of ending the world. (But couldn't do it yet) It made them band together, and start fighting the good fight.
Did the players like it? Yup, and at the same time one was annoyed that I could still make them 'hero-up' as it where. Save the world so they could take it over XD
A conversation needs to happen first. Even if you can't come to an agreement on how to play the game, there is still the fallback of "avoiding enemies doesn't provide the same XP as defeating them", as Dastis pointed out. And leaving adversaries behind you can be detrimental to your long-term health.
In terms of game mechanics...the way I look at this is, burrowing is not a normal form of movement for a humanoid. Using it here and there is fine and is part of the character, and they should be allowed to do it, but it's not without risks. What else has a burrow speed that might happen to be wandering around or living underground? Attracting the attention of a bulette, an earth elemental or a xorn might encourage the player to save burrowing for special occasions rather than use it casually.
Also, the earth isn't a solid mass of dirt and rock. There are caves and caverns, underground streams, etc. These are real hazards that they can stumble into if they aren't careful.