LauraGarrison's page

I'm confused by the Teamwork feat Pack Attack from Ultimate Combat.

The blurb in the table on page 88 says: "Ally's attack allows you to take a 5-foot step"

And the feat description on page 112 says:

Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +1.

Benefit: When you are adjacent to an ally with this feat, the first time you melee attack an opponent, you can spend an immediate action to take a 5-foot step, even if you have otherwise moved this round.

Normal: You can take a 5-foot step only if you have not otherwise moved in a round.

d20pfsrd

I'm unsure of how 'the first time you melee attack an opponent' fits into the rest of the sentence. If it means that you can only 5-foot step once after the first time you attack an opponent that seems really useless. If it applies to the condition (ie you must be adjacent to an ally while making your first attack to use the rest of the feat) that seems to fit the 'pack tactics' theme much better since you could use it to set up flanks. But I question whether that would be the correct ruling since it would last until the end of combat.

Either way, I don't see how your ally attacking has anything to do with it as written.

Can anyone explain how this actually works? Or at least how you would play it?

So you camped in a cave and some wandering douchbag wizard decides to kill the entire parry for no other reason than to be a douchbag. Sounds like the DM was the douch.

Well, to be fair, it was an enemy wizard who was specifically looking for us to kill us because we blew up his boss.

Still, not a tactic I'd recommend on a party without any effective counter to it. Pretty much, oops I just ended the game.

I haven't encountered this in many, many years, as it's very much a maturity issue, but...

GM Withholds Valuable Yet Obvious Information

This. My favorite "annoying DM" story is similar, although the moral really is that neither the DM or the players should ever assume that the person(s) on the other side of the screen is visualizing things exactly the same way.

My favorite DM ever is awesome, but he does have a few quirks that can be irritating when taken to extremes.

1) He absolutely hates maps and tactical combat. I enjoy narrative combat, so that isn't really a downside for me, but when you use a lot of terrain and environmental elements it becomes doubly important to describe everything very carefully so everyone has the same picture.

2) He is way into realism. None of this nambly-pambly level appropriate encounter gamist bullcrap in his campaign. Which I also enjoy somewhat because it leads to an entirely different style of play than let's kick open all the doors in this dungeon and kill everything that comes out.

Several members of the party (including my character) were under geas to serve the realm and protect the innocent, etc, etc, as a punishment for some crimes we had committed.

So we were tracking down these bandits who had kidnapped some women from a local village. Followed the trail back to their lair, an old abandoned and somewhat crumbly castle, perched on top of a low mountain with a single narrow path zig-zagging its way up through several nasty switchbacks which the bandits had rigged with deadfalls of logs and boulders they could drop down onto us. The mountain and the area around it were cleared of all trees and brush for several hundred yards to set up a killing field for several ballista and lots of bandit archers. Also the bandits sent out frequent cavalry patrols to sweep the whole area around their fortress and we spent several days on the run from them in the nearby forest, attempting to keep an eye on the gate and counting troops. Eventually we determined they had well over 100 men inside the fortress. These weren't mooks either. They were ~APL-1 Fighter/Rogue NPCs with some higher level commanders.

So the force and stealth options were right out. And we couldn't just leave because we were under geas to help these people. So we ran and we hid and we discarded a number of plans like: try to sneak in disguised as merchants/bards/recruits and finally someone decided that while we were trying to think of way in we should at least do some guerrilla warfare and start whittling their numbers down.

Our Sorcerer got bored and jumped the gun on our clever ambush scenario, so during the night while the rest of us were asleep, he wandered off and created some enticing magical bait to lure a group of bandits out of the fort. When he told us what he had done, we quickly armored up and set our ambush, scattering caltrops across the trail, and hiding just on the edge of the woods.

When the bandits came we leaped out of hiding and attacked, killing a few of them in the surprise round. Then...

(DM): ...the nearest soldier charges towards you on his massive warhorse slamming into you and sending you flailing backwards over the edge of the cliff!
(Every Player): Wait...what!?
(DM): He bull rushed and moved you back 10 feet. You go over the cliff.
(Me): No, I get that, but... WHAT CLIFF!?
(DM): The one that was right behind you.
(Me): You're telling me that during the ten minutes or so we were prepping this ambush, I never noticed that I was standing 5' from the edge of a cliff? I mean, I know it's dark out here, but that's crazy.
(DM): Well, I told you that the road zig-zags up the side of the mountain. It's a very narrow road.
(Player1): The mountain? But...we're in the woods!
(Me): Wait, you thought we set up the ambush ON THE MOUNTAIN?

We're not an argumentative group, so we just shrugged it off and finished playing out the encounter the way the GM envisioned it, but to this day when we're gearing up for combat someone usually quips, "I take 10 to check for cliffs!"

It's actually a pretty funny story, but it was annoying at the time because we got it handed to us due to our "crappy tactics".

Of course, that campaign ended shortly thereafter because the party was hiding out in a cave and an NPC wizard stone shaped the entrance shut. The ones inside died of starvation or oxygen deprivation or something before they could mine their way out. I was the only survivor. That's why you shouldn't camp in caves in the D&D world.