Interesting Encounters

[StabbittyDoom]

So you always see the typical "here are X enemies of Y type" kind of encounters, which are fairly boring. But what are the most exciting encounters you ever done or have thought of doing?

One that I've always wanted to try is an opposing party made completely of bards. Each one specializes in different things, and uses a different perform, but they all use song and/or dance in sync with each-other when they fight. Unfortunately, doing this would almost certainly be a brutal encounter and I haven't had players get high enough level for such a thing yet. I usually have this song in mind when I think of this encounter (stylistically speaking, not lyric-wise), especially the part from about 1:30-1:50.

Any cool ideas out there?

[mysterycellist]

I'm new to Pathfinder (and d20 in general), but I've been GMing for a while. Last weekend was our first Pathfinder game, in which the players found themselves exploring the tomb of a legendary pirate. At one point, they were travelling down a narrow stone pathway (think the bridge of Khazad Dum) when they were attacked by Dire Bats who were deadset on bullrushing the PCs off the edge.

Further down the pathway, there was a wide stone platform with an overhang above. Perfect to stop the Dire Bats' flyby attacks, right? Unfortunately, the ledge had a trap that turned it into quicksand...

Or at least, that was how it was supposed to work! Instead, my clever PCs hit one of the Dire Bats with sleep, and then critted the other, so the ledge trap ended up just being a non-issue entirely. Oh well.

[doctor_wu]

I was a player in this I encountered a chef that was under disguise self that threw something at the halfling rouge and then ran away in the bandit lair. That was fun.

[Elven_Blades]

My favorite encounter that i ever made, i ran as custom encounter in the Shackled City Campaign. The party was around level 10 and was on its first trip to the planes of the abyss. They had been breezing through the past few encounters, whiter were supposed to be difficult, but had the exact problem mentioned above... here is a group of carbon copy monsters, have fun.

So the encounter terrain first. The group was traveling through a canyon with somewhat high walls. It narrowed down to 10' wide for a stretch of about 60 feat. 20' above and again another 30' above that, were ledges also 10' wide. So the space in the first ledge was a total of 30' across, and the upper ledge 50' across.

I bet you can see the ambush coming at this point. About 20' into the pass, the first of the goblins emerged from the cave at the far end. But these weren't just any goblins. They were fiendish goblins. And not just any fiendish goblins, but 6 Phalanx Fighter archetype goblins with a Sorcerer and Cleric gobin behind them. Seeing as i was making things up as i wanted, and had also just finished watching 300, I decided they could knock back with a shield bash and then attack with their longspears. But before they did their knock back, the second line would take its set off attacks first.

But wait, i'm not done. Overhead, on the ledges, were 4 Soulknife/Ranger fiendish goblins.

With bow fire coming down, the light armored party members, with the cleric slowly trudging behind, climbed up to deal with then overhead support while party barbarian held the line down low and protected the caster. With the party now split, the goblin sorcerer cast Wall of Force overhead, putting a solid wall between the 2 party members on the ground and the 3 above.

The whole thing took me about 10 hours to design, and 5 more for us to carry out the encounter. Well worth the effort, i wish i had more time to do out encounters like this, but i only had the time that week cuz i was on vacation from work.

The level of the goblins was between 7 and 10, with the sorcerer and cleric being the highest, and the Soulknife/Rangers the lowest. The Fighters weren't strictly RAW, but whatever, it was a good time.

[doctor_wu]

Some others I had been thinking of for around low levels are monsters behind a door with a hold portal trap to seperate one party member who goes through first and then the rest of the characters are stuck as it slams shut.

You could have kobolds do this.

You could fiat in an onset delay to trap the whole party.