In a few days, my PCs will find themselves in a fort assaulted by giant creatures akin to shambling mounds or earth elementals. I want to set up a fight in which the PCs help defend the walls using balistas or other siege weapons to prevent the assaulting force from smashing down the walls.
Any advice on how to spice up such a battle? I am a little worried that it will degenerate into reloading the balista a lot of times, so I was thinking about mixing groups of smaller creatures in with the giant ones. But what else can be done?
Basically, I want to do sort of a unique "mini-game" before it probably turns into all-out desperate melee when the fort is about to fall. I am inspired by lots of the online games out there, where you have different defensives and you need to use them correctly to prevent the opposing force reaching your base, if you know what I mean.
Any ideas? :-)
|
What level are the PCs? How tough do you want these monsters to be? I ask because at a point, the players own attacks will outpace a siege engine for fighting monsters. An archer with cluster shots, rapid shot, many shot, and deadly aim will laugh at the balista.
The catapult could throw the melee guys at the beast to start hacking away. Your barbarian may enjoy being a weapon launched at the great beasts, give him a special shell or parachute to negate the impact. Of course this applies more if the players are higher levels.
If you have a summoner in the party, they could summon their own Elementals and launch them from the catapults.
Enlarge Person could let the Barbarian of Fighter go fisticuffs with them.
Thinking up something more effective than boiling oil is probably worth doing, I'm sure it'll work to some degree, but there has to be something in one of the rulebooks that hurts Elementals more than hot oil.
That's all I can think of for now, if you want more detailed ideas you probably have to provide us with a few details (like party level etc).
As mentioned, the unfortunate problem is the PCs can churn out a lot more damage by not using siege weapons and doing their normal thing than they can otherwise.
The damage a dedicated archer can output will far outstrip what a ballista can do, mostly because of reloading times.
Siege weapons will work well for the horde of NPC warriors that are staffing the location to do something meaningful, but for PCs it's a waste of their abilities.
While this is an iconic sort of scene, it doesn't translate well into game mechanics because siege weapons become nearly worthless once you are above level 6. They just don't do enough damage to keep up. Mostly because of reloading times and the amount of crew required to use one.
When I played through Skull and Shackles my fellow player kept asking me to man a ballista on the ship. I was playing an archery focused ranger. I had to sit them down and show them the mechanics and why it was strictly an inferior option to me just shooting stuff with my bow (and I decidedly unqualified to use indirect siege fire weapons). In fact your players are actually probably unqualified to use indirect siege fire weapons as well because it takes either good int or knowledge engineering. ANd those with high int are probably casters, which are probably better off casting spells onto the battlefield.
In summation...siege weapons are just kind of awful actually (if you're a higher level character).
Thanks for the input. The party just reached level 4 in the last game session and they are low on magic items.
I had in mind that these monsters (I will make them myself due to the storyline) would have some sort of damage reduction necessitating siege weapons (something similar to siege weapons ignoring the hardness that buildings normally get against regular attacks).
The point is not really to penalize the PCs but to offer up a unique situation, where they get to fire "big guns" at "big monsters" during a desperate last stand :-)
