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If you allowed him to wear armor simply tell him you made a mistake and change it. GM’s are only human so a good player will understand.
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The problem with tanks in Pathfinder is that they're completely ignorable. With everything invested into defense up to and including taking the penalty for fighting defensively your NPC's should be able to just whack the other guy.
Armor doesn't help vs. touch attacks (like guns), if you just want a brief reminder to him that his character can be hit. Sure he's still got everything else but gunslingers can get quite good attack bonuses as well as using touch attacks.
True strike exists. It can even have magical lineage applied to it and be quickened.
Dark which trumps whatever vision he has, or invisibility, negates the dex and dodge bonuses.
Well, try to get him flat-footed so you can get past most of the AC. And non-save spells like Stone Call will deal damage no matter what.
I'm pretty sure grappling a tank is effective. Getting him flat footed will also reduce his ac. After a while, 32 ac becomes standard as the enemies get higher hut bonuses. What level is the party?
True strike and things like magic missile that auto-hit are important. Remember that the crane style only works for melee attacks, and that you lose it if you are hit.
A true-striking unchained rogue with something nasty in a spell storing weapon can do a lot of damage. Remember the unchained rogues can lower AC with a hit.
Now the trick is getting true strike on a rogue, but there are certain objects, especially for ranged attack - a set of bracers, I believe, and some other items.
Monks generally have pretty good saves, so you want AOE damage that doesn't have a saving throw. Walls of fire are nice. Invisible foes (particularly the invisible stalker) are perfectly good foes at this level; air elementals can whirlwind and move over him to inflict damage (he'll probably make his save to avoid being picked up, though.)
One way around the saving throws: lots of AoE attacks. At this level, you could have quite a few enemies with AoE attacks -- spellcasters with 3rd level spells are a dime a dozen, small dragons, winter wolves, and a few others. Attack with several of them at once -- even if the monk saves, the damage adds up rapidly if the whole party is being bathed in fireballs or grenades or something.
Well I was considering doing A slayer and either doing Circling Mongoose
or two weapon feint or Gming over some other feint ability to customize the character to make him able to hitBut I am not sure what level to make him
The Group is all level 9
and has a level 7 Npc i built
The Rest is a magus to focus on range
A fighter who is a lore-warden with advance weapon training
and a occultistI don't want to Tpk but i do want this next mission to be a challenge
Its a breaking in to hostel lands and rescuing a high ranking elf
its going to be a small fortress with several Enemy npc
It looks your original post has the party level, my bad. You could possibly hit the monk with a ray of enfeeblement or exhaustion. Since its an NPC, you can make his int mod +10 just to make sure that the monk gets his str drained. An encumbered monk loses his unarmored bonus.
Attack his saves and FFAC. You can create a feint monster that will attack nothing but his FFAC.
A Slayer would be perfect for this. They have Lightning Feint and Slayer’s Feint, and you can give him a high dex, Skill Focus: Acrobatics and/or Acrobatic feats to really beef it up. A rogue is also a good choice for a feint monster.
Any caster who can fly or have greater invis is also a nuisance to a Monk. You’re going to have a tough time beating the monk’s saves, so get greater spell focus, greater elemental focus, and heighten spell, and Spell Perfection (at later lvls), and a Headband of Intelligence.
The problem with tanks in Pathfinder is that they're completely ignorable. With everything invested into defense up to and including taking the penalty for fighting defensively your NPC's should be able to just whack the other guy.
Then you're metagaming as a GM, and your players will notice.
Let's run through the list:
* Is the foe intelligent?
* Did the foe make any knowledge or perception checks?
* How many rounds has the foe been fighting the PCs?
It cheeses me off to no end when "fresh" non-sentient opponents appear to have preternatural knowledge of my martial character's abilities, and decide to pick on someone else who's farther away when both PCs are roughly identical in appearance because one guy in breastplate looks pretty much like the next.
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Mysterious Stranger had the thread "solved" in the second post. (Note that a monk can wear armor, they just lose a lot of abilities if they do.)
Or just hit the monk with blindness. Now the monk can't hit and he lost all of his bonuses to AC.
This and invisible opponents will work once, maybe twice, before the player takes Blindfighting, assuming he does not already have it.
A lot of the suggestions in this thread simply do not work on monks without hitting the rest of the party even harder.
Monks are high touch AC, high saves, high CMD, have evasion, etc.
Yes, you could throw in an opponent capable of overwhelming the monk's defenses, but that same opponent will steamroll the rest of the group afterwards.
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To be fair, the problem is not the house-ruled Monk-light armor. A vanilla Monk built in the same way would have the same AC from Dex, Wis, items and feats. This leaves out the armor base AC and eventual enhancements. The base AC for a light armor should be, at most, 4 which can be easily obtained with a cast of Mage Armor or Bracers of Armor; the enhancement bonus can be instead substituted by Magic Vestment. So ultimately is not your fault, and making him remove his armor at this level would not solve anything.
As other have said, the best option is to hit first. While flat-footed, he has no Dex-to-AC, and cannot activate Crane Style, which should hit his AC quite a lot. Nothing will scare him more than a couple of well placed 5d6 sneak attacks in the surprise round. Maybe the damage won't kill him and you won't be able to hit him easily later during the fight, but for sure he won't perceive the encounter as trivial.
As other have said, the best option is to hit first. While flat-footed, he has no Dex-to-AC, and cannot activate Crane Style, which should hit his AC quite a lot. Nothing will scare him more than a couple of well placed 5d6 sneak attacks in the surprise round. Maybe the damage won't kill him and you won't be able to hit him easily later during the fight, but for sure he won't perceive the encounter as trivial.
A DEX/WIS build monk will have both high initiative and high perception.
Without metagaming the encounter with arbitrarily high stats on the NPC's, the tactic is not reliable against monks.
Even if you get a surprise round where the monk fails his perception check, opponents won't typically start within 5', they will have to move or rely on ranged attacks.
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32 on a defensive monk is quite low.... he is missing nat armor , deflection, shield and insight bonus. 3/4 are easy achieved by a monk and can be built in a lvl 9 monk.
Id he really tried his ac could easily be 5 higher.
A monk is easily countered by constructs since they often dont have access to adamantine
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A DEX/WIS build monk will have both high initiative and high perception.
Without metagaming the encounter with arbitrarily high stats on the NPC's, the tactic is not reliable against monks.
First of all, it's not like anyone here is saying that surprise rounds will definitely kill the Monk in question. Mainly because I don't think this is the OP's goal, as I believe it is to make the encounters challenging for the Monk's player, and thus interesting. The OP asked how to handle high AC, and being flat-footed is quite a successful way to do it. This does not mean that it will always work, but it's still better than not doing it at all.
That being said, having high Perception doesn't mean being immune to surprise rounds, and playing clever enemies does not mean doing metagame. Enemies who plan an ambush (and bandits, stalkers, lurking creatures usually do it) don't usually do it at midday, in the desert; they do it at night, while the party is asleep, taking advantage of the surrounding environment and so on. So the Monk might indeed have a high Perception, which will surely make him less susceptible to being surprised than other characters, but it's still a very reliable strategy that virtually costs nothing to the GM.
Even if you get a surprise round where the monk fails his perception check, opponents won't typically start within 5', they will have to move or rely on ranged attacks.
So what? Melee opponents can still charge, if the terrain allows it, or can shoot at distance. Sneak attack, if any, applies in both cases, and synergizes well with the type of NPCs who usually pull off ambushes.
The point is not killing the Monk on a daily basis, just to make resisting the encounters a non-trivial task.
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A monk is easily countered by constructs since they often dont have access to adamantine
You can also use creatures that deal damage on successful unarmed/natural attacks, like oozes or elementals.
A fight that most parties are not prepared for is Simple Advanced, Simple Aerial Creature Leech Swarm. CR 6 individually, so a CR 9 encounter would be about 3 of them.
I cannot endorse this level of evil.
The problem with tanks in Pathfinder is that they're completely ignorable. With everything invested into defense up to and including taking the penalty for fighting defensively your NPC's should be able to just whack the other guy.Then you're metagaming as a GM, and your players will notice.
Let's run through the list:
* Is the foe intelligent?
* Did the foe make any knowledge or perception checks?
* How many rounds has the foe been fighting the PCs?It cheeses me off to no end when "fresh" non-sentient opponents appear to have preternatural knowledge of my martial character's abilities, and decide to pick on someone else who's farther away when both PCs are roughly identical in appearance because one guy in breastplate looks pretty much like the next.
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Mysterious Stranger had the thread "solved" in the second post. (Note that a monk can wear armor, they just lose a lot of abilities if they do.)
Anything with even a semblance of intelligence is going to spend one round trying to hit the untouchable guys who punches like a wet noodle and then never bother attacking him again.
Anything with even a semblance of intelligence is going to spend one round trying to hit the untouchable guys who punches like a wet noodle and then never bother attacking him again.The problem with tanks in Pathfinder is that they're completely ignorable. With everything invested into defense up to and including taking the penalty for fighting defensively your NPC's should be able to just whack the other guy.Then you're metagaming as a GM, and your players will notice.
Let's run through the list:
* Is the foe intelligent?
* Did the foe make any knowledge or perception checks?
* How many rounds has the foe been fighting the PCs?It cheeses me off to no end when "fresh" non-sentient opponents appear to have preternatural knowledge of my martial character's abilities, and decide to pick on someone else who's farther away when both PCs are roughly identical in appearance because one guy in breastplate looks pretty much like the next.
* One round is a third or fourth of the duration of most fights.
* If the enemy rolled a 13 and missed, how is he to know that a 19 would also miss and that he has almost no chance at all? If it has more than one attack in a full-attack, but decides to move off and engage another, similar-in-appearance target next round, you better believe that there will be lowered eyelids and dirty looks.
Thunderlord said: "I'm pretty sure grappling a tank is effective."
Do you want to rethink that? Where does this guys AC come from? What do you think his CMD will be?
Last thought. What kind of an evil mastermind would leave the princess in need (or, we are equal opportunity here, the hag paladin) in a location known to the rescuers?
I stand by what I said.
The monk likely only has wis and dex going to his cmd so crane and other dodge bonuses wouldn't be applied. Assuming bonuses are dex +6 and wis +6, his cmd would be 24, a monster profficient at grappling should be able to hit this then do its grapply things. His bonuses might be different and he might even have a str bonus but it should be better than normal attacks.
Anything with even a semblance of intelligence is going to spend one round trying to hit the untouchable guys who punches like a wet noodle and then never bother attacking him again.The problem with tanks in Pathfinder is that they're completely ignorable. With everything invested into defense up to and including taking the penalty for fighting defensively your NPC's should be able to just whack the other guy.Then you're metagaming as a GM, and your players will notice.
Let's run through the list:
* Is the foe intelligent?
* Did the foe make any knowledge or perception checks?
* How many rounds has the foe been fighting the PCs?It cheeses me off to no end when "fresh" non-sentient opponents appear to have preternatural knowledge of my martial character's abilities, and decide to pick on someone else who's farther away when both PCs are roughly identical in appearance because one guy in breastplate looks pretty much like the next.
* One round is a third or fourth of the duration of most fights.
* If the enemy rolled a 13 and missed, how is he to know that a 19 would also miss and that he has almost no chance at all?
Because the guy he's fighting moves like a Wuxia character and bounces swords off his arms. How does my monster even know he rolled a 13? I thought we were aggressively NOT metagaming here. The GM is in no way obligated to have antagonists continually behave stupidly to their own detriment. Remember also that combat is moving, so in all likelihood, whatever failed to hit the tank was already trying to push past him to a higher value target, because the entire purpose of the tank is to get in front of those things (or to be a lulzy reach fighter who can defend them effectively from 30 feet away)
Edit: Like it's not as if you can't build a high AC character who also hits like a truck and/or has area coverage and/or has bodyguard feats. If all you have is high AC then... yeah, enemies prioritizing other targets is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's not like antagonists are expected to be totally clueless either; they may already have heard about this guy or seen him or anything else.
Keep in mind that you don't want to insert encounters that seem suspiciously geared towards countering/negating specific player abilities. I've had it happen to me a few times: I use Create Pit and Wall of Fire to destroy a load of zombies, in the next session we just so happen to fight flying undead that are immune to fire.
All I'm saying is you should make it seem organic. How you do this depends on your campaign. In the right scenario it's entirely feasible that,for example, a criminal organisation with sufficient resources would learn something about the group that keeps disrupting their operations (e.g. the group has magic) and take precautions (hire specialist mercs). You could outright explain this in a note found on a body or something. In this hypothetical campaign I would let they players know that were they to take steps to cover their tracks, their opponents would have a harder time adapting to the parties skills and tactics.
They're called "vambraces", and no, my dwarf can't wire-fu, although he is slightly more nimble than some of his brethren in full-plate.Because the guy he's fighting moves like a Wuxia character and bounces swords off his arms.(snip)
* One round is a third or fourth of the duration of most fights.* If the enemy rolled a 13 and missed, how is he to know that a 19 would also miss and that he has almost no chance at all?
How does my monster even know he rolled a 13? I thought we were aggressively NOT metagaming here.Well, that would be ideal.
The GM is in no way obligated to have antagonists continually behave stupidly to their own detriment.His NPC attacked once, and missed. "Continually" implies a number of rounds exceeding the duration of most combats.
Remember also that combat is moving, so in all likelihood, whatever failed to hit the tank was already trying to push past him to a higher value target,
(And now this purportedly smart opponent is granting me a free AoO with a Fortuitous weapon? OK.... <whack!><whack!>)
Average mid-level party set-up at initiative-roll is:
* One invisible wizard and/or one hidden stealth type.
* A bunch of other people wearing armor, often breastplate.
My dwarf wears a holy symbol.
--Is he a "high value target"? What class is he? Who's the higher value target, if not him? One of the other two dudes in breastplate? Their vambraces could be every bit as bouncy.
Purportedly "smart" monster choices:
* Full-attack the adjacent target he moved-and-whiffed against last turn.
* Disengage, granting an AoO (or two!), to move and engage a different target that is similar-in-appearance.
Sure: If pointy-ears-in-robes isn't invisible, then they'd have a case.