DF combat tips

[Devil_Dante]

Hey forum, i need your advice for my DF campaign.
We are playing from one year now. They've started with 200 points (170+30 dis) and now they have 300 points more or less. Some of my characters have maxed the combat skills (i capped them at 22). The campaign has some cinematics skills, like power blow, and the power level is totally different from the one we started with.
If, at the beginning of the campaign, the players need to evaluate before attacking, aiming, taking a defensive manouvre, now they don't need them anymore.
They are 3, one pure wizard, one fighter with some sorcery spells and another fighter with rune magic from thaumatology.
They are all arounded team, with buffs, blast spell, heal and good damage overall.
Their defenses are quite good (13-16 as average) and the only way i can make an encounter difficult is to:
a)using a spellcaster as enemy;
b) using a godlike duellist
c) overwhelm them with low threatening enemies (but i don't like this particular solution, firstly because the campaign has very serious and cosmic mood, with deities, demigods and heralds' gods on the earth; using too many low tier enemies makes pathos going lower);

Now, for a) i have to be caution: their HT and Will score are not awesome, and majority of spells could be save or die.

I'm looking for some solution for b)
What i mean is: yes, there are skilled fighters, but the problem to solve is how to decrease their defense values?
Fainting and deceptive are good tools, if the enemy is a fighter, a man of war, a duellist and so on.
But if he is some animal-soprannatual-monstrous enemy? Not every enemy will be skilled and able to deceptive or faint. A giant fire golem would have 15-16 at brawling, it will use brute force and such, i can't design every fight having the heavy critter hyper skilled to lower the PCs' defense values, but if not, there are no more way to hurt them.
With haste spell+retreat, it's +6 to dodge, just to say about one of the combo they have. If they are fighting some monstrousity, just brute force, they are not threated at all if some serious penalty is used (At least -4).
Having this high defenses mean i have to change the way i design encounters, but it's the first time i play reaching this "power level", and i have no idea how to balance the encounters and let them be funny and tactical as i use to do some months ago.

Thanks for answers! Regards.

[Maz]

There are several things here, many of the problems I have faced as well, but I am going to address the "big slow brute" problem. (Your fire golem with Skill:15-16 for instance).

First things first. You have to figure out if the players themselves see a giant fire golem as a challenge or not. As a GM, knowing all the numbers, we tend to focus on being able to hit and hurt the PC's as a way to gauge if a combat was challenging. This is especially true for those of us coming from D&D.
This is likely not the case for from the players point of view. If they know that that giant fire golem is strong enough to one-hit them. Then every single dodge is going to feel like a life and death situation. Even if they have an active defense of 15. So where you the GM are left with a feeling of "I never hit them even once, this combat felt like a walk-over". The PC's might sit with a feeling of "Oh ****, we barely escaped that combat alive. If I had failed just one dodge I would have been dead!" Even though, running the numbers there was less than a 10% chance of any of them getting hit, let alone dying.

Solution: Talk to your players about how they feel about the challenge rating of the combats you are running.

---

Now, assuming both you and your players feel big brutes need to be more challenging (and that might very well be the case), here are some tricks:

USE DECEPTIVE ATTACKS: Yes this is written in all caps deliberately. This is THE most important rule. Deceptive attack can represent anything from "being very skilled" to "attacking very fast" to "attacking recklessly" and so on. So even if the giant golem only have skill:15 he can still give the target a -2 penalty to their defense. Sure you are going to make less actual succeful hits, but those hits are going to be more dangerous.


Evaluate: Let the giant brute take Evaluation actions (just like your players used to do when they had lower skill than their opponent). This is also thematic appropriate as the big brute isn't going to attack quite as often. This helps stack up more Deceptive Attack penalties. And additionally helps protect the big brute against feints and deceptive attacks.

All-out-attack: A giant fire golem is unlikely to have exploitable weak spots and so can afford to make All-out attacks. +4 to hit = -2 to targets defense.


Combine all of the above if you like. To have your Giant fire golem make 1 single attack every 4 seconds. But then make it an All-out Deceptive attack for a massive -6 to the targets active defense!

Base skill:15 +3 evaluate +4 All-out =22 skill -12 to hit -> skill:10 (-6 to defense).


.... and of course have lots of smaller enemies harassing the PCs while the big brute "winds up" his attack.

[Devil_Dante]

Thank for answer.
Sometimes seems lazy to use, but i think is the only way, except if magic is involved.

Anyway, they know what kind of enemies they are going to face, so, it's not a problem. Maybe I've always seen "Deceptive attack" as a kind of feint 2.0

That's my fault. I re-read martial arts, after reading what you wrote and yes, you are totally right.
Stacking bonuses as AoA and evaluate seems the way to go.
A golem with 26 of ST plus some follow-up fire damage punching one of them shouldn't be a huge problem, if he hits one.

It's bit challenging to create those encounters right now, but i know that, when they succeed, they are pretty happy about their performance.
And another thing about you are totally right is about the legacy of D&D: damn it still hurts my way to play. Looking for challenge is equal to look a difficult encounter "math wise".

I tend to create encounters with some windows of opportunities: the boss is casting a spell or channelling some heavy attacks for example, and during this time, they have time to stop him.

But for those specifically fights, they would face a more linear battles, and that's why i had those problems, but seems your point is very solid.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

The highest-power DF campaign I ever played in had the dials set to redonkulous (run by our own CousinX) with every PC starting off at 500 points. We were pretty much playing a Dungeon Supers game.* The GM kept us on our toes by changing things up a lot, hitting us with a variety of challenges tactical and otherwise, often at the same time and/or in a crazy environment, but not neglecting the occasional "boss battle" against something appropriately over-the-top.

* Most of the PCs were more-or-less a full-strength dual class, mashing two entire 250-point DF templates together, like the Gnome Artificer / Knight. My PC was a straightforward Barbarian taken to the logical conclusion of the point total and I can't really describe him without giggling.

[Humabout]

Don' lt forget to be absolutely meciless about tracking food, water, and sleep. Missing these costs FP that only come back under specific conditions.

Use low- and no-mana zones to screw around with magic users and force options that don't involve, "I kagic my way out of this."

Use and track environmental conditions. These stack to cause a lot of penalties, especialpy to DX and combar skills. Do this in a Low Mana zone if you don't want the PCs just magic-ing their way out.

Track spells on mercilessly. This cuts down on magic efficacy or the number of buffs active at a time.

Use a mix of monsters that compliment each other. A shaman casting Concussion will stun the party. Not cool but not bad unless the shaman has a few berserkers with him that'll use that Stun to get free hits on the squishies. It also might make the players think about boosting those characteristics it sounds like they've been neglecting.

Play the monsters as if they are actually smart. Give them fortifications and defensive plans. Give them fall-back positions already prepared. Make the PCs chase after them through hostile terrain while getting picked off. Basically, make the monsters fight like Rambo. They aren't dumb, afterall. They are going to do everything possible to survive.

Don't be scared of killing a PC. As long as you are worried about not letting a PC fail a roll and possibly die, uou'll never challenge them. Remeber that they are only as awesome as the battles they fight. Give them easy challenges and they'll never be great.

You're the GM. Your job is to present challenges and give the players sufficient agency to solve them. That never means giving them the answer or making sure they can even do it. Give them a crazy monster that targets their weak Will scores. Give them the oppoertunity to learn this before hand, but do NOT just hand that info to them. Then see what happens. They'll probably surprise you. But stop restricting yourself because you think its "save or die" for them. That's their problem to solve and tour job to create.

[Black Leviathan]

It sounds like you're doing a lot of stand-up battles with your players. Give them some penalties to deal with if their defensive checks are too high, or negate defense by putting them in a darkness spell or a cloud effect where they can't see their attacker. Let them attack foes that are on a higher ground facing more difficult to-hits and penalties on active defenses. Have fights on difficult ground or in rivers or on spinning platforms, cut down those big ability scores with some moderate penalties. It doesn't take much before your players start second guessing if they can attack the eye successfully.

[Devil_Dante]

Thanks everybody for answers!
A lot of great ideas. Generally, my secret weapons as DM are simply enviroments and low magic zones: enemies, quite often, have terrain adaptation, in this way there are some penalties here and there only for PCs.

On top of this, i often let the PCs look for informations about what they are facing, cause i like good fights who involve weakness exploit and such (pretty much there is another "boss fight" to understand its weaknesses, like a stealth mission; a trip in an ancient city to study at library...)

^_^

[khorboth]

There are lots of other options for interesting things in DF.

Consider undead with no vitals who always all-out attack. Bump up the ST and your players may start taking defenses pretty seriously.

Constructs who are homogeneous and strong but not too skilled may also pose real problems. Especially if their weapons are too heavy to parry.

An encounter where the PCs are trying not to hurt the enemies is always interesting. I ran one where villagers were mind-controlled via circlets. The adventurers had to figure this out while dodging attacks. They then had to manage to get the circlets off the villagers' heads without hurting them unduly.

Also consider modifiers which don't affect the enemies. Swampy ground, slanted floors, mist, and things to which the opponents are adapted.