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(D&D) A Wild Bugbear Appears!

Blogs > Tzel
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Tzel
Profile Blog Joined October 2010
United States72 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-03-13 01:22:35
March 13 2011 01:15 GMT
#1
Players and their Characters
+ Show Spoiler +
Ted - halfling ranger
Zen - half-elf bard
Walten - Elven Wizard
Damien - Half-orc Barbarian
Ren - dwarf cleric
David - half-elf cleric


The title's relevant because Black and White just came out Sunday and Walten decided it would be a good idea to memorize the entire Gen V pokedex, and bugbears as they found out, are fun. That is, when you manage to one-shot them.

Well. We're moving along in the Scourge of the Howling Horde - combat is moving faster, people are starting to understand some things better. Ted pretty much one-shots anything that he manages to hit (the 'you have to exceed the AC of your opponent with your accuracy roll' thing still doesn't make much sense to me but I go with it)

Expand for our progress in the campaign:

+ Show Spoiler +

They enter the cave with two dogs down, but since the dogs saw them and alerted the goblins, I had them stay in the cave and attempt to get higher ground. It works out decently - Damien gets hit a couple times because he runs into the cave and invokes an attack of opportunity from all six guards that were waiting inside the cave as he rushes in, but he's only down about 11 health. With two clerics that's nothing. He and Ted clean up all six nicely, Ted either one-shotting them to death or rendering them unconscious and Damien doing some decent damage; he got a crit on one of them and ended up doing about 43 damage (Goblins only have 4-6 health). I start frowning, since they're pretty much OP as shit as long as they do well on their accuracy roll.

They get past the guardroom, which is now empty because they alerted all the guards, sent them into the entrance chamber to help out the other two who were waiting in the shadows, and then killed all six in about a span of 30 in-game seconds....and make their way down the hall. I was going to redraw the map as they got to certain rooms so they didn't see the entire thing, but I gave up and just used a cover sheet instead, which was a horrible, horrible idea. They were able to see parts that they shouldn't have been able to see and whether Zen admits it or not, it at least had a subconscious affect on what direction he wanted to go.

The corridor after the guardroom looked like a +, with them coming from the western direction. even though I drew out their cone of vision, I wasn't able to move the paper in a way that would hide what they couldn't see, so Zen decided to go left instead of right - which would have been fine. However, they got into an argument on which way to go, and Damien wanted to turn right, which just messed everyone up. Their party dynamics are horrible! Damien's trying to be a low-witted barbarian, but he doesn't realize that some decisions for the character should be made with the intellect of yourself, not the character. The party's yelling at Damien for going right when everyone else is going left, and I can feel the friction between the players growing, so I intervene. I had made them do a listen check earlier, and a couple had made over 20, so I decided that the best way to solve the problem would be to make the bugbear down the right corridor growl happily. It does the trick, and the whole party turns and moves in that direction.

They kind of freak out over the fact that the door is locked and there's a sign on the door that says "Big Bronk's Room", and actually approach with caution. Damien gets out his battering ram (I probably should have mentioned to them that there was a 15 DC strength check, so he didn't really have to do that), and after some probably horrible DMing of the damage to the door, they break inside. As they're doing this, and making all that noise, Big Bronk got up from his lair of leather or cloth or whatever, and is standing in front of the door waiting. When they bash inside, Zen does a quick diplomacy check to make him turn indifferent, and then Ted shoots from beside Damien using an attack of opportunity...and does 17 damage. Big Bronk's health was only 16. Big Bronk was intended to be a sort of mini-boss for the party, and it was rather disappointing how quickly he dies.



I stop the session there, since Walten had to leave early. Everyone leaves, everyone's mostly happy, and then I log onto facebook to check on the group's wall. Damien sounds a little distressed about the incident I mentioned earlier when everyone is yelling at him for going the other way (as well as many other in-character impulses throughout the campaign that get squashed) and posts something on the wall about it. Ensue 50+ comments about it, mostly between Walten and Damien, but eventually involving pretty much everyone except Ren about the party dynamics.

However, somewhere in all those comments, it comes into light how OP Damien and Ted are. I'd been calculating damage as hit die + BAB + dex/str modifier...at least, I thought I was. They were both getting damage counts of ten or above most of the time, with the minimum (assuming they hit) being about five on Damien, and twelve on Ted. Enough to one-shot or almost one-shot a goblin with 4 or 6 HP. What do? Ted copypasta's the section in the PHB about attack bonuses and such, so I get confirmation that I'm doing the rolls pretty accurately. Is there something else I'm missing? Something to do with their armor that I should be subtracting? There's got to be something. There's no way level two characters should be doing this much damage. The CR ratings on the goblins are 2!

tl;dr: being a DM is difficult. All the blame for any sort of error in the campaign can be traced back to you. All of it.

Also, thank you all for your comments and suggestions :3 I posted this earlier in the day because I wanted to actually stay up and respond to comments this time instead of falling asleep... if you asked me something in the previous entry, I did post a response the next day in there.

EDIT: lessened the wall of text a bit. I also texted Ted and asked him what he had for his BAB, since his minimum damage is just way too much. He had it down as eleven...so that's part of the problem. There's a chart on page 22 of the PHB that lists the BAB of classes - a ranger's BAB is two no wonder!

I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.
firexfred
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States78 Posts
March 13 2011 02:59 GMT
#2
I'm not sure what you are reading in the PHB, if you could maybe copy a bit here it might help. But in general, damage for melee is Str + weapon damage. As far as I know hit die + BAB + dex/str is nothing. BAB + str (melee)/dex(ranged) is how you calculate whether or not you hit.

The idea behind AC is whether you can use your physical ability (Str/dex) and your ability to attack (BAB) to hit someone or something who is armored and trying to not be hit(aka dodge out of the way). This is why AC is 10 + armor + dex + any bonuses be they magical bonuses or feats or whatever.
Tzel
Profile Blog Joined October 2010
United States72 Posts
March 13 2011 03:13 GMT
#3
This is what it says in the PHB:

ATTACK BONUS
Your attack bonus with a melee weapon is:
Base attack bonus + Strength modifier + size modifier
With a ranged weapon, your attack bonus is:
Base attack bonus + Dexterity modifier + size modifier
+ range penalty

ATTACK ROLL
An attack roll represents your attempt to strike your opponent on
your turn in a round. When you make an attack roll, you roll a d20
and add your attack bonus. (Other modifiers may also apply to this
roll.) If your result equals or beats the target’s Armor Class, you hit
and deal damage.
Automatic Misses and Hits: A natural 1 (the d20 comes up 1)
on an attack roll is always a miss. A natural 20 (the d20 comes up 20)
is always a hit. A natural 20 is also a threat—a possible critical hit
(see the Critical Hits sidebar, page 140).



oh, so that means that the attack bonus goes into the attack roll which is the accuracy roll...I'm an idiot x.x When you say that damage for melee is str + weapon damage, it would be dex + weapon damage for ranged, right? I suppose that does make more sense
I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.
firexfred
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States78 Posts
March 13 2011 05:11 GMT
#4
You only add str to melee and thrown weapon attacks. Not bow or crossbow (unless the bow specifies otherwise) You never add dex to damage.

If you think about it, having more strength would make you hit harder with a sword or throw something harder, but having more dexterity won't make an arrow fly faster or hit harder.
Cuddle
Profile Joined May 2010
Sweden1345 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-03-13 07:28:54
March 13 2011 07:26 GMT
#5
nvm, didn't read properly.
Klockan3
Profile Blog Joined July 2007
Sweden2866 Posts
March 13 2011 13:20 GMT
#6
On March 13 2011 14:11 firexfred wrote:
You only add str to melee and thrown weapon attacks. Not bow or crossbow (unless the bow specifies otherwise) You never add dex to damage.

If you think about it, having more strength would make you hit harder with a sword or throw something harder, but having more dexterity won't make an arrow fly faster or hit harder.

You can get str bonuses with composite bows.
firexfred
Profile Blog Joined September 2010
United States78 Posts
March 13 2011 21:32 GMT
#7
Hence me saying "unless the bow specifies otherwise." Composite bows would be an example of that
TheYango
Profile Joined September 2008
United States47024 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-03-13 22:31:41
March 13 2011 22:26 GMT
#8
Note that the Strength bonus to damage is modified by the weapon type: two-handed weapons get 1.5x the Strength bonus to damage, while off-hand weapons get only half the Strength bonus.

Also, while you normally don't add Strength bonuses to damage dealt with a bow, you DO subtract the Strength penalty (if the character's Strength is less than 10).

With regard to the strength of Damien and Ted, that tends to be a problem with D&D--character strength doesn't progress evenly. Fighters and Barbarians are super-strong from 1-5, but tend to not scale up really well in longer campaigns. By contrast, playing a level 1-5 caster with all of 3-5 spells per day is somewhat dull, but they become super-broken at higher level progressions.

Personally, this is why levels 7-12 are my favorite level range (and I recall reading somewhere that it tended to be peoples' favorite level range for D&D 3.5). That's the level range where, as a DM, you don't need to get too bogged down worrying about people being too strong or too weak. Also, levels 7-12 generally line up best with what one might consider a reasonable power level for a traditional high-fantasy adventure.
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