Fantasy weapons
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- The anecdote about the turtle does make the scenario seem a bit dull - with the PCs turned into mere spectators, but it wasn't as bad as it might sound. The players just heard a quick description of the army's methods, and were of course free to try to intervene (they didn't, much), and most of the scenario dealt with other things. The scenario was not actually about the turtle, but about another mission to sabotage the efforts of the occupying forces. The turtle incident was just a little warm-up to show that the local Empire troops were well-organised and capable of making the PCs look silly. It was to guide the PCs into thinking a bit harder about the main mission.
www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
Solution: once the Turtle is mortally wounded, the Heroes attack the army, which will be easily defeated since they are using large, heavy cumbersome weapons specialized for killing giant turtles instead of humans
Ah yes, the complete Murder Hobo cycle
some people are utterly ridiculous.
everyone knows the correct way to kill a dragon is by shouting at it.
+1 for username.
That Reference Guy is that a motherfucking Skyrim reference?!?
why kill a dragon in the first place? Team up and extort villagers, sell high priced fire insurances to castle owners. Don't throw away endless business opportunities.
"YOU THERE! STOP THAT! GET DOWN HERE!"
*dragon roars*
"DON'T YOU TAKE THAT TONE WITH ME MISTER!"
I'd use chemical weapons but whatever
Against a dragon, I would have to go for the javelin.
the FGM-148
omg x'D
First I thought "What, are javelins that well classified? Huh. Let me google that."
Then I laughed.
Then I wrote this comment.
Personally, I think Dragon Hunting(at least, the way I envision it) is more of a battalion sport,than anything. There should be men with long-ranged missile weapons, balistae with anchored bolts(chains and/or ropes - to entangle it, remove the functionality of certain limbs, strip it of it's flight), fast moving cavalry with lances(to skirt around it, make passes at it and retreat - to divert it's attention, primarily, as much as to get in the odd scratch here and there), and skirmishers with javelins and throwing axes to keep the dragon confused and busy so the balistae can do their job(of pinning it down) and then get in some men in heavy armour with some heavier weapons(preferably pole axes, long pikes, greatswords) to start poking at it's face(gouge out it's eyes), damage or hack-off it's tail and other limbs, sort of dismantle it piece by piece. Unless you're using magic, in which case a lightning-bolt through the heart should be enough(put it in to cardiac arrest or arrhythmia), fry the brain(if the head is hit) that kind of stuff, though,that would only work on hatchlings, drakes, wyverns or smaller worms - I imagine dragons to be pretty, fucking, gigantic.
OwariNeko I first thought "oh, so this is a sort of pun of a weapons' name", scrolled on, read your comment, googled it regardless due to your laughter, and then giggled slightly at the thought of using that against a dragon
Really, I think if you're hunting a dragon for sport, the fairest way to do it is to use a fighter plane or attack chopper.
Or a tanks shells.
Maybe if we had a catapult and load it with swords...
+Observer29830 Better still, load it with men holding swords for that extra in-air control. Don't worry about the landing.
+Zap “Gee” Gun Even better still, give those men wingsuits. KAKAW MATHAFAKAZ! Perhaps a massive trebuchet type thing where it just smashes the ground with a sling full of boulders.
Even better would be a catapult launching an enourmous pommel to end people rightly.
+Hristo Kuymdjiev I laughed way harder than I should have ._.
Isnt there a gun in Borderlands 2 with this concept?
"SWORDS ARE NO MORE USE HERE!" gandalf the grey
+WarbanderLasty OMG so true
This also shows a common ducking out of this problem in fantasy. Just use magic. Solves everything! Tolkien had a restricted enough magic system where “just use magic,” worked without sounding cheap but many authors fail to get this right.
Edit: just realized I’m replying to a comment made two years ago. What the Hell though!
Nope, if some enemy has high magic resistance but mid/low armour you are going to have some big trouble if you're using magic only.
Is that against the Balrog? Doesn't he eventually defeat it with Glamdring?
@@adamcetinkent glamdring in Combination with magic
I always wonder if you play as a magic user in D&D. You know.. LindyMage!
+Josh Porter He doesn't really play D&D, he plays runequest and some others more. Though I do hope he still does LindyMage in those too.
+TheNerd I see the joke went over someone's head.
+Joshua Porterfield It really didn't.
Haha
That was magical
He would have been a BeigeMage!
I use my swiss army sword, with a sword in it for any occasion
+Dennis Bauer ha ! Useless weapon when compared to my Swiss Army Polearm !
image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/41/1444205325-swiss-army-poleaxe.png
+Dennis Bauer now i new what i want for x-miss
+scarfacemperor Do you mean a halberd then?
+Dennis Bauer I use my Swiss Army Axe/Sword/Dagger/Spear. Get rekt
The
And that's why Sorcerers are always the right answer.
"Oh my God! A big turtle!"
Answer: "My Magic should do the job"
*Meteor kills the turtle*
"Oh my God! A powerful knight!"
Answer: "My Magic should do the job"
*Fire ball kills the Knight*
"Oh my God! My friend is out of control!"
Answer: "My Magic should do the job"
*Cast sleep on friend*
"Oh my God! We can't pay the Inn prices!"
Answer: "My Magic should do the job"
*Performs an Illusion show*
"Oh my God! That guy is saying Katanas are the best swords ever"
Answer: Point him to Lindy's channel.
Annnd that's why balancing D:
But what happens when an enchanted knight comes along and your magic does nothing to him and he is within range of melee then in that case you are fucked.
That is why for effective Mage work you need a Tank to stand in front while the Mage does real damage.
Eric the Red They wouldn't get up to that stage without a tank. In DnD a mage could start with 4 health and they can die easily. My friend plays a mage and agrees with me.
LNG Varck And at level six they get good. At level 10, they easily outclass pretty much any other given class except the druid. Those early levels where they have four hitpoints? Mage Armor, Sleep, Coup de Grace. There is a reason Wizards are tier 1 (AKA God tier) and Fighters are tier 5. Not to mention, Wizards and Sorcerers can make their own tanks. Also, be mad that almost all other melee classes are defunct thanks to the Tome of Battle.
If you're still not convinced, let's expand it to all spellcasters. Druids are better tanks than Fighters ever will be, same with Clerics, and they both still get 9th level (albeit different, but still great in their own right) spells. There are also Artificers, Archivists, etc, but stating why they're god tier (and spellcasters) would be redundant as a whole.
Now, even aside from all these reasons, your retort is weak as you were talking about a high level melee combatant and I gave an appropriately high level Wizard response/ solution. The comment before this paragraph was just icing on the cake.
LNG Varck Also, Spellcasters made your Fighter's armor possible in the first place.
I love that you weren't content to just see the party fail, but you went ahead and showed them how it was supposed to be done.
Well, hell; I guess to only decent weapon to go into a fantasy world with is a modern large-caliber rifle.
+ThePhantom710 that would solve a lot of problems xD
+masterianna or a bazooka, let's see those dragons flap their wings, also the katana, the katana solves everything XD
+ThePhantom710 You'd probably end up finding ammo for it somehow as well.
Heh. I was going to say something like that.
Just bring a howitzer. The turtle can't be that fast, being a turtle and as big as house. One good shot, you're golden.
but modern high caliber rifles don't have screw off pommels so you can't end enemy's righteously
I want to suspend disbelief to enjoy the fantasy, so I want a world that is consistent and makes sense.
See: Monster Hunter.
People with hilariously oversized weapons "hunting" animals the size of buildings.
if they had to fight monsters 10 times bigger than them I suppose medieval weapons would look much more different than what we have nowadays :)
Are you referring to MonsterXHunter?
no, monster hunter, an action rpg videogame
Still more realistic than a with tiny swords meant to kill people lol. At least those giant weapons look like they would do some damage to the beast.
If they had tried to work out a way, then certainly, but they did the usual thing of not thinking about it. It was a deliberate lesson.
The basic rule books of fantasy RPGs that I have seen just have the usual weapons for taking on other armed men.
if you read the fantasy book series by Raymond E. Feist, this actually gets mentioned a fair bit. There's a pretty interesting bit where a couple of characters are discussing how you would kill a Wyvern (small dragon basically), and the guy says 'bring 20-30 men with huge spears and rope and hope you can stab it before it flies off'
Just interesting because it's opposite to the typical fantasy ' go ask the hero with the cool sword to kill it'.
BeepingMetal I like those books, and their approach to fantasy creatures, but the main character bugs me. He's good at EVERYTHING, which is very Mary-Sueish.
StormchaserKnight Heh yeah, and they pull a 'well of course he has godlike powers, but he can't use them today because (insert plot stamp here).
Oddly, the Main dude is one of my least favourite characters. Other heroes die all the time from falling off horses, accidently falling off buildings, getting killed by a 'sucker move' because of exhaustion.... so much better :)
The Stoned Videogame Nerd Why not leave it a pie laced with sulfur?
The Stoned Videogame Nerd Worked at least once
BeepingMetal A Song of Ice and Fire (and Game of Thrones) also got this right. The dragons in the background were more or less unstoppable monsters on the battlefield because swords and spears are fucking useless against something that can FLY and BREATH FIRE. The Southern Kingdom of Dorne stayed independent from Targaryen rule for so long by running the fuck away when ever it appeared a dragon would come on to the battlefield. The only dragons that were killed by humans (rather than another dragon) was during the Targaryen Civil War when a bunch of people rushed into the dragon's pen, and the dragons died when the roof collapsed.
The Giants of the show were able to ignore normal arrows, and were only killed when the Men of the Night's Watch used a ballista.
The party regretted coming over to play this adventure after the last member to make a contribution to the story did so over four hours ago. All of them sliding of their chairs in boredom except for you, being completely oblivious and happily playing with your NPC army.
+Kurt Pachernegg Or the players roled out theyr PCs discontent after the army action description took like 2 minutes (as it does in the video) and the players were later going to have much more fun in devising clever strategies and exploiting weaknesses instead of just rolling dice.
And they lived happily everafter. The end.
More Roleplay less Rollplay!
This story tells us rolls weren't literally everything, and one man should seriously not be able to both make a house tremble into dust with pure strength and suddenly can't lift a big tree branch that is usually liftable by normal humans strength.
Yeah no, that kinda stuff happened to my friend playing DnD, it was hilarious btw.
I remember once when we got on a scenario like that.
Contrary to that, our DM thought we would go to it with swords and stuff.
Instead we made 2 easily maneuvered ballista and basically caught it when it tried to get out of the cave with shots to the wings.
Then we fired steel-wired nets over the back so it would not move very well.
After that we blinded it with crossbow bolts to the eyes and from there on it was pretty much only start shooting it with everything we had, ranging from the remaining ballista bolts and the like.
I want to see the face of that dungeon master.
He! Genius! And teamwork and forethought! Even better. :)
When all else fails, there's always the peasant railgun.
It is the privilege of the game master to decide that realism and critical thinking are important aspects of his game, but it is not inherent in the game as such. Therefore I might be a little naive to be surprised that the players bring only their swords... Unless you've told before the adventure that you expect them to think critically and outside the scope of the rule books.
The way I interpret the description, this was supposed to be a wake-up call. Perhaps the GM was expecting the players to not catch on to what he meant without a demonstration.
To be fair, all they needed was ONE pyromancer... Or anything, really... pure damage is pure damage, GM can't argue with that!
Alexander The Okay He never stated whatsystem they were using. And of course the GM can. The GM is the god of gods.
How to kill a monster with medieval weaponry: 1) Find out where it sleeps 2) Bring and set up Ballistae (preferably several) about 200 metres from where it sleeps while it is off killing villagers, then hide until it returns and sleeps again. 3) ??? 4) Profit
i know right XD
Or simply unscrew your pommel and...
Damadicius Phoenixia Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!
Damadicius Phoenixia it's pretty obvious what the skal crowd does when it's out of videos.
Simply end it rightly!
The main difference between a hero and an NPC is usually in stats. Maybe he can run circles around the turtle and hit its exposed parts. Maybe he can breathe underwater and contest it after it submerges. Maybe he is 10 times stronger than a regular man and can actually break the shell with a greathammer. Or maybe he's a grandmaster archer and can hit it right in the eye or something. Maybe he's a master alchemist and can poison his weapon, so that escaping won't really help the turtle.
And we're not even talking about mages.
There's also a point about the weapons themselves - it's a fantasy setting, after all. Materials and enchantments matter. If they're using a regular plain iron or steel sword instead of a [Mithril Giant-slaying +10 Rapier of Shell Penetration], it's not really fantasy. More like Game of Thrones-like medieval realistic-ish somewhat-fantasy.
This is often distinguished as high fantasy vs. low fantasy. In high fantasy magic is common, mithril/adamantium are just expensive, heroes are like half-gods from Greek mythology (Hercules and Achilles being perfect examples) and you can expect a handful of well equipped adventurers to kill a dragon.
In low fantasy magic is so rare most people have never seen it, mithril is "stuff of legend", heroes are simply brave mortals (Joan of Arc and Robin Hood would be good examples) and killing a dragon might require an army, siege engines or such.
At least that's the definition I've seen the most.
+Tennouseijin Low fantasy is kick ass
+Tennouseijin
Aye, very true. Ironically, virtually all high-fantasy settings, (including D&D, Warhammer, and even settings which can seem very different at a glance, like the Final Fantasy series) are directly or indirectly derived from and heavily based upon the surprisingly low-fantasy setting of Tolkien's Middle Earth and LoTR in particular.
Fal Leithani
This isn't as surprising if you consider that almost ALL middleage'ish fantasy is at least inspired by Middle Earth.
Tolkien compiled a lot of European folklore, added some ideas of his own, and then it was the spark that made fantasy popular, with D&D playing a major part.
Tennouseijin
I see where you are coming from, but I'd say that's untrue on many counts. Many (if not most) of the low-fantasy medieval settings are based on Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, stories of saints and Dante's Inferno, Germanic sagas and mythology, that sort of thing.
It's typically only the high-fantasy stuff which traces to Tolkien, and the reason I find that so amusingly surprising is that many people think of Middle Earth as high-fantasy, when it really, _really_ isn't. In fact, Tolkien was generally much more sparing with magic, miracles, and superpowers than the older myths, and yet the works derived from each tend to invert that curve.
I have an amusing anecdote about this. A few months ago I watched Return of the King for the first time since I started getting deeper into medieval history and weapons(I was usually a modern history buff for most of my life). Anyway, I get to my favorite scene where the Rohirrim charge against the orcs. As they charge, the orc commander orders his archers to "FIRE!" This of course doesn't stop the riders and so he then changes his order to "FIRE AT WILL!" Suddenly it hits me. Why would he say "fire?" Fire has nothing to do with bows or arrows whatsoever, and this is a world where firearms don't exist and explosives are clearly rare(given the way Grima Wormtongue is ignorant of Saruman's magic powder in Two Towers). Seems to me the command should have been "LOOSE!" Did not "fire" derive from the original musketry command "GIVE FIRE?"
I find it a bit hilarious, that was a good move as a DM, sure they didn't get much of a role in it but it kind of teached them to not head straight into battles they couldn't deal with. Always hated that kind of buffonery when I DM.
I'm surprised no one has posted that "katanas deserves far better than masterwork bastard swords" rant thing yet
Love this video, just stumbled on it by wandering the internet. (Although, I've already been subscribed to your channel and watched many of your videos.)
I'm actually designing an rpg, and I had considered this, but the method I'm taking with it is similar to Shadow Of The Colossus, Dragon's Dogma, or God Of War, where to kill massive creature you need things like great swords and halberds(or siege weapons), and to do something like attack its leg so you can make it fall over, and/or climb on it so you can get near its head and then kill it that way. Or do it the hard way, which would involve attacking its body with considerably more defenses(thicker armor and more mass) and just hacking a giant hole into its body until you can actually expose some vital organs, and then stab those repeatedly. Sort of like how in older Final Fantasy games where you'd fight a boss where you need to kill its limbs as a separate unit first to make the fight easier, or attack the main part of it which took maybe 3 times as long.
Another thing I had considered is with undead, since skeletons would never work without magic, since they have no muscles or tendons to hold them together, or to move their limbs, so they would have to be literally 'animated' by the magic. Thing is with that, if you put heavy armor on a skeleton, that thing is going to be nearly immune to most weapons, unless you are using a Maul, or at least a mace, and even then it's going to take a lot.
I wish more DMs were like you. If you get creative most of them think "Oh shit, didn't think of that, better hit them with lightning"
This is something I loved about the 1981 film "Dragonslayer." The enchanted weapon made to kill the dragon Vermithrax is a spear, which would make a lot more sense against a dragon than any sword would.
Great videos, I really like them. I do hope the adventurers took the opportunity to slaughter the "evil empire army" when they were equipped with ridiculously oversized weapons and were busy fighting a giant turtle, as true murderhobos should... :)
a video from 2012 that's actually pretty awesome for anybody who plays RPGs
I love Dark Soul's way to deal with fantasy creatures: *make it bigger*. Example, Dragon Slayer Arrows look like they are supposed to be fired from a damn ballista, but are fired from a large bow.
Problem is that no normal human, no matter how strong, would be able to operate such a bow in any effective fashion :P
So even if Dark Souls has the right idea, most of their solutions simply aren't possible to execute under "realistic" settings.
SinerAthin What can ya do, the makers are japanese.
You can swing at the shell, and from the safety of behind the creature. No one wanted to be in front of it, but the massive pikes could have a go sometimes. Its head was the most dangerous bit.
Naaah, don't be ridiculous.
THIS SWORD IS SHARPENED BY A SERIES OF STONES THAT MAKE THE WEAPON STRONG ENOUGH TO KILL GODS, EVEN.
DESPITE THE FACT IT'S BASICALLY A TOOTHPICK COMPARED TO THEM.
I am of course, poking fun at Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
Games, that I both love, mind you :'D
+Vorst I never really got how those stones were supposed to be used to upgrade your gear. Are those blacksmiths literally just reforging your gear every single time to include the materials? They're always using a hammer and anvil, it seems (except for when they're not *cough*thesorcererunderneaththefirelinkshrine*cough*) and yet it's still useable to upgrade leather and cloth. I know, fantasy upgrade materials, but still. It would make a bit more sense to have the upgrades all done by mages who are imparting some kind of ancient magical powers into the equipment instead of just... handing them your Black Leather Boots +3 and a Large Titanite Shard to get it to +4 by smushing the hammer against it.
.... of course I'm just overthinking deliberately because I find it fun, in all seriousness.
+JetBalrog The explanation really is that titanite is... Magical. I guess.
Most people imagine they strengthen the weapon by hammering it while it rests atop the titanite.
Vorst That does make a bit of sense, yeah. It still harkens back to RPGs and MMOs where you take your cloth robes to get hammered back into peak condition by a blacksmith :P
+Vorst the combat still is by far the most realistic in all the fantasy worlds. One wrong dodge and you are done for, atleast with my build. :D
Zajin13
I guess? :P
But you can still become Demi-God like in Dark Souls, the first one especially.
They would certainly be a lot less efficient, unless they work by magic.
*sigh* if this was in a D&D situation, I take my normal approach when faced with a large monster:
Commoner Railgun: Prepare to fire!
Commoner Railgun: Fire!
Commoner Railgun: Loot corpse!
The "commoner railgun" is illogical. It requires the use of game-rules-only logic (passing an object can be done a theoretically infinite number of times in a single round) combined with real-world logic (for an object to move that far that fast, it needs to be moving fast).
*Of course* it's illogical. Of course it's silly and inane. That doesn't mean it's not AWESOME!
IVIaskerade
Any sane DM will either say "You can't do that because I'm going to put a limit on the number of free actions you get per turn which I'm explicitly allowed to do according to the rules, and would still be allowed to do even if it hadn't been made explicit because I'm the DM", or say "You pass the rock along the entire chain as expected because that's how it works according to the rules as written and at the end of the line it drops to the ground right in front of the last person because that's also how it works according to the rules as written".
At best, you might get a DM to allow it *once*. Because roleplaying games are about fun, and that's a fun thing. *Once*. After that, it just makes every encounter trivial and ruins all of the fun forever after. You'd be better off just having the "are dragonwrought kobolds dragons" debate and building Pun-Pun.
That's a debate? Doesn't it say they are in Races of the Dragon?
Timothy McLean
I haven't quite memorized the entire argument, but there's a series of about 4 different sources, all of which take precedence over the previous, and which alternate in their implications. There isn't anything anywhere that makes it explicit that Dragonwrought Kobolds are "True Dragons".
The issue is that there are a lot of monsters that have "dragon" in the name, which the designers didn't want to make eligible for the special feats they were writing at the time for "real dragons". And since it wasn't feasible to rewrite the statblock for every dragon-ish creature, and for every dragon (of which there were a lot by that point), they decided to make the distinction on the basis of the way that they advance by age category. Now, at that point, Dragonwrought Kobolds were certainly considered True Dragons because they advance, as a dragon does, by age category. On the other hand, the semantic counterargument is that, while dragonwrought kobolds advance by age category in much the same way as dragons, what they lack is an entry in their monster manual statblock that explicitly says "Advancement: Age Category", or the "Advancement: Wyrmling x HD, Young y HD, etc" that other true dragons have.
Then another source came out, which, because half dragons were becoming very popular as a template, had an explicit listing of "every" half-dragon. Which gave rise to the other major argument against Dragonwrought Kobolds being True Dragons, which is that there is no entry for a "Half-Dragonwrought Kobold", to which the expected counterargument is something along the lines that Dragonwrought Kobolds cannot make half-dragons because Dragonwrought Kobolds are already modeled after a particular color, so they aren't included in the list for the same reason why there's no such thing as a "half-half-red dragon", and so they're excluded to avoid something akin to Russel's Paradox.
TL;DR, it's the nerdiest lasting debate on the internet, and your understanding of it is directly proportional to your nerd cred.
It greatly amuses me when the party encounters a dragon and proceeds to draw melee weapons, expectig it to land.
The only thing that amuses me more is the look on their faces when said dragon proceeds to burn them to cinders from quite a comfortably height
THe weapon choice for killing a non-human monster is important... but you have to also consider location. If you have to kill a dragon, the best place to do so is in its lair... where it can't take to the sky and roast you from above. Also, all weapons should be poisoned, because those first hits have to count!
Ogres generally aren't very smart... so they can be easily lured into traps and ambushes. The best option for an ogre would be a spiked pitfall trap... any trap that would turns its massive size into a disadvantage.
As for demons... you'll need to consult your local priest. Demons are generally vulnerable to ancient artifacts and rituals, as opposed to physical weapons.
It's all about the situation! Take it from a seasoned adventurer like me.
And now I need to go. My mom is telling me to go to bed.
+lapinbeau I used to be an adventurer like you...
+Ulfric Ruthgardsson ...but then my mother told me to go to bed.
Инреr sонал And then my adventuring days were over. Like if you cry every time, because you know I do.
(Faint sobbing heard from the distance.)
For demons, I would suggest arrows dipped in holy water, after being blessed by a priest. One God shot would put it in enough pain to distract it while you sprinkle a salt circle around it.
***** You know, you could base a religious archer character off of that. He could do a super-cheesy line from the Bible, like: "Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle."
"They have a dragon, do they? Squire, fetch me my Wednesday sword."
"But Sir, it is Tuesday!"
"Yes, it is, lad. Yes it is."
This is a battle won with spades, pickaxes, pitch., and planning.
You fight fire with planning. Floods and drought are fought with planning. Giant turtle monsters? You beat it around the head and shoulders with planning.
Going by the preferred methods poachers use around here one would conclude that a small coil of wire is more efficient than a firearm.
Giant turtle? No problem. Stand to the sides of it's head/neck and prod it in the squishy bits with pikes. Not like it's turning all that fast, so you can avoid the whole "snapping" attack. If it tries to retreat, prod the pikes in on a slight angle, so the beast's motion drives the pikes in even further.
Seriously. Has no one ever used polearms? What do they TEACH in schools these days . .
I know, right? Polearms are so much more useful, this is why I like the Uruk-hai orcs, because they took massive amounts of pikes to fight HORSE lords.
Algebra and linguistic studies, mainly.
I assume that the giant turtle was some sort of snapper, so if you try to get that close to it you will be dead. I don't know who came up with the idea that turtles are slow, but they are actually pretty fast. I've poked snapping turtles around ponds before and they are super fast. Also, their heads are about half the length of their body, so it will shoot forward further than you think that it can reach. My bud got half of his toe bit off by one,didn't realise what it was and reached down to grab his toe and got the last knuckle of his finger bitten off. Long story short, don't fuck with big turtles
DysrMe
My old housemate had a tortoise. It was pretty darn slow, even when prompted to hurry. The snapping of the head is quick, but had a limited arc for good speed. Standing to the sides right by the head could work. You might lose a man, but the beast would be going down.
we must have been slow because it was tamed, but most are fucking fast man. They can probably charge 10 mph, and can turn around very fast (again, snapping turtle)
This was a meat-eating monster that resembled a turtle in that it was aquatic and had a big tough shell. If it met significant resistance, it retreated to the lake.
I will put forth the idea that in D&D, beyond about 4th level, pretty much everything the PCs do is going to be superhuman in one way or another. Swords are supernaturally sharp and durable, fighters are inhumanly strong and skilled, and so on and so forth. This does a hell of a lot to render these tools that players use much more reasonable.
This isn't to say that your players' strategy wasn't awful though.
Verily it is said that ballistae covereth a multitude of sins.
Where was their spellcasting support? Minions, mist, mesmerization, walls, buffs, debuffs, divinations... A wizard can easily be the most dangerous member of the party without ever dealing a point of damage.
Didn't they even ask around town as to the monster's habits?
Or consider making traps?
Or really preparing at all?
I wish we had a GM like you. If you try to think out of the box in our games, like even doing reconnaissance, you get penalized. In our games you must go face to face with the giant turtle using standard weapons until one side dies.
That wouldn't have worked, you know: Gamera can fly. He's also the friend of all children, so maybe that fact could be exploited.
Now you're thinking! The scenario was not actually about the turtle, but about another mission to sabotage the efforts of the occupying forces. The turtle incident was just a little warm-up to show that the local Empire troops were well-organised and capable of making the PCs look silly. It was to guide the PCs into thinking a bit harder about the main mission.
If I had to fight a 30 foot tall dragon in a fantasy setting (without magic available) I would want either, ballista, or cavalry with steel tipped and banded lances.
You'd also need a drugged up horse, because no normal horse would ride towards a fucking dragon, lol xD
SinerAthin That depends on the setting of the fantasy.
+Asura R-R
Yeah, but every horse has a point where fight switches to flight. I think that point is usually (barring parasitic brain diseases) significantly short of 'massive winged lizard spitting great gouts of hellfire.'
Asura R-R
Still thinking that what looks to be a gargantuan avatar of Satan himself night be a bit much. When they do flee, they often do that pirouette thing where they tilt back, dumping the rider and spinning 180 degrees. I don't think that would be too advantageous.
Then again, any important enough ruler could easily have a court sorcerer and his assistants cast "Lesser Know No Fear" or something on his knight's mounts.
*****
Well I was talking about in a world were you can't actually use magic.
If you can? Get wizards.. Get _all_ the wizards.
Loved your point! I have always felt most role playing games don't properly represent how one would fight something like a dragon. I think a great way to better understand how to fight strange creatures is to look at how armies learned to fight exotic animals such as elephants or how people learned to hunt dangerous animals like grizzly bears or large crocodiles
the pun at the end... :-)
my approach to the turtle situation:
make some land anchors from wooden logs with great spikes attached and attach them to a long is rope with a barbed spear on the other side. stab these into the softer fleshy bits around the head, arms, legs or tail. now with the turtle trapped you get out loggers axes and start working at the tail or legs. additionally you could use great long spears with a single square spike at the end for penetrating deep into the turtle.
if you wish to kill it from the shell and in you could trap it with the land anchors (and some extra rope maybe) and the start a large bonfire square on the middle of the shell. the heat would slowly cook the turtle and crack and damage the shell.
So how many heroes were there in the party to carry the enormous spiked logs, swing the two man hammers and push at the creature with those four-man spears?
An entire platoon of the Empire's soldiers, if that tells you how many.
HipposHateWater
"The party" as in the players. If it was a normal rpg he probably had roughly 4 players who could never move and utilize all those gimmick weapons.
Unless they hired mercenaries of their own they probably didn't have the manpower to do anything like that the platoon showing them up did.
Muazen He mentioned that the heroes stayed and watched the empire's soldiers try with the specialty weapons, and actually succeed. The "heroes" failed because they were using crap like swords and axes to try and take it down ;)
HipposHateWater
Yeah, that's my point, they never had a chance cause they were 4(?) wandering hobos and couldn't spare the manpower for this sort of thing.
Muazen
Ah, I see what you mean now :)
They're probably better off jumping across dimensions, and stealing the gear from some hunters from Monster Hunter, and trying their luck then :p
kill the giant turtle ? easy, just poison the water !
Good idea but that would probably make the entire village, everyone downstream and most likely that evil empire want you dead. XD
louie wallenberg i was thinking about the local economy actually, im sure the fishermen would have loved it ! but wasn't it a lake ? doesn't that mean there is no downstream ??, I don't know entirely, but if that's true, then depending how big the lake was it would be very possible, also if your using the kings soldiers then im sure the king is gonna be real pleased when his expenisve soldiers died when there was a way that might save his nice new pricey soldiers ?
mcpartridgeboy All lakes have downstreams. The only lake that doesn't is the ocean. XD
oh ! haha ! well that's me hung by the villages isn't it !
Him talking about a battle w/ a great turtle reminded me of EverQuest. Finding & fighting the massive turtle Lodizal in the Iceclad Ocean was a pretty large & potentially rewarding task. Such a long walk & search for him. I miss those days. Very fun.
Great. Now I gotta go think of fantasy specialist weapons.
madcat789
Yeah, I'd love to see some kind of videos from people who know more about medieval weaponery how they would see the arm race against some of the fantasy enemies.
I acutually like the idea: having to use different weapon against different enemies. Would be a fresh change from having 'all-able sword' all the time.
Against such an armoured foe, I should think that the best course of action is to use some long poky implement and hit it in the eye. A spear or lance, or perhaps even shoot it.
Or use magic to assault its mind and drag it somewhere else.
Well, yes, but I wasn't factoring that in.
few ballistic blade zweihanders to the face could do the job
I remember reading a similar scenario, but with a different aim - Tucker's Kobolds. This was from a relatively early edition of Dungeons and Dragons, where kobolds were small dog-like humanoids which were basically fodder. A mid-high level adventuring party went into a dungeon said to be populated by kobolds, and expected to wipe the floor. The kobolds hid between the walls, shooting through murderholes into long, thin corridors, and the adventurers couldn't hit back. It was a disaster.
Giant Turtles are easy to kill. Just take +5 Long Sword with depleted uranium chant. Those things will pierce any armor and cause +5 HP damage!!!
Based on the information he has given us (that the weapon to defeat it was a giant spike and not an enchanted crossbow or something), I'd say that enchanted weapons, and perhaps even magic, is not present in the scenario.
Still, if it was, shrink dire porcupine, cajole turtle into eating shrunken porcupine, end shrink spell, loot corpse, find another porcupine.
Oh! So all the adventurers should have done is realise the job was imposible for them and hire an organised army... really good DM'ing Lloyd... You made the encounter almost impossible for a standard party of 4 people and gave it as an example of bad planning on the players' part.
Ah, yet.... hiring mercenaries is not out of the player’s abilities, is it? Perhaps they wouldn’t have that exact strategy in mind, but my PCs always travel with some mercenary cavalry so every outdoors encounter on a road of field begins with a thundering charge of lances (albeit in the hands of level 0 men at arms)
That kind of adventure seems somewhat advanced for beginners, so I hope you wrote this for some more experienced players.
Regardless, this kind of adventure is a good break from the monotony of dungeon crawling and forces players to use their brains once in a while, good for keeping them on their toes.
To be quite honest, it seems more like 'common sense' to me xD
Even if you had no experience with fantasy earlier, one should instinctively know that when hunting a formidable prey, you would require weapons capable of felling that prey.
And identifying the proper weapons for the job would require knowledge about the prey, which means reconnaissance or shifting through libraries.
SinerAthin Common sense isn't very common in fantasy.
Excellent point once again! In my Fantasy novel, dragons (and war in general) were considered extinct so no weapons were made against it. When one finally did appear, the warrior Queen with no weapons readily available to fight such a thing made an 'alliance' with a wasp-like people and had them swarm the monster by the thousands. Pretty much all she could do for the time.
So, what would they have been able to do if they did try to prepare for it? Did they have access to magic, alchemy or siege weaponry? Would they have been able to acquire enough resources to fight it like the army did? That almost sounds like a no win situation for them depending on the answers to those questions.
He could have made the turtle thing an entire story arc - the adventurers could have had to go seek out the necessary people and do them favours and/or earn the gold to buy the equipment and extra help from mercenaries.
But then, wouldn't the "evil empire" have come in to deal with the beast while they were trying to gather the manpower/resources anyway?
I don't know how he runs his sessions, but it's possible that he was suspending their action until the party failed, rather than keeping them active. Atleast, that's what I would have done if I was running the campaign, ofc everyone does things their own way.
To each their own, of course. Still, to my mind, at least, it sounds like he had planned it to the point where he expected them to fail. Either way, he does sound like a better GM than the ones who actively try to kill their PCs.
You could use poison... a very strong one... or maybe boiling oil... these thing are quite easy to find since the entire village will likely help... But the PC showed no sign of trying to prepare for the battle, just rushed to face the monster...
I liked how in one of the Conan stories he builds a spear and then poisons it to kill a huge monster and hits it in the mouth to avoid the armored hide. I would use that as the overall strategy for any such large and well protected beast, a pointy weapon (javelin, dart, or spear type) plus poison is the only way to really do enough damage. But then in most games the creatures have no tactics (even the ones that are supposed to be really intelligent) thus allowing infantile methods of hack and slash adventurers to work anyways.
That's my kind of DM.
That actually seems like a terrible session to me. The first problem begins when the PCs arrive at the lake. The players spent far too much time at the time waiting for the plot to find them. Couldn't one of the villagers have tipped them off regarding the specific spot where the monster tends to emerge? Then came the initial fight. That isn't a problem. It's okay for the PCs to fail from time to time. Lastly, NPCs arrive to save the day while the PCs are reduced to non-acting spectators from the sidelines. Regardless of whether the PCs are being clever or not, reducing them to spectators in the story is just unforgivable. Lindeybeige seems like a fantastic player but a terrible gamemaster.
***** He didn't reduce them to spectators. They reduced themselves to spectators. Maybe if they had questioned the villagers until they found someone who knew the spot the monster emerged they would have had that information. Maybe if they had put some thought into tactics or equipment they could have taken the monster. They did neither, so they failed. Then they faced the consequences of failure, which in this instance meant losing the glory of defeating the monster to another group.
I'm sure it felt like shit to play in that game. That's fine, every session isn't supposed to make you feel good, especially when you fuck up, which they obviously did. They're lucky their characters are still alive.
Sorry +yunikage, I have to respectfully disagree with you here. The PCs did not handle the situation well. That far, I fully agree with you. After that, however, the GM piled more mistakes on top of their mistakes. There are several better ways that a GM could handle this situation instead of having a Mary Sue NPC ride in and save the day while the PCs do absolutely nothing. A total party kill would have been preferable because the story would have still been about the player-characters.
***** The narrative of a game is always about the PCs, no matter what action takes place. Nothing about this anecdote shows that the story wasn't about the PCs.
Imagine I wrote a short story about a man who failed at something and was upstaged by another man. Is that story "about" the second man simply because he succeeded where the first failed?
Obviously not.
The story is "about" the character whose viewpoint is prioritized, and the perspective of the PCs is automatically privileged in the context of a tabletop game. No matter what happens, the story will always be about them.
It only seems otherwise if you insist on framing the action of the story in the context of a HEROIC narrative, in which the victorious party is the focus of the story. Or, as you suggest, a tragic narrative in which the protagonists fail....heroically. And these are certainly the usual tropes of tabletop gaming, but it's an entirely arbitrary restriction you're imposing.
And this is demonstrable very simply by reversing the roles. What if the NPCs tried to subdue the monster and failed, and then the PCs succeeded. Is that story "about" the PCs by your standards? Why? Both groups participated in the action, by what rationale is the group that succeeds automatically the focus of the story?
You seem to assume that creative choices that don't fall in line with your tastes, your preference for heroic narratives, are mistakes, which is on-face false. Stories about disempowerment and failure are still stories, and the focus of a narrative is not determined by which party succeeds or fails, that's simply not how any of that works. Resolution of the type used in the anecdote has enormous potential for humor and for pathos, regardless of whether it plays into your players' empowerment fantasies.
yunikage Ironically, your own example is a fair argument for my own point. You wrote that a story is always about the character through whom the story is being experienced and related "no matter what action takes place." You write about a hypothetical story in which a character fails at someone and a second character then succeeds. Okay, let's look at that example. The first story which comes to my mind and fits this description to a tee is The Hound of the Baskervilles. In that story, Watson investigates a mystery and fails to discover the villain even when he thinks that he has a solid lead. Instead, the person he finds is Holmes who goes on and succeeds exactly where Watson failed. The entire story is experienced by Watson and related to the audience through him because Watson is the narrator. So, Watson is the protagonist, right? Heck no, Holmes is always the protagonist in every Sherlock Holmes story. Watson's purpose is to provide the audience with a witness to the protagonists adventure and an ear to whom the protagonist can explain things. Doesn't that sound a lot like the role of the PCs in the story that was shared in this video?
The restriction that I place on a game is not "arbitrary" nor a matter of "personal taste". It is a real problem as evidenced in the video's story. There is even a name for this phenonema: the Mary Sue. Here is how the RPG Wiki defines the term: Mary Sue is a character who is obnoxiously competent and receives a disproportionate amount of the spotlight. Although the term comes from fanfic, it is often applicable in rpg contexts. Such a character may be the fantasy of a power-gaming munchkin or a GMPC who becomes an avatar of the acting-out GM.
A closely related term in GMPC which is defined like this: A GMPC, or "game master player character," is sometimes a pernicious form of self-insertion by the GM in which an NPC not only outshines the PCs in ability but seems to have greater importance. Such a character is often a Mary Sue but could simply be a poorly conceived ally for the PCs. Many GMPCs were not intended as such, but may have arisen out of a sincere desire to participate. In the hands of a capable GM, however, who does not set out to outshine the other players but to supplement them, a GMPC may be a valuable addition who complements the group by providing additional skills the group's existing characters may lack. When a GM is careful to keep the GMPC to the back of the group and not in the spotlight, the main problems of the GMPC are negated.
Regardless, I don't think you are ever going to believe that this is a problem. I will rely on someone elses words instead. This quote is lifted from the article "Five Common GMing Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them"
January 16th, 2016 by Oren Ashkenazi. The remainder of this comment will be a direct quote from that article. Oren writes,...
Some GMs like being a player so much, they do it in their own games. How does that work, you ask? Poorly. These game masters create a special NPC and plant it in the party’s midst. Soon that NPC is taking the spotlight at every opportunity and rushing in to save the day before anyone else gets the chance.
Players serve as advocates for their characters. When a character’s advocate has a GM’s power and authority, abuse follows. The GM’s character has no limits and no one to reign it in when things get out of hand. No PC can equal the GM, because regular players are bound by rules that don’t apply to the GM.
The natural reaction is resentment. Players don’t take hours out of their day to hear how awesome the GM’s character is. Every time the special NPC solves a problem or shows up the other characters, that resentment grows. Eventually it turns into anger. Nothing’s more frustrating than being told your character can’t do something because the GM’s beautiful and unique snowflake already did it.
How to Avoid It
If you’re running a game and one of your NPCs looks like player-character material, make a note of it for the next time someone else is running a game. The character might be as cool as you imagined, or they might not, but either way you’ll get to find out without ruining your players’ fun.
If you still find yourself tempted by a particularly cool NPC, give them some traits you don’t enjoy playing. Make them greedy, or rude, or cowardly, whatever turns you off. If that’s not enough, make them less powerful or weak enough that they can never outshine your players. The key is to remove temptation by any means necessary.
I totally agree that a good DM would rule as you did. But to be fair, it would be of great benefit to the game if the Monster Manual itself just basically said that human-scale weapons cause no damage to some particular mega-monster. They did occasionally rule that you needed +3 or better weapons to hurt some extra-planar creature, but that was for magical reasons, not because of the sheer physical toughness of carapace. DMs should have the confidence to say to players "look, you may have an amazing +5 sword, but it's not like you can shape stone with it. Arguably, it won't even allow you to cut your way through the wall of a log cabin. So it's barely gonna put scuff marks on the shell of a house-sized turtle. Another helpful addition would be the in-game existence of powerful, single-purpose weapons that are otherwise impractical. If a character party found such a weapon, it could at once be an amazing artifact and still not unbalance the game. Just moving it from where they found it could be its own adventure. A major city could proudly display a now-obsolete contraption that allowed it (and perhaps an unprecedented coalition of allies) to defeat some immense former assailant.
You do know a turtle the size of a house would collapse under its own weight right? I really hope you didn't do this to a group of people willing to sit down to a fantasy RPG simply because you disliked the 'REALISM' it proposes.
KiloShank He's wanting weapon realism.
KiloShank Depends on its proportions and wether or not it has a respiratory system fit for its own weight. Also fantasy world. But it should pretty much stay in the water in the first place.
KiloShank Well there's a great deal of difference between doing things because of realism, and doing it for common sense. You're questioning the legitimacy of a giant turtle while playing an RPG that allows dragons and magic? Are you loony?
Lindy is just talking about using weapons that just make sense to fight with. As he says in the video, you wouldn't want to just charge a Dragon with a sword and no forethought would you? Especially if it meant that you'd be putting your life at risk!!
Kite I was saying that the way he described getting his point across would have taken all of the fun out of the players hands.
KiloShank I see, and agree. The way Lloyd handled by taking it out of player control isn't how I feel it should have been done.
Perhaps a better way would have been to have the army attack with traditional methods and fail. After the battle, maybe the party meets up with some engineers in said army, devise a better plan and regroup to attack the beast together.
Dragon-slaying weapons? Depends on your fantasy. If your dragons have impervious, overlapping scales over most of the body, ballistae are basically your best option, short of having a friendly giant do the fighting. It's much easier if you can harm the scaly areas, but also much less common in fantasy.
However, one underused tactic which could do quite well against basically any version of a dragon is to go for the wings. IF you can engage it on the ground (big IF there), blades will be exceptionally good at slashing the membrane, ruining them for flight. Once the dragon is grounded, it becomes (somewhat) easier to deal with.
Other unscaled points likely exist, such as eyes, inside the mouth, perhaps the inside of some joints. Clearly, the ideal kit for actually wounding and killing a dragon should be spears, arrows, and other such piercing weaponry with range. You need precision, long reach or range, and the ability to pierce quite deeply into any exposed area to try to reach vitals, or failing that, damage tendons or muscles and hobble it, or aim for the eyes to blind it.
Axes, most swords, and other cutting or hacking weapons wouldn't do much good against armor-scaled dragons beyond attacking the wing membrane. Swords could be quite decent for thrusting into unarmored spots, but only if they're well-suited to stabbing, although admittedly most swords could thrust well enough.
Of course, if your dragons only have normal scales, and the scaled bits can be damaged by hacking or slashing, then your best bet is to simply go for maximum damage. It's a big creature, you need big weapons. Greataxes, greatswords, glaives, and the like would be preferred, because those *might* be big enough to cause some real harm.
Let's see, thirty foot tall, scale armored, fire breathing lizard.....Servant, ah yes, fetch me my RPG-7 and oh, I think a half a dozen High Explosive Anti Tank rounds should do the trick. Now, as to armor...I think my asbestos fire suit would do nicely here. Because this bastard is so heavy, if he ever hits me, it's going to crush any armor I might have like a beer can. Oh, and servant? Please make sure my will is up to date and my life insurance is paid in full. There's a good man.
***** Smelling the sweet, sweet stench of sarcasm. ^_^ At least, I HOPE so...
***** Just hoping you weren't taking the original comment seriously, sir.
30 foot tall fire breathing lizard huh,
send in a baitmen and lure it into a forest,
20 lasso men to keep the beast steady,
~50 bowmen with fire arrows,
~30 spearmen,
and if all else fails bombard the area with greek fire,
I've seen shows where experienced adventurers are kinda like Batman. They have well-prepared and elaborate solutions to whatever creature they're fighting at the time. Often times they did carry exotic weapons made specifically for certain types of monsters.
Or, you know, you could summon the power of the gods to kill it for you.
Fucking clerics are op as hell
Joe Allen Don't you mean OP as heaven :P
Christopher Hebbard Only if they're serving a good god.
The stationary crossbow in The Hobbit is a great anti-dragon weapon. Just have some ox tow one of those to the cave the dragon lives in, and fire it at full crank.
Well if you got a turtle and a dragon problem you could make a blind date for them ;)
Then just come back and mop up the wounded survivor...
Dragon would lift off and scorch it, killing it without a scratch.
Lukáš Klečka
Yeah, just assume a dragon could pick up a million pound turtle...
Christian Rankin O____O
I never said the dragon would lift the turtle.
Lukáš Klečka
You got me there; I misread.
To be fair though, the turtle could just "shell-up" or go in the water. Plus, not all dragons were supposed to fly...
I'm not about to write 30 comments about this silly shit so I'll just give you the last word(if I can resist).
I think a good anti-dragon weapon would be ballista, it can pierce armor (unlike trebuchets and catapults), it can hit aerial targets, and it has moderate range and decent accuracy
Aw man, I wanted to kill the frost giant everlasting one with that -1 (cursed) twig that I found in the forest earlier and whited to a point.
What you really need is a pommel to end them rightly
kn1ghtpr1nce wasn't that supposed to be used on a handsome boy that fights frost giants for fun?
"Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. Discipline in war counts more than fury". - Niccolo Machiavelli
It doesn't sound like a fun adventure. I'm not against the idea of a difficult to defeat monster that the players need to get creative with.
I'm very much against posing problems that have only one defined solution because then things become a "guess what the DM thinks" instead of playing the characters.
I also don't like NPCs stealing the spotlight unless the PCs had a lot of interaction with them, talked about the behaviour of the monster, saw them constructing the devices, etc.
It doesn't sound like fun, it just sounds vindictive and childish.
A pen-n-paper roleplaying game should never have a "cutscene". The PCs should be part of and interact with anything that happens.
Yeah, never use a hold person spell on a PC, or have them go down in a fight... or god forbid face consequences for failure & die!!
I think the Scandinavian swordstaff would be a not bad choice, depending on "how big is big" in the setting. Indeed, putting weapons on long poles is a generally good idea (though, again, it depends on "how big is big" in the setting).
So you set a scenario for a finite amount of players that was impossible to beat with their own abilities and gear granted by you then trotted out your super smart specialist PCs (with knowledge that you as the GM impart them) that enact a plan that takes loads of manpower to operate effectively (that is almost certainly not present for your players unless you were GMing for, what, 10 folks?) and they go about making your players feel stupid because of A: knowledge from god about how to handle things and B: the clear fiat of being successful about it to C: show up your players?
Sounds like a terrible time. I don't play a fantasy game to be bogged down and punished for not applying stringent real world strategy against things that don't exist in the real world, and then get shown up by my GM's special NPCs afterwards. I like the vast majority of your videos but this sounds utterly terrible.
+davidredeuced OR, players can be creative. There might have only been 4-5 players, but they could have done any manner of things. I mean, yeha its 1 thing to have a GM do something like this if you aren't expecting the GM to be like that. But you'd kinda think that them knowing lloyd would probably figure "we should try and take this game literally"
Linkxsc Lloyd seemed to have derived a one upsmanship style of pleasure in what he was doing, especially the way he described it. If the players knew how Lloyd was running it then they wouldn't have been so "confused" or dumbfounded by the situation as they were. Maybe Lloyd is embellishing the story for dramatic effect but I'm just going with how he presented the story.
I mean, it's a fantasy campaign. If the humans and their tools aren't fantastical and the monsters are then there's a jarring level of difference. What Lloyd describing would b something akin to very high Damage Reduction, Hardness, or Armor in most systems which is accounted for in the rules -- we don't know exactly what system he was playing or if it was free form but this "concept" of big tough fantasy creatures being unharmable without the right equipment isn't a new thing -- it just seems Lloyd changed the manner in which it was able to be handled via his love of specific purpose weapons.
TLDR: That's not how the story was presented. Who knows how it literally was at the time, I'm just responding to the story he told.
My takeaway from this video is that medieval squires were essentially “battle caddies”.
Not too far off, really.
I'm reminded of your double-bitted axes video. Now, the other side of the axe is pointless, but perhaps this is why these weapons we see fantasy warriors wielding are so large. They're not regular weapons for killing other men, they're for monster slaying, and that's why they're so huge.
Yes, I hated that bit because it was so flagrantly daft. In the book it is a thrown spear. He would have looked like a squeezed tube of toothpaste.
Usually I've found in my campaigns the rule of thumb is "Hit it with something heavy preferably sharp or pointy until it stops existing"
Lindybeige, there is another problem with this in that it forces realism in a genre which usually does not welcome it and sacrifices fun in order to do so. Using my own specialized area, allow me to dip into an argument by analogy. Suppose I sold you on playing a game I would GM where you and the other PCs would be the trained medical practitioners (the physicians, lab techs, nurses, and so on) at a rural community hospital when there is a deadly outbreak of a virus. We use All Flesh Must Be Eaten or the World of Darkness or Unknown Armies or whatever other dark, modern horror system you like for character creation.
Then it's game time. Surprise! I hand the PCs a mock report from the Center for Disease Control detailing some obscure virus which outbreaks in Africa. I also dip into my collection and drop a few texts on virology onto the table. We spend the next two hours reading it, looking up any new features, drawing up protocols for treatment, and screening NPC patients per guidelines. There are zero cases in the area. You ask about the same four or five symptoms to about sixty people and have not one positive answer. A dozen NPCs ask you silly questions about the virus. Periodic over-the-top news stories about the virus interrupt your day. The virus never even makes it to the province your hospital is in. This is broken up by a side plot where the billers are way behind in sending in paperwork because of a change in the requirements, and the hospital is suffering due to a backlog of unbilled services rendered.
Ha! I showed you! That's realism! I used my superior knowledge about some area to deconstruct the genre rather than let the PCs have fun with something that is patently silly. I mean, why on earth would anyone believe that such a setup would lead to something fun but unrealistic? Did my initial setup of the game, before game time, lead you to assume one genre and possibly be annoyed when it turned out to raise a giant middle finger to that assumption?
A GM is there to serve their players and ensure their fun, not to show off their particular set of specialized knowledge. Specialized knowledge possessed by the GM shouldn't be used to show the PCs how little they know at their expense, but to add in details that increase that fun. Genre conventions exist to support genres that often had elements that simply don't work in real life, and ignoring how unrealistic they are is the price of admission.
+Carlos Caro good points, but i feel if the party had some forewarning to think it out and the campaign stuck to the premise of using your brain it wouldn't be a problem. I personally find any DnD (or otherwise) game where every problem is solved by sticking a sword in someone/something incredibly dull, genre conventions or no.
+disasterman52 "I personally find any DnD (or otherwise) game where every problem is solved by sticking a sword in someone/something incredibly dull, genre conventions or no." - as do I, but what he described is just a combat encounter.
I suppose so, and supposing the party wasn't stupid, its up to the GM to make it clear what to expect in such an encounter.
Now that I think of it... I shouldn't have allowed those adventurers to kill a dragon with just swords.
I'd be overjoyed if I had players who were that creative and engaged with the game-world. It'd be more demanding to deal with, but worth it.
Now that I think on it, the dwarves in JR Tolkien's The Hobbit, (and I'm refering to the books, not the movies) made that very mistake, but to a bigger degree. Thorin Oakenshield's party had geared up for the journey to Lonely Mountain (the Kingdom of Erebor) with the intent of reclaiming their homeland from Smuag the Dragon. And when they arrived they hadn't the faintest idea of how to slay him. Seriously, at no point before or during the journey did anybody in that dwarven band try to think of a way to kill Smuag. Effectivly, the part just winged it and lived.
+fred fry I could be wrong, but didn't they thought smaug was already dead?
And that's why Loyd was never allowed to DM again.
This kind of thinking is highly encouraged by Dungeon World. One of the reasons I like the system.
I like this turtle idea. One thing that most people don't know, or don't fully realize, is that turtles (especially snapping turtles) have extremely long necks and can still get to you when you're behind them. Many people have grabbed a snapper by the tail only to learn this fact in a very painful way.
So I think my scenario will have a bit of a surprise for any attacks from its rear.
I can answer that for you. Having done extensive research I can say that the longsword has a significant advantage. 16 cuts instead of 8 (using both edges), halfswording, the pommel, better forged, designed to be a frontline weapon (katana is a dueling sword not meant for a primary battlefield role), large focus on grappling and binding, much better thrusting point, handguard can trap weapons, etc.
Only advantage the katana has really is it is a tad better at draw cutting an unarmored opponent.
Question: How did you run this scenario, was it game or something?
Poisoning the local lake would not have gone down well with the locals.
There was a 2nd Edition D&D boxed adventure built around that premise too, called Dragon Mountain.
When playing Shadowrun the main options for killing a dragon are either ATGM (to penetrate the armour) or SAM (to actually hit it while flying). Other AT/AA weapons are of course also possible.
The turtle scenario reminds me of a real life example - elephants. Far (far !) bigger than a human opponent and tougher and taller than even a warhorse, the best tactics were to swarm the thing and aim for the soft areas - eyes, ears, feet and groin. Once the animal was weakened with bow fire and hand missiles the foot troops would close to bring it down with spears and axes. Another idea would be to use fire to guide it into a pre-planned killing zone, such as a gully, pit or marshy bog.
A similar set of tactics would have been used to take out mammoths by Neolithic hunters and they had little more than short bows and stone spears and axes to do the job.
I had a similar "meeting with reality" years ago when I ran a Harn campaign (look up the system - it's excellent). The players came across a small fort in the desert that was plagued by small bat winged creatures that could use small bows and javelins. I quickly realised that against a foe like that the classic medieval fort design (intended to keep out foot troops ) was entirely useless. Instead I thought more along the lines of a WWII fortress - low walls, covered roofs, netting to trap flying creatures and isolated blockhouses to hide from stray scouts that did get into the compound.
This is partly why I ended rejecting fantasy altogether - when you change the things that make up the society (eg magic, dragons, orcs etc) then you change the way that society itself would function. I mean, how could you keep a feudal society running when any man and his dog could use magic ? It's a bit like European nobility and handgonnes - be careful abut what you wish for because you just might get it !
Warband is considered (sort of a) medieval non-fantasy simulation. Feel free to look it up. It has an online multiplayer component as well, which is also inclusive of a combat system which is largely based on physics/reaction timing.
love the ending pun LB and the interesting and unique scenario you told
When my group took down their first dragon, they heard rumours about the elemental type of its armour, fought in a tournament to win a weapon that could cut through it, had to get chummy with the local hunters guild for advice, killed one of the dragon's young to create a shield resistant to the cold flame breath of the dragon, found an ideal ambush point to lure the dragon in, then used the corpse of its child and the call from a kobold dragon priest to lure it in. When it was close enough, one of them jumped on its back and wrapped a chain around its neck. When it tried to fly up, two of the adventurers used their weight on the chain to bring it back into mile range.
As a fantasy writer, this is great food for thought.
never have Lloyd as a referee, because he will absolutely gut you like a sardine.
Ballistas mounted on wagons pulled by horses. Faster than the monster, can penetrate it and has a longer range than the monster. The ballista bolts should have some rotten meat attached to it so that even if the monster manages to escape it can still die from the infection later on. :)
One of my favorite tactics to use against a party is to remind them that the monsters know their own abilities at least as well as the PCs and are going to take advantage of them. A Dragon, which in DnD has a genius intellect, can shape change more or less at will. So I'd enjoy having the entrance to the dragon's lair a long, narrow tunnel warded with a simple magic to let the dragon know when anyone was coming. Then he'd simply look down the tunnel and breath ... nowhere to dodge, toasty PCs.