Pen and Paper D&D

[Fordel]

You knock enemy A into enemy B which then knocks enemy B into enemy C which then repeats until you are out of enemy's to cascade into each other. It's a push to it will eventually run out of things to knock as each target must be a bit further from you.

[Ironwood]

That's stupid.

[Fordel]

It's level appropriate! Level's 21+ in 4e are well into 'fighting gods and demons as superheroes' territory. You start to get powers based around ideas like "The first time you DIE this day..." 

[Sheepherder]

And if you cheese it, you can pretty much roll an army off a cliff, or into a wall where they all grind against each other until one is left, et cetera.

Unless the magma nymph gets you first.

[Fordel]

It's pretty standard action/super hero movie stuff really. Flinging the badguy into all his badguy friends and they all tumble together in a heap.

[Sheepherder]

...and continue to collide with each other recursively until only one is left alive?

[Fordel]

The push prevents them from endlessly colliding. If it was a slide, sure, you could knock them back and forth, but the push means you'll run out of targets pretty fast unless you are dealing with a horde of badguys or whatever.

[Sheepherder]

Technically you don't have to push them anywhere, it's the triggering character's discretion how many squares to push, and what direction.

It just begs to be house ruled so hard, and if I were DM and anyone decided to abuse it they'd need that "...the first time you die today" power when they spot a sexy nymph just chillin' out in the magma beckoning them over.

[Goumindong]

And if you cheese it, you can pretty much roll an army off a cliff, or into a wall where they all grind against each other until one is left, et cetera.

Unless the magma nymph gets you first.

You get a save to be pushed off a cliff. Once you push one guy off the end of the cliff there will be no one adjacent to him so you can't push that guy.

You will also eventually miss, since its a secondary attack.

That being said, I do think they forgot about the whole "push 0" thing and so forgot to word the power in a way that fixed it (I.E. just say that the secondary target has to be adjacent and further away from you than the prior target)

[Sheepherder]

Re-roll last attack effects / temporary attack bonuses means you could draw out the chain for a bit.

It's kind of academic, because it's the sort of thing that the DM would immediately overrule, and then decide to slay your character for.

[Fordel]

All you would have to do too 'full-proof' the power, is say that a target may only be effected once by this attack.


There's a Sorc at-will that does something similar, where if you are lucky you can just build up a chain reaction of attacks, but has that wording to prevent infinity hit.

[Sheepherder]

Or you could make a house rule than any creature that's prone cannot be struck by the flying character.

Then, because you're an absolute asshole of a DM, you give every monster afterwards the ability to dive prone as an immediate interrupt.

[Fordel]

Isn't falling prone a free action to begin with or whatever. I'd have to double check zee rule book.

[Sheepherder]

Minor Action.

It should be a free action.  Alternatively you should be able to spend a minor action to prepare a minor action, rather than preparation always being a standard (by the rules).

[Musashi]

That's stupid.

[Sjofn]

It's kind of academic, because it's the sort of thing that the DM would immediately overrule, and then decide to slay your character for.

You have some weirdly bloodthirsty DMs. Either that or you are the bloodthirsty DM.

[CmdrSlack]

We had a stupidly bloodthirsty DM who only got one session before we demoted him.

This was in like 7th grade, so maturity may have played a role.

DM: "You see a small bag on the ground."

ThiefGuy Player: "I pick it up and open it."

DM: "A giant spider jumps out and kills you."

That's literally how it went. He then gave the thief guy a chance to save vs death, and tried to convince the rest of the party it was cool because the bag was actually a bag of holding and that's how the spider fit therein and had some kind of unstoppable stealth attack.

Admittedly, the thief guy was the annoying snowflake guy, so it was kind of ok with us. I mean, a bag of holding is useful. We decided that the spider bag move was too stupid and blatantly mean to allow him to keep running games.

[Sjofn]

I've only had one DM that seemed to consider it a failure on his part if he didn't murder at least one person in the party per play session. I stopped playing in that group because it just wasn't very fun (although most of the not-fun-to-me part wasn't so much the murderous intent and rather some other game-related stuff that is really too boring to relate). Proudft is about the level of murder I can stand. He's perfectly capable of wiping us out (he just did two sessions ago, in fact) but I never feel like "OK, this is a bullshit encounter designed to kill us all unless we pull some rules-lawyering bullshit out of our collective ass." Ingmar mostly runs modules so he doesn't get to count.

HEAR THAT INGMAR

YOU DON'T COUNT

[Koyasha]

I hate intentionally killing players just to kill them - they usually have to do something really stupid for me to pull some kind of 'you die' thing on them.  However, I like to just design situations without considering the party - I design them by considering what the NPC that's creating them would do.  So sometimes they seem really hard and sometimes they seem very easy, but they always seem logical, and it's almost always possible for the players to learn what they're likely to be up against.  It usually works better for me than trying to design an encounter that is meant to be difficult but defeatable.

The other thing I like to consider is a little self-limiting rule that sometimes I let players take advantage of too.  I can make an on-the-fly adjustment to something I have decided, with the justification 'he would have thought of that' once for every point of intelligence or wisdom (usually whichever is higher) that exceeds 'average'.  So if the players do something I didn't expect but they're infiltrating the lair of a 21 INT lich or something, I can change things on the fly (because I know I don't have 21 Int, so I can't think of everything he would).  But putting a limit based on the character's stats prevents it from being a 'no matter what they do, I counter it' situation.  When it seems appropriate I allow players to do that too.  They think of something they should have done that the character would reasonably have thought of, then poof, they did it.  Maybe they purchased exactly the right piece of equipment for this situation.

It's really the only reasonable way I can think of to represent characters that are vastly more intelligent than their players.

[Megrim]

I've only had one DM that seemed to consider it a failure on his part if he didn't murder at least one person in the party per play session. I stopped playing in that group because it just wasn't very fun (although most of the not-fun-to-me part wasn't so much the murderous intent and rather some other game-related stuff that is really too boring to relate). Proudft is about the level of murder I can stand. He's perfectly capable of wiping us out (he just did two sessions ago, in fact) but I never feel like "OK, this is a bullshit encounter designed to kill us all unless we pull some rules-lawyering bullshit out of our collective ass." Ingmar mostly runs modules so he doesn't get to count.

HEAR THAT INGMAR

YOU DON'T COUNT

It's often not about setting out to kill players intentionally, few GMs do that I think. It is the duty of the GM to reach across the table and smack people upside the head if they start trying to munchkinise the system "because the rules don't specifically state that I can't do that..."

If I run a game and someone thinks it would be funny to bring in PunPun, they go out the balcony.

[Ironwood]

It's pretty standard action/super hero movie stuff really. Flinging the badguy into all his badguy friends and they all tumble together in a heap.

Yes.  That's why it's stupid.

[Sjofn]

See, proudft just looks sternly at the person trying to be lame and says no and we move on. Clearly I don't play with enough jerkfaces. 

[Fordel]

Ironwood doesn't approve of Goblin bowling :(

[Ironwood]

No.  Especially when they do it in movies and you hear that fucking annoying 'bowling pins knocked over' sound effect.  I remember watching one 'serious' film where the hero threw someone into a crowd of baddies and cue the 'pins'.  It totally fucked me off.

No.

It's Stupid.

[Sheepherder]

You have some weirdly bloodthirsty DMs. Either that or you are the bloodthirsty DM.

His name is Gary Gygax.

[Polysorbate80]

I don't have a problem with making intelligent NPCs make intelligent choices.  Where I have to be careful is making sure they're not cheating and acting on knowledge of the players that they wouldn't have.

This makes recurring villains awesome--they can pull out all the stops because they know what the party is and is capable of, and I can take advantages of the groups' weaknesses (such as the full-auto archery ranger of death and his low, low will save--nothing like dominating him and making him shoot the party instead  )

Older dragons are the exception.  I will completely metagame them in regards to the party.  If you've survived a thousand years of player characters barging into your lair trying to steal your loot, odds are you can identify everything about a character down to his last feat and skill point by smell & taste.

Orb spells:  I find them cheesy.  Not because they're overpowered, but it felt to me like they created the Warmage, realized that it would have a weakness to overcoming spell resistance, and then instead of saying "welp, them's the breaks" they went and made a bunch of spells just to eliminate that weakness.  Because a "conjured" chunk of fire is different than an "evoked" chunk of fire somehow.  Plus, throwing an orb of conjured sound 

What are some of y'all's favorite house rules?  One I like (3.5e) is to allow folks with the tumble skill to oppose someone else's tumble check, no matter what armor they're in.  It doesn't come into play often (not a lot of my NPCs use tumble) but it's nice to mess with the guys abusing the low tumble DCs sometimes.  The players always seem to forget that I allow it when they could be applying it themselves, which is another nice bonus...

[Ingmar]

I want to say my tumble house rule was that the DC was 10 + the reflex save of the person you're tumbling past instead of a flat 15. Pathfinder has a more complicated way of doing it.

[Ratman_tf]

Killer DMs are stupid, but if you go too far in the other direction, you get garbage like Dragonlance. The most railroady, plot is more important than fun, piece of twee made into a series of modules.

[Bunk]

I want to say my tumble house rule was that the DC was 10 + the reflex save of the person you're tumbling past instead of a flat 15. Pathfinder has a more complicated way of doing it.

Pathfinder cleaned up a lot of the opposed roles of 3.5 (which were inherently way too random). All combat manuevers are CMB + d20 vs target's CMD.
CMB = Str Mod + Base Atk + size mod (feat available to use Dex mod instead)
CMD = Str Mod + Dex Mod + size Mod + 10

Tumble is now Acrobatics roll vs. CMD, which means tougher opponents are harder to tumble past (as it should have been in 3.5).

As to the Dex mage mentioned earlier, it is doable in pathfinder. They removed the +1 prereq on Weapon Finesse, so as a Human, you can have Finesse and Point Blank to start, add Precise at third. Lack of feats for a 3.5 Wizard isn't as bad, as Pathfinder gives you a feat every odd level.

Heh, just after I hit submit, I realized that there is no reason for Weapon Finesse in the first place... That's for melee weapons. So yea, human wizard/sorcerer with Point Blank shot and Precise shot to start. Works especially well when you consider that 0 level spells are unlimited in PF, so you can Ray of Frost to your heart's content. Add some Rogue and head to Arcane Trickster for added fun of Sneak Attack Ray of Frosts. 

[Ingmar]

That's actually the PF character I'm playing right now - except my dex is 11, and I'm a gnome, so I had to wait for level 3 for precise shot. It still works fine even without the high dex, though, touch ACs are typically very hittable, and by the time they're not I'll have other options. I had the pyromancer trait + burning hands to make up for the lack of good ray spell at level 1, but it still wasn't what I'd call ideal for a bit. Have scorching ray now, though, so zapping ahoy.

[Morat20]

You knock enemy A into enemy B which then knocks enemy B into enemy C which then repeats until you are out of enemy's to cascade into each other. It's a push to it will eventually run out of things to knock as each target must be a bit further from you.

That reminds me of my brother's time-travelling Samurai, using a misprint about Great Cleave (wherein it wasn't limited to your dex bonus). If you lined up enough chickens at five foot intervals, you could Great Cleave your way through them -- all in a single round. Which could result in you moving faster than the speed of light.

Admittedly, he had to fudge a magic sword that could make automatic hits on anything more than X levels below him to avoid the 5% chance of a clean miss....

[Samwise]

My group called that feat the "Fighter's Teleport".

[Morat20]

My group called that feat the "Fighter's Teleport".

Our GM decided that those rods -- immoveable rods? The ones that you could set anywhere and couldn't move. He decided that from now on in ANY gameworld where those could exist, only one could exist. Ever.

Those, portable holes, and a few other artifacts just got overused as solutions.

I think the game that finally got them banned was the one where I got stuck (I joined late and was given an already existing PC) playing a Holy Avenger who lacked any levels in paladin or cleric, and who rode a skeletal steed because he'd been convinced it was "low maintaince" and would "save on food costs".

Stupidest character ever, and was my introduction to the notion of a truly cursed character. No matter who played him, his rolls sucked. Unless he was rolling on a critical table. Then it was 90s and 100s.

[Ingmar]

Does every group go through a 'zombie horses' stage?

[Strazos]

Nope, never had an undead mount.