Question Keith (Yeah, that Keith) #2: Colorful Combat

We’re proud to present the 2nd in a series of monthly articles by Keith Baker.  Best known for creating the Eberron Campaign Setting for Dungeons & Dragons and the card game Gloom he’s also worked on at least five games that you’ve never heard of.  Yet.

Question:

I have a problem and I need some advice from the experts.  I run a D&D 4e campaign every few weeks as dungeon master and my friends are the player characters.  One player had played D&D growing up and he keeps “targeting” specific spots on the monsters’ bodies.  Here are some examples of things he will say:

“I am going to swing my axe at his hand holding his sword and try to chop it off.”

“I am going to try and chop at the griffon’s wing to cut it off and disable him from flying.”

“I am going to chop into his spine to paralyze him.”

It’s creative and I hate saying no but he will do this right out of the gate and it takes the fun out of the fight.  He cuts off limbs before the monsters have a chance to attack.  He likes to chop at the neck too.  He will perform strength checks to see how hard he can hit them.  I’ve thought about raising the Armor Class for specific shots but I didn’t know if there was a better way to handle it.  In conclusion, I need a way to counter him trying to end fights early by using specific shots.  Any ideas would be GREATLY appreciated.

-Kirk Wiebe from {waiting to hear back from Kirk where he’s from}

Keith’s Answer:

There’s a lot of things to discuss here. But let’s start with the most basic. Your player says:

“I am going to chop into his spine to paralyze him.”

Great! Then he rolls an attack, hits and does 8 hit points of damage. The creature has 50 hit points. So what does this tell us? He failed. He was attempting to take an action that would cripple the creature – in other words, reduce its hit points to zero. He didn’t. Therefore, his attack – while fully successful in game terms – didn’t accomplish his stated goal. Your role as the DM – the storyteller – is to explain what did happen. In this particular situation (and I’m assuming the PC was attacking from behind as he’s striking at the spine), I’d say the following:

“He senses you coming and spins just in time to save his life. He catches your blow on the edge of his blade, but he can’t parry it perfectly and you trace a grazing cut across his shoulder.”

This describes the result of the action. He tried to kill the target with a single blow. He failed to do so, though the attack did successfully inflict damage. Meanwhile, if he’d rolled a critical hit and done enough damage to kill the target in a single blow, you’d know exactly how to describe it – he’d have succeeded in chopping through the victim’s spine. But the key point here is that just because he’s trying for a one-shot kill and succeeds in hitting the target doesn’t mean that he succeeds in doing what he was trying to do.

Personally, I approve of the player’s actions – as long as he’s willing to accept that he may not achieve the result he’s aiming for. Any fight in which players simply say “I try to hit him. I try to hit him again.” is going to be a dull story; one of my favorite RPG systems actually penalizes people whose combat actions are too boring, on the theory that they are predictable and easily blocked. In roleplaying, we create a story together… but the key word there is together. The player says what he’s trying to do, and if it’s a battle to the death, I hope he IS trying to kill his opponent; it would be odd for him to say “I’m going to try to graze him in the shoulder.” As the DM, it’s your job to describe how his action succeeds or fails.

There’s another aspect to this: What is success? When a creature has 80 hit points and you hit it for 10, what does that even mean? One option is to say that any successful attack means a physical injury to the target… but there’s another school of thought that says that a “hit point” doesn’t always represent a flesh and blood injury – that it also reflects general energy and a creature’s ability to defend itself. If a creature has 80 hit points, it could be that for the first 40 hit points you don’t physically harm it at all, but rather you’re wearing it down… that you don’t draw blood until, well, it’s bloodied. This helps to explain how a warlord can “heal” people with an inspiring word, or how a second wind lets you fight on – you aren’t actually causing a spinal injury to magically seal, you are simply building your resolve and fighting on through exhaustion or minor injuries. At the end of the day, it’s something you can decide on a case by case basis – but the point is that hit points are a metaphorical concept, and it’s up to you to decide what any particular injury actually means.

If you like having more flavor to combat, you could choose to reward imaginative descriptions with a mechanical benefit. If the player has a creative or unexpected action – swinging on a chandelier to attack the target from an unexpected angle – you could provide a bonus to attack, or even decide to allow an additional effect on a successful attack, like knocking the target prone. The key is that the player should never take such a bonus for granted: it’s always up to you as the DM to decide if the action is worth a mechanical bonus. What I lay out for my players is that something predictable – even if it’s just predictable to me – is less likely to get a bonus. Essentially, I see 4E as a very cinematic system, so I look to action movies for inspiration. The hero may swing in on the chandelier once in the course of the movie, and it’s a great scene; the audience will eat it up. But if he swings in on the chandelier EVERY scene, soon the audience is going to be bored or start making fun of it. Can you keep it entertaining? If so, you might get a reward. For example, take that spinal blow. If the attacker IS behind the victim and it’s the first time he’s said that, I might actually say that if he drops the victim to 5 or fewer hit points, I’ll call it a kill – because it runs with the flavor. But that’s it. He can’t kill a creature that isn’t even bloodied by saying that he wants to; if he tries, I’ll just come up with a description of how the creature was able to defend itself.

Now… in my Thorn of Breland novels, there are a number of scenes where Thorn does something just like that – killing a powerful enemy with a single precise blow. The key there is that in D&D terms, Thorn was envisioned as an assassin; typically she only gets such a quick kill when she’s had time to study an enemy, as per the 3.5 Edition Death Attack rules. So it’s a case of the description of the action meshing with the mechanics of what she’s doing. In 4E terms, the player’s likely to have better luck severing a spine if he combines it with his 5W damage daily attack that with a 1W damage basic attack.

One way I’ve found to help people ease into more colorful combat descriptions is to ask them to describe death scenes. When I have an extended combat with a powerful foe – a solo or elite who’s been giving the group a difficult time – and a player finally lands the finishing blow, I like to say “Tell me what it looks like as you finish him off.” First, this is a moment of triumph for the players, letting them know that the battle is done. But it also lets the person who strikes that final blow drive the flavor. As the dragon is already dead, it doesn’t matter if the PC severs its head or finds the chink in its armor; it’s all about the flavor.

You can extend this approach to critical hits and fumbles. I especially like to do this when a player has a critical failure when making a skill check. So you rolled a one on your Diplomacy when trying to impress an ambassador. Well, I could decide exactly what you did wrong (You didn’t realize that your hand gesture is a deadly insult in his culture; you made an off-color joke; you laughed at his shoes) – but it can be more fun to ask YOU to tell me what you did that is causing this to be a dramatic failure. The key here is that it has to BE a dramatic failure; you can’t talk your way out of that. But it gives you a chance to come up with a failure that makes sense – something that keeps your character image intact – as opposed to me saying “The ambassador doesn’t appreciate your dirty joke” when you know your character would never do something like that.

Of course, sometimes you or the player might not have a brilliant idea, or you might want to be surprised by the outcome of a critical hit or fumble. Many companies have products describing creative effects for exceptional successes or failures, such as Paizo’s Critical Hit deck; these often specify mechanical effects, so even if you don’t use the randomized aspect of the chart or deck, you might find inspiration for the impact of the ideas your players come up with on their own.

To sum up: far from discouraging your player’s creativity, I would encourage it. But I would make sure that he understands that the system doesn’t provide any mechanical effects for the actions he is describing and that he will not instantly cripple the creature just because he wants to – though you might provide some bonus if you think the action is especially appropriate or creative.