Thread: Defeating Extraordinary Opponents

This post was brought on by one of Nikolas Lloyd's "lindybeige" videos, specifically this one: A point about weapons in fantasy worlds - YouTube. The current debate about composite bows on these boards also has something to do with it.

It always bugged me that, in D&D, all you needed was enough "to hit" bonuses (and possibly a magic weapon with a certain number of pluses) and you could hurt and kill pretty much anything. BRP, despite its more simulationist combat system, still suffers from the fact that RuneQuest was written by members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, with an emphasis on man-to-man melee combat. It's great when slugging it out with other humans or more-or-less humans, but I've often thought that the armour points attributed to truly huge creatures like giants, dragons, and the like, is not scaled very well. In other words, even in BRP, you can still take out these superhuman beings with ordinary weapons made for human conflict. The upshot of this, at least in my experience, is that players don't tend to think of alternative means of dealing with big bad guys, means that even primitive man might have used such as pit traps or using natural terrain to trap or hinder very large animals, or Siegfried's method of digging a foxhole in the path of the dragon so he could slit its belly when it passed overhead (not that he thought of that one himself).

Have you come across innovative methods employed by players (or used them yourselves) in your games?

I kinda know what you mean, but it's a two edged blade.

In legends, giants, dragons, and the like were usually slain by one person. And that fits with the "you can kill it" school.
Likewise, in the real world, you can kill a big critter like an elephant or even a dinosaur with hand held weaponry. Pistols and arrows can, and have, killed elephants.
So there is some justification for keeping the values in the "killable" range. Plus you don't really need to do a lot of damage to kill a big critter, just do what damage you can to something really important. Matter of fact, I'd say the big critters are more resilient to weaponry in BRP that they are or probably would be (for the fictional beasties) in reality.


As for innovative methods, I've occasionally seen them, but more often than not, I've seen stupidity, masquerading as "fun" or :bravery". I once ran an adventure where a rogue bear war terrorizing an area. The PCs managed to hunt it down, and could have peppered it with arrows from a distance, and brought it down without much risk of injury. Instead, they rushed into melee where they could "do more damage" and quickly discovered that in melee they could "take' more damage as well.

The player characters of my fantasy campaigns usually are members of a community,
and the players normally learn soon that their characters can use the accumulated
experience of their community ("How did others deal with that kind of problem?") and
that their characters are vital survival assets of their community ("We need you, co-
me back alive and well."). As a result stupid "heroism" is very rare, in most cases the
characters plan well and use all means available to them, like ranged weapons, terrain,
prepared positions, traps, fire, poison or whatever else gives them the necessary ad-
vantage to survive the encounter. And they usually realize that a fight to the death is
not always necessary, that it is often sufficient to be able to make life so unpleasant
for the "problem" that it decides to behave (e.g. leave the community alone) or to go
away.

Never been a D&D-er. Unfortunately, even in other genres my players have tended to be "charge the bear" types. Why negotiate with the galactic smugglers when you can start a space bar fight?

In fantasy literature, however, things are quite different. Jack the Giant Killer used trickery, traps, magic items, and lots of fast talk to defeat his numerous foes. Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) actually talked Galactus into not eating the Earth. (Try that tactic in your next Call of Cthulhu game!) The heroes of countless giant critter films managed to figure out said critter's weakness (they always have one) in time to exploit it and defeat the monster before the movie's end (but not before countless National Guardsmen have been eaten first).

Somehow, my players rarely think that way. They've taken out a few pirates/goblins/wolves/Klingons and have become cocky, eager for a direct physical confrontation with the biggest of Big Bads. Wicked witches routinely get bested by pre-teenage girls. Tiny hobbits and cowardly robots defeat evil empires. Why should they be afraid?

Call of Cthulhu is a very good teacher here. Just try to charge a monster and you will rapidly have to create a new character!

Call of Cthulhu players quickly learn to search for knowledge before acting (what are the monster's weaknesses? how can we beat it without fighting it?) and this habit tends to be used in other genre after that - each time there is a big monster (or a more ordinary but still powerful foe).

Call of Cthulhu really teach to think before acting.

I'd say that is only partially true about CoC. Some of the menaces in CoC are simply not beatable by the PCs, no matter how clever they are. For instance, if Chtulhu wakes up, there is really nothing a PC can do about it. By the rules even if the PCs manage to nuke Cthulhu, his body will reform in a bit. About the only possibility would be to try and summon another Mythos being to pit against Cthu;hu. Nodens if the PCs can swing it.

And often the PCs don't really have any idea of just what they are up against or what options are available to them until they are already committed in some fashion. It's not like in a FRPG where everybody knows about the dragon that lives in the mountain that overlooks the pass. With CoC, everything is a secret, and the PCs have to hope that they can stay on the frings of events and keep a low profile long enough to find a weak leak to exploit. Usually some deranged, but killable cultist.

But for the most part, I'd say CoC does as much to discourage clever thinking as it does toe ncoruage it, as there aren't many options for defeating the real nasties. Hiding in a pit and stabbing the belley won't be effective against a Dhole, and setting up steel cables as a trip line, will hardly defeat Cthulhu, even if damage taken from the fall could be considerable.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

I'd say that is only partially true about CoC. Some of the menaces in CoC are simply not beatable by the PCs, no matter how clever they are. For instance, if Chtulhu wakes up, there is really nothing a PC can do about it. By the rules even if the PCs manage to nuke Cthulhu, his body will reform in a bit. About the only possibility would be to try and summon another Mythos being to pit against Cthu;hu. Nodens if the PCs can swing it.

And often the PCs don't really have any idea of just what they are up against or what options are available to them until they are already committed in some fashion. It's not like in a FRPG where everybody knows about the dragon that lives in the mountain that overlooks the pass. With CoC, everything is a secret, and the PCs have to hope that they can stay on the frings of events and keep a low profile long enough to find a weak leak to exploit. Usually some deranged, but killable cultist.

But for the most part, I'd say CoC does as much to discourage clever thinking as it does toe ncoruage it, as there aren't many options for defeating the real nasties. Hiding in a pit and stabbing the belley won't be effective against a Dhole, and setting up steel cables as a trip line, will hardly defeat Cthulhu, even if damage taken from the fall could be considerable.

I don't know with which kind of Game Master you played Call of Cthulhu but I'm beginning to understand why you don't like it!

In the adventures I run, there is always an important investigation part in which the player characters learn enough to know what kind of danger they will meet and what to do (and fleeing far away as quick as possible can sometimes be the only good option - especially in front of Cthulhu itself).

And yes, there are to many nasties to defeat and some of them are impossible to kill... But surviving (as in a lot of other horror genres) and defeating a creature or several cultists from time to time is the main goal of the campaign.

You know, there are a lot of horror stories where the heroes never win. Almost all, actually. The monsters always come back. Even when the players believe that they won... This is a main feature of the genre.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

I'd say that is only partially true about CoC. Some of the menaces in CoC are simply not beatable by the PCs, no matter how clever they are. For instance, if Chtulhu wakes up, there is really nothing a PC can do about it. By the rules even if the PCs manage to nuke Cthulhu, his body will reform in a bit. About the only possibility would be to try and summon another Mythos being to pit against Cthu;hu. Nodens if the PCs can swing it.

And often the PCs don't really have any idea of just what they are up against or what options are available to them until they are already committed in some fashion. It's not like in a FRPG where everybody knows about the dragon that lives in the mountain that overlooks the pass. With CoC, everything is a secret, and the PCs have to hope that they can stay on the frings of events and keep a low profile long enough to find a weak leak to exploit. Usually some deranged, but killable cultist.

But for the most part, I'd say CoC does as much to discourage clever thinking as it does toe ncoruage it, as there aren't many options for defeating the real nasties. Hiding in a pit and stabbing the belley won't be effective against a Dhole, and setting up steel cables as a trip line, will hardly defeat Cthulhu, even if damage taken from the fall could be considerable.

I've never really considered anyone actually making PCs face major mythos beings like Cthulhu. I always looked at the incusion of stats as more of a threat, kind of like including stats for a nuclear bomb in a spy game. If you can't stop the ritual being used to summon an elder god, then it is kind of like cutting the wrong wire when defusing the nuke, [Hudson voice]"game over man"[/Hudson voice].

Originally Posted by Toadmaster

I've never really considered anyone actually making PCs face major mythos beings like Cthulhu. I always looked at the incusion of stats as more of a threat, kind of like including stats for a nuclear bomb in a spy game. If you can't stop the ritual being used to summon an elder god, then it is kind of like cutting the wrong wire when defusing the nuke, [Hudson voice]"game over man"[/Hudson voice].

That's why I think the stats are pretty much meaningless in CoC. At least with a nuke you can come up with blast radii, radiaton exposure and such. With The Mythos nasties,yopu really can't. The GM can look at game stats, but the PCs shoudln't. They don't know just how strong a Spawn of Cthulu is. They might get some rough clues in some text, or painting, or, if they are unlucky, personal experience, but they can't know.

Years ago, one of the best ways our CoC group came up with for handling the waked cultists was to use a summon spell to call up something that we sicked on the cultist. Chances are, we could call up something that the baddies couldn't defend against fairly easily, and the Mythos critter didn't leave a trail of clues back to us. And we could ususally do it with something fairly modest.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Years ago, one of the best ways our CoC group came up with for handling the waked cultists was to use a summon spell to call up something that we sicked on the cultist. Chances are, we could call up something that the baddies couldn't defend against fairly easily, and the Mythos critter didn't leave a trail of clues back to us. And we could ususally do it with something fairly modest.

Quite strange, in my humble opinion... Calling something in Call of Cthulhu is one thing... Controlling it is another, much more hazardous... And doing it, especially letting this thing killing people without loosing enough sanity to become a cultist is even stranger...

My player won't ever try that! Or they will remeber it for a long while...

Now, to come back to the main topic of this thread, Dragons, in a lot of stories, are exactly like what you described here... They killed dozens of knight before and when you attack them, you absolutely don't know how exactly powerful they are (except that it is terrible) and what are their specific strengths or weaknesses... Players shouldn't know their stats more than Call of Cthulhu players should know those of Cthulhu entities. Unfortunately, in most fantasy role playing games, experimented players know by heart the stats of dozens of creatures... Even when their character didn't meet them yet. The problem is exactly the same...

And that's why a good GM can change monster's stats! Especially their weakness.

Sorry guy, but this vampire doesn't sound too fear garlic...