My group is playing Abomination Vaults, and on the second level there is a room with an undead Minotaur Skeleton Warrior. The book specifically states that it never leaves the room it’s in.
My group quickly figures this out and would simply have everybody ready an attack, one PC would open the door, triggering everybody else’s reaction, and would then close it again.
After doing this about 10 times they finally took down the skeleton despite it having resistance to most of their attacks, with none of them taking any damage.
This is a somewhat inexperienced group that doesn’t usually do strategy things, so I was happy to see them plan and execute.
Anyway what’s the weirdest way your group beat a supposedly challenging enemy?
Be careful letting your players do that. Once is fun, but AV has lots of encounters that say the thing won’t leave its room. You don’t want them to cheese every encounter like a video game where they figured out a glitch. I’d say if you are trying to run any kind of enemy that is smart enough to have self-preservation instincts, just ignore that stuff and let the monster chase the players.
That’s a good shout, thanks.
In this case it was a mindless creature with -5 intelligence so I wanted to give them the reward for actually making a strategy for once. Next time they will have to make a better strategy :P
I see this as an excellent strategy to use with inexperienced players.
Let the gamify the tactics a little, give them a false sense of security and then BOOM give them a genuinely intelligent opponent that makes them pee their pants
Oooh, or you could bring in another player to play the enemy similar to this greentext (tl;dr: FelixLaVulpe tells the story of playing a minotaur against an min/max adventuring party at the DM’s request. Spoiler, it goes very poorly for the overconfident party)
That greentext in turn reminds me of Tucker’s Kobolds
Even with the minotaur skeleton, I’d argue that it has enough object permanence to know that the things it’s trying to kill haven’t just ceased to exist because it can’t see them. I’d have let the players do it for like one round (an entire round of free damage is still a big reward for clever tactics) and after that have the skeleton start attacking the door itself.
They were dealing like 5 damage a round due to resistances lol
Even if the minotaur smashed the door, it would be attacking through cover to try and hit them in the hallway, and wouldn’t be able to enter the hallway
I think it depends on how experienced the players are. Players without a lot of experience get a lot out of feeling like they outsmarted the game, and it can lead them toward seeing the wider possibilities outside of just hitting the enemy really, really hard.
But definitely don’t let them do the same trick in multiple encounters.
Yeah. One of the fun things about live improv games like TTRPGs is that the game can respond to player tactics, and grow with them.
Great, you figured out this puzzle. Let’s retire it, rather than having you memorize the solution and use it everywhere.
Yup, don’t marry the module.
Weird ways my parties have beaten tough enemies is usually by abusing magic items the DM has given us or trying to avoid it entirely with unreasonably high skill checks (a staple of min-maxed 3.5 and PF1e).