Post date: May 23, 2011 9:3:0 PM
Some days you wonder if your can even scare your PCs. So I spotted an interesting post on the PEG forums that covered making your NPCs better at killing players.
Jose wrote:
can you tell me some nasty ideas to improve my creatures against my players?
1. Tactics: Gang-Up bonuses, called shots, Defend, Total Defense, and using their numbers to their advantages. Example: 5 spiders swarm 1 hero (and for our example they go on separate initiatives) - four Wild Attack (+2, +3, +4, +5 vs Parry), and the last uses a Wild Attack to Disarm (called-shot arm, Str vs. Damage or drop held objects). Disarm is damaging the arm (lighter armor = lower toughness), has a +4 vs Parry (+4 gang-up, +2 Wild Attack, -2 called shot), and does +2 damage with a chance to make the PC an Unarmed Defender. And that is just one combination.
2. Hardy - Effectively the creature's toughness just went up by 4 for the purpose of dealing wounds. But Shaking him is still useful since it eats actions.
3. Multi-Action Abilities - (improved) Frenzy, Sweep, First Strike, and precast uses of Quickness or Speed (with a Raise to make Running a free action) all make a single monster more effective.
4. Aura Effects - things that automatically affect everyone within X distance. Either as an action (like a magic spell), or as an innate protective / offensive ability.
5. Attack penalties - (improved) Dodge, Block, Deflection, bad lighting, cover, and anything else that makes it harder for the PCs to get to deal damage. Heck, one of the Masters could just strap a shield onto one of the arms of every Spider in his army; all Spiders just got a +1/+2 to Parry and +2 armor versus ranged attacks.
6. Recover - Combat Reflexes, and similar abilities (Construct, Undead, Command Edge), make it almost impossible for an Extra to remain Shaken. Stacking them means that the Extras will almost always recover with a Raise. Example: Zombie Warriors with Combat Reflexes and a commander with the Command and Inspire edges have a +6 to recover from Shaken.
7. Ranged combatants: use Aim, Double-Tap/Three-Round-Burst (if available), and called shots as available. Best if combined with someone else who's busy making the target Shaken (damage, tricks, tests of will, suppressive fire, magic, etc.).
8. Close combatants: Gang-up, Wild Attack, Unarmed Defender (disarm if you have to), Called Shots (head/vitals is -4 for +4 damage; with wild + gang-up + unarmed you end up with a net +4 attack versus Parry for +6 damage; and you can always target unarmored spots or legs to slow down the heroes, allowing the boss to flee safely).
9. More generally, a combination of Cover and Hold ("setting against a charge", while not technically the pg. 97 rules, could use a circumstance bonus equivalent to those rules) can make it difficult / impossible to used ranged attacks on the foes, but deadly to get close.
So I was thinking of the permutations of the Tactics portion
Gang-Up: +1 Fighting per additional adjacent enemy, max +4
Wild Attack: +2 Fighting, +2 Damage for -2 Parry - well if the PCs are such awesomesauce it doesn't matter.
Called Shot for Disarm: -2 to Hit Limb, (Head -4, +4 Dmg).
Unarmed opponent: Armed Attacker gets +2 to Fighting roll vs. the target.
So If you swarm a PC with 6 opponents simultaneously - all of them go for the Disarm (+2+4-2 = +4 vs. Parry then the Opponent must make a STR Vs. Damage to hold the weapon, the DC is pretty hard as wild attack is +2 Damage and if the arm is less armored then the body, all the better ) if successful, then those left are (+2+4+2 = +8 vs. Parry, as raise only add a D6, it might better to go with a called shot to the head -4 to but +4 DMG, +2 DMG for the Wild attack)
The key is to generate bonuses and then to remember all your bonuses.
Example: In the above villain has a +4 attack for +6 damage (+4 vitals, +2 wild attack). Assuming that he hits, he'll do ~2d6+6 (average 14 damage) to the PC, who likely has a Toughness of 6; that's 2 wounds, and the +2 damage from Wild Attack made the difference.
What's scary is when you apply this to other genres.
Example: Take the excellent War of The Dead campaign. The zombies in there have no Fighting skill. None. But they Wild Attack constantly, and most of their victims (except the heroes) are unarmed. So while the d4-2 attack looks pathetic, they're usually on a d4+2 versus a parry of 2 to 4 (typical modern person) and deals d6+d4+2 (average 9) versus their Toughness of 5, for immediate incapacitation.
A happy side effect is that the zombies are also easy to kill for a trained crew. They have a parry of 2, which drops to 0 when they wild attack. Even the called shot to the head means the hero is on a TN 4 to hit the head in melee. Which means that heroes that know how to stomp face are encouraged to get into melee with small groups of zombies (it's easier than shooting them!). Which is a mean, no-good, rat-bastard-GM trick, because there are always more zombies ready to close in and eat cocky PCs. They just haven't come around the corner yet.
A Key thing to note here about the Gang Up bonus is this: The additional enemies only have to be adjacent - they do not have to be attacking the target, they can even be in full defense and still grant the bonus. Even shaken enemies "threaten" for the gang-up bonus. Once you swarm a PC, then the gang-up bonus applies to everyone (it is not incremental assuming everyone is on the same initiative card)
So example is PC is swarmed by 6 bad-guys.
Round 1
6 spiders swarm the PC, they all get the max possible bonus of +4 for gang-up.
Player kills two of the spiders.
Round 2
4 spiders attack the PC, they all get a bonus of +3 for gang-up (as the bonus equals the number of foes past the first).
Another interesting note about Gang-Up is there does not have to be numerical superiority. Imagine 2 PCs (A) and 2 ghouls (G) in a formation like this at the start of the round
AA
GG
Everyone gets a +1 Gang up bonus, the rule is very simple, to grant the gang up bonus the foe has to be adjacent.
Which also has the interesting effect that attackers weapons with reach do not add to the Gang Up bonuses, BUT, still benefit from it.
This thread on Reach weapons was very enlightening
Anyway, great post and very helpful in making monsters scary to PCs.