Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;907911Seriously.  The correct answer to " the magic users keep dying" is "so learn to protect them.

I took to hiding around corners of the dungeon and just popping out to toss a dart or flask of oil now and then. Helped that in BX (And OD&D) at the early levels everyone fought on the same level. The only difference was usually HP and AC since weapons all did 1d6 at first.

All hell usually broke loose whenever we met either A: ranged opponents or B: more opponents than the frontlines could keep busy. Wilderness encounters were hell as half the time wed get caught out in the open. Much preferred the dungeon environs where we could bottleneck or at least narrow the avenues of attack. If all else fails. Run. We ran alot.

Quote from: Bren;907968I was assuming an overhand throw. The normal throwing style for both Molotov cocktails and grenades is overhand. I suppose underhand is possible--especially for the girl-goblins softball team. But yeah, sure skirmishing, underhanded throwing goblins might not hit the ceiling. But they can't throw over the front rank of PCs without some risk of hitting the ceiling well before they hit any PCs. So we're back to first hitting the less squishy guys in front not the MUs.

Chris is kinda right. Many dungeons are stated to have around a 10ft high ceiling. Even assuming a 6ft tall fighter thats still 4ft of clearance to throw flasks over the front lines. Bowmen and slingers still need LOS as you cant effectively arch close range at that low a ceiling without losing penetration power.

Might be usefull for disrupting spellcasting though.

Back on topic.

Something alot of people forget is that at least in O and BX D&D at the early levels everyone fights much the same. As noted above aside from AC and HP there was nothing differentiating a fighter from a magic user. Same to-hit, same damage (since weapons all did 1d6).

Quote from: Omega;908009All hell usually broke loose whenever we met either A: ranged opponents or B: more opponents than the frontlines could keep busy. Wilderness encounters were hell as half the time wed get caught out in the open. Much preferred the dungeon environs where we could bottleneck or at least narrow the avenues of attack. If all else fails. Run. We ran alot.

My wife's wizard has her personal bodyguard: a sword-and-board guy tasked to just about nothing else in battle than to keep unfriendly people from pestering her.

Also, my groups use tactics.  They are firmly dedicated to the principles of outmatching the enemy, that frontal attacks are for suckers, that getting holed up without a line of retreat is for the birds, that surprise is a virtue, that fighting to the last man just means that you'll indeed have to fight until the last one drops, and that the proper way to handle failure to ensure that the preceding principles work to the party's advantage is to run like hell.

In so doing, the aforementioned wizard has been damaged, by enemy forces in combat, the eyepopping total of four times in thirteen years of play.

To play devil's advocate a bit some of what Christopher Brady is saying makes sense although he's doing a horrible job of arguing it.

There's a big difference between a culture of play and a set of rules. For example I remember reading (on Story Games of course) someone talking about how they played Diplomacy. He said he played with a club where pretty it was almost unheard of to break agreements and people lost games rather than betray an ally as if they did that people would never ally with them in future games. Although they used the same rules I did the way the game worked out in actual play sounded completely different from how I've always played that game, and I'm a pretty squishy carebear as far as Diplomacy players go.

Similar things happen with D&D. The rules are only a small part of how a D&D game is played and the rules often didn't do a very good job of explaining the way the authors played D&D or explaining WHY the rules were written as they are. Thief skills are probably the best example of this. If you use them as they were intended to be used they work fine, but it's really hard to communicate that and the books don't do a very good job of doing that. It's got to the point that when I play D&D with my students I don't teach them anything about thief skills but just roll a d100 as needed and narrate what happens as they're so easy to misinterpret.

Same all down the line. A lot of people who had no one to teach them how to play and just read the books approached them like board games rules in which everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden which lead to all kinds of weird shit. A lot of people with only the rules to work with ended up with cultures of play that were pretty different from what was intended and which often didn't match the rules to well and then developed hacks and work-arounds to make the rules match how they played them.

A big part of what has made the OSR as successful as it is is people finally getting to hear how rules a lot of the rules were originally supposed to be used. Reading a lot of Gronan's posts years ago was a real eye-opener for me since a lot of things about old school D&D were just not things I understood as a kid by reading the rules.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;908000I stopped using smart tactics for my monsters when I got to the point where I could destroy parties with a balanced combat encounter pretty easily. Focus fire. Target the casters first. Hell, the game it crystalized for me is when I had a bunch of giant beetles gang up on a half-giant fighter, and dropped him in one turn. I now call it the "Beetle problem" Simply having the monsters use focus fire can be pretty devastating.
Now, I use semi-random tactics. I justify this approach as the confusion of combat, that a foe might choose to make a risky charge, or choose to play it safe, and I haven't got the time to delve into every orc's psychology every turn when making decisions for them. I just assign a tactic to a die roll chance (2 in 6 chance this goblin is gonna try to chuck a spear at the wizard in the back row this turn!) Not every monster is a tactical genius with a GM's eye view of the battlefield.

A good solution to the beetle problem is to declare actions then roll initiative (for the GM just deciding what to do before the players decide and/or scribbling down some notes). If you do that focus fire is not necessarily a good tactic. For example if you have 10 guys shooting at one guy and the first arrow kills him then the other 9 are a complete waste. Also unless the NPCs have a clear idea of how tough the PCs are, it makes tactical sense (based on their limited information) to spread out their attacks a bit to avoid overkill and wasted attacks. Now if the NPCs DO know how tough the PCs are then in a lot of cases it'd make sense for them not to engage the PCs in the first place unless they're fairly suicidal.

Also simple dungeon geography helps a lot as it often makes it really hard to focus your fire.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;907970AD&D 1e in their monster manual, does not say that it's for the WHOLE dungeon, just gives a no. encountered.

They assumed (foolishly in your case) that the reader would be able to figure out on their own that 200 goblins can't fit in a 20'x20' room so that there must be (a) far fewer goblins, (b) a much bigger cavern or room, or (c) the goblins are spread out over multiple rooms.

QuoteIt would, if the game bothered to clarify.  But the issue is that people read differently than you apparently.  Unfortunately, not always to the benefit of the game.

The game assumed a reader with enough intelligence and common sense to figure out some things on their own, like choices (a) - (c) above or, as Gronan so picturesquely phrases it, to shit unassisted.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;908000Not every monster is a tactical genius with a GM's eye view of the battlefield.

I totally agree. Just like not every monster will fight to the death like a berserker trying to kill or even just damage the PCs.

Quote from: Omega;908011Chris is kinda right.

Even a stopped clock is right once or twice a day.*




* Mine is digital and set to 24-hr time.

20'x20'x10' room... if 3 humans to the 10' corridor, and goblins are half a human at smallest... and each ground goblin had two other goblins riding atop their shoulders like the Flying Zambino Brothers...

Oh wait, this is all unnecessary. Never mind.

Quote from: Opaopajr;90803120'x20'x10' room... if 3 humans to the 10' corridor, and goblins are half a human at smallest... and each ground goblin had two other goblins riding atop their shoulders like the Flying Zambino Brothers...

Oh wait, this is all unnecessary. Never mind.

There's a teleport on the opposite wall leading to goblin spawning area...

...ummm... Oh well, it was fun, wasn't it? :cool:

Quote from: Omega;908011Chris is kinda right. Many dungeons are stated to have around a 10ft high ceiling. Even assuming a 6ft tall fighter thats still 4ft of clearance to throw flasks over the front lines. Bowmen and slingers still need LOS as you cant effectively arch close range at that low a ceiling without losing penetration power.

Right. You can in theory lob something over the heads of the guys with shields ... which is why I suggested early on that the guys with shields wouldn't just stand there like lumps of clay, but would actively use their shields to block. But more to the point, why are they lobbing things over these guys' heads? Do they know there's an M-U back there? Did they see him?

I specifically mentioned "marching order" because I was thinking of a party moving through the dungeon and either meeting a wandering monster or seeing monsters in an open space ahead. Monsters generally target M-Us once they've spotted someone who looks like an M-U. But if they see some guys marching towards them through a corridor, will they necessarily see who's behind the front line? Will they just guess? Why are they running up to the 10-foot range needed to lob a flask of oil? Why aren't archers in the party firing their longer-range weapons before the goblins get close enough to lob?

The scenario is like loads of others I've seen, especially in arguments about "this class is overpowered": someone sets up a battle where it's assumed one side made all the worst choices and the other made all the best choices, and of course the side with the deck stacked in its favor wins. In this case, we're assuming that the goblins, a monster normally described as less intelligent than humans, has figured out exactly who the M-U is beforehand, is using fully intelligent tactics, and invented gasoline just so they could make molotovs. We're also assuming that the smarter humans are too dumb to raise their shields and don't use missile weapons before the goblins get close enough to use their short-range thrown weapons. Oh, and hundreds of goblins attack at once in this corridor. Presumably, only the first couple ranks are lobbing explosives, and the others are just waiting in case the front ranks are killed by the humans who woke up and realized "Hey, we have weapons, too." And the goblins aren't going to break morale when their front ranks are killed.

That proves that there's absolutely nothing any other character can do to protect the M-U, so you need a gentleman's agreement not to target M-Us.

A good GM plays the world, not an Omniscient, Omnipotent narrator.  If the Goblins see a Cleric or M-U they may be able to recognize them, they have their own Witch Doctors and Shamans as well.  They may even target them specifically because of religious fervor rather than tactical brilliance.

The idea that all monsters automatically know the weaknesses of the party and will automatically always do things that make perfect sense tactically is the kind of 100% white room metagaming horseshit that the people of TGD thrive on and naturally is one of the signs of a complete and total shit GM.  It's not GM 101 that you don't misuse your Omniscience, it's more like GM Kindergarten.

As far as the whole Gentleman's Agreement goes, that's the most idiotic thing I never heard of in 35+ years of gaming.  Someone needs to adjust their meds...whether legal or illegal...quickly.  Or maybe, once, just once, shut their goddamn piehole about something they have no actual knowledge of or experience with.  Whichever.

Quote from: Opaopajr;908002I think I kicked a hornet's nest and may have derailed the topic. Sorry, everybody!

I don't think the topic is derailed.  To the contrary, I think niche protection, and the types of parties that it generates, does impact party tactics and by extension, monster/npc tactics and scenario design.  Then, discussions about tactics leads to rules interpretations, questions about game balance, play style, the nature of a shield, and blah, blah, blah. It's a natural enough progression.

For me, the tactical implications of niche protection are not inherently good or bad - I'm just bored running games for the same swiss army knife parties who have a specialist for every occasion and expect me to come up with scenarios with mufti-fasceted challenges that allow each unique flower of the same perfect pot, a day in the Sun. I am ranting against my players here I guess because somehow it is intrenched in them that they need niche protection to "win" or something.  This is probably my fault somehow.  Nevertheless, my problem with niche protection I think is that I simply bored with trying to challenge the same old niche protected party over and over again.

Quote from: Madprofessor;908057I don't think the topic is derailed.  To the contrary, I think niche protection, and the types of parties that it generates, does impact party tactics and by extension, monster/npc tactics and scenario design.  Then, discussions about tactics leads to rules interpretations, questions about game balance, play style, the nature of a shield, and blah, blah, blah. It's a natural enough progression.

For me, the tactical implications of niche protection are not inherently good or bad - I'm just bored running games for the same swiss army knife parties who have a specialist for every occasion and expect me to come up with scenarios with mufti-fasceted challenges that allow each unique flower of the same perfect pot, a day in the Sun. I am ranting against my players here I guess because somehow it is intrenched in them that they need niche protection to "win" or something.  This is probably my fault somehow.  Nevertheless, my problem with niche protection I think is that I simply bored with trying to challenge the same old niche protected party over and over again.

That's a toughie. You don't want to punish the players for making an effective group.
My first thought is to try to sprinkle in a few encounters that don't address niche abilities at all. Like moral dilemmas.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;908067That's a toughie. You don't want to punish the players for making an effective group.
My first thought is to try to sprinkle in a few encounters that don't address niche abilities at all. Like moral dilemmas.

That's pretty much my go-to solution. There's no specialist niche for those. I also enjoy kicking back and letting the players have a lively debate for an hour or two, while I just field an occasional question.

My players love it. They sub-titled one of my SF games "Arguments in Space."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;907963Yes.  That is specifically mentioned, and CHAINMAIL explicitly states that a figure controls a space on either side to prevent infiltration.

But once again, YOU are smart enough to shit unassisted.

That space on either side part is key. We've often run into the problem that the corridors were much wider than 10' across (or we were in a room, and not a corridor), and thus we did not have enough to truly block off advancement. I'm not sure that that rule is in all the versions of TSR D&D and AD&D. I know AD&D has a free attack if people turn their back on you, which we used against people who tried to run past you to get to the back line. Still, in some versions (I think), there aren't rules to keep people from just moving through the unoccupied squares past the fighter line and chop up the wizards. We always considered that an artifact of the 'everyone take their turn in order and then freeze while the next person does' nature of initiative and ruled that if your movement intercepted a square touching one a fighter was in, they could make you engage them rather than move past (which I think is the same as what you are mentioning). However, in those editions where that isn't spelled out, that was a house rule. And I'm not sure that I could defend the assertion that that isn't a gentleman's agreement.
 

Quote from: Omega;908009All hell usually broke loose whenever we met either A: ranged opponents or B: more opponents than the frontlines could keep busy. Wilderness encounters were hell as half the time wed get caught out in the open. Much preferred the dungeon environs where we could bottleneck or at least narrow the avenues of attack. If all else fails. Run. We ran alot.

Yes, this. If you can't form a front line that the enemy can't get around, then the wizard really is going to get people on their tail.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;908067That's a toughie. You don't want to punish the players for making an effective group.
My first thought is to try to sprinkle in a few encounters that don't address niche abilities at all. Like moral dilemmas.

That's good advice. I'll think on it. Thanks.