Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Solik 10-15-06, 11:25 PM	Attacks of Opportunity are nifty. They're a fun resource. Everybody gets one, and with Combat Reflexes, you can get more! But they are sadly underused. You can take them only to make attacks. The purpose of this thread is to further examine -- and exploit -- the AoO resource. With this, players and monsters alike have new tactical options to use in combat. I present a list of suggested options below. Feel free to grab and twist them at your leisure, or to supply new options of your own designs. Perhaps together, we can really spice up combat. Because let's face it -- as DMs, we hate it when players are idling, looking bored, or doing something else when it's not their turn in battle. Adaptation: You may consider Combat Reflexes too powerful a feat if it works for all of these options. In that case, consider allowing Combat Reflexes to be taken multiple times; each time, the bonus AoO's may apply to only one of the following situations (or to standard AoO's). Parry Mechanics Description: If attacked by a melee weapon (including natural attacks), you may expend an Attack of Opportunity to attempt to Parry the blow. You must declare the parry attempt after the enemy makes a successful attack roll and before the enemy rolls damage. To perform a Parry, make an attack roll. If your attack roll result is greater than the enemy's attack roll, then the attack is foiled. You cannot parry with an unarmed attack unless you have Improved Unarmed Strike. You may only parry weapons up to one size larger than your own. Natural weapons are considered one size smaller than the creature that uses them. Successful parries do not prevent opponents from making additional attacks (from full attacks, two-weapon fighting, etc). You cannot parry in heavy armor or while carrying a heavy load, or when denied your Dexterity bonus to your Armor Class. If an enemy makes a successful Feint against you, then you cannot make any Parry attempts until after that opponent's next turn (when the effects of the Feint wear off). You cannot parry a Charge, Bull-Rush, Sunder, Trip, or Grab. The following new feats are associated with Parry: Parry Focus Requirements: BAB +1 You gain a +1 on all Parry attempts. Master Fencer Requirements: Parry Focus, BAB +5 You gain a +3 on Parry attempts when using a light weapon or a rapier. This bonus stacks with the bonus from Parry Focus. Armored Fencer Requirements: Heavy Armor Proficiency, Parry Focus You may parry while wearing heavy armor (but not while carrying a heavy load). Protective Parry Requirements: Combat Expertise, Parry Focus You may make a Parry attempt against an attack made at an adjacent ally. Pierce Defenses Requirements: BAB +5 Opponents receive a -4 penalty to attack rolls when attempting to parry your attacks. Two-Weapon Parry Requirements: Two-Weapon Defense When wielding two weapons, you gain one additional Parry per round. This extra Parry must be used after all of your normal Attacks of Opportunity are exhausted. Swashbucklers receive Parry Focus as a bonus feat at level 4 and Master Fencer as a bonus feat at level 9. If the Swashbuckler already has Parry Focus at level 4, he instead gains Combat Expertise. If the Swashbuckler already has Master Fencer at level 9, he gains Protective Parry. If the Swashbuckler already had Combat Expertise or Protective Parry as well, then he gains no bonus feat. Parry Commentary Explanation: The Parry mechanic was first introduced in a Dragon issue, then modified in various threads on these boards, and now I present to you a modification of the modifications. I'm using this one in my own campaign, and it's working brilliantly. Players are having a ton of fun with it, and don't mind at all that it's slowing down combat slightly. Yes, what you see there is a straight-up give-me to Swashbucklers; that is, they get something and lose nothing. I think that's okay, because nobody takes the class beyond level 3 anyways. Now there's some additional motivation to do so. The really nice thing about this class is that it allows PCs who don't use armor to still be defensive, thus fight on the front lines. It's great for dex fighters. Adaptation: In Dragon, you had to expend a feat to gain Parry. I dislike this, as I think feats should increase power, not simply increase options. However, if you're worried that your twinked-out PCs with ridiculous attack rolls are going to dominate with this change, then consider making Parry a feat and grant it to Swashbucklers for free at level 2. Originally, Parry required light or no armor. I upped it to allow medium, since medium armor is normally very gimped anyways. You could run into problems here, though, as heavy-armor wearers in mithral full plate start to become nigh-unhittable. Consider ignoring mithral's property of reducing armor classification for purposes of Parry. Counterspell Mechanics Description: You may expend an attack of opportunity to counterspell as an immediate action any time you succeed on a Spellcraft check to identify an enemy spell. Doing so, however, provokes an attack of opportunity. To counterspell in this manner, you and your opponent make opposed Concentration checks. If you succeed, the enemy's spell is countered. If you fail, the enemy's spell fires as normal. You must expend a spell as normal per counterspell rules, even if you lose the opposed Concentration check (the spell is simply lost). You cannot counterspell in this manner if you are currently casting a spell or concentrating on maintaining an existing spell, nor can you cancel casting or concentrating at the enemy's casting in order to counterspell (unless you have the Arcane Control feat). The following new feats are associated with Counterspell: Rapid Casting Requirements: None You are adept at casting your spells quickly. Enemy spellcasters must exceed the Spellcraft DC by 10 or more in order to counterspell your spell as an immediate action. This applies only to spells with a casting time of a standard action or less. Reflexive Counterspell Requirements: Dex 15 You can counterspell as a natural instinct. Counterspelling as an immediate action does not provoke an attack of opportunity. Arcane Control Requirements: Reflexive Counterspell If you are in the process of casting a spell of your own when an enemy casts a spell, you may instantly cancel your casting in order to attempt a counterspell. You may decide to do this after making your Spellcraft check to identify the enemy spell. In addition, you may counterspell as an immediate action even if you are concentrating on maintaining an existing spell. Counterspell Commentary Explanation: Let's face it. Nobody readies an action to counterspell. It's a complete waste of time. With immediate action counterspelling, however, expect it to come up constantly in your campaign. This allows, or even forces, arcanists to devote some resources to counterspell success and protection. Feats and abilities that increase the Spellcraft check to identify your spells (there's one of these in FR, and it's quite silly) suddenly become useful. Adaptation: Yeah, okay, this one is powerful. Sure, it's equally powerful for all spellcasters, but you might consider it too powerful that two casters can entirely negate each other. Personally, I'm not using this one as-written, at least not yet. I gave this to sorcerers as a level 20 class ability, with Reflexive Counterspell tossed in for free. If you're looking for a way to power-up the sorcerer without changing his spell progression, this ability and the two feats might make a useful class ability progression at mid and high levels. Of course, you can also make AoO-based immediate counterspelling a feat. Have it require something like the Quicken Spell feat. Personally, I think arcanists are too feat-starved for the mechanic to see much play if you do it that way, but your group's different from mine! Distract Mechanics Description: When a foe in melee range provokes an attack of opportunity, you may instead choose to distract them rather than attack them, interrupting their action and ending their turn prematurely. To attempt a distraction, make a Bluff check opposed by your opponent's Sense Motive check. If you succeed, your opponent's action is lost and his turn is over. You may only attempt to distract creatures that you can use the Feint maneuver against. The following feats make use of Distract: Distract Artist Requirements: None You are a master of distracting your foes. You receive a +4 on Bluff checks to distract opponents in combat. Distract Spell Requirements: None Spellcasters everywhere are wary of your uncanny abilities. You may attempt a Distract even if an enemy casts defensively; however, you make your Bluff check at a -4 penalty when doing so. Focused Mind Requirements: None You always keep your head about you in battle. If an opponent attempts to Distract you, you may roll a Concentration check instead of a Sense Motive check to resist. Quick Thinking Requirements: None Even when things go wrong, you're fast enough on your feat to recover. If an opponent successfully Distracts you in battle, you may still take a 5-foot step and/or make a swift action instead of immediately ending your turn. Quick Thinking is a Fighter bonus feat. Distract Commentary Explanation: This one's for you skillful characters out there (sorcerers too!). So your opponent provokes an AoO. That's great -- unless you're not in position to benefit from sneak attack. A dagger in the foot isn't going to hurt much on a single attack against most beasties past the early levels, and your low damage isn't likely to force a caster to fail a concentration check. This gives you the ability to still make a difference with your AoO. Adaptation: As before, you can restrict this to a feat benefit if you think it's too powerful. You can also pass on Distract Spell if you'd rather casters be safe when casting defensively. This is a new one I wrote for the purposes of this thread, so I haven't actually made use of it myself. So, there's some fundamental AoO options designed to expand tactics available to all characters in combat. Critique and discussion welcome, and submissions of your own are even more welcome!
Solik 10-16-06, 04:51 PM	Oi. Not a particularly popular idea eh?
Aeromus 10-16-06, 05:21 PM	It adds a ton of rolls, makes combat reflexes, and dexstarity way more importent then other feats/stats. It favors warrior types, mostly the fighter. Why would anyone ever attack a fighter if those rules are used?
Solik 10-16-06, 06:12 PM	Talking about Parry specifically? Well, once you've got full attacks going, especially from multiple people, fighters won't be able to parry everything. And goading a fighter into performing a parry when an ally wants to do something that would provoke an AoO normally would be a good strategy. Not to mention, most fighters are in heavy armor, so they can't parry in the first place. The variant favors Swashbuckler-types. Plus, if the fighter has activated power attack (a common strategy), his attack rolls are lower, so he has a reduced chance to succeed on his parries. And finally, if you can outroll the fighter, Parry doesn't do them much good (such as the case with fighters vs fighters, or big monsters, or boosted clerics). There's not that much more dice-rolling either, since AoOs arguably require more dice-rolling than Parry (damage dice).
Nom 10-16-06, 07:43 PM	Oi. Not a particularly popular idea eh?Oh, I thought it had some good ideas, but didn't have anything to add so just bookmarked it until I'm next editing my house rules.
Aegeu 10-16-06, 08:50 PM	Interesting, but you might want to consider how this handles with a typical chain tripper tank. The tripper puts on mithral plate (or takes armored fencer), and can not only trip people who try to break past his line, as normal, but when the bad guys finally break through, he can use his almighty reach with protective parry to prevent anyone from ever hitting his allies. And before you say "But that costs him his AOOs!", remember that he can also trip on his turn. This is also true for distract. It gets even crazier when you add in Thicket of Blades and other tricks that really optimize a tank. Maybe slightly nerfing combat reflexes could reduce the power of a parry tank slightly.
Arganis 10-16-06, 09:13 PM	Talking about Parry specifically? Well, once you've got full attacks going, especially from multiple people, fighters won't be able to parry everything. And goading a fighter into performing a parry when an ally wants to do something that would provoke an AoO normally would be a good strategy. Not to mention, most fighters are in heavy armor, so they can't parry in the first place. The variant favors Swashbuckler-types. Plus, if the fighter has activated power attack (a common strategy), his attack rolls are lower, so he has a reduced chance to succeed on his parries. And finally, if you can outroll the fighter, Parry doesn't do them much good (such as the case with fighters vs fighters, or big monsters, or boosted clerics). There's not that much more dice-rolling either, since AoOs arguably require more dice-rolling than Parry (damage dice). Solik, I'd have to say that these are some of the most compelling house rules I've ever seen posted. I am already strongly considering your implementation of Parry (though I do not intend to limit it to any type of armor). I particularly enjoy that this implementation of Parry is greatly dependent on Combat Reflexes to be truly effective. AoO Counterspelling is genius. It brings the entire Counterspelling mechanic out of the background and adds a new level of strategem to caster combats. I dig it and am going to propose it to my group. AoO Distract seems like fun, but I would like to see it played first. It seems like it might give Rogues and Bards a solid (but not unavoidable) defensive move against heavier melee types.
Solik 10-16-06, 10:14 PM	Interesting, but you might want to consider how this handles with a typical chain tripper tank. Hmm. Well, one thing there -- protective parry specifically says adjacent allies, not allies within reach. So, reach weapon users can't defend allies more than one square away. The fun trick here is standing behind an ally with a polearm and parrying for them :p Chain trippers also already need a lot of feats to start pulling out their power, so this adds more on top of that. It's something to think about, but without some more specific build examples, I'm not sure yet that it's a problem worth dealing with. Particularly since ally-protecting roles are great, underused, and promote teamwork, whereas the one-man death-whirling chain-tripper tends to promote gung-ho go-it-alone power envy :) Arganis-- Thanks for the thumbs-up :) Let me know how this stuff works in your group, especially if you identify some issues and come up with some intriguing alterations.
Nom 10-16-06, 10:42 PM	I don't like Distract - negating an entire round's worth of actions on a simple Bluff vs Sense Motive check is way too powerful. I agree that the Counterspell idea has a lot of potential, though I'd start by rewriting it as "Once per round, you may ... . This also counts against your limit of attacks of opportunity per round." The biggest issue I can see is that it will burn through spells a lot faster (since you can burn one regular spell and one counterspell per turn). Parry has potential too, though you're going to find that characters parry opponents' iterative (low BAB) attacks with their full BAB ones.
Solik 10-16-06, 11:00 PM	Distract is different from the other two in that it requires that an AoO actually be provoked. You can't just up and use an AoO to do it. Note that melee characters can use an AoO to trip (unless it's an AoO vs. standing up), which is arguably better than Distract. Whether you can counterspell more than once per round depends on how you choose to adapt Combat Reflexes. If you choose not to allow Combat Reflexes to be used for these extra abilities, then there's not much need to have that wording :) I tried to keep it general enough to fit various adaptations.
Arganis 10-17-06, 11:13 AM	As you have Counterspelling written, you can only do it once per round, regardless of Combat Reflexes. You may expend an attack of opportunity to counterspell as an immediate action And that's cool, cause I wouldn't want to go down the multiple counterspells per round route. However, I would be interested in making some kind of power-distinction between opportunity counterspelling and readying a counterspell. The latter should have some kind of advantage. How would you (and others) feel about having to succeed an opposed Concentration check to counterspell as an AoO? Regarding how you implement parry... Your writeup here fails to indicate if a failed parry falls back to AC, or if Parry is made in place of AC. That is to say: If Defender's Parry Roll < Attacker's Attack Roll < Defender's AC, does the attack hit or miss?
Solik 10-17-06, 11:27 AM	You can only attempt to parry a successful hit. You're right that I wasn't specific there, mostly because I couldn't imagine anyone attempting to parry an attack after hearing the attack roll if the attack didn't hit :p Forgot about immediate actions being once a round. That wasn't really what I was intending; the adaptation section was supposed to address if you wanted to limit to one counterspell per round even with feats. I'll think about that one some more. I like the opposed Concentration check. I'll add that. I don't see any reason to give an advantage when readying to counterspell. It's almost always better to cast a spell yourself than counterspell, which is why nobody does it. This is essentially a replacement system.
Arganis 10-17-06, 12:21 PM	You can only attempt to parry a successful hit. You're right that I wasn't specific there, mostly because I couldn't imagine anyone attempting to parry an attack after hearing the attack roll if the attack didn't hit :p Ah, good! Forgot about immediate actions being once a round. That wasn't really what I was intending; the adaptation section was supposed to address if you wanted to limit to one counterspell per round even with feats. I'll think about that one some more. I like the opposed Concentration check. I'll add that. I don't see any reason to give an advantage when readying to counterspell. It's almost always better to cast a spell yourself than counterspell, which is why nobody does it. This is essentially a replacement system. I think that being able to counterspell more times per round than you could actually cast would be a bit too extreme for the base mechanic here, though I agree that it could be allowed with a feat. I settled on Concentration because I thought it reflected the "urgent" nature of Opportunity Counterspelling, but if Oppportunity Counterspelling is intended to replace Readying a Counterspell, then no additional checks should be added--the dispel check is enough to worry about here.
Solik 10-17-06, 02:34 PM	I dunno about that. Readying a counterspell is so easy to succeed with because you have to waste an action to do it. If you could do it every round, that could be quite powerful if you happened to have similar spells prepared. Requiring two rolls when using Dispel Magic means that sorcerers with that spell aren't automatically uber counterspellers.