Amidst the horde of grunts, two great heroes stood side by side. They were both stout and fresh, but the horde might overcome them, unless they turned the tide... with a tidalwave of force. So one of our heroes casts thunderwave, knowing that the damage would decimate the peons, but his ally would be largely undscathed.
Treading water, our hero knows that he's in a pickle. The enenmy rowboat approaches, covered with spearmen hungry for his blood. As they stab at our hero, he calls for help. His ally responds! By saturating the area with lightening, for his ally knows that the spearmen will die while his buddy will live.
The sorceror was trapped, with enemies charging him from both directions atop a high castle wall. His escape? He jumps. Sure, 60' would kill an average man, but this sorcerer has plenty of hit points, and knows the fall won't kill him, even if he lands on his head.
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These are a few situations that have come up where players willfully damage each other because they know that the damage won't take out their own allies. But I find this highly annoying. Do you run into this a lot? Is it expected as part of the system? Or is this bad metagame thinking?
I haven't run into it, but it wouldn't bother me at all. I don't think it's meta to know your companion is hardy enough to take what you're going to dish out. I suppose it could be considered meta if a player asked another player how many HP they had. But that wouldn't bother me either. I let the players dictate how they want to play.
Cliff Clavin!
1st, remember that you adjudicate actions, using the system only when you cannot for whatever reason determine the outcome yourself.
2nd, you may inform your players that their course of action is likely fatal. "That's a 60 ft drop. You will die." "No I wont, I have all these HP." "Yes you will, I promise you. Suicidal actions will end in death, regardless of your hp."
3rd, calling down artillery on your own position is perfectly valid. It's also clever. this is a matter of tactics, strengths, and weaknesses. You may of course rule the action instantly fatal or ineffective, or use the rules. But you must let them know before doing so. "Yeah you can electrocute the pool, but if you do everything will be reduced to zero including your ally. What do you do?"
AndyDay wrote:
This harkens back to AD&D for me, where anyone who knew Lightning Bolt also had to know two things: trigonometric geometry, and exactly how many hit points you had.
(To save people time looking it up if they don't get the joke, in AD&D2e, Lightning Bolt reflected off of walls. By aiming it right you could bounce it through a room and overlap every foe but no allies. By aiming it wrong you took a few dozen jiggawatts to the face. Sadistic DMs were known to suddenly transform every dungeon into R'lyeh just to maximize the chances of the latter.)
The simplest solution I've found (barring a total restructuring or having only you track HP) is to tell players that their current HP values are something you only share with the DM. You can share maximum HP with each other, and can guess if an ally's badass enough to avoid the meteor you're calling down on the people surrounding him, but that's it - you can only guess.
Note that this relies on viewing HP as more than meat. Maybe you call down some indescriminate justice over an area including a rogue knowing he's nimble enough to avoid it - but he still loses HP and badmouths you for trying that.
Alternatives include being a bit more ham-handed with instadeath, which I dislike doing, but it certainly conditions people to not try it again. (Normally I largely concur with Bawylie, but I really have to disagree on the merits of saying "Nope, you die." You can, however, get a compromise position by not starting play at a high level. If you play at lower levels where such actions will kill you without the DM saying "it kills you regardless of what the rules say", then you learn to avoid those tactics except where absolutely necessary, and when you grow in durability as your levels increase, that training remains.)
For example, a 60' fall deals 6d6 (21 on average, but if you want to guarantee survival, you have to plan for as much as 36). A sorcerer's d6 HP progression means that with 14 Constitution (which is already very high by human standards) he'll still need to be at least level 5 to survive this using average HP rolls. That's already pretty badass. (Yes, that was written for 3e, but 1) the basic logic still holds, and 2) the specific numbers actually hold reasonably well, since low-level 5e is very similar to low-level 3e.)
AndyDay wrote:
My players have their characters avoid dealing unecessary damage to their party members, but sometimes the situation is extremely dire - somebody, or everybody, is surrounded and very likely to be in a very bad way if something is done and done quickly, and some party member(s) taking the damage of an area effect like thunderwave or even fireball is less damage coming their way than if the baddies surrounding them get to take another turn attacking them and hit or critical.
Or, to say that more briefly: player characters dealing damage to other player characters isn't an issue (unless the player is doing so maliciously).
I kind of like when a player makes a tactical decision to harm friends and foes.
In one game during the playtest a player in my group was playing a death cleric. He was in a situation surrounded by friends and foes. He asked everyone "do you have faith?" Then he unleashed his channel divinity that blast out a wave of necrotic damage to everyone in a 20' radius (it was one of those powers). Everyone loved it, and it did end the threat sooner than it would have ended if he didn't indiscriminately harm everyone.
Friendly Fire is part of tactical thinking. I'm all good with that.
Falling damage? I assume that a known deadly fall is avoided if you have HP remaining. You have 3 HP left after taking 6d6 falling damage? Then you are hanging on by your fingertips at the edge of the ledge! If the character chose to leap? I have to run into that and see but I like Iserith's take on it.
Our gaming group has a mantra: if you're a wizard and not hurting your allies once in a while, you're doing it wrong.
I wouldn't be too worried about the situations you described, but if it became an issue there are the Injuries and Massive Damage options on pp. 272-273 of the DMG. Just the threat of them might be enough to curb a cavalier attitude to causing 'friendly fire' damage.
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
CCS wrote:
In a lot of video games there is an option to turn off friendly fire – just something to think about.
Long ago I was furious when players where using metagaming knowledge of HP and other similar stuff, saying “Your character can’t know that”. But I’m over it, its not like it breaks the game…. Right?
iserith wrote:
CCS wrote:
JRutterbush wrote:
My Paladin regularly goes into rooms full of enemies and invites them to all brawl with him. Because I'm the only Tank in the group. And because I built his AC up on purpose; I can take it. My allies get to shoot at Team Monster from relative safety (behind my back). I don't mind at all.
A Monk can jump off heights and walk away unscathed. My favorite Gamma World character has something like Wolverine's metal-reinforced bones, and under that game's rules I figured out I could jump out a 5th-floor window on purpose and walk - oh all right, limp - away completely unscathed. My 4e Dark Sun Druid used to try to blow people out of trees / off cliffs / over the top of walls, once I figured out how the Falling damage rules worked; he hurt the enemies more that way.
At L1-L3, cast Sleep on the elf or half-elf, and watch everybody around him fall down, while he just stands there.
My 4e Warlock volunteered to be the center of a big damaging burst because we needed to take down a lot of enemies fast, and I was surrounded anyways, and as a CON-minor build I figured I would probably stay upright afterwards. (It worked, in the opinion of everybody but the Cleric.)
I've also been an incidental target of a quote ally unquote blowing up the room and not caring who was in it. This kind of thing works much better when a little roleplay happens which ends with the soon-to-be-injured hero saying something like, "You know what needs to be done. So do I. DO IT!"
Coredump00 wrote:
JRutterbush wrote:
Kentus wrote:
JRutterbush wrote:
Kentus wrote:
JRutterbush wrote:
JRutterbush wrote:
Coredump00 wrote:
AndyDay wrote:
If you've played Savage Worlds, you're familiar with the concept of trappings. Basically, there are only so many mechanical effects out there, but you can reskin them however you like.
AndyDay wrote:
Why does it concern you? Your PCs are supposed to be super human. Falling from a crazy height on purpose because you know you will live is almost a trope. Hell I bet it is. (It is http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoOneCouldSurviveThat)
He blasts his buddy with a fireball because he knows his buddy is a tough SOB.
He jumps off a cliff, because its badass to land, and send shockwaves everywhere and crush the ground below you.
Two tropes... http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GroundShatteringLanding
If you can't support that, you probably aren't actually playing high level DND where characters have enough hit points to survive the fall.
I don’t want to wade into the argument, nor do I want to restart it, but I wold say that if it was the game makers intention for a 60 foot fall to be almost always deadly, then they would have said so.
From the basic rules “At the end of a fall, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet it fell, to a maximum of 20d6.” This tells me that they know that you can survive a 200 foot drop, as long as you have more than 20d6 HP.
It also doesn’t say that after 200 Feet you would die, just that that is when the point of maximum damage is reached.
As to the original post, I once used burning hands, knowing it would hit my barbarian companion, who was enraged and would take less damage than the enemies. So obviously I think it is an OK tactic.
mattaddhall wrote:
Tempest_Stormwind wrote:
Tempest_Stormwind wrote:
mattaddhall wrote:
Tempest_Stormwind wrote:
AndyDay wrote: