Brutality Makes Everything A Little More Fun
Okay, so everyone knows that I have a bit of fun telling you my ideas and opinions, whether or not you really want to hear them. Without concern for safety I come with a new concept. My group is playing D&D 4.0, and with this you all know that everyone is a little more powerful than you’re used to, but this can be used to your advantage.
My character Hephaestus has done many different things. For a while he was carrying a great sword which he used to pin an enemy to a wall and proceeded to break his neck. Several times, I’ve used the environment around me to make deadly kills. My other veteran friend has been doing the same. He used an at will power to force an enemy into an open kiln and locked him in.
In our last fight, we were attacked by (Ceiling Walkers). One of the items I acquired was boots of Spider Climb. It gives you normal speed when moving up walls. Therefore, my minotaur ran up the wall when the beastie got close, dove at him… grabbed ahold and pulled him down to the ground below. Fifteen foot drops aren’t too horrible, but add four hundred pounds on top of you, and you get hurt.
So, because our GM was feeling generous, he allowed an extra d6 of damage for both creativity and “cool” points. Hephaestus, however wasn’t done. The point of the creature was to pull you in close and kill you and it didn’t try to break my grip. Instead, it started choking me. With one free hand I held it firm and with my other, I pulled my sword free of its sheath, then placed it firmly across the being’s throat, putting my foot on the tip of the sword and pushed down. With two turns, of pushing, I severed the being’s head completely.
With spikes welded to my armor, and skulls placed upon the spikes. My intention is to be completely intimidating when I do things. A fully plated Minotaur with skulls on his armor and a large size great axe of Terror plus two is not something to trifle with.
Natural settings can sometimes lend themselves to a certain amount of ‘badassery’. Such as this one room that contained 3 pits. Two held slaves chained to walls and the third was a twenty foot pit with fifteen feet of water. Our dwarf knocked a fully armored druegar into the water pit who eventually drown. My Minotaur grabbed a flying bat out of the air and smashed it below. It took nearly four turn but I twisted its neck until he died.
So remember lads and lasses. If at first it seems hopeless, pay attention to your surroundings. You’d be surprised with what you can do when you have just a few simple items such as anvils or lit kilns or pits. A surprise like this may impress your GM enough to give you something in return.
In our next campaign our GM intends on offering ‘cool’ experience points. If you do something utterly amazing and creative, well within the realm of your character, you will be reward. Just telling your GM that your character is going to take someone out with a spinning back kick is outright, but taking out a group of warriors by destroying the bridge they were walking on, may reward you with an extra fifty experience. Think about it. GMs, I challenge you to allow your players a reward such as that. This gives them a reason to role play instead of just battling.
Some great ideas there. Players should watch a few good action movies and note when the heroes use their environment to pull of some great kills, like Stallone taking out Brian Thompson’s evil cult leader at the end of the movie Cobra, or Sarah Connor crushing the T-101 at the end of Terminator (or heck, the end of both sequels as well – all “environmentally aided” kills).
I’ve used environment to great effect in the past, but one time really stood out for me. Our party was attacking a lich’s keep, fighting our way across the courtyard, through the hall and up to the tower were the lich was hurling spells from. Only my dwarven fighter and a human ranger made it to the top of the tower stairs – everyone else was holding off the skeletons below or lying around trying not to bleed too much.
We burst in, ready to wreak havok. The lich was guarded by a couple of skeleton warriors. They moved to engage us, and the lich charmed the ranger! I mean, I’m fucked, right. Half hp, alone vs a lich, a nasty ranger and 2 skeleton warriors?
Environment to the rescue! With a shout and a charge and a flying tackle, I took the lich off the balcony, fell 60 feet to the flagstones and ended up alive in a spreading cloud of dust and lich fragments. I don’t care how many hp that sucker had, falling 60 feet and landing under a plate-armored dwarf does baaaad things to you.
The charm broken, the ranger took down the skeleton warriors, and after some healing potions, I attacked the skeletons from behind. Later, another player from our group re-created that attack by dive-tackling a fleeing cleric off of a spiral staircase with his helmet spike. He survived, but just barely.
Using environmental assists is great fun – it’s memorable, cool and helps win fights. 4e is great because it has easy-to-use rules for improvisation that don’t penalize you for out of the box thinking. For DM’s, it’s really important to add features that PC’s can use – making the battlefields more complex and interactive adds a lot to the fights in 4e – and any RPG.