Steal This Rule: Fighting Colossal Creatures

So, your dragon is 100+ feet long. Oh, you say you’re fighting the Midgard Serpent? The giant towers three stories above you? And YES, a MIMIC the size of a WHOLE CASTLE!

What’s that you say? You can’t imagine how you slay that massive monster by stabbing its foot with your tiny little sword? Your willing suspension of disbelief is shattered by a toothpick-like spear jamming into something the size of a modern house? You wonder how your character can survive getting hit with a claw bigger than themselves?

I have rules. They are unabashedly cinematic. Let me show them to you.

FIRST: IT IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Let us start with a basic logistical limitation: anything big enough to fall into this ruleset is too big to effectively run on a grid. When the area you occupy is half the grid (and the area you can attack into is the other half), positioning and placement become less important to get precise. These critters could be a battlefield, if they weren’t moving around and trying to kill you. So let us take it off the battle-grid with one simple ground rule:

Three Zones: Melee, Close, and Far
Just to give some basics. “Melee” means that you are effectively “adjacent” to the creature – close enough to hit it with your weapon. “Close” means that you are within one move action of the creature – close enough to charge, or to use most thrown weapons, but also still within the creature’s reach. “Far” means that you’re out of the creature’s reach. You can still make projectile attacks (such as from bows), and the creature needs to use ranged attacks to hit you.

Your zone can change or be changed by one step in either direction with a move action on your part, or the enemy’s. If you’re “far,” the enemy can make a move action and make you “close.” If the enemy makes two move actions, you’ll be in “melee.” If you’re in “melee,” you can take a move action to become “close,” or two to become “far.”

This might reduce some of the subtle differences between, say, 15 ft. and 25 ft., or between 25 ft. and 30 ft, but for our purposes here, that’s fine. This combat mode isn’t intended to replace all combat in your game, just to be used for the occasional flavoring, so if you use it sparingly, PC’s will still get to use those differences in combats that aren’t against things the size of your house.

Terrain can play a role, but it should probably be “abstract” terrain. If you’re fighting a frost giant on a glacial rift, make it slippery (save or fall prone whenever you make a move action!). If you’re fighting a fire giant in a volcanic chasm, make it lava-filled (10% chance of having to save or take fire damage each round!). If the players indicate their characters are moving in a certain way (ie: "away from the lava,") you can adjust the terrain on the fly to fit (okay, only 5% chance this round for that guy).

If your game of choice employs a lot of reactions as punishment for moving (OA’s, AOO’s, whatnot), you probably want to not give the giant monster those. As you’ll see below, the giant monster will have other ways of reacting to the party. The PC's can have them, but they might not be the most effective, as we'll see.

SECOND: OVERWHELMING POWER DYANMIC
Look, if a mosquito has any sense of self-preservation, she knows every time she lands to feed that she is risking her life. You casually swat her, she dies a violent and protracted death after struggling just to feed herself. Meanwhile, she can’t do much with her proboscis to slay you immediately (though she might give you a disease that does the work eventually). In fact, she barely injures you. If she’s lucky, you don’t even feel or notice her stabbing you.

In order to capture the fun parts of fighting a big creature, your PC should feel a lot like that mosquito, at least at first, at least for a while.

Two rules help with that:

You Can’t Hurt It
Oh, you can “hit” it. It is the proverbial broad side of a barn. But your blade cannot cut deeply enough to matter to it on a true HP level. It might prick, sting, hurt, even bleed a little bit, but even though stepping on a tack hurts, it ain’t never gonna kill you. Your PC, when attacking a colossal creature, is that tack: annoying, maybe a little painful, but deadly? Pheh.

Any conditions or ailments you afflict should likewise generally fail to take effect. A drop of poison from a dagger in a blood stream THAT big? A psychic gnat buzzing around a mind bigger than a whale? What works against critters your size isn’t going to work against a creature that big. Even effects like Finger of Death won’t kill such a creature outright. It is like one hundred souls. It is massive.

Also, it has no HP. Or rather, it has infinite HP. All of the hit points.

It Will Kill You Easily
On the flip side, the creature’s own attacks are doom for anyone caught in them. This is represented by their attacks filling a space, demanding those within them make a saving throw or take massive damage. See, the creature doesn’t need to roll to hit: you can only depend on your luck or skill.

How big is Massive Damage? Well, that’s going to vary a bit with the edition, but maybe these general guidelines:

• A Wizard (or equivalent squishy character) will die in two hits (each hit halves their HP)
• A Thief (or equivalent semi-squishy character) will die in three hits (each hit thirds their HP)
• A Cleric (or equivalent not-very-squishy character) will die in four hits (each hit quarters their HP)
• A Fighter (or equivalent tough character) will die in five hits (each hit quints their HP)

If you save, you still take half damage (that is, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8, or 1/10 of your maximum HP). Which means that sooner or later, everyone is going to die, and that someone's going to take damage every round. The creature can also, depending on its attack form, target only one party member, or target the WHOLE party. A sweep of a massive tail might risk everyone, but a quick bite might risk only one character. By and large, whole-party attacks should be limited use, though. A good place to use them is in a trigger event (see below). If the creature CAN use them whenever it wants to, they should be about half power (ie: save or take half of a hit, nothing on a successful save), and that generally weakens the feeling of "everybody is going to die" that these creatures can telegraph so nicely.

THIRD: LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD WITH WEAKNESSES
In order to do damage to it (or avoid the damage it’s dealing), your PC’s are going to have to be two things: active, and inventive. Sitting there pressing the “I hit it with my attacks” button isn’t going to get things done.

Rather, there are special things you can do to the creature to expose it in some way, to make it vulnerable, or to disable its ability to strike at you. That thing is likely to be unique to the specific creature.

For instance, you’re fighting some sort of ice giant, a sort of living glacier with a blue heart of cold ice. The above rules apply: it’s a mountaintop, it will crush you, and you cannot annoy it (much).

Ah, but it has a weakness. Perhaps if a fire attack is used against it, it might become vulnerable for a time: the next attack can strike the same space the fire struck, and deal actual damage to it. The fire melted the icy protection, and now the blade can strike true.

Or perhaps you’re fighting a massive blue dragon. Its scales are thick, its illusions are impenetrable, and it will incinerate you with lighting from its forked tongue. But water can protect you. Thankfully, the battlefield contains an oasis that you can hide in…at least until the dragon gets around to using destroy water on it enough times...

A weakness can be a general trait (like the glacier’s vulnerability to fire attacks) or something more specific to the creature or the battlefield (perhaps the massive giant won’t kill anyone bearing the symbol of its ancient tribe – that person isn’t attacked), but the creature should have multiple weaknesses, because each weakness should work only a few times (once or twice or thrice) before it is shut down.

Generally, attacking the creature is a two-stage process: first, disable the defenses so that you can actually damage the creature. Then, deal the hit (ie: roll a successful attack). Similarly, defending against the creature’s attacks is two-stage as well. First, weaken the attack so that there's a chance you can escape all damage. Then, avoid the attack (ie: make a successful save). After this, the cycle is reset, and must be repeated to be effective. That is, the glacier creature’s defenses weaken when hit by fire. Then, the creature is actually damaged. After that, the defenses reset (the melting stops), and to be damaged, the creature bust be hit by fire again. And after doing that a few times, the creature’s defenses can no longer be lowered by fire. Fortunately, it has another weakness (say, a creature can make a Strength check to climb into a cavern in its flesh and stab it from within). Or, in the case of the blue dragon, you can take an action to hide in the oasis, but this means you can't attack it on that turn, and each time the dragon gets a turn, the oasis is evaporated a little more...

Discovering these weaknesses should be a matter of trial, error, rewards, and lore. Weaknesses can be discovered by throwing various attacks and attack forms at the creature and seeing "what works," or as elements of the adventure leading up to the battle. Weaknesses could even be given out as rewards: accomplishing a particular task might give the party a flaming sword especially useful against the glacier-beast, while an old man who needs some adventuring done knows that the dragon's breath is dissipated harmlessly in the sacred oasis. You can even make weaknesses up dynamically as you go along. Should the cleric’s idea to fight it against the setting sun help by weakening its attacks? Sure, why not, if you think it’s a good idea in the moment, even if you didn’t think of it before.

Of course, this creature has ALL THE HIT POINTS. How can you slay it? No matter how many times you attack it, you can’t reduce its HP total.

Well, rather than hit points, it takes wounds. A colossal creature takes one wound on any round it is hit by a character after its defenses are lowered. A character's damage potential is key to your e (like with 4e’s striker damage), you can have those characters deal an extra wound when they attack, and you can also use that to model things that are "super effective," like the flaming sword in the above example. The amount of wounds a colossal creature can take before being “defeated” can vary with the amount of time you want to keep it around (and the number of different weaknesses you want to employ), but something like 9-12 is a good ballpark most of the time (meaning between 12 and 3 weaknesses, depending on how many times each can be triggered). That might be a bit long for a “normal” combat, but these are supposed to be setpieces.

FOURTH: INSTANT REACTIONS KEEP THINGS DYNAMIC
In addition to your colossal creature’s normal action each round, there can be pre-programmed “reaction points” in the creature that trigger alternate attacks or new defenses. Typical triggers may include:

• When the creature is wounded
• When the creature’s defenses return after a weakness is exposed
• When one of the creature’s weaknesses is exhausted
• When the creature reaches the halfway point (or the two-thirds and one-third point, or the three-fourths, one-half, and one-fourths point) in its wound tally.

The triggers can be useful ways to tie what’s happening in the mechanics to what’s happening on the battlefield. Once the glacier creature has been hit by fire three times, for instance, perhaps it summons a vast magical blizzard that extinguishes all exposed flame instantly for the rest of the combat (and also functions as an attack against the entire party).

This also helps mediate the action economy that the critter is subjected to, keeping the players a bit more on their toes.

NOW YOU
So, that’s the basic set-up for fighting colossal monsters. Perhaps un-surprisingly, it works for mythic “horror monsters” pretty well, too (vampires have weaknesses built right in!), though you might not need to abandon the grid in those cases.

But now that I’ve laid the groundwork, I’d like to see what you can do with it. Post your colossal combats to the comments!

 

[DancingSatyr]

Does the mosquito have a + 5 flaming Human-Bane probiscus? Then you could have a problem

 

[airwalkrr]

I really like the idea. Very reminiscent of climactic video game battles. I like the notion that it requires players to think of creative solutions instead of looking at the monster as a wall of hit points. I think I may give this a try.

 

[The Mormegil]

Nice work. I believe this works for boss battles in general, not just colossal creatures. I might try to spice this up with a bit more structure too... we'll see.

 

[Razjah]

The first part reminds me of the way ranges work in Burning Wheel. As for the rest, it does seem like a climactic battle in a video game, which is often what we want to emulate for bass fights. The button mashing fight versus a giant monster (like how the Path of Neo game had the ending changed to make it a fun fight) while being so into the game you are standing-that is something I want my players to feel during a fight with a titan. I like this idea. It could possibly be combined with the Shadow of the Colossus approach of climbing and fighting on the monster.

 

[Shayuri]

My first reaction was, "Wow, cool!"

Then I had a bounceback where I thought, "Yeah, but...."

I find myself re-warming to the idea a bit with some reflection. I like the idea of making a significant fight more than rolling more dice and tallying up bigger numbers. I think your idea accomplishes that, and so I like that.

My reservation has to do with the idea that players spend a lot of time and effort building characters for the purpose of doing a fairly limited number of things really really well. The system rewards this; encourages it with synergistic abilities and 'combos' enshrined in rules that characters can...and in many cases are obliged to...take advantage of.

A system like this really takes something away from that effort. It takes all those cool abilties and synergies, that time and effort spend crafting a character, and makes it redundant. It doesn't matter if your guy is super mobile and can move, attack and move again...there's no real movement here. It doesn't matter if your guy does super good crit damage...there's no damage points. It doesn't matter what your tank's defenses are...you roll a saving throw dice against these attacks.

As a one-shot, to shake players up, this is awesome.

As a regular event? Significantly less so.

I notice in your description that fights of this sort are uncommon, which I think is not just good but necessary. I would even go so far as to say that encounters of this sort should be almost singular...reserved for 'ultimate challenges.' Not your run of the mill bad guy "boss" or possibly not even the "BBG" of a particular story arc. It'd be reserved for very special foes, possibly even the superBBG of the entire campaign and no one else...depending on the size of the campaign it might apply to others as well...but no more than a handful.

Otherwise you'll get your players trying to re-optimize for that kind of fight I think, which will create nothing but frustration.

 

[Umbran]

Otherwise you'll get your players trying to re-optimize for that kind of fight I think, which will create nothing but frustration.

For folks who have optimized for one kind of combat, yes, this could be a bit of an issue. But then, they have that issue any time you step them out of their optimized zone.

But, we can also consider such a system a bit more broadly. It isn't like all D&D campaigns are much focused on optimization. And certainly, there are systems out there that aren't designed to encourage optimization.

If you put some of this together with Radiating Gnome's recent column "Chewing Up Scenery[/rul]", and you get a pretty close approach to how, say, the upcoming FATE-based game, Atomic Robo, handles such things. The interesting tidbit there is that the GM does not have to generate all the weaknesses for the monster - there's a cute little subsystem to allow the players to figure out what the weaknesses are. Admittedly, this works somewhat better for a game in which the basic character type is an "Action Scientist" than it does for fantasy, but there may still be some merit.

Or, you can just think of it in terms of a Wound Point/Vitality Point system. The Really Big Monster has nigh infinite VP. It has limited WP, and you can do WP each time you exploit a weakness of the critter.

 

[I'm A Banana]

My reservation has to do with the idea that players spend a lot of time and effort building characters for the purpose of doing a fairly limited number of things really really well.

Yeah, I get that. And if you're coming from standard D&D, that's going to be a concern, if you over-use this kind of combat. You can fluff the character as super-mobile, but it's not going to matter too much in the mechanics, at least in this combat. You can kind of throw a bone with the abstract terrain (if the terrain is slippery, perhaps the mobile character doesn't slide around), but positioning isn't going to be as dramatic.

In part, this is a consequence of the type of combat it is. Mobility just isn't very useful against a friggin' building. If you're in the combat-as-war camp, and this type of encounter only makes up a portion of your fights, this isn't a problem: big monsters will invalidate some tactics that might work against folks on foot. Meh.

In part, this is a consequence of the typical system of D&D, especially in its more complex, modern forms, especially as it leans more toward combat-as-sport in many places. If it's important to you that a mobility-focused character (or whatever) is always able to demonstrate that trait in a fight, you probably don't want to use these rules, and definitely not often.

For me personally, I think the trend toward such "one-trick ponies" is kind of a problem. I'm pretty firmly in the "combat-as-war" camp, myself, so I have no problem with a particular encounter or series of encounters defeating a particular strategy, especially just "on occasion." If a player concentrated on big crit damage, and then met a creature that they can't functionally crit, I'm OK with their focus being wasted for that fight. You know, part of the virtue of this system is that it encourages outside-the-box thinking and strategy, and if the player is decidedly uninterested in doing much outside their box, that's not much of a virtue.

I don't think I'd use this in every fight (at least not without some variation for a less lop-sided battle). But I've used it in about one to three fights at each level, against both colossal monsters and more "mythic" monsters that aren't necessarily huge but are pretty lop-sided (ie: fight this Vampire! Weaknesses include garlic, sunlight, etc.). As a DM, I tend to value cinematic fights over strategic/realistic/mechanistic fights, so I tend to attract players who aren't going to be too into one-trick ponies or narrow optimizers anyway, so I haven't hit that wall.

I imagine a player who really likes their 12-20 crit range and all the extra crit sauce they get and isn't very "resilient" about not getting to crit on stuff would be pretty bummed about not getting to use it for a while. And I do imagine that optimizers here might turn toward optimizing skill checks or ability checks or the action economy or saving throws. Which is why I use this as one weapon in my DM's arsenal. But, like I said, most of my players know that over-specialization in my games works about as well as it does in the real world: if all you eat is eucalyptus, you're not going to fare well in a pine forest.

 

[Shayuri]

Well, in fairness, I'm not even talking about what I'd consider to be 'overspecializing.' But D&D, as a system, encourages characters to be built with a kind of 'theme' that guides the overall design. If you pick feats and powers at random, or according to purely flavor-driven criteria, you will arrive at a character who is noticibly behind the curve in terms of combat performance.

And in a game as mathematically precise as D&D, that's not a small consideration.

Don't get me wrong...I really like the idea of of throwing in special encounters like this, to keep players on their toes, encourage and reward creativity and roleplay, and break up the humdrum routine that encounters can start to fall into after awhile. In particular I think it's useful to avoid the kind of, "Oh look, another Balor, and it's been buffed up a bit. Hah," sort of blase' reaction that players AND characters develop at high levels.

SOME of that is fine. It's part of the reward for getting there. But it's good to have tools to disrupt that, and this system looks like one such tool.

I just squirm when I think of it being used more generically, or frequently. It undermines a lot of expectations that players use, and NEED to use, to design effective characters. That's why it has the effect it has. But as a player, I'd be pretty annoyed if it showed up a lot.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I just squirm when I think of it being used more generically, or frequently. It undermines a lot of expectations that players use, and NEED to use, to design effective characters. That's why it has the effect it has. But as a player, I'd be pretty annoyed if it showed up a lo

Yeah, it's true that if you're going to redesign D&D's combat engine, you probably are going to have to redesign a lot of the rest of the game, too (depending on your e; OD&D is pretty resilient!). But there's enough give for this to be used on occasion. Actually, I think 4e with its tight math is one of the easiest E's to do this in, even if the lack of grid and binary abilities make hay of a lot of the power and role mechanics there.