How to roleplay monsters into making suboptimal choices discussion

[gooddragon1]

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=20205068&postcount=33


This is all super false. 1) The game is clearly designed around Wizards and Clerics, if you don't have a Cleric or Wizard you straight up can't even deal with 90% of encounters that exist. A Glabrezu has Greater Teleport at will. If you can't interdict it's TPing in some way, the only remaining option is to kill it in a single round before it can take a standard action. Outside of huge piles of damage that the game definitely didn't plan for in CR, that is not going to happen except by a lucky rogue.

I didn't realize stuff like that could come up, but an intelligent Glabrezu (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/demon.htm#glabrezu) would just keep out of range and chaos hammer/confusion away until the enemies all died. Assuming an open area. Players could probably do something I suppose, but here's how I might handle it:

"You're just mortals, why would I waste my time with such a boring tactic?" Proceeds to confuse one and use mirror image while getting into melee.


They follow a confusion attack with melee attacks, hoping to finish off wounded foes with chaos hammer or unholy blight.

And while they are losing...

"I cannot lose to such pathetic mortals" etc... attempts to summon a demon and continues the fight until dead. Or if ordered for some reason with a very compelling motivation (because chaotic evil and following orders don't go together much), it could teleport away.

There's an example of how I might run something suboptimally. Can you think of any monsters that noncasters and/or a not high-op party might have trouble with that you could justify running the monsters suboptimally and how you would do that? Feel free to suggest any other methods that you would tailor a fight better in advance, or on the spot, or whatever comes to mind.

[TheifofZ]

A lich would be easy to handwave running sub-optimally against non-casters.
"oh look. A bunch of goons in armor wielding shiny swords. Again. I should seriously set up signs or something. Oh well. They'll never find my phylactory even if they do beat me, and I can't feel any pain from what damage they do deal. So what do I care? Besides, my current plan isn't going anywhere for the next couple decades..."

[Florian]

A creature is a three part thing:
First: The fluff. It describes the creature and defines how it will act
Second: The stat block. It tries to translate the fluff into useable game terms.
Third: The players and the challenge. A creature is only as tactical savvy as the gm controlling it and needs to pose an appropriate challenge for the players who encounter it.
All three things are closely tied together.

The first point actually describes the creature, its personality and what it will do. That comes from the fluff, not the stat block. That only gives you tools to work with.
So if a Glabrezu is described as a melee combatant that starts with Confusion and then enters the fray, that is the creature. Doing this is not playing the creature "dumb", it simply is playing the creature as it should be played.
The stat block (and CR) is there so you can adapt the creature to your party and keep the appropriate CR at the level it should be.

Doing it the other way around, first reading the stat block and playing the rules you find there, will simply lead to every creature being a wizard without any personality to it.

[NichG]

The fact that the DM is more mentally spread thin than the players is usually enough to give monsters a fatal dose of suboptimal decision making in my experience. Keep in mind that each player just controls their character, and they built and tested that character over the course of potentially months. Whereas the DM might have to control multiple monsters at once, and may have only looked briefly at what each of those monsters can do. So it's pretty much a given that the DM will have the monsters behave less than optimally without having to go out of their way for it.

In fact, when the DM goes out of their way for it but the players are taking it very seriously, it often feels kinda cheap, like the monster sort of just committed suicide-by-hero.

If you really need to weaken a monster's tactics for balance reasons, give them multiple objectives to accomplish in the fight. Trying to fight off a group of competent characters while simultaneously accomplishing some other goal will really limit them. That said, if the enemy is so much more powerful than the PCs that you have to do this to make the encounter feasible, I'd suggest just using a different enemy instead and saving the powerful one for further down the road.

[Beheld]

The first thing you should understand is that while monsters certainly can deviate from tactics, you should always look at the sample tactics in the MM first. (Which if you don't own a MM, is hard, because the SRD doesn't have them).

So for a Glabrezu: "Glabrezu prefer subterfuge to combat. However, if their attempts to entice or deceive fail, these enormous demons attack with a vengeance. They follow a confusion attack with melee attacks, hoping to finish off wounded foes with chaos hammer or unholy blight."

So this tells us a few things:
1) Glabrezu should at the very least advertise their presence to the PCs from hiding with Telepathy, probably drastically reducing the chances of a Surprise Round and giving the party some time to buff. They do this for good IC reasons: They think they can win anyway, or failing that, TP away, so the chance to corrupt souls to evil is worth the warning.

2) Glabrezu should always have mirror image up, and should probably be casting Reverse Gravity in locations the PCs aren't in while they are talking, but they should open combat with Confusion, and then melee, not kiting, and not Power Word Stun. This is again, for IC reasons: They want to conserve their Power Word Stun, and they are angry at the PCs for rejecting their offer and believe they can take them out in melee.

3) Only after they have been beaten up quite a bit, should they teleport away, try to summon some other demon(s), teleport back but far away, and use Unholy Blight to target enemies while any demons they successfully summoned engage in melee, using Power Word Stun on anyone that gets close.

This makes the fight much easier for a standard PC party than it might otherwise be, and provides them with a decent chance of total victory if the Wizard can take away it's actions with a stun or daze effect. (Or the Cleric can just banish it, and you can win that way, depending on your goal). I mean, you still have to fight a melee monster under constant mirror image effects who can teleport away at any time, while possibly confused, and while definitely going in and out of reverse gravity areas, but you are a 10-14th level party, you can manage.

However, if a Glabrezu ends up losing but escaping, they should probably just much better tactics next time, based on what they saw of the PCs, and if that means Unholy Blight spam from a distance, then that is what it means.

As to specific answers to the question of the OP. Just don't do that. Mostly, people just run monsters like idiots without noticing in the first place, if you make it any more overt, then the PCs are just going to feel condescended to. If you really notice that the monsters are beating the crap out of PCs, don't run monsters stupid on purpose, just run lower CR monsters.

Of course, that doesn't help much when a monsters described tactics are "Live in a Palace of Illusions that will **** over the PCs" or "Pouncing charge out of nowhere and eat the PCs" or "When the door to the closet opens, the Troll eats you" but there aren't a lot of solutions to closet trolls aside from not walking into closets.