Target selection and Power Attack

[Gorthawar]

Hi Playgrounders,

My party is about to encounter some frost giants (slightly improved with brutal & power throw) and it got me thinking on how to decide the right amount of power attack against which opponent.

How do you decide? And by decide I'm not particularly interested in situations involving shocktrooper or wraithstrike where the correct answer is 99.9% of the time to go all in.

Who would you (as a frost giant) attack with a thrown rock when you had free choice? How much power throw penalty would you use depending on the target chosen? How much power attack would you select when attacking any of the party in melee with a greataxe?

The party (all level 9) consists of:
A dragonborn cleric (dragon scale ACF that we changed to count as a medium armor with 6AC that can be enchanted like normal armor and gains elemental resistance against 1 element as he levels up) holding a two-handed weapon.
An arctic elven druid wearing no armor aside from some leather bracers and some sort of spear or sword.
An elven ranger who spends her time shifted into a advanced gold wyrmling dragon form (homebrew) with a studded leather armor.
A human rogue/swashbuckler/swordsage with a mithral chain shirt and two swords.
A human ranger/scout wearing a mithral chain mail and a bow.
A human wizard not wearing any armor with a staff and a rapier on his side.

PS: To the wizard players despair my background of playing shadowrun in the 90s more often than not leads me to "geek the mage" first but I try to be better :).

Edit: Included party level.

[Telonius]

Mostly trial and error. Completely metagaming, but if you're going up against a bunch of similarly-equipped enemies, you can usually assume they're all the same AC. (DMs usually have better things to do than roll up individual stats for Orc #6). See what everybody else is rolling and what does and doesn't hit. Work the math from there, for what you can afford to give. If your attack bonus is +13, and people are hitting on a total roll of 12, go nuts. If it's +13 and people are missing on a 23, maybe power attack for 1 or 2.

If it's a bunch of mooks, and you don't have any idea of what their AC is, I'd usually start with Power Attack 5 or 10, depending on your level. If they all hit (and anything's still standing), adjust it up the next round. If nothing hits, bump it down.

If you're going against obviously tough-to-hit types (full plate, obviously magicked-up, looks like high natural armor, blinking light that says "Mini-boss"), start off with maybe Power Attack 2. (Armbands of Might are cheap, occupy a usually-useless slot for melee guys, and kick in at Power attack 2).

If nothing's hitting at all, Power Attack for full. If you're only hitting on a 20 anyway, might as well make it hurt as much as you can.

(Note that all that is completely ignoring Shock Trooper/charge builds. Totally different considerations if that's in play, since it lowers your AC instead of your attack bonus).

EDIT: So, from the perspective of the Frost Giant, I've got basically no backup, and a war party after me. If I'm smart, "Kill Pointy Hat First" is standard operating procedure. You've got range, so chuck a rock at the wizard and see what happens. Target what you think is the Cleric next. Basically, you want to disrupt the support, and then break the charge as much as you can. If the party closes, Power Attack whichever party member seems weakest. Action economy is a thing, and you want to eliminate their offense as quickly as you can. Pounding a squishy rogue into the snow is a good way to do that.

[Xervous]

If winning initiative, higher power attack against light/non armored characters due to flat footed.

Higher PA against things that are taking hits on lower rolls. The giants should know how vaguely close they were to hitting/missing.

[Troacctid]

For monsters, you should use trial and error, calibrating the starting point based on the monster's personality. If they're more confident, start with a higher penalty; if they're more cautious, start with a lower penalty or no penalty. Then after the monster's first attack against a target, they should adjust their strategy based on the defenses they observe. (Unless the monster is either mind-controlled or just not very cunning, in which case maybe they just use the same penalty for the whole fight.)

[Yogibear41]

There is actually a power attack calculator floating around out there that tells you the optimal number. I would def target the unarmored guy casting spells aka the wizard.

[Rleonardh]

Take your least attack Bab.

So giant gets +18/+13 with axe.

Say you want to hit 16 ac and figure out your pa.
Take 13+10-16=7 so you power attack at -7.

The rock is +9
So 9+10-16=3 so power throw at 3.

This way roll of 10 will hit your opponent.

Once the roll + Bab can't hit ac you max power attack no matter what.

Say 18+10= 28 you can't hit that ac unless you roll critical. So 28+ you just go for broke.
This is reason why if you wanna be meaner to your players give them falchions and give them the keen enchantment or the feat.
This way you can do critical more and if you reach a ac you can't hit, you can still do normal damage on crit threats at least.

Unlike 5e crit fishing is good 😊

[Maat Mons]

If I'm the giant, my top-priority targets are the Druid and Wizard. They're not wearing armor, so they could be mages. Mages are scary. I don't want to give them a chance to cast spells that I won't be able to deal with.

After the first round, I no longer have to guess. I know the Cleric, Druid, and Wizard are casters. I prioritize them based on who's casting the scariest spells, and who I think I can kill fastest. So, probably targeting the Wizard. But if I dealt a decent bit of damage to the Druid in the first round, I might stick with him in the hopes of quickly finishing what I started.

[Khedrac]

Once the roll + Bab can't hit ac you max power attack no matter what.

Say 18+10= 28 you can't hit that ac unless you roll critical. So 28+ you just go for broke.
This is reason why if you wanna be meaner to your players give them falchions and give them the keen enchantment or the feat.
This way you can do critical more and if you reach a ac you can't hit, you can still do normal damage on crit threats at least.

Unlike 5e crit fishing is good 😊
You appear to be saying that a critical threat is an automatic hit. In 3.5 this is not the case, only a natural 20 is an automatic hit (though I agree, once you need a 20 to hit you may as well max power attack, but you are probably better off doing something else).

[Rleonardh]

When you make an attack roll and get a natural 20 (the d20 shows 20), you hit regardless of your target’s Armor Class, and you have scored a threat. The hit might be a critical hit (or "crit"). To find out if it’s a critical hit, you immediately make a critical roll—another attack roll with all the same modifiers as the attack roll you just made. If the critical roll also results in a hit against the target’s AC, your original hit is a critical hit. (The critical roll just needs to hit to give you a crit. It doesn’t need to come up 20 again.) If the critical roll is a miss, then your hit is just a regular hit.


So if you got a 18-20 critical weapon you do hit on a 18, roll again to confirm critical, of not you still hit.

Unless you saying only a 20 regardless of weapon can have a chance to critical. I have always ruled it if you roll the weapon crit it's a crit chance.
I can see where I may have goofed on that, however the players like it this way, as a level 9 fighter they got:
Bab:9
Str:5
Weapon:1
Which gives them at least one attack of + 15, and they are fighting things with 32ac if not higher.

Ac scales faster than attack does, that I have found.
Plus no one is a power gammer in groups I dm, even ones that do aren't heavy op.

Also been known to give full plate to monsters that bump there ac higher.

[Maat Mons]

You should read the sidebar on page 140.

Sometimes your threat range is greater than 20. That is, you can score a threat on a lower number. In such cases, a roll of lower than 20 is not an automatic hit. Any attack roll that doesn’t result in a hit is not a threat.

[Khedrac]

The groups I play in are mainly fairly low Op, and when characters have problems hitting they usually look for other things to do to air the combat (like aid attacks for the main fighter's attack roll).

The rules are quite clear. If an attack roll is both a hit and in the critical threat range, then one can roll for confirmation of a critical.
If the roll is within the threat range but not a hit it is still a miss.
If the roll is a hit but not within the threat range it is a normal hit.

Although critical chances of 19-20 (x2) and 20 (x3) are approximately equivalent most people rightly prefer a larger crit range to a higher multiplier (the maths is much more complex than most people realise and there are plenty of other factors that can kick in with criticals, e.g. like confirmation roll boosts) so the slight boost that small range weapons get on high AC opponents relative to large range weapons (i.e. that if you roll two natural 20s and so confirm the crit you get more damage) is negligble.
To have a 19-20 threat range weapon auto-hit on a 19 is vastly more powerful than a 20 (x3) weapon (or even a x5 weapon) - it makes iterative attacks far more dangerous allowing attackers to use more power attack as they can worry less about the last attack missing when it has a 10% or 15% (or higher with keen effects) to automatically hit.
Consider a keen rapier - threat range 15-20, by making any threat an auto-hit this weapon now has a 30% automatic hit rate - something that is incredibly powerful.