Invading Enemy Strongholds (without turning into Party vs. the World)

[GreatWyrmGold]

Note: Names of some places in the Rise of the Runelords adventure path are mentioned. Dunno if that qualifies for a spoiler warning, but...there you go.


I'm currently running Rise of the Runelords, and have set a bit of a precedent. When the PCs invaded Ft. Rannick, they drew out just about every ogre in the fortress. The first time they died, but when they actually coordinated they managed to beat them. Something similar happened when they invaded the Kreeg stronghold. Just tonight, they invaded Jorgenfist, and once they caught the attention of its inhabitants they wound up in a sprawling brawl that cleared out half a floor and most of their daily resources. It's not a bad thing; it can easily be a big, cool setpiece. However, it has many disadvantages; it can easily overwhelm the players without warning (especially if you don't keep track of the PCs' HP), it will take a lot of attack rolls, and it's dull when it happens a couple of times every adventure.

The problem is, I'm not sure how to not do it. My group prefers adventures where the enemies act like people (or at least enemies in a comprehensively-constructed VRPG), not like mobs in an MMORPG; having enemies react to intruders is all part of that. Moreover, for next week's session, I have to deal with the fact that the enemy explicitly knows about the players and their greatest strengths; I've been dropping hints that the giants have been keeping an eye on the Hero of Sandpoint* and his party, culminating in an explicit sending from a caster who knew her time was up.
The enemy is going to be prepared, and they will be ready to counter the PCs' strengths. That sounds like fun! Between the invisible flying alchemist who can nuke eldritch monsters in a few turns of nova to the giant tiger who can glide through earth and stone, the party has some tricks I'm looking forward to countering. But you know what doesn't sound like fun? Fighting the dozens of stone giant soldiers and whatnot who would be readied to fight the invaders.

I don't suppose anyone has advice on how I can prepare the enemy stronghold and/or have enemies react in a way which is both consistent with the campaign style thus far and doesn't degenerate into the same kind of battle again?

*AKA the only PC to have made it all the way through the campaign...and the only active one who was around before the slaughter at Rannick, come to think of it.

[JoeJ]

If the enemy knows that much about the PCs, they should either counter pretty much everything the PCs do (if they have the power), or retreat. The likely result of the former is a TPK, so I wouldn't really recommend that.

Maybe it would be more interesting if the enemy sends a smaller holding force to try and delay the PCs so that they bulk of their forces can escape.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Perhaps it is on the party to do things to counter the reasonable monster behaviour.

[mucat]

It does seem like the party ought to be thinking about how to avoid bringing the whole damned place down on them. (Especially because that could happen literally. If I were a stone giant commander, facing a small but powerful strike force, I would try to lure them into a pre-arranged spot where I could collapse the frikkin' mountain on their heads.)

Smart players should be thinking in terms of recon and surgical strikes, feints, diversions -- maybe the noisier half of the party "attacks" with fire and thunder and hordes of summons and illusions of more of the same, drawing most of the defenders to them, and keeps the tumult going as long as they can, before making a carefully planned escape by dimension door or teleport or similar...while their more subtle colleagues slip in and do whatever the party REALLY came here to do.

If the monster are behaving like real people with real brains, then the PCs need to do the same...

[Glorthindel]

Perhaps it is on the party to do things to counter the reasonable monster behaviour.

Agreed; if the party are engaging in poor tactics, and are wading in despite knowing the enemy have intelligence on them, then they deserve the brutal beating they are going to receive.

Ultimately, players do what works - if a frontal assault lacking in any planning or subtlety always works, then there is no incentive to waste time and resources on intricate (and pointless) plans. The only way to convince them to be more subtle and engage in better tactical planning is to show them the blind frontal assault doesn't always work. Sure, its going to be a mess, and characters are going to die, but that is the price of complacency. Sometimes you just have to sit back and watch the car crash happen. Maybe give the survivors a route out once a number of the bodies have started dropping, and the lesson has been learned, but they need to be made to feel the faliure.

[Calthropstu]

This is where tactics and strategy come into play. They KNOW the pcs are coming. They know what the pcs look like.

Possible winning responses:
Polymorph the party. Trick the giants into recruiting the polymorphed pcs

Play a shadow war game with the pcs finding weaknesses to exploit, assassinating individual giants over the course of a week until the giants can no longer mount their perfect defense.

Nuke the fortress itself with spells and bombs.

Summon monsters to assault the fort each day.

Find a more powerful monster and lure it to attack for you.

There's a lot of strategies that can be effective here. It's on the pcs to come up with one. If they go in guns blazing and die, it's on them.

"I will attack from the front. Then you will follow with a full frontal assault. Then he will be the third wave and attack from the front" is not exactly the best of strategies. Employing it will generally lead to tpk... So it's on them.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Perhaps it is on the party to do things to counter the reasonable monster behaviour.
Perhaps; I can try to bring this up before the next session. But I'd rather not rely on the party acting differently than they have before. If they do, great, but if they don't...



Maybe it would be more interesting if the enemy sends a smaller holding force to try and delay the PCs so that they bulk of their forces can escape.
Problem is, the party can shadow walk, and some giants saw them doing so. Hard to lay an ambush for them, especially since they're apparently not in the actual Plane of Shadow. (This came up when I decided to toss a random encounter at them during their first major shadow hike.)


The best idea I've been able to think of so far is "Send away the mooks, keep only the minibosses/elite mooks/whatever". That way we don't get this huge battle battle with a dozen giants who can barely scratch the main tank, but still have a prepared response.
Which brings me to another question. The giants happen to be lead by a necromancer; does anyone know any fun undead templates I could apply to, say, clerics or barbarians?

[JoeJ]

The best idea I've been able to think of so far is "Send away the mooks, keep only the minibosses/elite mooks/whatever". That way we don't get this huge battle battle with a dozen giants who can barely scratch the main tank, but still have a prepared response.

Given what you've described, it would probably make more sense to leave just the mooks and send the bosses somewhere else. If the bosses can remotely destroy the entire building once the PCs enter, so much the better.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Given what you've described, it would probably make more sense to leave just the mooks and send the bosses somewhere else. If the bosses can remotely destroy the entire building once the PCs enter, so much the better.
The building is kinda central to the villain's plans, so...