OOTS #1174 - The Discussion Thread

[Seward]

Ironically what Minrah did is what you normally do under vanilla rules once you stake the vampire. (staking it is one way to incapacitate without ultimately killing it in D&D 3.x)

Sunlight or running water, whatever is easier. The whole "holy wafer and decapitate" thing is harder to arrange since holy wafers aren't on any equipment list. But that was 1st ed, I am not sure it caried over into 3rd.

But yeah, what everybody else said about action economy and dominate, and action economy wasting Gontor's escape action on attacking Durkon's mom. You are 100% screwed in D&D if you act first and then a whole lot of folks get to go before you or any allies get to go again, unless your action ended the fight (either by winning or escaping). It's bad enough that a weird string of initiative rolls can swing a battle if all of one side "clumps up" and is a primary reason why some high level parties try to get everybody on a pretty high initiative check, encouraging spell selection, feat selection and item selection to try to get the entire party going first and ending the fight in before any opposition goes. (the term Rocket Tag applies). It is also why surprise is really dangerous - not only does the opposition get an action, their high init rollers get another action before anybody gets to react.

I saw nothing dodgy about any of that. In 3.5 grapping the d20 looms large and the more folks rolling a d20, the higher the odds that somebody will make a roll that Gontor won't beat with his die roll, unless he also lucks out, rolls high and is actually a better grappler than others who also rolled high.

With cleric BAB, a not terribly imposing physique for a dwarf, the strength bonus for being a vampire isn't going to give him a grapple check larger than a typical mid-level fighter, and you gotta know that the folks with decent grapple checks were in front of that crowd (right behind the Bull Rush woman). Including the first guy who established the grapple having the actual improved grapple feat, so Gontor didn't get an attack of opportunity to prevent it.

He'd need luck on the order of the die roll that dominated Hilgya to get out of that situation, and the dice (and author) didn't cooperate.