Hello! I am a DM for a 3.5 campaign. Me and my group of friends (we started in grade 7) have spent the last 3 years playing small campaigns in all of the different editions to find our favourite, we have started with a "main" campaign. Due to my party being tired of early level encounters, I decided to inflate some of the xp as well as give one player the power to grant a wish spell to all member states of the party. The result of this has allowed one of our players, an evil half giant rogue, the ability to increase one size at wish. In the moment I found no issue to this and allowed it, but I am now encountering the issue with this player winning every combat through grapple checks. With a 19 in strength, and the ability to become huge, he simply grapples any enemies he encounters, and has the rest of the party beat down the enemies. This has caused The party of 4 level 5's and two level 6's (due to the wish spell) to leave almost unscathed from 20 wood elves and two Minotaurs. Do you have any suggestions for balancing his character? The only one I can think of is giving them creatures with a large size class to deal with, but that seems like a bad solution, and not being able to use any large or medium beasts in the campaign would suck
You could start granting some of the creatures a natural freedom of movement or a feat to gain advantage on grapple checks. Just enough to get them to vary their approach to fights.
Another option is to use more ranged monsters or a dabbling of transporty spell casters.
Low ceilings and cramped quarters. Restrict their ability to transform as often.
Are you still playing 3.5? If so make sure you are appling all the (complicated) grapple rules, make sure your player is not short cutting anything or taking more advantage of the situation than the rules call for. If playing 5th now, then grapple status only takes away a creatures movement, that shouldn't be too bad especially 22 enemies against the party, how is a single enemy being reduced to 0 movement at time breaking this so badly?
Have enemies react smartly, if they have no hope on an escape attempt don't have them waste their action that way, have them use attacks and special powers as applicable and depending on which rule set you are using.
In addition to to the cramped quarters and ranged weapon usage mentioned above I will add that Incorporeal creatures in 3.5 are effectively impossible to grapple (Force spells or Dimensional Shackles not withstanding), meaning that strategy won't work against them.
It's a very good question and a real challenge in any version. I find the main issue to be how it unbalances the game for the party as a whole. Worst thing is when you deploy a monster to deal with the over cranked PC, and the regular guys get flattened with one attack. In this case you could try swarms, or creatures too small to grapple, or ghosts and such.
Low ceilings and cramped quarters. Restrict their ability to transform as often.
Are you still playing 3.5? If so make sure you are appling all the (complicated) grapple rules, make sure your player is not short cutting anything or taking more advantage of the situation than the rules call for. If playing 5th now, then grapple status only takes away a creatures movement, that shouldn't be too bad especially 22 enemies against the party, how is a single enemy being reduced to 0 movement at time breaking this so badly?
Have enemies react smartly, if they have no hope on an escape attempt don't have them waste their action that way, have them use attacks and special powers as applicable and depending on which rule set you are using.
Regarding the strength of the strength of the party, we have two spell casters, so all small enemies are dealt with via spells, which is too be expected, but it leaves only the major enemies who are easily dealt with. We made the decision to go 3.5 as we enjoy it for a slightly more refined game then 1st edition, the edition we originally played, while still having enough similarities to require a bit less knowledge on different rules. I may consider changing grapple rules to 5th edition for balancing, considering we already do have a fair amount of edition mixing.
Yeah I have received good advice from other DM's here already, so that should help :) The main issue is that our spell casters use fireball for swarms and any major enemy is dealt with through the half giant
Hello! I am a DM for a 3.5 campaign. Me and my group of friends (we started in grade 7) have spent the last 3 years playing small campaigns in all of the different editions to find our favourite, we have started with a "main" campaign. Due to my party being tired of early level encounters, I decided to inflate some of the xp as well as give one player the power to grant a wish spell to all member states of the party. The result of this has allowed one of our players, an evil half giant rogue, the ability to increase one size at wish. In the moment I found no issue to this and allowed it, but I am now encountering the issue with this player winning every combat through grapple checks. With a 19 in strength, and the ability to become huge, he simply grapples any enemies he encounters, and has the rest of the party beat down the enemies. This has caused The party of 4 level 5's and two level 6's (due to the wish spell) to leave almost unscathed from 20 wood elves and two Minotaurs. Do you have any suggestions for balancing his character? The only one I can think of is giving them creatures with a large size class to deal with, but that seems like a bad solution, and not being able to use any large or medium beasts in the campaign would suck
You could start granting some of the creatures a natural freedom of movement or a feat to gain advantage on grapple checks. Just enough to get them to vary their approach to fights.
Another option is to use more ranged monsters or a dabbling of transporty spell casters.
Low ceilings and cramped quarters. Restrict their ability to transform as often.
Are you still playing 3.5? If so make sure you are appling all the (complicated) grapple rules, make sure your player is not short cutting anything or taking more advantage of the situation than the rules call for. If playing 5th now, then grapple status only takes away a creatures movement, that shouldn't be too bad especially 22 enemies against the party, how is a single enemy being reduced to 0 movement at time breaking this so badly?
Have enemies react smartly, if they have no hope on an escape attempt don't have them waste their action that way, have them use attacks and special powers as applicable and depending on which rule set you are using.
Let two allied Dragons allmost TPK them, that will teach them to outsmart their DM ;-)
I think you just have to come up with clever Traps and ways to challenge your players.
How about a Giantslayer-Bow? He grapples one enemy, another fires an artow at him, that grows to tree-size and gets him 3d6 extrafamage and proned...
Ranged weapons should also work very well...
In addition to to the cramped quarters and ranged weapon usage mentioned above I will add that Incorporeal creatures in 3.5 are effectively impossible to grapple (Force spells or Dimensional Shackles not withstanding), meaning that strategy won't work against them.
It's a very good question and a real challenge in any version. I find the main issue to be how it unbalances the game for the party as a whole. Worst thing is when you deploy a monster to deal with the over cranked PC, and the regular guys get flattened with one attack. In this case you could try swarms, or creatures too small to grapple, or ghosts and such.
Thanks for the advice!
Yeah I have received good advice from other DM's here already, so that should help :) The main issue is that our spell casters use fireball for swarms and any major enemy is dealt with through the half giant
Find weaknes of characters and attack them. Do not base on stats olny. Be creative.This could be useful https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/175-how-to-play-a-mind-flayer-like-an-eldritch-horror
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/164-how-to-play-a-red-dragon-like-an-evil-genius