How do you kill a Monster?
When I was a teenager, I played a lot of Skyrim. I didn't like it very much. I preferred Morrowind and Oblivion; though I was terrible at Morrowind and got lost most of the time, and spent most of my time in Oblivion cheating in items and wandering around the Dev Testing room playing with console commands. My mom never "got" video games. She would play games like Pikmin 2 with me when I was younger, and Mario Kart and stuff, but she wasn't into them the same way my brother and I were, just indulging us because we were kids.
It's strange though, because she was the person who got me into fantasy by reading books like Eragon and Deltora Quest to me when I was a child, which sparked an obsession that persisted long after I had grown enough to read for myself. She was always more interested in mystery novels and crime thrillers. Though she reads the odd urban fantasy or vampire novel, fantasy was really only something that she engaged with for us.
She made an effort to show interest in what I liked, so sometimes she would poke her head over my shoulder while I was reading or gaming and ask me what was happening in my book, or to explain what I was doing in the game. I was in a crypt killing Draugr, because that's what you spend 80% of your time doing in Skyrim, and she actually seemed interested in what was happening on screen, a rarity. She saw the Draugr rising off their burial shelves and grabbing their weapons and she leaned forward intently while I readied my own sword and shield. The following fight held her interest; she watched me weave between clutter and rubble to keep the archer from shooting me while also catching the two melee fighters in a chokepoint so I could fight one at a time- a maneuver more interesting if you've never played Skyrim before and don't know that the combat is so trivial that tactics like that aren't necessary. After the first Draugr fell to the floor from a few quick swings of my sword, she asked a very important question: "How do you make sure they stay dead? Do you have to cut off their heads, or burn them?" (It had to be one of the two.)
A gamer would not ask that question. Draugr are not that kind of challenge. They're zombies yeah, but you just have to hit them with your sword a few times and they die permanently. They function identically to every other Human enemy in the game, being Undead has basically no mechanical baggage tied to it. Skyrim is just not the kind of game that expects you to burn fallen enemies, or carefully line up your sword and hack off their heads mid-combat to ensure that they didn't get back up to rejoin the fight. (A shallowness found in basically every aspect of Skyrim's design. Even though the game world is incredibly interactive, allowing you to pick up every plate and fork and rat-gnawed bone on the floor of a dungeon, there is basically no point to that interactivity. Skyrim actually does feature both the ability to chop off heads and burn bodies, but there is never any circumstance where that matters. I think it would be a much better game if it leverage the care and effort put into its design towards making a deeper experience.)
All of which I sheepishly explained to her, and the light of interest went out of her eyes, then a minute or so later she gave me a kiss on the forehead and went back upstairs to watch Doctor Who and drink a mug of tea. Fair enough.
Normies are the most fun people to play TTRPG's with, in my experience. They do unexpected things, sometimes clever and sometimes silly. They try to use the light cantrip at point-blank to flashbang enemies, light their sword on fire with lamp oil, and leap into the way of oncoming monster attacks to protect their friends. They're a lot more fun than most of the veterans I play with, who usually just try to min-max a Sorlockadin with Sentinel and Polearm Master, which is the opposite of interesting or novel. Unfortunately, Rules as Written, when they have these good ideas, you're supposed to say "no that's not really how the game works, sorry." Then you get to relive that experience with my mom, where she realized that the game I was playing wasn't actually interesting.
Do you have Video game brainrot? Here are a few case studies of things people suffering from VGaBr have done, for the sake of diagnostic comparison.
- Asked to take a Long Rest in an unlocked room adjacent to a room with three Red Slaads inside. After opening the door, seeing and being seen by the Slaads, then shutting the door.
- Applied poison to their arrows while fighting a skeletal beholder
- Tried to shoot a skeleton with arrows
- Tried to stab a skeleton with a spear
- Drank Lava because they "had enough HP"
- Got genuinely mad at me for putting a punji trap in front of them they couldn't walk around that they refused to jump over because they were afraid of falling onto the spikes, and then refused to come up with any other solution other than walking around or jumping over until another player literally solve it for them by dropping a nearby small boulder into the pit to smash the heads off of the spikes and drop down harmlessly
- Said "I roll my perception," instead of "Do I see anything suspicious down the hallway?"
(Why do we make games that are boring as fuck, by the way?)
Yes, I'm making fun of these players who did these things in my games, and I'm also making fun of myself, because I'm guilty of at least three of these things. But we're not idiots for doing this stuff, we're victims of a chronic lack of Fiction First design in the games we play, which is slowly draining us of the whimsy and imagination required to pretend to be an elf.
"Fiction First" is a style of game/culture of play where the most important thing is the fictional scenario presented by the narration. A sleeping monster doesn't require an attack roll, because obviously it isn't trying to defend itself; you can just cut its throat. Drinking lava will kill you regardless of your HP because there is no way for a Human body to withstand that level of trauma regardless of how tough you are as a fighter. It doesn't matter that the poison needle trap is a DC 15 Dex save when you open the chest, you're wearing plate gauntlets and a pair of oven mitts over the top of them, there's no way you could have been pricked regardless of how clumsy you were. Etc. Mechanics are engaged only as a consequence of the fiction; not as something outside of or above it.
Fiction First games are the most intuitive for new players, because the "correct action" is the one that they would take if they were thrust into that situation, not the one that they know the game is expecting them to choose. Veterans have had the creativity ground out of them by bad DM's and systems and video games. They know that it doesn't matter if they didn't bring a bludgeoning weapon for skeletons, they can just left click them until they die, just like Draugr.
In those stories my mom read me as a child, monsters are very rarely beaten by just stabbing them to death with a sword. (It was actually something of a point of annoyance for me, before I grew up and read a bunch of isekai slash-em-up type slop and realized that it was actually really boring when that was the solution to 90% of the protagonist's problems.) In the fantasy media I consumed as a kid swords are basically never used to slash an enemy. Most monsters are beaten by doing something like ripping open the curtains and casting it into sunlight, or by blowing up a bridge and dropping it down a pit, or playing a flute song while being chased through a magical maze. If the sword ever did get used, it was to pin something in place or slash a rope to swing across a chasm. That was the fantasy that I brought with me to the DnD table. It is not the fantasy that I find nowadays, though.
Swinging your sword is a default action. The sword, glaive, Greataxe, they're set aside from the other items in your inventory, elevated in order of importance. Combat has rules entirely different from the rest of the game world, and this elevation of the tools of immediate violence alienates them from the rest of the items and equipment in the game- it makes everything other than the sword feel half-real. In the Deltora Quest I remember, a waterskin was almost as important a tool to Lief as his sword, if not more so! God, think of all the puzzles you could solve with water!
Modern combat isn't something you have to think about, it's just something that happens. Yes there are "tactics," but in my experience there are mathematically correct choices to make that are fairly obvious. Pathfinder 2e and Lancer aren't boring, but that the tactics that they require you to engage in are not lateral thinking puzzles like "how do we lure this monster over the lava pit to drop them in?" and more like "which ability should I use in this scenario to deal the most damage/and or enable my team to do more damage?" Some are even less engaging, players mostly just walk up to the nearest enemy and roll to hit them with their equipped weapon. Worst of all, most Tactical type games are set up for you to win. They call this dreadful invention "balance."
In a "balanced" combat the players feel comfortable, because they know that seven Orcs are an appropriate fight for their character level, and that they can get by with the abilities on their sheet. There's no real incentive to avoid combat, or try to tip the scale in your favor by pulling a clever trick, you can just wade into battle secure in the knowledge that encounter design is tilted in your favor. A monster being unkillable by the abilities and equipment at your disposal is a negative in the tactical framework; an encounter that can't be cleared is an unbalanced encounter! Tactics do not have to be adjusted, because every battle needs to be balanced for the typical party; and just by virtue of being the right level for the kind of monster you're fighting you've already been equipped with everything you need to win. Monsters have to be mechanically self contained, they're puzzles that have already been solved for you, all that's left is running through the motions of roll-to-hit, roll damage, rinse, repeat.
If you couldn't tell, skeletons are a huge pet peeve of mine- being able to kill them with arrows is dumb! I understand that theoretically your arrow could punch through the skull or splinter their long-bones or ribs- but also they have no brain or lungs or heart to puncture, what exactly are you going to accomplish by piercing their skull? (I'll accept that smashing them up with a hammer prevents them from reforming, and even that a sword should be able to cut through their long bones with enough force behind it.) Water Elementals are worse, because how actually are you even injuring a floating blob of water with a sword? Surely, you should have to boil it into steam, or soak it up with a sponge or spray it with salt- or something? But both 5th edition DnD and Pathfinder 2e let you deal damage to Elementals with weapons- 5e requires those weapons to be magical, but you can fully just chop up a water elemental with a normal sword in Pathfinder, for some reason? Do they have ligaments to cut, muscles, veins, arteries?! What is the actual fictional scenario being presented by this creature? How the hell am I going to expect a player to not try and shoot a skeleton to death with arrows when the game fully endorses killing a puddle by stabbing it to death? (there's also something to be said here about how that would make martials feel worse to play, but that would need me to go on a huge tangent about martial/caster divide that I don't have time for.)
Isn't it cooler to have to say, "I knock its skull off with the flat of my sword and then kick it through the door, forcing it to go running after it to put it back on- then I slam the door behind it!" than using a bow to kill something without internal organs?
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Okay, this post is getting long, and turning more into a rant than anything actually useful. next time I'll write up some more eminently gamable content, and hopefully show off what I mean with monsters that are more interesting to fight/kill!
