Dungeon Master Forum

When you're facing one enemy (or one party of enemies) there's a standard trick for going toe-to-toe with many of them while avoiding most of their attacks. It's the two-step cheese, which many are probably familiar with. You attack, sidestep, wait for the monster to move. The monster will first turn, then move to be adjacent to either one side or the other, so that when you turn to face it, and find a monster staring sideward. You take a free slash or two, then when the monster turns to face you, sidestep again before it can attack, etc...

Wouldn't it be interesting if a map designer had an option to enable certain monsters to "out-smart" this cheese? Perhaps by instantly facing the player when it moves.

Along those lines, could some monsters be made resistant/immune to freeze life?

While we're at it, what if we could have certain monsters go up stairs.... hmm never mind, better not go there

Some monsters *are* already resistant to freeze-life. Also a monsters turn rate is related to their movement rate and so you can't do the turn-and attack thing for some of the fastest monsters (e.g. gigglers / chaos) as they can be even faster than the party (in some situations).

I thought about implementing the stairs thing a while ago, but decided against it. Not because that it would be different from DM though, more that it would making designing dungeons difficult. Because monsters try and track you down, those that could open (or go under) doors would would find you far too soon. For example there would be nothing to stop the water elementals comming up and attacking you half way through level 1...

Eh, you can already, do a bad version of this monster up stairs with DM. Essentially has an activation like the two levers to open the door trick on level 2. In this case one 'level' is a pressure pad at the bottom of the stairs activated by monsters, and the other 'lever' is a step off pressure pad on the stairs at the bottom, activated by the party. There is an additional pad at the base of the stairs that will reset the effect of the party activation. The door in this case is a monster teleporter placing the monsters on the stair tile on the level above. So as long as you are on the level no monsters can go upstairs. However, if you go back up the level, the monsters will get teleported up!. You can have a reverse version on the above level too - so that no monsters will go down until you have gone down.

The problem with this in DM is you can kill monsters by entering the stairs, but I assume RTC will be different?

And the two step cheese inneffective for some creatures? coooooooooool, I never noticed!