This is part of a series of articles that tackles the concepts of tropes and how they can be applied by a DM/GM to improve their favorite Role-Playing game adventures. It is heavily inspired by the sheer goodness of the TV Tropes Wiki.
Description: a DM’s main weapon and canvas to paint the world in which the players cavort.
Wowing the players with descriptions is not always an easy task depending on your natural style (and some DM just drone on and on). But from my own experience, short, enthusiastic burst of descriptions, especially during action scenes, are a winning strategy.
Playing with the following trope is such an approach.
Diagonal Cut
A swordsman strikes an opponent or other object with a mighty blow, almost always on a diagonal — from shoulder/armpit to opposite hip if the target is human(oid). For a moment, nothing appears to happen. A few seconds later, though, the top half of the object begins to slide off the bottom half: through great strength, great skill, the legendary virtue of the sword, or a healthy dose of Applied Phlebotinum, the sword has neatly cloven the object in two with a single blow. If the cloven object is a person, they may laugh for a moment before a shocked realization and the slide-apart.
Here’s a very graphic presentation of the Trope (If you’re in a hurry, forward to the last minute, it’s well worth it):
This is a great way to exploit a player’s critical hit that instantly drops a foe. Take a few seconds to describe how a character’s sword cut through an opponent like a hot knife through butter. Also adding the details on how the 2 halves slowly slides in opposite directions is guaranteed to bring a smile to your favorite butt kicker and Supercool players.
Heck, if a player kills your last ultimate Boss with a Single Stroke, you might as well milk this anti-climatic event for all it’s worth. Do a second by second account of the whole combat round, complete with the hero charging the boss, sword held up high, the moon’s reflection traveling across the blade, and the single stroke, cutting so clean through the enemy that the hero fails to see a wound… . Wait a few seconds, checking your stats, getting your attack dice out, smile and say ‘my turns now’ and describe how the Boss collapses to the floor in slow motion, a bemused expression on his face.
Players often expect the DM to be disappointed when the Boss is killed too easily, and they’re right. Not showing the disappointment and segueing directly to the diagonal cut description will surprise them and lead to very positive reaction on their part.
I pulled that one on Eric the Butt kicker in the last session and he loved it. We were in a fight against a large numbers of mooks and I was trying out the hit point pool variant. He activated one of his crazy Crusader attacks that dealt enough of damage to cover 2 mooks’ hit points. Since he has the Cleave feat, I described, with gestures, how his diagonal cut dropped 2 mooks in one stroke without rolling a second time for the Cleave. His expression was priceless.
Adapting the trope to other type of weapons is also interesting.
- The Arrow/bullet in the eye.
- A Crushing Blow to the vitals that makes the heart stop beating with no signs of external damage.
- An Axe Stroke that cleaves a body in two from head to groin
The possibilities are as numerous as they are gruesome.
Do you have similar examples you used or seen in your games?
There’s the monk, last game, who decided to leap down from the roof onto a Large undead vulture-like bird.
He leapt, rolled some dice, and plunged right through the bird, seeing rib cage surrounding him. The bird fell a couple seconds later.
My barbarian has a habit of destroying mooks like that. As he averages 13-14 damage every strike. (2d6+7+cleave=awesome)
This is cool (and yucky) guys!
You are right, I didn’t expect my astonomical damages (for mooks) to slice through two of them in one maneuvre. THAT was cool to me. Worth the time wasted on fighting mooks. The description you made of it made the difference and enhanced the mental image that I had of it.
This could make some fights just ten times more awesome. I’m a deadlands/D20 Modern player so i mostly rely on gunplay in my games.
Explaining a critical as “The bullet shoots him right through his chest, it ricochets off the metal border of the window behind and hits him again right through the back of his head” makes the whole instant kill thing so much cooler.
Cruguer: I’ll keep on doing it. Coming up with variations on this trope will be my personal challenge. Funny you should call a mook fight useless.. 🙂 But I guess you call this time wasted because they weren’t ‘worthy opponents’ lol!
Seth: What’s cool with this approach is that a critical hit already creates a rush in the player, adding a very graphic description and outlining how awesome the hit was floods the player’s emotion with coolness and satisfaction… This emotional high then makes the player more ‘into’ the game for the rest of the session.