Multi pronged attack

Back in the day when I was running DnD campaigns I would try to have monsters make multi pronged attacks.  I found that if all the monsters were just beating on the characters trying to reduce their HP to zero, the fight wasn't that interesting.  You can have multipronged attacks by simply having archers shooting at the party while melee beaters run in from another angle, but that still lets the party respond in fairly simple ways.

I much preferred making the extra attacks entirely different from the main one.  For example, on monster could be grappling characters trying to swallow them, while the other is reducing their Charisma score.  Is it more of a problem that someone gets chewed on, or that their essence is drained away?  Not an easy thing to figure out!  You can also have enemies trying to execute prisoners, set fire to houses, or any number of other things.  Forcing the party to balance threats that are orthogonal to one another makes for exciting gameplay.

We had an entertaining example of a multipronged attack in my DnD game with Naked Man last week.  We hopped through a portal and were immediately attacked by a group of Shadows, a Ghost, and Wraith.  The Shadows drain Strength, the Ghost possesses people, and the Wraith bashes down.  The Wraith was fairly predictable in that it was attacking our HP, which scales with level.  The Shadows attack our Strength though, and that is a stat that doesn't improve as we level up.  Our defenses against Shadows stay basically the same from level 1 to 20, but since we are higher level encounters contain ever greater numbers of them.

This situation leads to some silly circumstances.  If we encounter the Shadows in a big room, I Fireball their end of the room and they all die instantly.  Trivial encounter.  This time though we were in a tiny space, surrounded on all sides.  The Shadows started draining our Strength and AOE effects were not usable.  We could have easily had someone die on round 1 with nothing they could do about it, against monsters that are rated to be utterly trivial to us at this point.

It ended up that we used a lot of resources fighting off all the undead, but we did win.  The issue is that the battle was so binary.  Both sides can wipe the other out nearly instantly without any recourse.  This just isn't true for other weak monsters like orcs, which have the same difficulty assigned to them as a Shadow, but who are no threat whatsoever to a high level party like ours.

The Ghost gave us real trouble too.  Being able to possess one of our people and fight against us is a devastating blow, especially when we have no idea at all how to stop it.

I love the idea of one monster bashing, one monster messing with brains, and a third group of monsters attacking in another totally different way.  However, I don't know that it worked out as well as we could have hoped.  Being possessed doesn't give you a lot of fun choices.  In a computer game it would be fun, as the player still would control 3 characters.  However, being taken out of the battle with a single roll before you get a turn isn't great.  Nobody wants to sit out a long, intricate encounter entirely.

The glass cannon Shadows didn't work out that well either.  We summoned some critters to distract them, and Naked Man was left with a choice.  He could have the Shadows ignore our summons and beat on us, in which case he probably wipes out a character, or maybe all of us.  Alternatively he could have the Shadows attack the summoned monsters, which pretty much removes the Shadows from the fight entirely.  Neither answer is particularly satisfying, and it comes from Shadows being set up in a binary all or nothing sort of way.  He chose to have the Shadows bash on our summoned critters and we beat the fight.  I think that is the better choice, but he obviously didn't like it.

It is a tricky thing to evaluate.  I love the idea of multipronged attacks, but without customizing monsters to the party it seems quite difficult to make the reality match the fantasy.  DnD has this thing where characterse get better at resisting HP reduction with level, but most other sorts of attacks are just as good at high level as at low level, and that puts encounter designers in a weird place.  If you don't attack HP, your critters are locked into being trivial or deadly, with almost no room for challenging in the middle.