Total Surprise – House Rule

Although this may come back and bite me in the ass and I have to reduce or remove it, because of an ecounter I’m planning, which I’ll post here when it’s done, perhaps today, tomorrow if not, I’m going to try the below as a house rule.  The encounter has the chance to try to take out solo sentries.  Under the standard combat system there is simply zero to almost zero chance for anyone to take out a sentry without that character being able to sound the alarm.  Which in some instances isn’t very cinematic at all.

So, the below at least gives them a chance to possibly take out a sentry without a sound.  The intent of course is to allow the ranger/warlock to snipe the sentry or the rogue to stealth up behind it and gank it. It only works for a single attack and never if the target is on alert much less in combat.  So I don’t think it’s going to be horribly exploitable and provides some incentive I think to try for the sneak attack.  We’ll see how it goes.

And yes I know you could just make all sentries Minions but that’s not necessarily the way I want this particular encounter to go, most of the minions will come in waves after the fight starts.

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Total Surprise – In the event that a character takes another character by complete surprise i.e. the target is unaware there is any danger,  then the first attack against it (includes attacks that have multiple attacks per power) automatically does critical damage on a successful hit. Â  In addition the target is stunned (save avoids). Â  If the target takes its bloodied value or more damage from the total surprise attack it suffers a -5 penalty to the save to avoid being stunned.