Ranged Monster Attacks

[IvenBach]

Just played through the first quest with friends and have some questions. True to form my two friends that played HQ long time ago with me threw out the cock block door jamming strategy. The group went right towards the room with the 2 chaos warriors first. Normal combat, that is walking into the room and attacking ensued until they saw the 2 in the room. At that point they made the formation (grey is hallway & white inside room)

			Cupboard-1	Cupboard-2
	:dwarf:
:barbarian:	Hallway/Door	Door/Room		:chaoswarrior:
	:elf:		:chaoswarrior:

It was either wait for the wizard to catch up and them to make way for him to attack from a distance or walk into the obvious hollow and let them wail on him. They naturally killed it when it walked in and hit the dwarf for 2. With the 1st killed it was the dwarfs turn and she (female was playing him) walks in to see where I hid the other Warrior, to the left of Cupboard-1 so only 1 person would be able to hit it. She moved to where the Chaos warrior started on the third row. I moved the Warrior to the square to the right of her to allow only 1 extra attack. Sadly the barbarian came in and killed the Warrior.

The same thing happened again with Verag where they stuffed the door with Dwarf on one side and Barbarian on the other. I forgot to put in the but I'll just put him somewhere else on the map as they only explored the bottom 3 rooms and middle. Same tactic but I decided to let the orcs have ranged weapon and shoot at them to make them come into the room. Sadly they killed the orcs and Verag without any problem.

How do people here deal with gameplay tacticians? I'm thinking about just giving the monsters the ability to switch weapons as an action. I'll still reserve the right to choose what they have initially depending on MP of the heroes and how soon it'd be before/if I could retaliate on my turn. I'm never going to be able to convince the group to 'go in and attack' so I have to come up with a variant allowing me to avoid cock blocking the doorways. The other option I came up with is simply making them double doors but that may turn into a problem. I can't blame them but makes it impossible to hurt them to any real extent especially when they are going to pool all their gold and pimp out the barbarian asap.

Overall went well so far. Don't ask me how but they are pulling all of the gems/gold out of the treasure deck and nary a monster to be seen. I toyed with a spell variant allowing the spell to be kept if on the red d6 the number rolled was less than the number of element spells currently used. And wouldn't you know FML the Elf (another female player) chose fire and just kept rolling 1, 2, or 3 and kept reusing Ball of Flame. Anyone have in suggestions as to how I can make more threats? I'll wait to hear and them give some more suggestions that I've in mind.

[knightkrawler]

I use Descent double wide doors where I see fit.
There are many many other solutions and tactics. Can't point you to specific links but they are all over the place.

[chaoticprime]

Don't have the enemies march out the doorway. Have them step out from line-of-sight. The rules specify which attacks work through doorways, and how. The door blocking strategy should never, ever, work.

Give gargoyles 2 hits (if on the same Hero, they still only get one defense roll), give fimirs either ball of flame, sleep, or rust--chosen at random. Utilize traps. Monsters dont set them off. Have monsters run away from heroes and then stop behind a trap. Stack the treasure deck in your favor--alternate between hazard, gold and monster cards; each is an even third of the deck.

One thing I like to do is tempt them with wasting their resources, like offering them a deal on an expensive weapon when they start talking about buying more armor.

[IvenBach]

I know what you mean. It becomes very anal retentive about gaming when they stack the doorway. If I do hide in a corner or go out of LoS then they pile into the room and end up taking them out while it's still the heroes turn. I just figured on simply adding more traps/secret doors allowing monsters to use them to set up ambushes.

I am probably going to stack the deck in my favor. I have 3 full treasure decks and I don't think they'd notice but say something like 'man we keep finding all the monsters'. I'll start pumping some of the boss monsters to give them more BP and Combat Dice.

[chaoticprime]

You should also have enemies gang up on one character at a time. Since you know what character have which potions, consider that when choosing whom to attack. You can fool heroes into using their good potions against lesser threats this way.

[IvenBach]

I plan on doing that. Right now it's hard as only one character exposes themselves at a time (the rest stay fully clothed). I'll take down whoever is the weakest to start off and do as much damage as I can. I've formulated a few good ideas but will have to see how they pan out next time we play. May be a couple of weeks with classes having started.