Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 267 - Should you Counter PC Abilities

Episode Date: December 28, 2025

Description Today we dive into the age-old debate that divides Dungeon Masters: When do you negate a powerful spell or maneuver? We explore the thin line between creating epic tension and causing frustration. Tune in to discover the crucial difference between an earned victory and a slog, and learn the rules of engagement for challenging your players in the most satisfying way.   #rpg #ttrpg #dnd #pathfinder #gmtips #playertips #tabletop #roleplaying #Countering Resources: Episode 135 - The Rule of 3 Episode 64 - Beholders, the Eyes Have It Buy Me a Coffee! - ko-fi.com/taking20podcast www.taking20podcast.com  Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/taking20podcast  Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/taking20podcast  Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/taking20podcast.bsky.social

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. You look at the monsters or Big Bad's ability list, and you have the perfect counter to nullify that player's choice for their character. But the Lizard folk mage has a counterspell prepared. You smirk, and ooh, the temptations there, you can nullify their spell and give the players the shock of the night. Thank you for listening to The Taking 20 podcast. episode 267, asking if you should counter your PC's abilities. I want to thank this week's sponsor, gift wrapping. If you don't wrap your gifts before you give them out to the people that you love,

you're making your presents known. First and foremost, no matter what holiday you celebrate, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, winter solstice, boxing day, Bodie Day, Festivist for the rest of us, whatever it was. I hope you had a very happy one, ate some good food, and spent time with loved ones, whether it was family, friends, or whomever you hold dear. What makes my holidays happy is that you're listening to this episode. Thank you so much for downloading and listening.

That being said, I owe all of you an apology. All the way through recording the last episode, I thought I had never done an episode on the rule of three. I announced it to be the topic of this episode. I started writing it, getting examples, and it all sounded so familiar. Yeah, that's because I covered it in a large part in episode 135. I could have recycled that episode and called it a day, but I really wouldn't have felt great about doing that. Instead, I bumped the episode I'd planned for early next year

to this episode slot, talking about DM's countering player abilities, should you, and if so, win. It's 3.15 in the morning. I have a terrible cold. I've been up all night with insomnia. I'm all jacked up on caffeine. I'm on jacked up on Mountain Dew! Let's do this thing.

We've all been behind the screen. One of your players lets loose with their favorite ability, a powerful spell, a combat maneuver, a class ability, whatever it happens to be. You look at the Monsters or Big Bad's ability list and you have the perfect counter to nullify that player's choice for their character. They cast fireball and are already celebrating

and picking up a whole mess of D-6s to roll damage on your lizard folks. But the Lizard Folk Mage has a counterspell prepared. You smirk and ooh the temptations there. You can nullify their spell and give the players the shock of the night. Or maybe the PC's strongest fighter is amazing in melee, but the monster that found their camp can fly for an unlimited amount of time and never has to get into melee.

Do you frustrate the fighter player by staying just out of their reach? This is one of the most fiercely debated topics among DMs and GMs out there. and it's high time I weighed my two cents in on it. First things first, do I counter player abilities? My too short didn't listen answer would be yes at times. I don't do it every fight. Hell, I don't even do it every time the situation arises where my batty could counter it.

But I do counter it when it makes sense to me in the moment. Okay, Jeremy, that's just vague-ass advice. You're right, but just because it's vague doesn't mean it's not good advice. Let me explain. Obviously, not every enemy should be able to counter PC abilities at all. That's not realistic that the wolf happens to be wearing a collar of anti-magic, or every opponent is immune to trip, or something equally is insane. Most creatures the PCs will face won't have the ability to counter,

even if they had the intellectual capacity to realize what the PC's common tactics are. There are no carrion crawlers sitting around sipping tea saying, I say, Reginald, I hear the latest group of adventures. to darken our hole in the ground to have lesser restoration memorized and they can undo our paralyze abilities. I'll droll. No, they have an intelligence modifier of minus one.

They're barely intelligent monstrosities with no appreciable high brain functions beyond sea prey, eat prey. It's not like they have a sign up in their carrion crawler living room that says eat prey love or live, laugh, sting. Sorry, I keep thinking about carrion crawlers on the couch, watching Starship Troopers and rooting hard for the bugs. Yes, let's watch that part where the guy gets bitten in half again.

That's absolute cinema. Not only will every creature PC's face not have the ability to counter the PCs, but I'd argue that even the vast majority of creatures that have the ability probably shouldn't use it most of the time. Let's use an extreme example to illustrate why. I remember a Reddit post a few years ago where a player was complaining that the DM countered every spell the party cast. every bard and cleric spell completely nullified by DM baddies.

Can you imagine what that would feel like from a player perspective? Clerics and barbs get most of their ability out of the classes via spells. Every bless getting bane, every spell getting counterspelled, every hypnotic pattern fizzling out, every vicious mockery silenced. Having that happen once in combat is frustrating. Round after round spell after spell would make me want to. to snap my dice tray in half.

That being said, occasionally countering PC abilities really make for satisfying moments behind the screen. When the fighter charges into melee with their giant hammer and hits the stone gullum with a satisfying critical hit that doesn't do much damage or maybe even

any damage at all, or when the fay creature just misty steps out of the way, the look of shock, and dare I say it, a flash of oh shit, now what, fear on their face is just, That's delicious. The occasional counter ratchets up the tension of the fight,

and I think it really reinforces the You're not fighting in Kansas anymore, Toto, Roll Initiative. Couple countering with intelligent tactics, minions or lieutenants in the fight, and baby, you got an epic combat stew going. Again, the key word in that previous paragraph is occasional. I think most of the time PC opponents won't have the ability to counter, so it's a moot point.

Even if they do, you should use it very sparingly. Okay, Jeremy, so when should I counter PC abilities? I think there are three and a half situations when you should consider countering PC abilities and spells. What, three and a half? Yeah, you heard me. Listen to the rest of the episode. The first situation when you should consider countering PCs would be when the PCs are fighting the big bad, the major villain, the boss, whatever term you want to use for the powerful creature at the end of an adventure.

Boss battles or Big Bad battles could be an entire episode all its own, and reach out to me if you'd like to hear more about that, by the way. In short, these final combat should feel different from standard encounters. Big Bad should be more than just hit point sponges which turn combats into a slog. Big Bad should be tougher, smarter, more capable, and have a plan for countering the PCs if they have even half of a hint of an inkling that the PCs may become a problem. They should have contingencies in place to counter both marshals and spellcasters.

The PC's frontline fighter likes to use pole arms? Great, they'll try to negate the reach advantage. The PCs have a lot of range attackers, then they or their minions will close to melee to try to minimize that advantage. Big bad combat should be more difficult than regular combats, and one of the ways you make combats more difficult is that you use Big Bad's and minions' abilities to counter the PC's strongest, or most commonly used abilities either directly or indirectly. Yes, the Big Bad could, and I would argue even should, be able to directly counter the PCs in some ways.

For example, a Spellcaster Big Bad could have counterspell prepared for the party's best spells. Put yourself in the shoes of whoever the Big Bad is. What would you do if you knew the party had a high-level sorcerer? I mean, you'd be ready for them, right? They tend to rely on fireball, disintegrate, or ice storm, or whatever. Good. Be ready to directly counterspell it or indirectly have some magic item to mitigate the damage they could cause.

The same logic can apply to the second time when you should consider countering abilities, which would be high-stakes encounters. Jeremy, those are the same thing. Aren't boss battles and high-stake encounters the same thing? Not necessarily. Generally, boss battles are high-stakes encounters, but not all high-stakes encounters are boss battles. Look, there are a ton of casters out there that love spells like flame strike, fireball, scorching ray, flaming sphere. Oh, what? We roll initiative and I have the highest of initiative and all the baddies are all grouped up?

Fireball it is. No judgment here. That's good strategy. But if you were the intelligent crime boss or hobgoblin king or druid of swarm, destroying the town's crops or the wayward execution or whatever the boss of your campaign is and you know that the sorcerer has fireball, why the hell wouldn't you invest some of your gold in a ring of fire resistance? Or have a dozen archers in the balconies trained to shoot arrows at the robe figure as soon as he starts going hamina, hama, hama, hama, and waving his hands. Never lose sight of the fact that the big bads want to survive and continue doing their thing, whatever that thing happens to be.

They would intentionally prepare the battlefield in such a way that they have the best chance of walking away. This level of intentionality, by the way, makes the final combat more epic. It feels that way. You're justifying the villain's status as a threat that the players have been working so hard to overcome and ensuring that they are truly worthy opponent

of all that player effort. Sorry, to continue an earlier thought, by the way, not all high-stakes encounters are boss battles. Imagine if you have one of those fireball-slinging wizards, and the enemies know that's their preferred tactic. If they have a chance to set the battlefield, what if they put it somewhere where the populace is highly concentrated and ever-present, like a big city or inside a tavern? That fireball may damage the opponents, but it would likely take out some innocence as well. Unless your party is a 10 out of 10 on the murder hobo scale, they'll probably think twice before slaughtering half the town when they don't have to. The baddies may choose a place where fire damage can be absolutely crippling to the party or to the people that hired them.

The goal in designing these encounters, by the way, is not to frustrate the players. It serves to push their creativity and resource management. When the enemy has a clear counter for a player's favorite or most powerful ability, like a flying creature against a melee fighter, it forces the entire party to pivot and utilize a broader variety of solutions, tap into an arsenal of spells and class features, maybe ones they've always had, but just neglected, because it's just like when you have a hammer,

everything looks like a nail, when you have a fireball that solves most of your problems, you tend to rely on it. I get it. By challenging the player's most common tactics and draining their resources, you are encouraging creative problem-solving by your players and asking them, without saying in so many words,

yeah, you have a favorite solution, but elevate your game, do better. come up with something else. When they do, it makes the victory so much more meaningful and so satisfying when they achieve it. It feels like it was earned through wits and teamwork, not just a standard, easily repeatable battle strategy they use over and over again.

Now, here's one important caveat to big bosses countering PC abilities. They should just have a few counters, not an infinite number of them. This restraint is crucial to prevent the boss fight from becoming an adversarial, slog where the DM is actively working to nullify every player contribution, or simply turning the combat into unrewarding round after round of, nope, can't do that, nope, you can't do that either.

Ha ha, ha, I knew that was coming, you can't do that. While an intelligent villain should certainly be prepared to negate a couple of the party's most reliable tactics, they should not have an automatic response to every single action. limit your boss's arsenal of counters to allow the players to eventually outmaneuver the villain and come out on top, but they've got to work for it. The third time you shouldn't be afraid to counter PCs would be when a counter would be logical in the moment or natural for the creature. For example, beholders in D&D have an anti-magic ray that comes out from their central eye.

That's a 150-foot cone. This cone is one of its more powerful abilities and only inactive when the beholder decides it so. I mean, if you're a beholder, you're fucking smart, you got an intelligence of 17 or plus three modifier depending on your game. You know there's a spellcaster there, because I mean, look at the robes. If I were a beholder, I'd leave that ray focused directly on that spellcaster that can either cause me damage or keep the other creatures alive who are trying to kill me. I mean, the only downside is that the beholder eye stalks don't work inside that cone, so I'd only look that central eye away from the sorcerer when I wanted to hit it with a paralyzing or petrification ray.

If that didn't work, then that spell slinger MFer would get a full dose of my central eye until either they were dead or I was. I talked at length about beholders, by the way, in episode 64, they're one of my favorite big bad monsters for a variety of reasons. Give that episode a listen for more of my thoughts on running these aberrant, wonderful monsters. Anyway, some creatures have natural counters to play your abilities, and you shouldn't Nerf those in general. In Pathfinder 2E, for example,

air elementals are immune to bleed damage and being paralyzed. If your party makes its hay with bleed damage and effects, then so be it. Don't make this air elemental start to bleed just to make it easier on the party. This just may be a tougher fight for this particular party. The same level party

that didn't rely on bleed damage may have a much easier time of it. The examples of creatures with resistances and immunities to type of damages are nearly endless, and these can counter PCs preferred solutions to encounters. Pre-remaster Pathfinder 2E, by the way, I loved bringing out, I think they're called Galugans or Ice Devils, against the high-level parties when it made sense. Most PCs who had never encountered them thought, oh, ice devil, right, let's set it on fire.

Logical? But there was an oh-shit moment when they dropped a fireball right on it, and it took zero damage because it's immune to both cold and fire. It's not going to drop those. immunities or resistances to make it easier on the party, the Galugan is immune to those damage types, and it's just part of what it is. So you can design an encounter in such a way that enemies are naturally resistant or even immune to the PC's primary spells and favorite tactics. Not every enemy would be like this, but occasionally? Absolutely. Finally, the half reason. I debated even not saying this, because it sounds like you're cheating or at minimum being a dick about it. There are times when PC ability should be countered or not work to save the narrative of the game.

Consider a D&D or Pathfinder game where it's an undead invasion. Most settings that use D&D and Pathfinder are high magic, meaning magic users and clerics and magic items are more or less readily available. Even smaller towns will have a few clerics who can channel divinity, make holy water, three-action heel, channel energy, cast divine lance at will, and so on and so on and so on, that can drop undead like wheat in a field. A dozen skeletons rise up?

Sure, three clerics have to head out there and they're done in a few rounds and everything's back to normal. A big town like Waterdeep, they could field entire battle formations of clerics by the score, dropping undead or turning them to bunch them up for the town mages

to burn them to a crisp or force them off a cliff or whatever. A D&D game that was set in the Night of the Living Dead would either be over quickly or become a prolonged siege, one or the other. Sorry, this thought was off the cuff and it really got me thinking about it. Unless the undead were spawning all over the world simultaneously, I think any sort of apocalypse like that would be short-lived.

Sure, there could be some sort of apocalypse like the Starfinder 2E world of EOX, which has a fascinating lore, by the way. I can't leave it there. I tried, I really did, I'm sorry, I'm a lore junkie. The planet of Eox was a lush and beautiful planet housing a race called the Elybrians. They had rival planets called Damiar and Eiovo, and the Elybrians built a super weapon to destroy the planets of their hated rivals. Good news! It did turn their rival planets into asteroid field, destroying them utterly.

But the backlash from the weapon turned their entire planet into a radiated, undead hellhole where only the non-living can survive. I suppose if there was some sort of negative energy event where only things that could survive outside of certain pockets were undead you could have a zombie apocalypse and a high magic system but anyway I'm done chasing this rabbit now and I'm going to get back to the real episode so the half reason would be to preserve the narrative of the campaign for example maybe the only way to cure a disease that the king's child has

is with a special flower that's rare or hard to come by so the PC's quest to find the flower and holy shit, I think I just wrote the beginning of the movie Tangled. By the way, the song and animation for the mother knows best from that movie lives rent-free in my head eternally. King's Child has a disease? Why the fuck doesn't a high-level cleric cast remove disease, lesser restoration, greater restoration, cleanse affliction, or whatever, and just make it go away?

Yeah, that's probably what would happen if these magic's real. I'm King. I have a shit ton of gold to offer the high priest. of Illmator, come remove the disease, and we all live happily ever after. But if you do that, PCs have no reason to adventure. So, in this case, the disease can't be cured the usual way. Why? Because it's part of the fucking story. Without this counter, the story is 15 seconds as the cleric teleports in, removes the disease, takes the hefty donation to the church home. The end, no point in even having a gaming session. Sometimes things need to not work just so we can

have a story. One of my favorite stories behind the old movie Armageddon was one of the stars Ben Affleck told the story in an interview where he asked the director Michael Bay, why is it easier to train oil drillers than it would be to train astronauts to become oil drillers? And evidently, Michael Bay told Ben to shut the fuck up, and that was the end of that talk. For the movie to happen, oil drillers had to be trained to become astronauts, not the other way around, even if the reverse would make more sense. All this being said, there are Two caveats I haven't yet mentioned. I've already said that countering player abilities can feel adversarial,

but it can also slow the game down. Usually PC's favorite tactics are their most effective, most damaging, most crippling to an enemy. And if you counter them, it will make combats take longer, forcing the party to use less damaging or less effective abilities. Keep that in mind when designing your encounters, by the way. Finally, countering when PCs heal other PCs should be used with it. extreme caution.

Most tabletop RPGs are built around having constant healing ability. I mean, yeah, there are exceptions, Delta Green, Callif Thilu, etc. Most high fantasy games like D&D and Pathfinder build their entire encounter system and game design around having healing abilities readily available. You should only counter healing abilities with extreme caution. Countering powerful attacks, sure, makes combat feel difficult. Regularly countering healing abilities can create heart. hard feelings are on the table and can make a standard encounter lethal in a hurry.

So as rare as countering is, you should really, really be extremely cautious before you ever counter a PC's ability to heal. To summarize, should you counter PC's abilities? Sure, at times. Countering should be done occasionally and sparingly to increase tension and encourage player creativity rather than as a source of constant frustration. Consider countering abilities when the players are fighting a big bad who would be smart and prepared, via the way you set up an encounter during a high-stakes non-boss battle encounter,

when a counter is logical to the moment and or natural for the creature, or the half-reason when you need to preserve the narrative of the campaign by temporarily at disabling simple solutions that would otherwise end the story prematurely. Be selective and creative when you counter PC abilities, and if you do, I'd be willing to bet that you and you, your players would have fun doing it. Thank you so much for listening. I'd like to use your feedback, either via social media or email, feedback at

taking20 podcast.com. What topics would you like to hear me cover? Is there a particular tabletop news item that you'd like me to discuss? Please send me a message and let me know. Tune in next episode when it'll be the first of the new year when I get to revisit an old subject because I've got some new thoughts on it, villain design. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Gift Rapping. Now that the holidays are over, I hope that the rest of your year wraps up nicely.

This has been episode 267 talking about countering PC abilities. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is Copyright 2026 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the host. References to game system content are copyright their respective publishers.