evilbob
Explorer
This is completely random and pretty much unrelated, but I just had to share: several years ago I was running a high-mid level 3.5 campaign and I had planned a huge encounter with mindflayers. Iconic as hell D&D villains, right? Totally awesome idea, right? I hinted at it all over the place for weeks, maybe months (because seriously, those guys are walking TPKs) and finally we came to the huge, dramatic battle - hours and hours of planning on my part for this great D&D moment!
Well, it sucked. In fact, it worse than sucked: it was boring. I don't know if anyone's ever fought these guys, but here's how they work: they stun the living crap out of you. Then, they kill you. There's no "fight" per se; you go from full to dead in a few failed grapple checks. Except of course everyone knows this, so they do everything they can to avoid being killed instantly - but mostly, everyone just gets stunned. So you end up with round after round of "oh, is it my turn again? I'm still unable to act, right? Yeah I'll go back to not paying attention then." It was easily the worst battle in the campaign, and it was supposed to be one of the coolest.
Of course, I'm not even going into the multi-hour (no joke) buffing session that happened right before the battle that already had everyone bored and frustrated from having to completely recalculate all their stats and spell slots and ... well anyway, high-level 3.5 sucked.
But more important than that, I learned that massive battles where all the players are stunned repeatedly is never fun for anyone. Just like renau1g said.
