D&D 5E When Fiends Attack: Are Balors, Pit Fiends and Ultraloths too weak?

CapnZapp said:

You mean, CRs are largely meaningless when you look at how important the ability to deal damage without looking at how likely the monster is to actually position itself in a space where it gets to actually deal that damage.

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Yes, because representing that ability via a one-size-fits-all numerical statistic is... unrealistic. In the hands of a competent DM, a couple of Goblins can be more dangerous to a level 1 party than an Ogre... e.g. in a dark warren with lots of hidden spaces, that the goblins know well and the party does not. Two or three goblins playing cat-and-mouse could probably ruin a level 1 party's day. Unless perhaps the party has a specific composition that would make it too hard for the goblins to pull this off... unless the environment also takes that composition into account... unless the party has an additional counter to the environment...

The variables go on and on. Take your "Advanced D&D" suggestion, for example (FYI, when the counter resets I intend to add a Laugh to that post, not because I find your ideas laughable or anything, just because the AD&D line elicited a genuine laugh out loud from me.) Your idea of Advanced D&D fits mine... in some areas. But not in others. I tend to expect my party to utilize sound tactics and smart play if they want to survive difficult fights. But I don't like the combat feats (e.g. Sharpshooter makes zero sense to me conceptually and is terrible game design IMO) so I don't currently allow them pending a rewrite, that I haven't gotten around to.

You want AD&D to account for "optimized" characters... but we've already seen in other discussions that your idea of optimization will differ from someone else's. If memory serves, your group centers around maximizing damage-per-round, for example with Hand Crossbow sharpshooting. Whereas, for example, Hemlock's idea of optimization involves something more like utilizing the insane range of Longbow sharpshooting and abusing summoned/animated/hired creatures to screen and control the field.

So which does AD&D account for?

The problem I often have with your posts in these discussions is that you seem to believe that your experiences are universal among people who optimize/play smart/have noticed certain failings in the system/etc. I think it's quite the opposite: once you get into the realm of "Advanced" play, the divergences in tactics, optimization, etc. are actually amplified, so that accounting for all of the possibilities actually becomes less and less possible the more advanced you get.

CapnZapp said:

The complaint is "monsters are generally not given the tools they need to function well in high level play."

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For what it's worth, I do basically agree with this. I don't think the problem is quite the way you tend to articulate it, and I don't think the solution is necessarily what you're asking for... but yeah. High level monsters should probably have a larger suite of abilities/spells/etc. to add some additional utility and flexibility to them.

I think it's an oversight, but also... in some previous editions monsters had a host of abilities that only got used by a small % of DMs. I think they just felt like keeping it simple so those DMs wouldn't feel overwhelmed by the stats, or feel inadequate for failing to utilize all the little tricks at the monster's disposal. They just expect the DMs to add some spells or whatever is needed on their own.

Which... I'm fine with. I know you're not. I hear you. But recognize that a lot of us probably noticed some of the same stuff as you, and just decided to slap on N level spellcasting and legendary attributes to whatever iconic monsters we thought were a bit lacking (Pit Fiends and Balors seem like obvious choices.)

Ugh, this again. The game is written to work "out of the box" for the lowest common denominator and they gave us the tools to tweak monsters and design encounters that work for the table each of us is at. No 2 tables are the same. What is difficult for 1 group is not what is difficult for every group so the game was written with a very low bar and then we are able to easily adjust that bar upwards to fit. The game is 1 size fits all and to make that work it is the DM's job to adjust for a perfect fit. Aside from that, a Balor solo against a fully rested party and a Balor against a party that is several encounters in that doesn't have all of their resources is 2 entirely different fights. You can dislike it all you want but the simple fact is that D&D is a resource management game and is designed for multiple encounters to siphon off resources so a monster is significantly weaker if it is put against a party that can nova.

Step 1: Assess you group.

Look at your group, consider their skill level and play style. Consider their build choices and the party composition. Consider what optional things you are using. Consider magic items.

Step 2: Assess your playstyle.

Do you prefer short adventuring days or do you run 6-8? How tactically do you run monsters? Do you like to build and use terrain?

Step 3: Define your game.

Look at what you learned in assessing your group and playstyle and define what effects it may have. What does the DPR and action economy look like for this game/group?

Step 4: Apply what you have learned to your encounter design.

If your group is larger than standard, optimized, tactical? Account for it by adjusting the monsters HP/AC/abilities, add class levels, add in a few lower monsters. Will your PCs have full resources? Add in extra monsters and legendary actions. All of these things are easy to do and will allow you to adjust the difficulty to match YOUR table.

Step 5: Have fun!

Charles Rampant said:

Friends, Roleplayers, Dungeon Masters,

I was reading the very interesting thread about Balor vs Pit Fiend, and though I couldn't contribute to the intense DPR calculations being made, I found the a minor point in discussion worth spinning out into its own topic. In short, the calculations being made were whether a group of (simple) 9th level characters with potent but minimal magical items could beat a Balor or Pit Fiend in a straight up fight. Now, setting aside the (fairly understandable) decisions made about the party makeup, we get the somewhat startling idea that a Balor will lose to those five 9th level Champions in virtually every fight, assuming that it just stands there and attacks. The Pit Fiend does a lot better, winning 90%. I'm using @Hemlock's numbers here, always a poster handy with the maths. This is before we begin discussing the Ultraloth, who is tailored as much more of an infiltrator, and is very underwhelming if you're expecting him to put the fear of the Yugoloths into a party.

So, that's the preamble: players apparently have a solid chance while in the second tier of play to take down the most powerful Fiends in the game, outside of demi-powers like the Demon Lords who we can ignore for the moment. My question to you is this: is this a problem?

I can see two primary responses, which I invite you to challenge or agree with or just shout Lemon Curry at;

1. The game works best, and is most popularly played, between levels 4-10. Letting the players fight anything in that level range - including Pit Fiends - lets them have any kind of monster as the BBEG for a storyline, adventure, or campaign. It lets the entire contents of the Monster Manual be useful for any group, and reflects actual campaign needs rather than plot concerns which are easy to explain.
2. Ultra-powerful enemies like the leaders of Fiend factions should be terrifyingly dangerous. They should only be faced by the most powerful of groups. In addition, it makes no sense that a Balor can be killed by mid-level adventurers, since it means that they cannot be the 'scourge of worlds' or whatever; any decent sized town could probably kill one.

It's worth noting that many other creatures in the game could be included in the discussion - Strahd does not seem able to kill one hundred adventurers, to be honest, unless they were all level two. Furthermore, we could draw minions into the discussion, but I'd like to focus attention on the boss level Fiends for the moment, rather than rely on having a three-hour swarm combat for a boss encounter. I'm interested in the philosophy of high level Fiends here: is their weakness a problem for the game, or something that enables players to face them when you want them to?

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Need it be established that something is "a problem" before it is changed?

I can't prove that it's a problem, but my preference certainly is for mighty enemies to be actually mighty. My preferred route is not to mess too much with their base stats/attacks/etc. (although I would at least give the Balor a third attack, because only two attacks just doesn't feel awesome enough) but to give them enough spells and magical abilities to be cunning, both tactically and strategically. For dragons, I give almost all of them above Wyrmling status between 1 and 19 levels in Dragon Sorcerer, which is enough to make them extremely mobile and formidable. For Pit Fiends and Balors, I'd basically just give them back all the abilities from 2nd edition. Balors will get at-will Symbol and Teleport Without Error and a handful of other spells; Pit Fiends will likewise get at-will Animate Dead and Suggestion and Advanced Illusion (Major Image in 5E) and Teleport Without Error plus nigh-unstoppable regeneration (IIRC, only holy water stops it, although that might be my house rule--I do remember that Lemures regenerate that way but I can't remember for sure if Pit Fiends officially do too).

What you're seeing here is that I prefer a game where a CR 20 monster is a serious strategic threat capable of proactively shaping the game world in complicated ways: dominating a region, animating undead in all of the graveyards, infiltrating courts and blackmailing nobles into submission or outright kidnapping/replacing them.

5E comes on Easy difficulty by default; I find Nightmare more interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a problem that the game defaults to Easy. AFAIK that design decision is deliberate, and it makes sense--it's more fun for players to know that they're wildly outperforming baseline expectations than to feel like they're just barely keeping their heads above water. If the Balor's stats were identical to today but it were rated as CR 5 instead of CR 19, nothing would change in the game world, but at the metagame level, players who can't beat one would feel awful about themselves for losing instead of justified.

Edit: BTW, Strahd is scary strong if you play him intelligently and ruthlessly (which is totally in character for him too). He's got an insanely high Stealth skill, high mobility including the ability to move through walls in his lair, minions to summon, and regeneration. I don't know where the number "a hundred adventurers" came from, and if I were him I wouldn't try to take on all hundred at once, but it's easy to imagine him succeeding in killing off groups of four to six professional killers ("adventurers") between levels 6-11, many, many times over the years. Perhaps some of them got away (Shadow Monks especially) to tell the tale, but it would have been Strahd who was victorious, and not the professional killers.

Edit2: one reason I like a world with a high difficulty curve is to explain why PCs of levels 6-11 even exist. In a low-lethality world in line with DMG recommendations where eventual advancement to level 20 is assumed, it doesn't even make sense that everyone wouldn't be level 20, since gains accrue so rapidly and reliably. I like a world where rapid advancement has a high chance of killing you off just as quickly, say 90%. Something like this (https://maxwilson.github.io/Beast/AbstractDungeoneering/) is fairly close to my preferred style for a world. In a world like that, many, many NPCs will never get past 6th level, and maybe not even past 1st. Either they die or they retire so that they won't​ die.

mpwylie said:

Ugh, this again.

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I'm afraid that you seem to have answered a different question than the one I posed. I don't care about whether you think your group can fight Balors at any given level. I'm interested to know whether you feel that Balors (and whatnot) should be only high level, or whether being killable from mid-levels is acceptable.

Hemlock said:

...

Edit: BTW, Strahd is scary strong if you play him intelligently and ruthlessly (which is totally in character for him too). He's got an insanely high Stealth skill, high mobility including the ability to move through walls in his lair, minions to summon, and regeneration. I don't know where the number "a hundred adventurers" came from, and if I were him I wouldn't try to take on all hundred at once, but it's easy to imagine him succeeding in killing off groups of four to six professional killers ("adventurers") between levels 6-11, many, many times over the years. Perhaps some of them got away (Shadow Monks especially) to tell the tale, but it would have been Strahd who was victorious, and not the professional killers.

...

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My players exited Barovia without fighting Strahd because I warned them they weren't even close to ready (Levels 9-11). Playing him with any level of intelligence in Castle Ravenloft would of eviscerated them. Example - send in minions, toward end of fight move in and Charm a PC, telling them to kill their comrades, then phasing through a floor. Rinse and repeat. In direct combats give him a 100hp threshold to bug out and phases through the floor, heals up in a few rounds and come right back at them.

Hemlock said:

Strahd is scary strong if you play him intelligently and ruthlessly (which is totally in character for him too). He's got an insanely high Stealth skill, high mobility including the ability to move through walls in his lair, minions to summon, and regeneration. I don't know where the number "a hundred adventurers" came from

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Well, a great many DMs - myself included - find that he dies in a round or two of open fighting, so he clearly can't be that strong. There just isn't time to make use of those abilities if he - as happened in my game - only gets a single action before dying. This was while standing in a large chamber with four Vampire Spawns and a heavily-wounded Rahadin backing him up, and friendly NPCs in the way of AoE blasts.

The line one hundred adventurers is about the graveyard in Barovia Village.

Cap'n Kobold said:

How do the CRs of the big nasties look if you consider them a component in an encounter with a number of other enemies, rather than exposed and on their own in front of a party of adventurers?

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Typically, the CRs do not look better. That is, you can make an encounter with a Balor and a bunch of lesser demons, and it will be much harder than the Balor by himself--but it's going to be an easier encounter than if you converted that Balor into the equivalent amount of XP in Chasmes.

E.g. a Balor, a Barlgura, a Glabrezu, and eight Manes is 87,000 XP, which the DMG predicts is a Deadly fight for a 20th level party. (In reality, it's not.) But if you swap the Balor for six Chasmes instead, the budget cost to 83,200 XP (officially easier) but the fight gets much, much harder. (I have run similar fights. Not easy at all, although part of that is due to my house rules for how Magic Resistance works, which prevents easy solutions like Wall of Force.)

So considering the Balor in the context of large groups of baddies makes the Balor look worse, not better.

Charles Rampant said:

I'm afraid that you seem to have answered a different question than the one I posed. I don't care about whether you think your group can fight Balors at any given level. I'm interested to know whether you feel that Balors (and whatnot) should be only high level, or whether being killable from mid-levels is acceptable.

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Ah, I see your question now.

I like the fact that bounded accuracy makes killing them at low level possible.

I don't like the fact that bounded accuracy makes killing them in straightforward ways at low level easy.

My preference would be for killing a high-CR monster at low level to require some cunning, player skill, and possibly trickery. I would like it if any easy play for killing a Balor had at least one easy counterplay from the Balor, so that you have to engage in counter-counterplay in order to kill him. E.g. since the Balor is extremely vulnerable to armies of archers (including skeleton archers), he should have the option via long-range Teleport to simply not be where the army of archers is. Then the party can only kill the Balor if they can trick him into coming (and possibly staying) where they have an ambush waiting. To me, that is about the right level of difficulty to make the game fun while also explaining why the players can achieve this thing that no one else ever has before, and why no one ever has done it before.

Charles Rampant said:

Well, a great many DMs - myself included - find that he dies in a round or two of open fighting, so he clearly can't be that strong. There just isn't time to make use of those abilities if he - as happened in my game - only gets a single action before dying. This was while standing in a large chamber with four Vampire Spawns and a heavily-wounded Rahadin backing him up, and friendly NPCs in the way of AoE blasts.

The line one hundred adventurers is about the graveyard in Barovia Village.

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This is a bit off-topic, because I do understand your point about the fact that Strahd's abilities don't make him massively tough by default, but:

I understand your perspective, hence my caveat about "if you play him intelligently and ruthlessly." If he's just sort of standing in a room waiting for the PCs to make the first move, that isn't intelligent or ruthless. It can be plausible, but it's the plausibility of "I don't take you seriously as a threat so I'm just going to chat with you," not the plausibility of "I want you dead and I'm going to make that happen." In that case, it's a story of how four adventurers tricked Strahd to death--the "killing" part is actually incidental compared to the part where they got him to underestimate them and meet for a friendly parley. (The fact that he had bodyguards there is really incidental.)

Every time I've heard a story about Strahd dying ignominiously, it's been a story about a straight-up fight.

The only way for Strahd to "only get one action" when he actually gets thousands of actions in a day is for him to waste all of his actions except the one right before he dies, if you know what I mean. Consider for example what happens if Strahd simply conjures up a horde of chaff like wolves, orders them to attack the party from one direction, turns himself invisible with Greater Invisibility, and then attacks the party's rear while the front-liners are busy killing the wolves. Either charm someone or else grab someone (like the cleric) with your grapple and then use your extremely high mobility (thanks to Legendary Actions) to drag him out of easy support range of the rest of the party, e.g. behind the corner of a mausoleum. If the party reacts in an unexpected way (keeping a tight formation so that you can't conveniently isolate a PC; or responding instantly with ranged cantrips as soon as you grab someone) then drop that strategy and Hide instead; you can always come back later with reinforcements, possibly while the PCs are asleep.

Strahd's single greatest asset is his crazy-high Stealth, which combined with regeneration and mobility let him pick his moment.