D&D 5E How to tear a pc's arm off?

[adam_antio]

Why people are so against lich pcs? it's not like he's ruining the game of something. On the contrary, that session was one of the most dramatic we ever had! As the DM, I was just preoccupied with this particular dragon. I have hordes of magic weilding, acid breathing, psychic damaging monsters to throw at him

@psikelord
I'll check on the lasting injuries rules, thanks!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It came to me that a smart dragon would try to (innately) cast silence and tear/chew off hands and arms to disrupt a Lich's spellcasting.

That's not how a smart dragon would think, in D&D Land. A smart dragon knows that it's easier to kill someone outright than it is to sever a limb in the heat of battle.

Given the specialized experience of this dragon, it would make sense that it has solved this problem long ago. In 5E terms, it has learned an ability that allows it to bypass magical damage resistances, and it fights liches with full effectiveness. Otherwise, it would not have been as successful as it has been. Whether this ability is a result of special training, or a magic item, is a matter to be decided by the DM.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

The silver dragon has a buddy who is a gold dragon, who does him a favour. Turns up in human form, becomes a follower or announces himself a fan, or even acts as Harmless Plot Device Quest-Giver - whatever, gold dragon arranges to shake the lich's hand and BAM transforms into a dragon and flies off with his arm in his gullet, but not before he breathes on the lich's face. Cue silver dragon with his frosty breath to finish him off while the lich is Stunned at the loss of his arm, eyebrows, and lips. Dragon fu.

 

[adam_antio]

Nice try. The Lich has Truesight.
[MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]
Yeah, I think some kind of turn undead is in order.

 

[Uchawi]

You hire a Battle Master NPC and shout it off!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm pretty sure I read something somewhere about a dragon's physical attacks being considered magical weapons for the purposes of bypassing mundane weaopn resistance/immunity...maybe I'm confusing 5e with my own homebrew again...

Some monsters have "Magical Weapon Attacks" in their stat blocks. Onis, for instance, count as attacking with magical weapons no matter what weapon they're using. If you wanted to give all dragons this quality I wouldn't object, but in vanilla 5E they don't have it AFAIK. (AFB.)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Why people are so against lich pcs? it's not like he's ruining the game of something. On the contrary, that session was one of the most dramatic we ever had! As the DM, I was just preoccupied with this particular dragon. I have hordes of magic weilding, acid breathing, psychic damaging monsters to throw at him

I'm not against lich PCs.

I think the people that are against lich PCs are very concerned with balance and wanting to run a low-level game. My experience tells me that including a lich PC in a 6th level party completely changes the party's threat profile and makes it much tougher than a standard 6th level party--a similar thing happened in my game, to a lesser degree, when I gave a PC trollish regeneration in exchange for 4 stat points and 1000 gp, which would let that PC power through certain kinds of encounters without expending any resources at all. DMs who are really focused on "balanced encounters" per the DMG tables will get very upset about such things because the DMG tables will no longer work at all. As far as I'm concerned, those DMG tables don't work in the first place, and it's easy to bump up difficulty, and my game isn't really combat-oriented in the first place, so it's not a big deal.

I suspect that any DM who likes the idea of lich PCs will have no difficulty coming up with suitable... interesting adversaries/foils for the PCs. E.g. an arch-Wild Sorcerer wearing a werebear body via Magic Jar, and his bodyguard the Oathbreaker Paladin. Not to mention those magic-wielding acid-breathing psychic monsters you mentioned.

 

[steeldragons]

Interesting thought for future story/plot points...you realize this PC is going to be a laughing stock among actual [level 18+] Liches, right?

"Let me get this straight...You don't even know the incantation to Dimension Door or Banishment and yet you became a lich?! I have mastered the mysteries of the cosmos and traveled the infinite planes for the passed two and a half centuries! I may have to kill you now."

 

[adam_antio]

Yes. In fact, there's a whole court of powerful undead (a dracolich, a vampire, a death knight, a death tyrant, and an actual lich) that will be way pissed off when they hear about this wannabe death lord

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

"Let me get this straight...You don't even know the incantation to Dimension Door or Banishment and yet you became a lich?! I have mastered the mysteries of the cosmos and traveled the infinite planes for the passed two and a half centuries! I may have to kill you now."

Pshaw. Sethra Lavode sneers at "two and a half centuries." Try 17+ Cycles, 230,000 years and counting.

D&D players have such an American idea of what "a long time" means. ;-)