Here's the Abyssal Sibriex From Mordenkainen's Tome

This....thing...is....AWESOME!

 

[darjr]

""Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?""

Yea, that was a simple bug hunt. After all, they fell like flies. Meat for the grinder.

How many space marines survived?

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

This is one thing I miss about 4e. When someone would write something like this, all you had to say was "what part of lurker don't you understand?"*. In 5e, you have to hope the commentator has enough system mastery to understand that, a) even though they don't use officially use monster roles in 5e, they certainly do have underlying roles (unless you really want to try to convince us the lich is supposed to pick up a battleax to fight the PC's and not cast a spell; if so, please do, I could use the laugh), and b) what those roles are.

In short, Stahd is a lurker and Sibriex is a controller. Neither one is a soldier to soak up PC damage. If either was one, it would clearly be built that way.

* I suspect this accounts for half the reason Pathfinder is going with monster roles for PF2....and honestly, even if WotC didn't want to assign any mechanical values to them, they could have saved us a lot of trouble by including the roles as keywords.

Yeah, except pretty much everything in 5E is a "lurker" because virtually nothing can take a pounding outside of a few corner cases (fire giants) that seem almost like they were included by accident rather than nerfed to wuss levels. Moreover, lurkers are a deeply unsatisfying thing to fight. No one likes a bug hunt, and they're tiring to run. There sure as hell aren't any solos, because nothing has the raw defenses needed to stand up to a party without also having too much offense.

Building monsters to role was one of the best things about 4E once they improved the math. It's a shame they caved to the "minions hurt muh v-tude" crowd. Now we have most everything be a two thump chump but with the needless hassle of tracking 17 different HP totals for the fodder to pad the encounter. I've worked around it, but doesnt mean I wont gripe about the design

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Yea, that was a simple bug hunt. After all, they fell like flies. Meat for the grinder.

How many space marines survived?

The bug hunt meant it was an irritating series of hit and run fights. Which arent fun, but more or less what 5E monster design points toward. Plus it's not like I'm magically smarter than 5 of my friends combined after I've been mentally drained from running all night just because the monster has a 20 in it's Int stat block.

 

[Dausuul]

That can be valid, but then the Abyss needs to be pulled out of the multiverse, and should have any spot on the great wheel.

Why? It works fine where it is. Everything it does makes perfect sense given its place in the cosmology.

Uncomprehendable horrors from beyond our existence are hardly from beyond our existence if they are a quick jaunt from a big city, and no farther than the realms of faeries, angels and astral ninjas.

All of the Outer Planes are "beyond our existence" for regular adventurers in regular settings. They are the distant realms beyond the Astral Plane, the dominion of gods and demons, the resting place of the dead.

It's only "a quick jaunt from a big city" if you're in a Planescape campaign; and the whole point of Planescape is to imagine a world where those "beyond" places are everyday reality. If you're just going to turn around and introduce "beyond the beyond," why bother?

 

[darjr]

The bug hunt meant it was an irritating series of hit and run fights. Which arent fun, but more or less what 5E monster design points toward. Plus it's not like I'm magically smarter than 5 of my friends combined after I've been mentally drained from running all night just because the monster has a 20 in it's Int stat block.

But you are. You know all their strengths and weaknesses and dreams and nightmares and plans. Is this really such a problem? I guess so. For me it isn’t really. And the feedback I get lately is all the many tpks. Especially in Tomb. He’s not meant to be the tetherball set, throw those in, around and in front of him.

 

[PrintableHeroes]

Where did the chains come from? Why does it have chains? Is it chained to the.. ground? How does it move? If it's as old as the Abyss itself who made the chains? Gah, so many chain related questions for this thing...

 

[Rossbert]

Where did the chains come from? Why does it have chains? Is it chained to the.. ground? How does it move? If it's as old as the Abyss itself who made the chains? Gah, so many chain related questions for this thing...

Didn't you read this month's DQ (Demon's Quarterly) chains are THE fashion accessory right now. You ain't caught in an endless battle for dominance of an infinite expanse if you don't have chains.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

But you are. You know all their strengths and weaknesses and dreams and nightmares and plans. Is this really such a problem? I guess so. For me it isn’t really. And the feedback I get lately is all the many tpks. Especially in Tomb. He’s not meant to be the tetherball set, throw those in, around and in front of him.

Without it coming across as petty, metagaming or cheating? Yeah. You get a pretty slim margin of error on something like Strahd. He dies when the party connects with him. If they had included narrative rules that reversed the party's plans, negated their actions etc (basically a free form wish) sure. But much like that 66hp Lolth in Queen of the Demonweb Pits, all that goes out the window the moment someone has a readied action or beats your initiative. Basically I run any major encounter on "hand wavium" and hope my party doesnt notice or care.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Yeah, except pretty much everything in 5E is a "lurker" because virtually nothing can take a pounding outside of a few corner cases (fire giants) that seem almost like they were included by accident rather than nerfed to wuss levels. Moreover, lurkers are a deeply unsatisfying thing to fight. No one likes a bug hunt, and they're tiring to run. There sure as hell aren't any solos, because nothing has the raw defenses needed to stand up to a party without also having too much offense.

Building monsters to role was one of the best things about 4E once they improved the math. It's a shame they caved to the "minions hurt muh v-tude" crowd. Now we have most everything be a two thump chump but with the needless hassle of tracking 17 different HP totals for the fodder to pad the encounter. I've worked around it, but doesnt mean I wont gripe about the design

I think "brute" is probably more accurate than "lurker", since not many of them are that sneaky. I will admit 5e is light on soldiers, though, which is an overreaction to 4e. As for bug hunts not being fun, I think if we counted up all the complaints of "bags of hit points" (even if we went Big Data and only counted one complaint per complainer), it is clear that there are a lot of DM's (if not players) are looking for more interesting options then "monster sits here and lets the PC's pound on it." If every Big Bad fight was a bug hunt, then it would be just as bad, but Strahd is just about the only "bug hunt" in AP's: we have had a lot more controllers and groups of brutes, and for the former, the goal is "grind the PC's down with flunkies", and for the latter, it is "grind the PC's down with other high level brutes" (fight enough demon lords or elemental princes in short order....). Of the top of my head, there aren't a lot of iconic high level lurker types left unless they are going to bring Zehir back as a big bad of an AP.

The problem with the white room is that it assume that the PC's have completely imposed their strategy on the monster, while in the red room (where the monster has completely imposed its strategy on the PC's), the sibriex never even gets with 500 feet of the PC's until they have been monkey piled by its 100's of flunkies, and it is time to turn them into wretches. In my opinion, it is a poor DM who lets either room dominate the final fight: one is boring and the sign of a DM who doesn't respect the players by giving them a memorable (challenging) fight, and the other is sadistic.

 

[dave2008]

Yeah, except pretty much everything in 5E is a "lurker" because virtually nothing can take a pounding outside of a few corner cases (fire giants) that seem almost like they were included by accident rather than nerfed to wuss levels.

To be clear I am an advocate for more HP, because I like certain monsters to have lots of HP (heck I have 2 threads of beefed up monsters in this forum), and I am a lazy DM sometimes. However, with the group I am DMing at the moment it would be overkill. They are actually challenged by the MM monsters as is. If I throw monsters with 2x the HP at them I would have TPKs all over the place. That is the difficult thing, the same monster can be easy for one party and a TPK for another. There is just a huge range of possibilities with PCs (and DMs) that the outcomes can very wildly.

Now, I don't know which group is more common, but I'm guessing WotC does.