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

[Avi Public]

Perhaps the Tarrasque is more dangerous than some people give it credit

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/203923

 

[Celtavian]

I've come to the conclusion that the designers have decided that there is no way to build monsters capable of challenging all parties. So they created a bunch of bare bones creatures with some starting ideas and made it very easy to modify nearly any creature to accomplish what you want it to accomplish. There's a lot of interesting design options in the Monster Manual with base creatures, legendary actions, and lair actions. It's up to an individual DM to build them to do what they want them to be able to do. You have a variety of options to accomplish this end. Someone like Flamestrike likes modifying the environment. Someone like myself likes modifying the base creature. Someone else may combine the two options or combine the creature with enough assistance to make up for its weaknesses or make the encounters non-combat with some other means of defeating the BBEG. You have to take these base creatures and all the ideas in the MM and DMG and build encounters that create the type of challenging experience you want. 5E has its weaknesses, but they have given us sufficient tools to create challenging encounters, even if it's not possible to do so with creatures as they are in a neutral environment. I'm starting to adjust to the new paradigm and let my creative juices flow when designing encounters. It's much easier to rebuild creatures than any edition of D&D I can recall. That is definitely a designer intended feature. And it works.

 

[CapnZapp]

If what makes Stradh effective is running away and attacking players later when they are alone perhaps wiping their asses he is a loser, the worst villain ever.

Harsh... but true

 

[CapnZapp]

I've come to the conclusion that the designers have decided that there is no way to build monsters capable of challenging all parties. So they created a bunch of bare bones creatures with some starting ideas and made it very easy to modify nearly any creature to accomplish what you want it to accomplish.

Alternatively phrased:

"I've come to the conclusion that the designers have decided that there is a way to get away with not spending the effort to build monsters capable of challenging all but the softest, newbiest of parties. So they created a bunch of lowest-effort lowest-denominator bare bones creatures with some starting ideas and offloaded the entire monster design finetuning process entirely on individual DMs and then just spun those cost-savings as something good for the consumer"

It seems to have worked. I just wish they were called out on selling considerably less work as the same title.

The "it's easy to modify" excuse only goes so far. We who want to pay money not to have to do things ourselves, we who actively enjoy the officialness of an official take on things, we still need WotC to step up their game and offer much more thoroughly developed products.

So far, I'd say their biggest success is the Player's Handbook, followed by Curse of Strahd. Their biggest failures is the Monster Manual, followed by the pale shadow of Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, aka Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

Just because I generally like 5th edition doesn't mean WotC gets a pass when they don't meet minimal expectations. On the contrary, in fact. Had the core game been shiite, I would not have bothered telling my mind regarding product that are either subpar in themselves, subpar compared to previous editions, or both.

Thank you.

 

[Helldritch]

Every time I see such a thread, my heart misses a heart beat.
The game is fine as it is. I feel nothing wrong with modifying it to your own needs. In fact, I do modify it myself.
Let me tell you a small story that happened to me last weekend at the hobby shop.

A "young" DM was complaining with the shop owner that Strahd was too weak. His 9th level group slew him. Coincindentally, I just tpk one of my group the week before and I was buying a few mini for the new group that would start CoS the following day. I stepped in the conversation and asked some questions.
1) Feats, multiclassing, Flanking, Hero points, Inspirations... in short almost every options in the rules were used. (just like in my games).
2) The encounter with Strahd was the only one in the day, Strahd location according to Madam Eva was in the chapel...
3) Party composition was 9th lvl battlemaster, 9th lvl life cleric, 9th level Wizard, 4th level rogue/5th lvl ranger and 3rd lvl warlock /6th lvl paladin (don't ask me...)
4) They did that without the quest items like the sunsword and icon of ravenkind. (I was surprised)
5) They attacked during high noon...

After a short time, they said that I could not slay them using standard rules. To make the story short, I accepted the challenge, and 4 hours later, Strahd was standing above them, laughing as the last player was slain by simple vampire spawns saying:" You dared entered my domain and acted like the worms you are. You will be a nice addition to my slaves." Yes he was in the chapel. But he never stayed static. I rolled everything in the open and never cheated a single roll.

All this to say that the monsters are as hard as you make them. 5ed is a bit bad on the BBEG side but only if it is a 5mwd. 3.x and 4th edition were great on BBEG/5mwd and it created some play style that old timers like me learned to work around to create a better balance using the rules themselves. Celtavian is right (in my opinion) that the designer created bare bone creatures for 5ed. Nothing in the rules prevents you from giving optional powers to monsters if the characters have optional powers themselves. What is good for one, is good for the others (in this particuliar case).

5ed does not prevent us from creating and adapting monsters. In fact, from the looks of it, I do think that we are encouraged to do it. Optional casting for dragons, optional summoning for demons and many other references show us that this is expected. Check what Dave2008 is doing in this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?519681-5e-AD-amp-D-Monster-Manual

It is realy good work. And you will have a chance to coment and help.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Van Helsing also strikes when he has the advantage and he is a normal human being. On the other hand players are very powerful not the blood bags of movies, they can be as stealthy, cunning, strong, etc as Stradh.
If what makes Stradh effective is running away and attacking players later when they are alone perhaps wiping their asses he is a loser, the worst villain ever.

Really? You change his stats to something that will put an optimised party at risk of a TPK while doing nothing but make basic attacks while bouncing axes off his face for 3 rounds? - What do you think that statblock will do to a normal group when you play Strahd like Strahd?

 

[Celtavian]

Alternatively phrased:

"I've come to the conclusion that the designers have decided that there is a way to get away with not spending the effort to build monsters capable of challenging all but the softest, newbiest of parties. So they created a bunch of lowest-effort lowest-denominator bare bones creatures with some starting ideas and offloaded the entire monster design finetuning process entirely on individual DMs and then just spun those cost-savings as something good for the consumer"

It seems to have worked. I just wish they were called out on selling considerably less work as the same title.

The "it's easy to modify" excuse only goes so far. We who want to pay money not to have to do things ourselves, we who actively enjoy the officialness of an official take on things, we still need WotC to step up their game and offer much more thoroughly developed products.

So far, I'd say their biggest success is the Player's Handbook, followed by Curse of Strahd. Their biggest failures is the Monster Manual, followed by the pale shadow of Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, aka Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

Just because I generally like 5th edition doesn't mean WotC gets a pass when they don't meet minimal expectations. On the contrary, in fact. Had the core game been shiite, I would not have bothered telling my mind regarding product that are either subpar in themselves, subpar compared to previous editions, or both.

Thank you.

I don't know about you, but I've never had a version of D&D/Pathfinder where I didn't have to heavily modify creatures to challenge my players. It's a bit disappointing at times creatures of such power aren't designed well enough to challenge a party, but it makes sense. Given the breadth of the game with all the possibilities for each party, it's very hard to create one size fits all challenges. If you know you can't create one size fits all challenges, it's often best to build to challenge a very average group of new players rather than try to build encounters to challenge a very advanced veteran group that's been min-maxing game systems for years.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Really? You change his stats to something that will put an optimised party at risk of a TPK while doing nothing but make basic attacks while bouncing axes off his face for 3 rounds? - What do you think that statblock will do to a normal group when you play Strahd like Strahd?

Isn't that the point, though? You shouldn't need or want to play him like Strahd, if playing him like Strahd means that he slinks around in the shadows and only attacks when you're trying to sleep. Because an enemy who does that is lame, and not awesome, and we want Strahd to appear awesome.

I recall this same conversation going on, with dragons, a while back - how a big red dragon can't even burn down a small city, because the archers will kill it before it can even kill a hundred peasants, with the counter being that the dragon is way too smart to ever attack a city head-on.

 

[CapnZapp]

Really? You change his stats to something that will put an optimised party at risk of a TPK while doing nothing but make basic attacks while bouncing axes off his face for 3 rounds? - What do you think that statblock will do to a normal group when you play Strahd like Strahd?

This still does not change the basic fact that a regular party (not superminmaxed but not carebear either) absolutely demolishes Strahd as written, and how disappoint this is.

You can argue "play Strahd like Strahd" however long you wish. This still does not change that a monster needs to be judged on what is in the statblock.

A DM should not need to burn braincells just to keep the BBEG alive long enough for a climactic end battle.

Nothing wrong with burning braincells, just that it's a huge negative if its mandatory as you say (and I'm convinced you're simply making stuff up in order to avoid having to concede the Strahd statblock was way too weak)

Which gets us to the bottom line. Why not simply accept that the stat block isn't good enough?

Whether you compensate by laborious tactics or by changed stats isn't the most important issue. You compensate. Which is less good than not having to compensate. Where running devious tactics is a luxury you can afford to spice up your game instead of *having* to do it. Where you don't *have* to change the stat block... unless you want to make the fight even more tricky.

Let's first agree SOMETHING needs to be done about how the WotC designers seemingly fail to take regular parties into account, like they wrote the adventure using playtest rules or something.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Isn't that the point, though? You shouldn't need or want to play him like Strahd, if playing him like Strahd means that he slinks around in the shadows and only attacks when you're trying to sleep. Because an enemy who does that is lame, and not awesome, and we want Strahd to appear awesome.

I recall this same conversation going on, with dragons, a while back - how a big red dragon can't even burn down a small city, because the archers will kill it before it can even kill a hundred peasants, with the counter being that the dragon is way too smart to ever attack a city head-on.

It's all about which you find cooler: brute force or skill.