5th level characters vs a purple worm

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Oofta]

There is certainly a significant possibility of the purple worm eating someone, so if it's something you want to avoid, I'd say substitute out a different monster or have it pop out, eat a horse (or camel) and run away. After all there's no reason for it to stick around if it's had a meal.

If you want to run it, it could be a pretty terrifying and deadly encounter. The worm should effectively burst up out of the ground from nowhere, get something to eat and retreat underground. Repeat until full.

But ... it is a predator. If it starts taking a significant amount of damage it will probably just run away. There's no reason for it to fight to the death. Then the problem becomes: what if someone was already swallowed? Well, there is the regurgitate effect. You could tweak the worm so that if it takes any damage it needs to make a con save, if it takes 30 points in a round, or simply if it takes 30 damage from anywhere. In addition, if multiple people are swallowed it regurgitates them all (the selective regurgitation is a bit odd).

Good luck!

 

[Quartz]

Don't forget that an encounter can be seeing one in the distance. Just have the guide say, "Sandworm. Very dangerous. Detects food by sensing motion. Have the camels lie down and be very still."

If they fail a roll, have one of the camels get spooked, run off, and get eaten.

 

[Stalker0]

Yeah I will say the Party can easily get tpked on this one.

The bite will take one pc mostly out of combat, and the poison has a good chance of dropping a pc outright (possibly killing if they are already really wounded). Between the two attacks, you should expect to have a pc drop out of the combat each round.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

However, in researching this post I noticed they increased the speed of the 5e purple worm to 50ft (basically double that of 1e's 9").

Eh, wouldn't that be 90ft in 1e? Seem to recall 1"= 10ft.

 

[Jester David]

Here's the thing: not every encounter should be a fair fight.
I'll repeat. Not every "encounter" should be a perfectly balanced encounter designed so that the PCs have a 90% chance of victory.

It's good to have the occasional fight where the party has to spend ALL their resources just to survive, even if not win. Where the win condition is just escaping or distracting the opponent rather than beating it over the head. Where the party has to react and think creatively rather than just attacking. Or even turn to diplomacy.

 

[Rod Staffwand]

Eh, wouldn't that be 90ft in 1e? Seem to recall 1"= 10ft.

That's exploration distance over 1 minute. For combat movement over a round I think you divide by 10 or 3 or pi. Or do you employ the Quadratic Formula? I haven't run 1e in ages, but I do occasionally flip through the old modules. Anyhoo, I do know humans have a base speed of 12" in 1e, which means 12" = 30 feet in 5e terms.

I do think the likeliest scenario is that the worm strikes from below, eats someone. Everyone else attacks it. It eats someone else. Everyone else runs away or is eaten. Sounds like 1e to me.

However, the fun-loving DM will just have it eat the water and food carrying pack animals, stranding the PCs in the middle of the desert without either.

 

[Quickleaf]

I recently picked up 5e conversion PDFs for the classic Desert of Desolation modules. Most of the conversion makes sense to me, but one thing that seemed odd is that they did a straight 'use the 5e monster stats' for purple worm encounters. The first Module is for levels 5-7, and the 'typical' 5e party size is 3-5, and a purple worm is a CR15 monster, which makes it seem like this a TPK waiting to happen to me. In 5e I haven't played much at higher levels or Dmed yet, so I don't have a good feel for how these things work, so I might just be underestimating just how much higher level characters can dish out. I wouldn't have a problem with giving the players a really tough fight (especially since this would happen when they have no time pressure), but I wouldn't want to just wipe them out with a hopeless fight.

The old 1e purple worm wasn't nearly as dangerous (especially the 6-8 size party assumed in 1e) - it had a straight 15 d8 hit dice instead of the d20 with con bonus it gets now, so something like 75 hp vs 250, and a much lower damage output. Being swallowed did automatically kill you after six rounds, but the current damage output looks like it would kill most characters at that level in 2-3 rounds. It also had a 'save or die' tail poison in 1e (because 1e loved save or die), but wouldn't be able to use it against a party.

Old modules like Desert of Desolation had an ethos that's absent from many modern adventures, and that ethos was: There's always a bigger fish, and sometimes the wise adventurer runs away to live another day.

The 5e DMG has (mediocre) chase rules, but I'd have those on hand for a purple worm encounter for 5th level PCs, adapting them for a flight & pursuit situation.

AFAICR, purple worms were borrowed from Dune's sandworms with a limited tremorsense and limited burrowing. At least that's how I ran them in AD&D. Generally there were clues of a purple worm's presence before encountering it – mounds, wormwrithings, excrement, etc. And in my games they were mostly drawn to large creatures (smaller prey not being worth the effort) or very heavy footfalls, so stealthy parties could avoid triggering an encounter entirely. If you got outside of its tremorsense and circled, the worm could lose track of you. If you reached really hard dense rock, the worm would be unable to burrow through that. Finally, they only had medium morale (12 I think), so reducing one to half hit points or so should be enough to drive it off.

 

[Umbran]

It's a random outdoor encounter in all 3 modules, nothing to do with the plot at all.

Ah. Not all random encounters are intended for you to fight and win. Sometimes, you randomly encounter things that you are supposed to then avoid at all costs.

 

[Henry]

Here's the thing: not every encounter should be a fair fight.
I'll repeat. Not every "encounter" should be a perfectly balanced encounter designed so that the PCs have a 90% chance of victory.

It's good to have the occasional fight where the party has to spend ALL their resources just to survive, even if not win. Where the win condition is just escaping or distracting the opponent rather than beating it over the head. Where the party has to react and think creatively rather than just attacking. Or even turn to diplomacy.

Under most circumstances I'd agree, but since we're talking about a random encounter that (if I remember the Martek portion correctly) just pops out of the ground/glass and starts snacking, it should probably be modded in some fashion to avoid a no-win kill-a-character-or-three moment. Now, if it's modded as a "cutscene instance" like [MENTION=40552]Quartz[/MENTION] describes, where only major stupidity would get them killed, that's not too bad, and gives them the idea of the danger level if caution is not observed.

Speaking to my own DMing style, I don't like to set up encounters where my players have to use all their resources to survive unless it's part of the main mission they're on. Because we have limited game time, any random encounter that 50/50 could be a TPK I avoid, because it would feel like a chump move, if a moment's tactical mistake or bad roll causes hours worth of reset while we either roll new characters or start a new campaign. I try to aim for more Firefly or Seven Samurai and less Walking Dead/Game of Thrones.