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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5877763" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, funny that you should mention that, Deities and Demigods lists one of her 'at-will' powers as Teleport Without Error. So really, no melee combatant represents even the capability of a real threat to our spidery friend. Even assuming you were to encounter her alone, outside of any location she controls, she has a 100% chance of summoning a considerable number of spiders, so our friend the paladin is going to have a tough time even getting close. She's got a good chance (66%) of summoning up one of a variety of types of demon as well, which should keep our Holy Avenger wielding friend quite busy. While having 66 hit points she's also got heal 3 times/day, so effectively something north of 120 hit points if things are going her way (and with TWA there's no reason she'd not be able to take a round to get to somewhere safe and use that as needed). These (and a long list of others including Confusion) are all 'SLAs', thus presumably not interruptable and available in spider form. If she chooses to manifest her drow form then she's also a 16th level priest and a 14th level wizard, so you can expect a good bit more nastiness.It isn't that melee combatants aren't potentially effective, they are. It is more that whether or not they can do substantial damage isn't necessarily all that relevant. In the vast majority of cases there's simply no chance they're going to decisively defeat beings of Lolth's power level (and she's really rather anemic for a demon lord). If you were looking at say Demogorgon it becomes more apparent, nobody is going to do real major damage to it in one round with a sword.Now, it is interesting to look at how Lolth evolved. In 2e an 'Avatar of Lolth' is pretty similar in powers to the 1e version, but has an AC of -6 and 128 hit points. I think there was some degree of effort to make a wider range of fun interactions with these sorts of monsters, a trend which seems to continue in 4e where hitting Lolth really isn't a huge problem, her hit points are on par with other similar demon lords, and her powers are considerably less on the lines of "you non-casters are boned."</blockquote>

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