• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

D&D 5E Are vampires and their spawn kinda anemic for their CR?

They are plenty strong if you don't play them like idiots. They hit and run, stealth around, send minions, sneak attack, and are capable of lowering max hp. It also has a not-so-easy-pass charm dc, and the capability of blending in with summoned bats. Plus some other fun stuff, and with the lair actions to make sure it all goes off quickly. Lastly, remember these are 17 INT, and should have no problem picking off or targeting the weakest member of the group first.
 

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It's worth remembering that a full vampire has Stealth +9, regeneration and up to 150' movement per round. They have the potential to be incredibly annoying hit-and-run monsters. Imagine the vampire popping up every few rounds, charming another PCs, and then escaping with legendary actions.

I've used a full vampire twice. The one time, the party monk stunned it with Stunning Strike repeatedly, and that was all she wrote. The other time, it was a semi-friendly vampire whom the players opted to negotiate with instead of fighting, and it sort of allied itself with them for a time (causing long-term problems in the process) before getting killed by a dragon. I suspect that without a monk, the fights would have gone fairly poorly. You need a way to lock it down, and that means stunning/paralyzation/grappling is mandatory unless you have a damage nova so huge that you can kill it in a single PC's turn, which frankly you probably can't, at least at level 7 and 8 where my players fought it. I suppose at level 13 you probably could: GWM Polearm Master Mounted Combatant Devotion Paladin with Str 16 and Cha 18 plus Sacred Weapon active for example could be doing avg.4.10a?d10+13+6d8=157.82 on average in a single round, or avg.4.8a?d10+15+6d8=179.40 on average if he had Magic Weapon IV active. (Plus, the vampire's Charm gaze won't work around the paladin.) That vampire would be in for a nasty surprise if it gives the paladin even a single round to prep.

But then, by level 13, a CR 13 monster is no longer supposed to be a real threat--it's just a Medium encounter. For lower-level characters, a vampire is pretty scary.
 

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