D&D 5E Beholder hunting: nasty counter-tactics to Darkness?

[MonsterEnvy]

Once you chuck out random, the beholder regains some of its frightening aspect again. Further write in that firing at an unseen target only grants advantage on the save, you're back to scary beholders. Though you may need to up AC and hit points depending on party size.

Just the 2nd part is fine. I asked you how were they weak ignoring darkness. Even with Random Eye Rays they are still scary

The clearly trying to take advantage of chesse darkness is just pointless as you said any sane person will just make it so that they get advantage on the save.

Anyway RaI always beats RaW in my opinion so the darkness thing is just not a problem to me.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

And I'm still wondering how a bunch of blind giff are finding their way across a room, let alone finding floating beholders they can grapple....

(BTW, that has nothing to do with the edition.)

 

[Celtavian]

Oh. That's dumb. I guess I've been playing it wrong all this time.

Wait, what is even the point of the antimagic eye, then? I thought the whole point of the beholder is that it disables your magical stuff and then shoots lasers at you. That's what's scary about it. If the antimagic eye disables its own eye rays, then when is it ever going to use the antimagic eye? Unless the DM is all like "the wizard's on the left, so it'll just look at the wizard with the antimagic eye and shoot lasers at the fighter", but that requires way more tactical minutiae than I want to put up with (and depends on how much control it can be assumed to have over the precise edge of its peripheral antimagic vision...). I think I'm going to keep playing it my way, but that's a houserule.

Anyway, as for the present dilemma (beholder vs. darkness RAW)...

As a DM, how would I adjudicate this situation? Well, what would you expect if it was a movie or whatever? Something casts darkness around itself... and the beholders just shoot a ton of lasers into the darkness until the thing dies.

The description explicitly says that the beholder "shoots rays." I will not accept that it can't shoot them wildly into darkness. That's what lasers are for, as far as I'm concerned. So, forget the "it can see" clause. I see this as less of a houserule, and more like errata, since the rule is obviously broken and needs a fix. I guess I'd have the characters in the darkness make two saving throws: One to see if they're even actually hit by the ray, and if they fail, they make a second save to resolve the ray's effect (so, if they succeed on this second save, they still take half damage or whatever).

The other option that occurs to me is that the beholder can open its antimagic eye, point whatever eyestalks at the now-visible target, then close the antimagic eye a split-second before firing.

Usually the beholder uses its anti-magic eye to neutralize casters while killing their buddies. Or to support powerful physical minions. You open and close the eye between attacks.

 

[Charles Rampant]

Would you then be tempted to have it open the anti-magic eye, locate a target in Darkness, then close the eye and fire other rays at full effect? I wonder if a group of players might not regard that as applying different sets of rules for themselves and for the enemies. On the other hand, it goes a long way towards preventing most gimmick tactics from working, right?

 

[fuindordm]

When I read the beholder entry, I took the random rays as an abstraction of facing in a fluid combat situation. Of course they can be non-random out of combat.

To mitigate the randomness, I might let the beholder spend its move action to "reface" then pick whatever rays I wanted, or a bonus action to make a minor facing adjustment and pick one of the rays.

Or if I was feeling simulationist, then I might just diagram the beholder's eyes and use the actual stalk positions relative to a figurine's facing.

As for the OP's tactics question, any super-genius creature will have a way of mitigating its most glaring weaknesses. Human beings are squishy, so they make steel armor and weapons. Beholders have to see things to be effective, so they have strong light sources everywhere and a supply of emergency flares on the ship to dispel or suppress magical darkness (Daylight bombs). Maybe not in every room, but after the invaders use their Darkness tactic a couple of times the remaining beholders will trot out the countermeasures.

I also always liked the concept of a beholder wizard who destroys their central eye to be able to learn and cast non-eyestalk spells. I forget which 3E supplement came up with that one--but the ship might have one of those on board.

The ship structure is another good point. There are probably a couple of areas where servitor races can walk around, but the beholders' exclusive area should look more like a scaffolding than a deck plan. To move around it humanoids have to climb thin structures, and are especially vulnerable to having these supports disintegrated. The beholders can afford to disintegrate quite a few of these before the overall structure weakens significantly.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Longer to dig? That's silly.

When a rule is so bad it requires an explanation like this, it's time to replace the rule.

Clearly you're not following the argument. The argument presented was:

"It undermines most of beholder lore, which relies on them selectively using specific eye rays for effects like boring out lairs, charming minions, operating levers etc. In fact the beholder write-up specifically mentions digging with disintegrate."

In short:

I. The MM lore specifically says they dig out lairs, charm minions, etc.
II. Random eye-rays prevent them from doing any of that.
III. Ergo, random eye-rays need to go.

I just pointed out that (II) doesn't hold.

All you're doing, KD, is saying that you hate random eye-rays for other reasons. Fine, do what you want, but it has nothing to do with the post you quoted. In fact, why not start your own thread on the subject instead of cluttering up this one?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I hadn't yet run a beholder in 5E. I assumed they would be extremely formidable in 5E given they're on the cover the Monster Manual. You would think a monster they feature on the cover the core monster book would be badass. At least I would I think that.

Oh, I see, you were reasoning from lore instead of from stats.

I'll grant that beholders were much tougher in some prior editions, not always because of changes to the monsters themselves but often as much because of changes to the rules and the rule paradigm. 5E is extremely mobile, so monsters which are slow are at a disadvantage when they come out in the open. Magic resistance is gimped to the point of near-uselessness, and most special abilities are limited to medium-range at best (e.g. 90' for ancient dragon breath weapons).

In AD&D 2nd edition, Iron Golems were far tougher and immune to almost all spells, Pit Fiends and Solars had immunity to non-magical weapons (Solars required +5 weapons to hit! Now you can kill them with nonmagical weapons), Mind Flayers had 90% magic resistance, the Tarrasque would scare anything with fewer than 7 HD that could see it (unlimited range), dragons had lots of spells and magic to spice up their game, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. If you want to maintain the lore of older editions you'll have to rewrite the MM extensively.

In AD&D, taking on a crashed shipful of beholders probably would be a suicide mission--you'd never accept that mission no matter how much gold was being offered, you'd just stand off at range and kill them with catapults once their ship crashed. In 5E it's a bit different.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Oh. That's dumb. I guess I've been playing it wrong all this time.

Wait, what is even the point of the antimagic eye, then? I thought the whole point of the beholder is that it disables your magical stuff and then shoots lasers at you. That's what's scary about it. If the antimagic eye disables its own eye rays, then when is it ever going to use the antimagic eye? Unless the DM is all like "the wizard's on the left, so it'll just look at the wizard with the antimagic eye and shoot lasers at the fighter", but that requires way more tactical minutiae than I want to put up with (and depends on how much control it can be assumed to have over the precise edge of its peripheral antimagic vision...). I think I'm going to keep playing it my way, but that's a houserule.

Traditionally (in AD&D), the point of the anti-magic ray was pretty much what you identify in your second scenario: you use it to segment the party into magical and non-magical segments, and then you mostly ignore the non-magical region while your eyestalks tear the magical region to shreds. It's similar to how PCs in 5E use Wall of Force: in and of itself it doesn't do much but it allows divide and conquer tactics.

That kind of segmenting doesn't work as well in 5E IMO due to the extreme mobility of 5E PCs, e.g. wizards can now move in the same turn that they cast spells, so if any party member is vulnerable to eye rays, other PCs can just move to the same spot and zap the beholder from there. In 5E, the main use of the anti-magic ray that I've found is to protect minions. A beholder with a dozen hobgoblins is really nasty to fight in broken terrain: you can't Fireball them due to anti-magic, and if you bring up a Sharpshooter or something to kill them, he's always at risk of being checkmated by the beholder's alpha strike. And you can't just kill the beholder in melee through Darkness because the hobgoblins will be hitting you instead for 80-100 points of weapon damage per turn.

In short, the anti-magic eye adds versatility. There have in the past been beholder variants which can shoot through their own anti-magic regions, but I would raise the CR on those significantly (CR 16?) and give accordingly more XP.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hmm... another thought: Darkness is blocked if its source is completely covered. If you use telekinesis to throw a huge cloth at the darkness and completely cover the bearer, can you then target a creature under a big sheet? Seems like you must be able to, or beholders would also be vulnerable to Halloween ghost costumes

And clearly these intelligent creatures would know of their weakness and have prepared their lairs and ships with plentiful giant cloths to defeat the Darkness spell. This is, of course, getting ridiculous, but that's often what happens if you take RAW to its logical conclusions.

Thanks kerbarian. These are the kinds of ideas I was looking for when I started the thread.

 

[iserith]

What might also be cool is that the ship's bulkheads or doors that separate one section from another are walls of force. Some are naturally on the floor or ceiling since beholders can fly. They're always on (except those malfunctioning due to the crash) and wink out when a beholder uses its central eye. So if the giff are roaming the ship and walking across these walls of force, a quick glance from the beholder turns the floor into a pit trap, potentially throwing the darkness to a lower level.