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

[FormerlyHemlock]

How is Five Beholders and fifty the same threat. Even a group of like 30 pcs would get crushed by that.

It's because five beholders will absolutely shred anything they can target. If you can kill five you're doing it from long range or by surprise or from an antimagic/obscured region, or else you'd be dead, and those same tactics scale up to fifty. Contrast with liches, where every additional lich adds new wrinkles and exponential difficulty. Beholders are slow and tactically narrow on their own.

They do however make good boss monsters for mooks. Five beholders and twenty hobgoblins is way tougher than ten beholders.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The random thing should be chucked out. 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.

There's no conflict. The aim isn't random. The only thing that's random is which eyes activate this turn. So what if it takes a little longer to dig because you're waiting for a disintegration ray? The tunnel still gets dug.

 

[KarinsDad]

There's no conflict. The aim isn't random. The only thing that's random is which eyes activate this turn. So what if it takes a little longer to dig because you're waiting for a disintegration ray? The tunnel still gets dug.

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.


The Computer Programmer analogy of this is:

Computer Programmer: "Yeah, I don't know which finger is going to type a key next, but I know it will be one of the ten. I can usually get a line of code written every 15 minutes or so, but it's mostly trying to get as many fingers as possible on the backspace key when they screw up."

The Beholder analogy of this is:

Beholder : "Yeah, I don't know which eye is going to fire off next, but I know it will be one of the ten. I can usually get a minion charmed every 15 minutes or so, but it's mostly trying to Fear all of the candidates back into the lair when I disintegrate, or finger of death, or flesh to stone one of them and they all keep running away. It's worse than herding cats."


Having an iconic D&D creature do random attacks is just plain silly. The issue is that the earlier Beholders had a type of facing. Just reintroduce that.

Assign the 10 eyestalks to 10 arcs of attack.

Use a 12 sided die. Numbers 1 to 10 results in 10 specific spells where each Beholder has them randomly selected. But once selected, they are permanent.

Numbers 11 and 12 are the AntiMagic ray eye (or if you have a 12-sided that does not have 11 and 12 next to each other, pick two other adjacent numbers for the antimagic ray).

This way, the Beholder moves in and might get 5 or 6 rays on foes, but typically only one or two on any given foe. Or if it is at long range, it might only get 2 rays total. Orient the Beholder any way you want and elevate it to get good angles of fire, but fire all of the rays simultaneously (which prevents the Beholder from shooting all 10, or alternatively some other max number, but the best ones).

This has another advantage. There is no random dice rolling (and associated waste of time). The DM orients the 12 sided "Beholder" die and whichever rays face whichever PCs, those are the ones that can fire (note: they can fire, they do not have to fire).

This type of solution also makes sense. If the Charm Person eyestalk is facing backwards and the Beholder wants to keep its antimagic eye forward, then the only thing it can do against a foe behind it is Charm Person (or possibly one of the other semi-rear facing stalks on occasion).

 

[Celtavian]

There's no conflict. The aim isn't random. The only thing that's random is which eyes activate this turn. So what if it takes a little longer to dig because you're waiting for a disintegration ray? The tunnel still gets dug.

Make it stop. Make it stop, please.

I feel like I'm being attacked by an intellect devourer.

 

[Celtavian]

Sigh. Then Darkness is pretty well irrelevant, isn't it, since the beholder never gets to act anyway. So why did it take you until this thread to realize how weak beholders are? You mocked the idea of multiple beholders in play at once, but you didn't actually run the analysis to know how strong they really are. Apparently you are still not seeing their other weaknesses or you wouldn't be harping on the Darkness thing like it was an Achilles heel instead of one glaring weakness out of many.

Face it, beholders are niche monsters. Quantity is almost irrelevant. Five beholders and fifty beholders have almost exactly the same strategic threat profile and capabilities.

in 5E they do, this wasn't the case in 3E/[/I]Pathfinder[/I]. 50 beholders firing all their rays in a coordinated fashion (as they can do in those systems) as touch attacks was quite nasty. I know you didn't play 3E/Pathfinder, so you're not aware of what touch attacks are, they made hitting much easier against many targets.

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.

The problems with beholders in 3E were the same problems with all solo monsters: hit points and AC. PCs could do a lot of damage very quickly due to crits and action economy. A beholder couldn't bring his eye rays to bear before he died. His eye rays weren't random. He could fire at invisible targets the same way an archer or anyone else could hit invisible targets. A 3E beholder was an intelligent and powerful monster capable of working in a precise manner. That is what made them as formidable as they are. They were a giant floating brain with lots of eyes that could fire rays they controlled. They were very hard to surprise because they could see in all directions at once. You couldn't much stealth up on them. They often employed magic items and were a powerful enemy once you took care of the solo hit point and AC weakness.

I will look the beholder over and write it up the way I need it to be when I run one. I'm already boosting hit points at the moment getting a feel for what a party can do. 5E parties are quite powerful. I'm fairly surprised how strong they are, especially classes like the ranger. I'm seeing a similar solo creature AC, hit point, and action economy weakness in 5E. I have more tools to take care of that with Legendary and Lair actions. I need to ensure I design both with the idea of limiting party action economy if I want them to work as they should.

 

[Celtavian]

Beholders have really high Passive perception they will see a party coming. How do the Warlock and the guys kill the Beholder before it goes?

How is it weak. Seriously tell me. Even including the Random aspect.

By RAW they can't target a creature they can't see. Even if it wins initiative, it can run 20 feet a move, so up to 40 feet in a round. So the warlock and his crew show up in the darkness. Warlock has Devil Sight 120 feet. He unloads on the beholder while standing in darkness. Archers move in and out of darkness firing arrows with the warlock telling them where it is. Warlock is getting advantage on all his attack rolls.

So the beholder gets to do nothing to the warlock and his crew if they stay in the darkness, they get to unload on him, the warlock with advantage. That is how it is weak.

Even maybe collapsing the ceiling on to someone might take a while given it has to randomly roll disintegrate eye ray and hit an area where the DM determines that works for that tactic to function. Imagine you didn't roll the right ray for your planned tactic. Then you have to role-play the beholder saying to itself, "Damn. Wrong ray...wrong damn ray again...son of a...charm ray. I need a disintegrate ray and I can't figure out how to get it to fire." Can you imagine as a DM role-playing a beholder in that fashion?

If you run it by the RAW of course, which I hope you would not do it.

 

[Celtavian]

The random thing should be chucked out. 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.

As for tactics against a darkness sphere? Aim anti magic field at it, drop 300 pound object on target from above the field. Disintegrate floor from under target. Disintegrate roof supports. Dig a vertical tunnel and don't let the giff close in the first place.

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.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Because the anti-magic eye affects the beholder's own eye rays, as explicitly outlined in the MM entry.

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.

 

[kerbarian]

I agree with many others that this is a great time for "rulings not rules", and I think it's perfectly reasonable to interpret the beholder's combat stats as a simplification of its behavior, to be adjusted by the DM if appropriate.

However, if you want to stick with RAW, the first thing I'd think of would be tricky aiming on the part of the beholders. If they're super-intelligent and aware of their own weakness to darkness, they'd be ready to deal with it. If they see a globe of darkness, they can compute its exact center (great stereo vision!) and aim their central eye to just clip the source of darkness to turn it off. Leave the bearer's head or legs outside the cone and the beholders obliterate the exposed parts with readied actions. Or at worst they'd leave a single giff immune and be able to target everyone else.

If you're talking about one giff going in solo and decide that the beholders can't manage any cheesy aiming tricks, I'd hope they could hover out of grappling range, disintegrating space to do so if necessary, using disintegration and telekinesis to make it very difficult to climb after them. And they can use the help action to help another beholder break free of a giff's grapple (which should be at +2 rather than +0 I think -- you can use dex or str when trying to escape).

 

[kerbarian]

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.