NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9092310" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I remember the days when powerful Fiends had a host of spell like abilities that were mostly there for flavor.  Sure, a Marilith can use Animate Dead to crank out some zombies, but if you're fighting a Marilith, a zombie shouldn't be much of a threat to you (yes, yes, I know, you could come up with a trick or distraction using zombies, but really, this is a window dressing ability if a Marilith is just gated in to fight you).On the one hand, you can use abilities like this to explain how a Marilith would take over a city or be a threat to more than just the PC's, but you don't really need a curated list of abilities.  I remember a really nasty adventure in Dungeon where a red dragon has equipped fanatical kobold minions with beads from a Necklace of Fireballs to run up and suicide bomb the PC's.  How did the dragon get all these Necklaces?  Not important to the adventure.If you want your Marilith to have an undead army, they have an undead army.  There's any number of possible explanations that make sense for the campaign outside of "well they have animate dead as a power".I'm not saying there's no value to such abilities, but when you load up a major enemy with spell like and psionic powers that it probably will never use, that's bloat.  Like, I miss spellcasting dragons, but I fully admit that a lot of the time, casting a spell was inferior to the other options a dragon has to work with.  Ditto with making sure everyone knows a Silver Dragon has an ability to take on a humanoid form.  If that's important to the game, there's any number of reasons why they can do it, up to and including having it as a special ability if you decree they ought to.If you want your dragon to have a labyrinth made with stone shape and walls of stone, it's not necessary to clutter up the stat block with such powers, you can just say "he's an Earth dragon/he's a prodigy/he made offerings to Tiamat/he's some kind of Dragon-Warlock".</blockquote>

Verification