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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6861995" data-attributes="member: 5834">They are a demonic warband raiding, not sitting in a cavern waiting for someone to come along. That is just as much a part of fantasy as a monster sitting in a cavern. No. I vary tactics according to the monster and circumstances.As I pointed out, no one is in robes. One character has a familiar. The bladesinger wizard.No. They choose an optimal base attack. They only attack weak saves if it is obvious. They don't know the weak saves of all creatures. Giants are a good bet weak wisdom save. Polymorph works against almost all types of brutes.Optimizing is about choosing abilities that work against the largest number of encounters with the highest percentage chance of success. Metagaming is choosing to attack weak saves and using player knowledge. Optimizing and metagaming are very different. I generally don't allow metagaming. I can't do much about optimizing.  Some abilities work better against more things than others. Players tend to choose those abilities.I do. The beholder cave I had them fight an eye tyrant in was created so the eye tyrant could move to full cover and blast with eye rays. One PC was dropped and another was nearly laid low. One of them got real pissy when he tried to drink a greater healing potion in the Death Tyrant's cone. Started arguing with me he would have known even though he had an active blink on and was in the ethereal plane when the Death Tyrant activated his cone. He wanted me to draw the cone on the board. As far as I know beholder cones aren't visible, so he didn't get to have that information. It was pretty irritating.Not against the marilith, but pretty high against the other stuff.He has resilient Con. He gets to add his intelligence bonus to Con checks for concentration. He has Acrobatics to resist grapple checks as a Dex based character. It's possible to grapple him, but not easy. He also has misty step, so it would have to happen pretty quick and work or he'll have them dead.They are Chaotic Evil and were overconfident given they had been killing most humanoid parties in their path pretty easily. I pictured them like a roving band of savages caught up in the ecstasy of their power thinking, "These little humanoids are our meat." I have a bit more dangerous series of demon encounters coming up in the Spiral of the Horned King. The environment in there is not kind. I'm a little worried they might die. But everything can't go their way, right?This particular encounter I considered environment neutral. Neither side had an environmental advantage. They met 120 feet apart in an Underdark tunnel. DC 14 Con save isn't very high when you have Resilient Con and a paladin aura. I think only the cleric has no proficiency on his Con save, but he has a high Con. But he is easy to grapple.Disarm? We do have those optional rules. But he's an eldritch knight with that one ability...what do they call it...weapon bond? He can't be disarmed and he can call his bow back to him as a bonus action. You see how many bases they have covered? I have to think up all this stuff every battle often on the fly. That was a fun ability to learn about. The Sharpshooter is the guy with his nose in the books all the time. He's probably the top optimizer in the group. Always has something up his sleeve, though he's gotten a few rules interpretations wrongs (but so have I, it happens) fortunately. He just loves finding some tactic to make life hard on me. Keeps it to himself all week sometimes too and springs it on me on gameday. Keeps me on my toes I guess.</blockquote>

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