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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8266769" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Alternatively: You might design an open-ended Skill Challenge (or just a "montage" part of the campaign, however long it runs) to see how many weaknesses the party can discover/exploit/create before she whittles away Bahamut's forces too hard to get you to the fight. Then, you generate a mechanical representation of the kind of threat she poses to the party, based on the spread of results from that process. As a result, a discrete spread of "possible Tiamats" could happen, all depending on what the party has done to prepare for the fight, whether by having tools/resources she's vulnerable to or actually sapping her power.E.g., Tiamat is specifically the goddess of Greed and Envy, and her domains are Strife, Tyranny, and Vengeance. 4e deities are effectively living concepts, so things that are anathema to those concepts should weaken them. If the party is able to secure the Tears of the Martyr, a set of earrings made from the solidified tears of a martyred pacifist who forgave her killers as she burnt at the stake, then perhaps an element can be added to Tiamat's statblock saying that certain attacks simply can't hit someone wearing them--they literally embody the antithesis of Vengeance, and thus treat Tiamat herself as if she weren't there. Alternatively, if Tiamat is able to corrupt a powerful figure into seeking disproportionate revenge for a previously-forgiven error, she is empowered symbolically and therefore literally, because symbols literally are divine power. Etc. There's no need to shape the combat mechanics for what Tiamat absolutely is, because the party literally cannot encounter her outside of a specific, prepared-for situation.*Hence [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] why I am so on about "why should it be that there is one-and-only, eternal, ideal Ogre?" (or whatever else), that all Ogres necessarily are or necessarily deviate away from. There is no Platonic Ogre; there are only living ogres. Each living ogre exists in a context. Sure, there are common trends or patterns--they're mostly strong, mostly pretty durable, and mostly not very smart--but trying to make one Form Of The Ogre and acting like that gives you real insight about the workings of the world really does have negative consequences. The abstractions--HP, accuracy, defense, etc.--only matter for the context of kicking (or failing to kick) the PCs' butts. The other stats are either beholden to overall narrative concerns (consistency, as you call it) or to what you know makes sense.*And, I argue, exactly the same applies to the ogre and the orc and the illithid and whatever else the party fights. If there are ogres in the place the party is adventuring, you should already know what their naturalistic attributes are (such as "how much can it lift?" or "what concepts can it understand?"), and most preferably should have already prepared a statblock specific to that context. You then prepare a different statblock if they return to that area later, because the context has changed; the monster itself has not changed, but the answer to the question, "what is this monster like in a fight?" has changed for this specific party.And that's all a monster's (combat) statblock IS: the answer to "what is this monster like in a fight?" That answer can and does change as the PCs do. 4e's rules very conciously DON'T tell you what to do with the non-combat attributes of a creature, because you as DM should know better than they do what those are.</blockquote>

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