Ettin Thug damage??

[Stalker0]

This creature seems fine. He's not the most brutal brute, but he makes up for it with a lot more mobility and resistance to conditions (remember 2 turns gives him double saving throws and more resistance to "end of your next turn" effect).

In a lot of ways he's more of a low damage elite than a standard monster.

 

[Infiniti2000]

(minor thread resurrection)

I used ettins last Friday and they are VERY effective at breaching defenses. That is clearly their strongest suit and if used as such then they don't need beefing up. If you don't use them to breach any defenses, then I think simply double their bonus (i.e. making it 1d12+6) would be more than sufficient.

I did have a question, however. I assume the ettin can delay, but then what happens? Can he delay twice? Ready and delay? It's very weird. I simply didn't allow the ettin to delay (too tough a question to handle during the game), but noticed that for the ettin group that went back-to-back, they were potentially very deadly. I think therefore to minimize that weird effect, the initiative roll should be "roll once and use that value and that value minus 10" to help ensure that the players (or other monsters) intersperse with the ettin's two actions. I'd appreciate any other comments on this.

 

[Jhaelen]

I did have a question, however. I assume the ettin can delay, but then what happens? Can he delay twice? Ready and delay? It's very weird. I simply didn't allow the ettin to delay (too tough a question to handle during the game), but noticed that for the ettin group that went back-to-back, they were potentially very deadly. I think therefore to minimize that weird effect, the initiative roll should be "roll once and use that value and that value minus 10" to help ensure that the players (or other monsters) intersperse with the ettin's two actions. I'd appreciate any other comments on this.

Well, readying requires a standard action, right? So, since they get two standard actions they could also ready an action twice. However, if their second turn comes up before the first readied action was triggered, they've lost an action.

Using delay once to act twice in a row isn't any different from being able to take two turns in a round, rolling initiative normally for each turn and getting the same result.

It's something that already happened in one of my (Eberron) games when the party was facing Dolgrims. This turned out to be a _very_ tough encounter, since the Dolgrims always focused fire, basically dropping one pc every round.