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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 2646869" data-attributes="member: 23937">Stats for demon princes are an interesting beast. For the Demonomicon articles, I'm mostly basing their stats on those done in the Book of Vile Darkness for the exact reason Shemeska cites: that book established the formula.As for the power level of those stat blocks... I gotta admit that I want to have my cake and eat it too. Statting up demon princes as CR 28 or so creatures really limits their usability for most campaigns that want to feature the "you fight the demon prince" as the final battle to the campaign unless you go into epic levels. It'd be nice if a standard 1st–20th level campaign could end with a big fight against a demon prince, is what I'm saying. At the same time, those demon princes have been around for eons; if they were fragile enough that a group of 20th level characters could take them down, they'da been put down long ago.Personally, I'm a big fan of the 1st edition concept of demons, devils, and other archfiends having "avatars" that they send to the Material Plane—that it's these avatars that are actually statted up in those old Monster Manuals. Kill the Material Plane avatar and you can put a delay into a demon prince's plans on the Material Plane, but you don't stop them. That way, you can defeat Demogorgon as a capstone to your standard 20-level D&D campaign, yet he's still around out there ready to come back at a later time.As for the versions of demon princes in the BoVD or the Demonomicon articles being too wimpy... well, maybe it's best to think of these stat blocks instead as "starter demons." The cool thing about monsters in D&D is that it's a relatively simple thing to add a pile of Hit Dice to a criter and make him tougher. No real need even to give them new special abilities (since combats already never last long enoguh for a demon prince to use ALL of his special abilities). Just give Fraz-Urb'luu another 30 hit dice, advance his skills, base attack, saving throws, feats, special attack save DCs, and ability score improvements as appropriate, and presto! Instant Bad Ass to menace your group of 43rd level PCs.</blockquote>

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