D&D 3E/3.5 First encounter with a 3.5E Beholder as a player

[Olaf the Stout]

Last night I had my first encounter with a 3.5E Beholder as a player. As a DM I’ve run about 3 Beholder encounters, so I knew roughly what they were capable of (the last time was about 5 years ago, so the memory is a little hazy), so I brought out the big guys early.

In the end I was pretty underwhelmed with my first combat against one of D&D’s iconic monsters (I may have faced one in 2E, but I don’t really remember).

The encounter versus our 12th level party lasted all of 1 round. The Beholder got the jump on the party and hit us with the anti-magic ray in the surprise round. It then acted first in round 1 and hit a couple of players with Finger of Death, with both PC’s rolling really high and making their saves.

The Barbarian went next and hit the Beholder for about 30 points of damage. My Wizard then had his turn, casting Disintergrate. The Beholder failed the save, copped 78 points damage and was killed.

Reading the monster description just now, I think the DM played the Beholder a little wrong (the Beholder should have hit us with up to 3 eyes, instead of the 1 (possibly 2) that we got. I also know that 6th level spells can be pretty nasty (and it was roughly a 50/50 chance the Beholder would make the save). However, I’m still surprised that he didn’t even make it out of the first round.

Anyone else had similarly underwhelming experiences with monsters that didn’t live up to their reputation?

 

[ccs]

2 weeks ago, in a PF game, I finally encountered a Vrock as a player after all these years.
I was not impressed.
We had a Cavelier (me), a divination based wizard, a gunslinger, and a war-priest (some sort of cleric). All 5th & 6th lv. The fight lasted 3.5 rounds.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I've had a few Vrock encounters, mainly from the DM side of the screen, but one or two as a player. I've found them to be pretty resilient for their CR. They have Mirror Image at will, can Teleport away if the fight is going against them and DR10/good is hard to deal with if you don't have a Good-aligned weapon. The spores allow them to chip away at PCs hit points and their screech can give them an extra round of free attacks.

What you really need to worry about though is their Dance of Ruin. When there are 3 Vrocks together you want to do all that you can to take one out before they get that dance off. 20d6 is nasty.

 

[Imaculata]

The thing with Beholders is that they are not much of a threat if they are on their own, and you manage to get into close combat with them. But if they are not alone, then an encounter with a Beholder can quickly go south. That is what everyone fears: That someone fails theirs save. Its pretty much a killed or be killed scenario. You either kill the Beholder fast, or he kills your party fast.

If the encounter had been two Beholders, or one Beholder plus some other monsters, then this encounter could have turned out very different.

Besides, Barbarians and Paladins are basically Beholder destroyers. Even in a game like DDO (where most monsters have their HP pool increased), if you throw a Paladin or a Barbarian at a Beholder, the fight does not last long. Both have really good saves against the Beholder's attacks too.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Solos don't exist in 3e, unless you're using Trailblazer. Beholders are "controllers" so they're squishy and won't last long without support. A beholder needs a lot of charmed allies to really be a threat.

I used a beholder in 3.0 once. Back then they had even fewer hit points. By sheer luck it killed the rogue (the rogue was taking shelter in a tree, so they had cover, concealment and high touch AC... but a terrible Fort save) but after taking a Flame Strike (it had "coned" the wizard, and of course the spellcasters were smart enough to separate) it had so few hit points left it was in danger of being killed by a crossbow bolt. Actually, that's what killed it. Of course, I'd foolishly not used charmed allies.

A friend of mine put one into Gamma World (the one based on 4e D&D) with two gauths, and the beholder had three levels on the PCs. That was very close. Only one PC actually died, but my PC fell unconscious near the end and almost bled out. It probably would have been slightly easier in D&D due to access to reliable healing... but it was nonetheless a very tense fight.

 

[Celebrim]

Throughout D&D's history, a single static monster on a 'tournament field' - that is some sort of small flat bounded surface like a typical dungeon room - goes down hard, usually in about a round and a half, to any well equipped party.

So, you had a beholder on a 'tournament field' and it went down hard. Why this should be a surprise I don't understand. In particular, your are 12th level party against what is probably an equivalent level foe and your party is in the favorable situation.

If you want a monster to be challenging, you have to take it off a 'tournament field' and put it into an environment that plays to the monsters strengths. If the DM had intended this monster to be challenging, he failed at the level of encounter design. My preferred encounter area for a Beholder would be a large and tall room with a large number of scattered pillars that reach halfway up the room. The Beholder has crafted this room by using his disintegrate ray to either remove a large portion of the floor (leaving only the pillars) or a large portion of the ceiling. Either way, the Beholder begins atop a pillar in the middle of the room and has a number of charmed monsters of some sort (monstrous scorpions maybe) located at the base of the pillars.

General strategy:

1) The Beholder can fly freely about the room, and uses this to try to avoid getting into melee with anyone dangerous. It knows that the most obvious way to counter this is with magical flight, but it has an anti-magic ray that can shut that down.

2) The Beholder is most dangerous when it can separate the party and use 6 or more rays in a single round OR use its anti-magic ray to shut down spellcasters while whittling down the rest of the party with 3 rays. So it tries to get itself flanked without getting into melee, stays at a decent range and uses pillars to provide partial cover from missile fire, and tries to use charmed monsters for distraction.

3) The three most useful rays are Disintegrate, Finger of Death, and Telekinesis. Both Disintegrate and Finger of Death come pretty close to save or die, and they have the very useful property of dealing significant damage even if the save is successful. Telekinesis does two things for you. First, it gives you battle field control by letting you bulrush or fling melee types that are using non-magical means (climb, jump, etc.) to get close to you. In the case of the room of pillars described above, fling people also involves dropping them from height. Secondly, it's the only eye ray you have that can make attacks into your anti-magic field or into an off arc. The way to do this is to leave scattered around your battlefield sufficient loose rubble to fling about. By using telekinesis to fling a bit of rubble (or the corpse of a monstrous scorpion!) you can attack someone that you're main eye ray has shut down, or which would otherwise not be in a valid 90 degree arc.

Your DM doesn't appear to understand the monster, since he used the same ray 3 times. Each ray is only usable once per round. However rays are useable as free actions, so it can do its full 40' move will firing off rays. So you might have a round where it uses anti-magic ray in the arc of a melee attacker (negating part of their AC and their ability to do damage), fires sleep at the lowest will save target not in the anti-magic ray, fires disintegrate and finger of death at a wizard potentially killing the wizard or at worst forcing the cleric to spend an action healing, then tries to bite the melee attacker, and then moves off 20' to avoid a full attack action the next round (and possibly now shutting down more attackers with its anti-magic ray), then flings a boulder at the melee attacker by aiming the telekinesis eye ray at a different part of the room. That ability to generate a large number of actions per round is what makes the beholder potentially dangerous.

4) Anti-magic ray is huge. There is rarely a situation where it should be closed, and that's basically only when its got good reason to believe it can't be targeted by attacks in the round. Remember that most parties of this level are relying heavily on their gear to generate damage. If you are unavoidably in melee with something, consider making a 5' adjustment to put that character in a different 90 degree arc and the putting it in your anti-magic ray while harassing the rest of the part with eye rays. A paladin in an anti-magic ray can't smite, will lose his enhancement bonus to strength, will lose the bonus of his magic weapon, will lose whatever spell buffs he's using to boost damage (divine favor, divine might?) and will generally cease to be an immediate threat. You can definitely survive the 10-20 damage a magic-less melee attacker is going to do. Raging barbarians might be a bigger problem, but even if you can just limit the damage you are taking to the Barbarian's 30 damage a round (probably less if its under anti-magic ray), you are still going to last 3-4 rounds. The next thing to point out is that a flying creature doesn't need to sit near a raging barbarian for 3-4 rounds unless for some odd reason its chosen to live somewhere it can't fly (which in the case of a Beholder is ridiculous, since it can carve its lair to suit it). Float 20' straight up.

 

[Celebrim]

As for overrated monsters, the single most overrated monster in D&D throughout D&D's history is the BBEG - typically a high level human with a PC class.

The fundamental problem with the BBEG is that you are pitting a single character against a whole party of characters. To try to compensate, DMs have historically resorted to cheese.

The most obvious cheese is to give the BBEG 'all 18's' or other absurdly good stats. In 1e, you often say a BBEG twice the PC's level just to try to make the fight even. In 3e particularly, there was a lot of cheese involving the NPC being absolutely perfectly prepared with spell buffs and potions just exactly before the fight began, leading to the cheese response of threatening to attack an NPC by making a very loud noise announcing you are coming and then walking away for 20 minutes to let the short term buffs run out. Another equally problematic approach was to deck the NPC out in a Christmas tree, but this just results in the PC's very quickly blowing past their expected wealth by level leading to an arms race. 4e responded to this by resorting to not having NPCs even use the same rules as PCs, resulting in situations where PCs couldn't remotely aspire to be as durable or powerful individually as NPC ruler/leaders were.

Careful use of human(oid) opponents is one of the most difficult arts of encounter design. Monsters by comparison are pretty easy to use and design for, since they almost invariably don't have to fight on a symmetrical playing field and match the PC's strength for strength.

 

[Random Bystander]

As for overrated monsters, the single most overrated monster in D&D throughout D&D's history is the BBEG - typically a high level human with a PC class.

The fundamental problem with the BBEG is that you are pitting a single character against a whole party of characters. To try to compensate, DMs have historically resorted to cheese.

The most obvious cheese is to give the BBEG 'all 18's' or other absurdly good stats. In 1e, you often say a BBEG twice the PC's level just to try to make the fight even. In 3e particularly, there was a lot of cheese involving the NPC being absolutely perfectly prepared with spell buffs and potions just exactly before the fight began, leading to the cheese response of threatening to attack an NPC by making a very loud noise announcing you are coming and then walking away for 20 minutes to let the short term buffs run out. Another equally problematic approach was to deck the NPC out in a Christmas tree, but this just results in the PC's very quickly blowing past their expected wealth by level leading to an arms race. 4e responded to this by resorting to not having NPCs even use the same rules as PCs, resulting in situations where PCs couldn't remotely aspire to be as durable or powerful individually as NPC ruler/leaders were.

Careful use of human(oid) opponents is one of the most difficult arts of encounter design. Monsters by comparison are pretty easy to use and design for, since they almost invariably don't have to fight on a symmetrical playing field and match the PC's strength for strength.

Give them minions and all of those problems are solved. With 3e, or 3.5e, no "boss" monster should ever fight solo unless at least two levels above the party, minimum. And, of course, classed boss NPCs can give too-powerful equipment to the PCs.

 

[Greenfield]

It all depends on how the DM plays the Beholder. Like any monster, if it's run ineffectively it's hamburger.

Anti-magic ray is highly overrated. All it does nothing but suppress spells and items while it's on them. If it's planning to use its other eye effects, it can only target opponents outside of the AM effect, otherwise it shuts down its own attacks.

Two Beholders can be even weaker than one, unless they coordinate well. The AM ray of either one blocks pretty much all of the attacks by the other.

The Beholder can only use three eyes at a time in any 90 degree arc. That italicized portion is important, and often overlooked.

Consider that it can arrange two such arcs so the dividing line splits a party. Now it has six attacks, all as free actions.

It's rays are: Charm Monster, Charm Person, Disintegrate, Fear, Finger of Death, Inflict Moderate Wounds, Sleep, Slow, and Telekinesis. We'll save the Anti-Magic ray for later.

Sleep is useless against any party that will ever face it, but will take out mounts and perhaps Familiars. Otherwise, you might as well forget that that one is even there.

Similarly the Inflict ray does weak damage (Its a CR 13. Nobody is scared of 2 D8 +8 with a Save for half at level 10+.) Use that one for Rogues, whose Will Save is relatively weak, and who have D6s for hit dice. Wizard and Sorcerer hit dice are even smaller, but their Will Save is better, so that use is questionable.

The two Charm rays should be split: One left and one right. The Save is the same for both (DC 17), so presume that they'll be reserved for obvious Fighter and Rogue types, whose Will Save is poor. He can probably neutralize one opponent in the opening round.

Finger of Death, Flesh to Stone and Disintegrate are all in the "Save or Die" category. Put one on each side. Since Disintegrate, and Flesh to Stone are Fort saves, life is simple for you if you split one left and one right. These are probably the second eye for each side (with the Charm rays being #1.)

Telekinesis does more than simple damage. Presume that the Beholder isn't an idiod, nor is it a stranger to its own lair. Since it can use this power to move things, presume that it did, and prepared a few unpleasant places to drop intruders. TK them, hard, against a wall, then drop them into a readied pit. (Two shots with Disintegrate makes a nice 20 foot pit.) Alternately, use the power to TK a number of projectiles at a single target. Check the spell to see how many it can fling, but that can be a nasty use as well. If you're of the inclination, use the power to hold an opponent in mid-air and spin them in place, or hurl them into each other. It's a highly versatile power.

Only one side can get Anti-Magic ray, and that's best reserved for the arcane spell casters. Keep them in the Ray and they're just plain shut down until you're ready to deal with them.

The third ray on the other side could be Fear, or the leftover of the Finger of death, Disintegrate, Flesh to Stone trio.

Disintegrate can also be used to create new hiding places for the monster, and even take out support columns or walls and drop ceilings, though that would be a last resort, since that kind of destroys their lair. It can slo be used to destroy the ground beneath a character's feet, dropping them into a 10 foot pit. Minimal damage, but an important first part of "Divide and Conquer".

While the book suggests that Beholders will charge right in so they can get opponents on as many sides (and thus subject to as many eye-rays) as possible, their AC is low enough for their level that it's a lot smarter for them to keep opponents at a distance. (AC 26 may not seem low, until you remember that a 10th level Fighter, Barbarian or Ranger type has a BAB of +10, probably a magic weapon for another +2 by 10th level, probably an ability bonus of +3 or higher, and perhaps a feat or two. They'll probably tag him on a 10 or better, and that's before the buffing spells come up.)

Also, remember that Beholders can fly, and not just hover at face level. If the room has any kind of ceiling height the Beholder can shut down the melee types cold by staying near the ceiling. The description in the MM specifically says they prefer lairs with a lot of vertical, and like to fight from places that are inaccessible to earthbound opponents.

If you run them brain-dead, they're just dead. Run them like they actually know what they're doing and they'll rip your group a new one. and at CR 13, they're supposed to be formidable.

 

[Imaculata]

A paladin in an anti-magic ray can't smite.

Is this correct? I'll have to look that up.

EDIT: Well I be damned, you are indeed correct, I just looked it up. Maybe I always assumed that anti magic field meant "only suppresses magic". But the text states quite literally that it also suppresses supernatural abilities. Huh. I learned something new.

Anyway, great post. I think a lot of DM's could learn a thing or two about encounter design. Creating an environment that plays to a monster's strengths is key when building an encounter.

Also, remember that Beholders can fly, and not just hover at face level. If the room has any kind of ceiling height the Beholder can shut down the melee types cold by staying near the ceiling. The description in the MM specifically says they prefer lairs with a lot of vertical, and like to fight from places that are inaccessible to earthbound opponents.

This applies to all flying monsters, and especially dragons. Most DM's don't run dragons correctly. They have the dragon land all the time, so melee characters can chop them into tiny bits with ease. If a creature can fly, then why should it ever land?

Celebrim also made some good comments regarding cover. While a Beholder is air born, it basically renders melee classes useless. Everyone it forced to switch to their ranged weapons, and that is when cover becomes an important detail in the environment. The Beholder wants to avoid being hit with arrows by every party member each round. It wants to deny the players as many attacks as possible. It can do so through flying, cover, and also through telekinesis.

Telekinesis should also not be underestimated. If the terrain has dangerous features, that gives the Beholder something to fling his opponents into. Imagine a Beholder on a bridge over a river of lava. Melee classes run up to him, and he flings them over the side before they can reach him. They take massive damage from the lava, and are out of the fight until they find a way back up to the Beholder, where he can do it again.

Anti-magic ray is highly overrated. All it does nothing but suppress spells and items while it's on them. If it's planning to use its other eye effects, it can only target opponents outside of the AM effect, otherwise it shuts down its own attacks.

It also instantly dispells all magical buffs that the players might have prepared before the battle. That is a huge deal. It makes the players so much more vulnerable.