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First encounter with a 3.5E Beholder as a player
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6771984" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6771984, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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First encounter with a 3.5E Beholder as a player
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