Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanB" data-source="post: 2859087" data-attributes="member: 1473">There's an awful lot of "should" being thrown around in this thread. "Should" is an entirely subjective notion when it comes to this sort of thing.Let's take our CR 19 friend Juiblex as an example. People are saying that he "should" be able to beat up a balor.But... why?Does anyone actually want his nasty ooze plane? Does he necessarily have any balors in his service?It seems entirely possible that his plane, to put it bluntly, sucks so bad that noone else wants it, and he might just not be powerful enough to have balors working for him.That's not a problem to me.The basic thing is to remember that whatever you think the balance of power of creatures "should" be, it has nothing to do with what the next guy in line thinks it "should" be.In my game, there aren't infinite numbers of balors running around any more than there are infinite layers of the abyss, or infinite numbers of solars. A solar may well be as powerful as a demon lord, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to just waltz into the abyss and start knocking them off. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances - alliances, planar effects, magical artifacts, deities and their interests, etc. - that stop the planes from devolving into one giant slugfest.So, I've described just one possible game world in which lower CR demon lords can exist and function normally. It is not stretching the imagination to realize that there are thousands of other perfectly valid campaign ideas and settings where the same thing might be true.So let's get away from "should," shall we? The only person who really cares what your idea of "should" is, is you. (Using the generic "you" of course, this isn't directed at anyone in particular.)Incidentally, I think if you go back and look at your dusty old 1E monster manuals, you'll notice that Juiblex wasn't all that, even then - and our old friend the type VI demon was practically a pushover. Times change!</blockquote>

Verification