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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 2836329" data-attributes="member: 12460">I have never agreed with option 1. Whenever I think about it, I imagine a fighter rushing up to a twelve-headed hydra. The twelve heads simultaneously attempt to converge on the fighter and wind up colliding with each other, knocking each head unconscious from the force. The fighter shrugs and starts chopping off unconscious hydra heads while telling the party wizard to note in his journal that you kill hydras by provoking attacks of opportunity.I think a hydra gets one AoO per head, not multiple attacks per AoO provoked. Basically you treat the number of heads a hydra has as its Dex mod for purposes of determining its AoOs per round. Extrapolate a bit and it starts to make sense. There is no reason you couldn't have a fifty-headed hydra by just building on existing rules, and nothing can convince me that fifty heads can all attack the same character within the fractional space in time it takes to provoke one AoO.Of course the ambiguous wording in the MM alone makes this whole thing debatable. I think it should be painfully obvious just by looking at the plain CR 4 hydra. Five attacks at +6 for 1d10+3 damage just for an AoO seems a bit much. Fighter moves up, takes five whacks, rogue moves up, takes five whacks, hydra acts, five more whacks. No other CR 4 monster is even remotely capable of that sheer amount of damage in one round even if critically hittng. It is bad enough to take one attack from a hydra while moving up when you know you are going to get attack five more times when the hydra acts next. Using option 1 just makes a hydra a practically impossible encounter unless the DM is soft-balling and/or fudging dice.</blockquote>

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