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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ObsidianCrane" data-source="post: 4442822" data-attributes="member: 54918">How to make insubstantial creatures interesting - Traps and Terrain.I recently had my 8th level party run into a Banshee twice. The first time it was near a couple of short drops (10') - this made its push attack more threatening. The party got immobilised and pushed off the first ledge and then battled the Banshee and its Shadow Bat (Fire Bat's changed to Necrotic instead of Fire) budies for a few rounds. Eventually the Banshee got its blast back and knocked several PCs down onto the next ledge, including the melee rogue and the paladin.The Banshee fled just before it died, and the PCs then spent over a good half an hour messing about before they encoutnered it again, so I put it back at full health. This time they encountered it with the Fire Blaster trap from the DMG. Now the Banshee was able to move from one end of the trapped area to another without triggering the trap, and being able to phase was able to move around behind the party and blast them into the trap zone leaving several on the trigger squares in the first round. It then became a scramble to disable the trap and fight the monster which was able to zoom from one end of the trap to the other without fear. Including a situation where the paladin had to run the gauntlet of the trap to engage the banshee so that it didn't kill the Rogue before she could disable the trap.They dreaded it recovering so much that when it phased through a door, even though they were down at least a daily and most of their encoutners each they chased after it, bringing the next encounter onto them as well.In short the mechanics of Insubstantial are useful for the other things that they can do, rather than the damage side of things. Being insubstantial means dodging through pillars rather than around them, flying over chasms, and pushing PCs into them if possible and so on. Just hitting is pretty dull pretty fast (I'm starting to hate Brutes already) but messing with the flexibility of powers can make thigns really fun.(Flying creatures with floor based traps are fun as well.)</blockquote>

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