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D&D 5E Is a CR 30 monster a suitable challenge for a 20th level party?

Hmmm, that is pretty good, certainly at least on par with 2nd edition--but the Tarrasque was notoriously easy to kill in 2nd edition. I still see some potential exploits that could nullify the Tarrasque without a Wish. Bestow Curse is the most obvious one (perma-stun), but you could also get an Intellect Devourer (via True Polymorph or alliance with mind flayers) to just eat its mind, after you've reduced it to 0 HP. Also, you could cast Sleep on it and then drown it, or toss it in a volcano. (Not as easy as if it didn't have Immutable Form, but should still be doable.)

Then there's Power Word: Kill, and Imprisonment, and Shadows that drain strength, and undead/demons that reduce your maximum HP until a long rest. I can see Contagion (Slimy Doom) playing a part in the disposal process too.

And it is still somewhat kitable unfortunately. 600' ranged attack is good, but a Sorlock can hit 1200' with Distant Spell, and a regular Sharpshooter mounted on a Phantom Steed has an effective range of 700' (because his steed can Dash for 200' of movement during his turn) unless the Tarrasque holds an action. Plus there are siege engines mounted on spelljamming ships. Regeneration helps deal with that, but I'd recommend bumping up the range to 800' (like a DMG mangonel) just in case. It'll still be susceptible to melee kiting by Mobile Moon Druids though (Earth Glide + Mobile = awesome).

So basically, if I had to kill your version of the Tarrasque I would probably set up a Symbol of Insanity (which targets its +5 Int save) or five, and then have a Sharpshooter on a Phantom Steed try to kite it into the Symbol of Insanity, at which point the rest of my team springs into action (e.g. Paladorc and his Simulacrum charge out and begin Smiting (need to find a way to prevent them from falling victim to insanity though)) to get it down to zero HP. Then the druid can Contagion it (Paladorc will Bend Luck to make it more likely that it fails) and the wizard will Bestow Curse to perma-stun it, and the horde of shadows the wizard created previously using True Polymorph/Shadow Dragon will descend upon the unconscious Tarrasque to drain all of its Strength while an Intellect Devourer eats its mind...

If I had to I could probably find a few more exploits that don't involve Wish or a spelljamming ship.

Anyway, your version does deserve its CR 30 rating, but I think it requires a bit more tweaking to justify its reputation as a recurring, civilization-destroying menace. Either fix its vulnerabilities, or keep its abilities secret, or make it so there is more than one of them. A truly terrifying Tarrasque is one that reproduces regularly (either by laying Godzilla eggs or else via grotesque, amoeba-like fission that probably leverages its regenreation). Imagine if you took your Tarrasque and make the number of Tarrasques double once a week, the way Witchlight Marauders and tribbles do! Combine that with some ambiguity in the intel on the Tarrasque's abilities and suddenly you have a genuine existential threat to the whole civilization which 1.) can plausibly be addressed by the PCs, if they are smart, but also 2.) can plausibly be said to have ended multiple ancient civilizations.

Well a few things. One it's abilities would be secret. Players are not supposed to look at a Monsters Statblock. Two the Terrasque has Magic Resistance and Legendary Resistance. Meaning it's very likely to save against anything you suggested and even if it does fail it can just use Legendary Resistance to negate that and save anyway. Also the Sorcerer with distant spell can you give me an example of a spell that would be useful that has a range of 600 ft and can be boosted to 1200?

Bestow Curse can't permastun. (It can make it so that their is a chance each round that a creature won't act but it can't perma stun it.) and it requires the Tarrasque to fail it's save with Advantage and Legendary Resistance. Contagion requires the Terrasuqe to fail 3 saves before it takes effect. A shadow requires a Natural 20 to hit the Tarrasque. THe intellect Devourer's save is super easy for the Terrasque to make.

Anyway even if reduced to 0 hp the Terrasque will keep on fighting until you use the Wish on it due to the fact it will just keep regenerating. If the Sharpshooter on Phantom Steed is annoying then the Tarrasque can just ignore it. I don't see how Pladorc and his Simulacrum will be able to overwhelm the thing in Melee.

Anyway it's still supposed to be beatable. And your entire thing pretty much shows a bunch of 20th level heroes that know all of the things weaknesses and strengths. Rather then a normal group of Adventurers that would run away. If this thing attacked a city or an army, Both the city and army would be crushed. (I always use the cleaving rules in my games so the Tarrasque would be wiping out 10 or so soliders with every swing.)
 

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pming

Legend
Hiya!

CR30 is extremely tough for 20th level PC's, IMHO. I have no actual experience with that level in 5e yet, but maybe one day. My 1e experience had our group of 20'ish level PC's get their donkeys handed to them when we ran a "lets see what would happen" battle. I can see 5e going down the same route (oh, and yeah, I was DM'ing the Terrasque; the MM2 had just came out and nobody knew anything about it).

If my current players had ever "fought" (or, basically, listed off all the stats of the Terrasque), I would gleefully change out many of the Terrasques 'special stuff' for different ones. Like, for example, how to finally kill it. Maybe give it a chameleon like tongue so that when the wizard is flying above it, the Terrasque leaps at said wizard...and then shoots out it's tongue, grasping the wizard like a fly and pulling said wizard into it's waiting maw. *evilgrin* Stuff like that.

One of my pet peeves is players that make the assumption that because they read something about a spell, monster, class, race, or whatever, that their PCs would "naturally" know that. So when/if the PC uses that Wish spell after beating on the corpse of the Terrasque for a few rounds...and then a few rounds after that it gets back up... I smile and just tell the player that "obviously your PC's information was incorrect".

But that's me, and I'm a pretty brutal DM (fair...but brutal).

Anyway, back to the CR30 thing... I've never put any stock in the whole CR concept (from 3.x when it started onward). D&D is a RPG, and in RPG's there are almost limitless things that can affect CR's "usablilty". As others have pointed out, some creature with major Fire powers is deadly to a group that has nothing to really defend against Fire, but can be a push-over to the same PC's who do have a lot of Fire protection defenses. That CR8 becomes CR12 or CR15 in the first instance, and CR 4 or CR2 in the later. I ignore CR for everything other than a base guideline of likely HD/HP/AC when "looking for a monster". So if my group of 4th level PC's are in need of a random encounter in a forest, I will first look at the monsters for Forest at around CR 3 to 5. That said, I am not above tossing in a CR 6, 7, 8 or even higher creature if it makes sense for the area. Other than that initial CR "perusal", I generally don't even think of the PC's 'capabilities'; if some monster makes sense for some area, or it shows up on my Random Encounter roll (I use them almost religiously), then so be it. A group of low level PC's who decide to go traipsing around in the Swamp of the Dragonmen and randomly encounter a large black dragon...well...that's what blank character sheets are for. :)

^_^

Paul L. Ming
 

Mephista

Adventurer
Its easy to beat any monster in a white room theory craft. I have yet to encounter a game involving a CR 30 monster that the PC party found easy.
 

Well a few things. One it's abilities would be secret. Players are not supposed to look at a Monsters Statblock. Two the Terrasque has Magic Resistance and Legendary Resistance. Meaning it's very likely to save against anything you suggested and even if it does fail it can just use Legendary Resistance to negate that and save anyway. Also the Sorcerer with distant spell can you give me an example of a spell that would be useful that has a range of 600 ft and can be boosted to 1200?

Let me be clear. I am not saying that your version of the Tarrasque is bad. I'm not saying that it wouldn't present a challenge or that it doesn't deserve to be a CR 30 monster. Your version both restores some classic flavor and makes the monster significantly more challenging, and if you were my DM and I heard that the Tarrasque was waking up, and I cast Contact Other Plane or otherwise did some research and found out that the abilities you described were its abilities, my PC would be like, "Well, fooey" while I was a player would be going, "Yay!"

When I say that it still has vulnerabilities, I'm coming from the perspective of a PC who either:

1.) Doesn't know Wish and still wants to save his civilization from the Tarrasque;
2.) Knows Wish but doesn't want to risk burning it out;
3.) Wants to deal with the problem permanently, instead of risking it waking up again after the Wish in another few decades.

It is from this in-character viewpoint that I suggest things like a Sharpshooter kiting it into a Symbol of Insanity trap followed by Intellect Devouring and a ton of Shadows who drain all of its strength, then drowning it.

Bestow Curse can't permastun. (It can make it so that their is a chance each round that a creature won't act but it can't perma stun it.) and it requires the Tarrasque to fail it's save with Advantage and Legendary Resistance. Contagion requires the Terrasuqe to fail 3 saves before it takes effect. A shadow requires a Natural 20 to hit the Tarrasque. THe intellect Devourer's save is super easy for the Terrasque to make.

RE: Bestow Curse, you obviously know what I meant, so good. Yes, the Intellect Devourer perma-stun is more of a genuine perma-stun, and is much worse for the Tarrasque. The Tarrasque has a 91% chance to beat the Intellect Devourer's devour attempt each round, or an 82% chance if it is under the effect of Bane or if there's a Wild Sorcerer Bending Luck, or 69% if both Bane and Bend Luck are in play. (If you landed a Bestow Curse (Intelligence) as well its odds of making the save drop even further to 45%.) But all of this is overkill really. Even at 91%, a few Intellect Devourers will make short work of the beast once you have it disabled in an Symbol of Insanity (cast 70' off the ground, so that it will affect the Tarrasque but won't affect your Shadows/Intellect Devourers/etc. because they're not tall enough). The exact details are unimportant.

Against a civilization-destroying threat (or at least one with a civilization-destroying reputation), I am going to engage in overkill, so in addition to the Intellect Devourers (getting those is probably an adventure in itself) I-as-a-PC would also be hitting it with everything else I can think of simultaneously, from shadows to Dominate Monster and Planar Bound Goristros and True Polymorphed dragons, just in case my information is inaccurate and the Tarrasque turns out to be immune to intellect devouring. But since I, as a forum reader, know that Intellect Devouring will actually work just fine, I can probably just stop writing here instead of detailing all of my paranoid plans.

Anyway even if reduced to 0 hp the Terrasque will keep on fighting until you use the Wish on it due to the fact it will just keep regenerating. If the Sharpshooter on Phantom Steed is annoying then the Tarrasque can just ignore it. I don't see how Pladorc and his Simulacrum will be able to overwhelm the thing in Melee.

Anyway it's still supposed to be beatable. And your entire thing pretty much shows a bunch of 20th level heroes that know all of the things weaknesses and strengths. Rather then a normal group of Adventurers that would run away. If this thing attacked a city or an army, Both the city and army would be crushed. (I always use the cleaving rules in my games so the Tarrasque would be wiping out 10 or so soliders with every swing.)

The key question for my enjoyment wouldn't be, "How are we going to beat this thing?" It would be, "How in the world did that thing, that we just killed, ever manage to take down the Ancient Empire of LostMagic?" If the DM has a good answer for that then I would enjoy the scenario. As I mentioned previously, the answer could be "LostMagic made some mistakes and didn't have all the information about the thing you did," or "LostMagic didn't catch the thing before it bifurcated ten times into a thousand Tarrasques and everybody, and then the Tarrasques ate each other," or "LostMagic was divided by internal politics, and they thought they knew how to deal with this thing but then LordBenedictArnold backstabbed Lord Mordenkainen right as they were about to execute their plan and the whole thing fell to pieces while Lord ShadyMcPuppeteer laughed his head off and then was awarded his own domain in Ravenloft to celebrate the tragedy."

If your players don't care about backstory and simulationism you probably don't even need to come up with that much.
 

The key question for my enjoyment wouldn't be, "How are we going to beat this thing?" It would be, "How in the world did that thing, that we just killed, ever manage to take down the Ancient Empire of LostMagic?" If the DM has a good answer for that then I would enjoy the scenario. As I mentioned previously, the answer could be "LostMagic made some mistakes and didn't have all the information about the thing you did," or "LostMagic didn't catch the thing before it bifurcated ten times into a thousand Tarrasques and everybody, and then the Tarrasques ate each other," or "LostMagic was divided by internal politics, and they thought they knew how to deal with this thing but then LordBenedictArnold backstabbed Lord Mordenkainen right as they were about to execute their plan and the whole thing fell to pieces while Lord ShadyMcPuppeteer laughed his head off and then was awarded his own domain in Ravenloft to celebrate the tragedy."

If your players don't care about backstory and simulationism you probably don't even need to come up with that much.

Simple none of Lostmagics heroes or magic were as good as you were and you came up with better plans and idea's then they did. But still you would not have all the info ether, who says the gods know the creature's statblock even. Honestly I still don't even see your plan working against it. Drowning it won't work as it does not need to breath.

Obtaining the Int Devourers and Shadows is hard as well. Because One your characters need to know those things exist, were to find them and how to obtain their aid or create them. (Your example of true Polymorphing into a Shadow Dragon requires you to have also met a Shadow Dragon as you can't turn into something you don't know about.) AKA it's very complex and by the time you got your plan runing the Tarrasque would have caused lots of destruction.
 

dave2008

Legend
But... I didn't suggest many ideas for killing it! I primarily suggested ideas for incapacitating it without having to kill it. A perma-stunned Tarrasque whose brain has been eaten by an Intellect Devourer is still Immortal, but no longer a threat. Especially if its Strength is 0 and it's chained to an anchor at the bottom of the ocean which continually drowns it.

A good BBEG plot would be to retrieve the Tarrasque from the bottom of the ocean, take it somewhere inhabited, and cast Greater Restoration on it.

OK - I would never rule it that way, but to each his or her own
 

Athinar

Explorer
The basic theory states that a CR 30 monster is a moderate difficulty for four level 30 PCs.

I love playing level 30 characters in 5.0

Calculations for a 4 Level 20 vs a CR 30 is deadly, so go for it, make it happen because at that level the people playing should know how to play the characters and with magic items etc.. should be a good fight
 

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