Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6725284" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Haha, my paranoia wins! There's a reason why my wizards learn Feather Fall at first level. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> (Remember that Feather Fall works on up to six creatures.) The lava field isn't a good comparison for the landlocked kraken though, because in the case of the lava field, the bat is irrelevant--it's the terrain which does all the damage. The analagous situation for a kraken would be placing it in an environment where it cannot survive at all, such as on land if it is unable to breathe air. Except that it's not, it's explicitly amphibious. The kraken presumably is amphibious for a reason, but the way it's built, it's not really amphibious at all--the kraken shouldn't venture more than 100' or so from water. It wouldn't matter a whit if it were fully aquatic, because effectively it is aquatic-only already when it comes to combat.The deeper answer to your question: a threat with boundaries is less scary than an unbounded threat. The first-level wizard is only a threat to the kraken under certain circumstances. The kraken just avoids those circumstances and is therefore not scared of the PC. The kraken is a threat to 10th level PCs only under certain circumstances. The PCs just avoid those circumstances and are therefore not scared of the kraken.There are threats, like spellcasting dragons and vampires, which will scare the pants off the PCs because of the can't run/can't hide/can't fight dynamic[1]. The kraken isn't one of them. As mentioned previously, it is an anvil, but it needs a hammer to be scary. An abomination cult might be a good match. Kidnap villagers at night, bring them down to the shore for the kraken to devour, HP Lovecraft-fashion.[1] You actually can hide from a vampire by never venturing out of an inhabited dwelling except during daylight hours, but even that doesn't work perfectly. And being required to hide indoors all the time on pain of death is actually pretty scary compared to "don't go near the ocean." Unless you're a fisherman instead of a murderhobo PC, in which case "don't go near the ocean" is pretty scary after all.Remember that I'm not claiming that krakens are unusable. You could scare a PCs with a kraken by using it to threaten something they love, like a town's economy. If they have to proactively engage it in the water, and letting it escape is a loss because it will just keep killing innocent humans, it becomes a lot scarier. Kraken-as-Jaws is a scarier scenario than Kraken-as-Jason-Vorhees. I'd probably want to be at least 11th level before tackling the kraken in a Jaws-type scenario where you're protecting innocents.</blockquote>

Verification