The 13 Zodiac (need help making them boss monsters)

[frodo12311]

Me and a friend thought of a fun thing to do with some of the new people joining us for dnd 3.5 just as a side thing while our main DM writes his story (very story driven makes us wait till he has it all) . We want to have everyone take their character from the main campaign and just kinda sprint through a short story about killing the 13 Zodiac gods who are now corrupt. The part will consist of 4 to 6 players and they will start at level 5. What I need is help making the 13 zodiac as bosses. I want Pisces as the first and Ophiuchus as the last. Every time one is slain the party goes up by 5 levels, gaining no xp otherwise. So with the party starting at lvl 5 Pisces needs to be of a challenge rating for a party of 4 to 6 all at level 5 and by the time we get to Ophiuchus the party will be lvl 65 so he needs to be up to snuff for that. I don't care about the order of the other Zodiac as long as they each have a different CR to meet my needs of the party fighting a new one every 5 levels, so one needs to work for a party of 4 to 6 all at lvl 10 and another one needs to work for the party all at lvl 15 ect up to that lvl 65 for the last one. So any help or ideas on stats abilities or even full stat pages would be great so we can pass the time as we wait. Also we play this on roll20 so if you are interested in this let me know and you might be able to play with us. Last thing is I am sorry if this is the wrong place for this never used the sight before.

 

[GreenTengu]

The party will be level 65?...

Are you sure you meant to post this in D&D? There is hardly an edition of D&D that traditionally goes beyond level 20. At most you might get to level 30, but that is under major restrictions in every edition.

And if you expect to do something once every 5 levels, you have to realize that you are likely to never get around to it. Levels take a significant amount of time to gain. I feel like you don't know anything about D&D and are coming at this from the perspective of a J-RPG kind of thing.

Really, if they were all designed for a party all level 10 to fight them, you wouldn't even get to level 11 by defeating all 13. That would also make each one the equivalent of an adult dragon or so. Far from a "god", but plenty formidable enough to perhaps be a Celestial or an Avatar.

Some of them ought to be pretty easy. You just need to take a similar monster and scale it...

Leo is a line, Sagittarius is a Centaur, Scorpio is a giant scorpion, Taurus could be a Gorgon, Pisces could be a shark, Cancer is a giant crab, Capricorn could be a giant sea horse

There is nothing like a ram in the monster manual, but maybe you could use the fighting statistics as a mammoth as your base (not any mechanical difference between tusks or horns)

Gemini could be a pair of Sorcerer/Rogues (so you would need them to be equivalent of 1/2 the XP budget), Virgo could be a female barbarian or paladin while Ophiuchus could just be a healing cleric

You are going to have to be more creative with Libra and Aquarius though.

At that point the trick is to just scale up their stats to the appropriate CR and then add the celestial traits to them.

 

[frodo12311]

I did mean D&D and I know most campaigns don't go past 30. There is not really anything other than these 13 fights in this story of mine and you gain 5 levels each time one of them is killed the proper xp gain is being thrown out for this. What I was trying to say is that the bosses need to climb in CR as the party meats the next one. So boss one is fought by a parry of 4 to 6 all at level 5 and boss is by the same party all at level 10, the third boss is fought at level 15, the 4th at 20 and so forth. Making a character up to level 70 is crazy but our party has gone around and slain pantheons of God's before at level 50 and we loved the crazy epic powers of our epic level character. So all I need is ideas for powers on these monsters and maybe even stats, I can do most stats myself just want some ideas to get me started. I don't really want to use things already made. If you don't like my idea that is OK but I don't need to know as it in no way is helpful. Sorry for any lack of clarity in the original post I hope this cleared it up.

 

[GreenTengu]

I can tell you right now that no one is going to be able to help you with this.

The very idea of trying to craft something that is supposed to be a challenge for a character who is completely off the map in terms of level-- characters for whom 9th and 10th level spells are just throw-away spell slots-- there is no way to even begin approaching such a problem.

Start with the monsters that are closest to what you want and try to scale them up as much as you can, but... it just isn't going to matter because the party is going to have too many "autokill" mechanics available to them. And the only way around that is to give them saves when they aren't supposed to have saves or to just make them immune to all such things.

I have no idea what wonky stuff you did to produce level "50" characters, but anyone who isn't in on your personal method of somehow determining what abilities a level "50" Paladin or Monk or Druid or Bard has available to them is not remotely going to be able to answer your question.

And, really, if the whole "scale up the most appropriate creature and then assign it necessary abilities" is something you turn your nose up at-- well, you just went and blew off the only feasible solution than one that is going to require far more work than anyone else should devote to your personal pet project of rolling lots and lots and dice and playing D&D with really big numbers and somehow feeling "crazy epic" because you dealt 1000 damage to the 10000 hit point creature rather than 10 damage to the 100 hit point creature because it has escaped you that those two actions are exactly the same and the later didn't require you to have 200 d6s available.

No matter how you build the creatures, fundamentally it is just going to boil down to having what is effectively just a lower level creature with all its numbers inflated except you need to build in solutions for all the extra auto-win mechanics the higher level PCs have. Also, the disparity between PCs attack bonuses and skill checks and such will expand out to the point where every attack or skill check will either basically auto-hit or auto-miss and the only time the d20 roll will come into play is if it is a 1 or a 20.

I cannot emphasize more than what you intend to do stretches the mechanics so far beyond the limits in which they actually function well that you would be better off not using the mechanics at all. And this should be helpful to you if you would take the time to comprehend what I am writing and understand why this is a bad idea so that you can come up with a more reasonable concept to try to implement or at least try to mitigate the issues rather than falling flat on your face and wondering how you could have gone wrong.

And, really, asking everyone else to do all the work for you? It is one thing for you to propose something crazy and dumb, another for you to demand everyone else make something crazy and dumb for you. Do it yourself and then maybe people will be nice enough to tell you how it is all going to go wrong.

 

[frodo12311]

I am thankful for your input and just want to clarify that the main thing I am looking for is not the stats, I said if you wanted to that you could but I mainly just want ideas such as ability ideas and flavor again I apologize if that was not clear. And I did not realize that is was so outside the scope of the game as we have played lots of epic campaigns that worked. Asmodeus of the nine hells is a challenge rating 27 and the takes an epic party to fight and he is not even the highest CR i have seen in a book from wizards. That along with the easiness of the epic level handbook I thought it was a common thing. And I was not turning my nose up I was just hoping for some original ideas, this was not meant to be all that serious. I just want power ideas and flavor text for abilities and maybe even Ideas as to where the fights could happen. I don't need numbers if you don't want to supply them I have experience with numbers that high so I can do that. Thank you for your input and I will work on not saying so much when I need so little.