The fear of the Wight is the beginning of wisdom

[nnms]

The Wight used to be a ridiculously powerful monster with it's immunity to normal weapons and the energy drain attack. It was horrendous to come across a Wight in a dungeon at lower levels.

Wights can still be pretty impressive if you use them against PCs two levels lower than them. And in some cases healing surge drain can be pretty terrible. But generally speaking, a Wight is not the creature of pure terror it was in AD&D or BECMI.

I'm already planning on running a future campaign with a house rules that limits HPs and Healing Surges restored at each extended rest, so that makes healing surge drains even more deadly.

My idea for making a Wight even scarier is directly against some of the game assumptions of 4E and will only be scary in certain party makeups. One assumption I'm slowly tossing aside is the "tactical encounter" as the framework for combat. So what would make a single Wight even more scary to fight, even all by itself, where you already only get back 1-3 healing surges a day from resting?

Immunity: Untyped Damage

Also, pretty much any monster that is immune to non-magic/non-silver weapons in BECMI would get that same trait.

Even in a tactical encounter, fighters, rogues, etc., without a means of switching weapon damage would need other targets. So I probably wouldn't make an encounter of all monsters like this unless the party has sources of untyped damage. Although... I wonder how many fights against such monsters it would take for a party to go back to town and get some alchemical fire and holy water.

 

[the Jester]

Bear in mind that "Immunity: Untyped damage" really means "Most of the party is useless."

Also, what if your party is 3 fighters and 2 rogues? Wights become virtually unbeatable.

If you're already only letting pcs recover a couple healing surges/rest, then surge drain becomes far worse than in the standard 4e game. I think you may be underestimating its effect in any extended adventure where the pcs are having more than one encounter per day. Even with standard assumptions about regaining everything in an extended rest, healing surge drain is pretty intimidating to the pcs in my experience.

 

[nnms]

Well, I tested it. More below.

Bear in mind that "Immunity: Untyped damage" really means "Most of the party is useless."

I'm not sure this is the case. It could be that I don't run encounters where the only options are kill every monster or be killed by them, but surely players can think of a few things to do in a circumstance where they fight a monster they can't hurt. Escape (either forward or backward) should probably be high on that list.

I don't buy that not being able to reduce a monster's HP to zero makes one useless.

In the session I ran with wights with this ability, the hunter did an amazing job dazing, knocking prone, slowing and sliding the wight around. Another character had charged the wight and upon finding out the attack did nothing, the controller (who only did untyped damage and by the quote above, should have been rendered "useless") totally shined. After the more conventional undead were taken care of, those with the ability to hurt the wight killed it pretty quickly. All told, the wight managed to successfully hit once during the first encounter that had one.

Also, what if your party is 3 fighters and 2 rogues? Wights become virtually unbeatable.

If you were a warrior and found yourself facing a foe you could not harm, what would you do? Keep attacking it again and again uselessly while it killed you and all your friends? Or look for another option?

In another encounter, I tested an undead warrior that had a high resistance to untyped damage rather than an immunity. Powerful encounter powers only did one or two points of damage, but it was the power's rider effects that the PCs wanted to apply to the undead knight. They utterly overwhelmed it and destroyed it. The party is a pretty typical mix of power sources and damage types. The wizard ended doing the lion's share of the damage to it along with the cleric.

If you're already only letting pcs recover a couple healing surges/rest, then surge drain becomes far worse than in the standard 4e game.

Yes. See:
What is Fourthcore? | Save Versus Death

I think you may be underestimating its effect in any extended adventure where the pcs are having more than one encounter per day.

In BECMI (and other previous editions of D&D), a wight represents a threat so much more enormous than losing a bit of your hit point recharge. A hit represents losing an entire level. Or if you're level 1, instant death. One of my design goals is to restore that level of threat without:

a) undoing the player's accomplishment by taking away the XP they've earned
b) instantly killing a PC because a monster hit them

Part of the difference in approach is also how I design/run adventures. There are no "must do" encounters. The PCs goals are what drives their decision making and how they fight and whom. Here's a great blog post about rethinking the dungeon that will provide some more background information:
Reexamining the Dungeon

So imagine a situation where the PCs have decided they need to get into the Catacombs of Tael Shar and discover that it's guarded by a Battle Wight that can't be harmed by their attacks. The players options might include things like:

1) Go fight it and die.
2) Try to lure it out of the gateway so they can sneak/rush past it
3) Go find a means to arm themselves with weapons/equipment that can hurt it (holy water, alchemical fire, etc.,).
4) Find another entrance to the Catacombs
5) Trick another creature into battling with it to distract it
6) etc., etc.,

This type of creature modification is ill suited to a game where the players don't have any meaningful choice when it comes to whom they fight, why, where or how. So yeah, for a (sadly) typical game where the DM runs the players through encounters, without their input or choice, it'd probably result in PCs seeming useless (or even a TPK).

 

[the Jester]

Fair enough; I'd be very wary of using it in any game where your players aren't familiar with your playstyle, though.

I don't mind the idea of a monster being immune to untyped damage in rare and/or unique cases; there's certainly nothing wrong with "find the Achille's heel of the monster" scenarios. Wights are a pretty common thing to encounter in 4e, at least in published adventures, though.

 

[nnms]

Fair enough; I'd be very wary of using it in any game where your players aren't familiar with your playstyle, though.

I don't mind the idea of a monster being immune to untyped damage in rare and/or unique cases; there's certainly nothing wrong with "find the Achille's heel of the monster" scenarios. Wights are a pretty common thing to encounter in 4e, at least in published adventures, though.

I can't say I'd want to use this houserule with any published adventure. They're all made with the assumptions that you're not making any drastic house rule changes.

As far as the frequency of it's use, if it's too frequent, it will rapidly become worked around. The PCs will do what they can to get weapons that can turn their martial attacks into typed damage, load up on holy water/alchemical fire, pick powers that do more typed damage and they'll rapidly become utterly unconcerned.

But when it's a relatively rare thing, it can probably be a pretty interesting challenge.

 

[the Jester]

But when it's a relatively rare thing, it can probably be a pretty interesting challenge.

Yeah, as a rare thing, I can see it. Your implementation seems prone to be pretty broad for my taste, though, based on:

Also, pretty much any monster that is immune to non-magic/non-silver weapons in BECMI would get that same trait.

But I'm a fan of monsters with unique traits or requirements to defeat them- the BBEG of my last group was a death knight that they couldn't destroy until they laid his lost love's spirit to rest.

 

[the-golem]

But I'm a fan of monsters with unique traits or requirements to defeat them- the BBEG of my last group was a death knight that they couldn't destroy until they laid his lost love's spirit to rest.

Epicness. This totally sounds like something I'd do, if I ever thought of it. (Which I didn't so grr @ you )

 

[the Jester]

In all fairness I stole a lot of the setup from the classic Gothic romance and Strahd, but hey, don't we all?

 

[nnms]

Yeah, as a rare thing, I can see it. Your implementation seems prone to be pretty broad for my taste, though, based on:

I guess it ends up being a matter of how often such creatures are used. Maybe even if they are used regularly, assessing whether or not they need to switch to their untyped sources of damage could be an interesting part of the game.

In previous editions this was largely an on/off switch. Either you had access to the particular type of weapon that hurt the creature in question or you did not. Generally speaking once you had a magic sword, creatures that could be only hurt by magic weapons no longer had that defense.

So maybe it's an episodic thing. They encounter creatures like that, find out ways to deal with them and then the episode about that particular challenge is at an end.

But I'm a fan of monsters with unique traits or requirements to defeat them- the BBEG of my last group was a death knight that they couldn't destroy until they laid his lost love's spirit to rest.

This might be a better way to go. As it stands untyped damage is basically physical damage rather than truly being "untyped" (in Gamma World physical is a damage type and there are creatures resistant/immune to it) and in a game where parties have access (in varying degrees) to a wide variety of damage types, it doesn't quite accomplish the goal of making undead that were horrible threats in previous editions into those once again.

For example, the worry the group had when the initial charge failed to damage the wight lasted about as long as it took them to daze/slow/slide the creature around until the right attacks could be brought to bear.

So while this particular monster trait worked to present an interesting challenge during a fight, I guess if I'm honest about it, it largely failed at meeting my primary goal.

Maybe I need to start thinking about this in terms of particular instances rather than house rules or sweeping modifications.

 

[the Jester]

Hmm... tangential to the discussion, I miss having damage differentiated as bludgeoning, piercing and slashing. Really, I think 3.5 did damage reduction fairly well, although I'd also keep DR 5/+2 and the like- there really wasn't much reason to increase your enhancement bonus.

Here's a thought on making energy drain "OH CRAP!!!" scary: How about lose a healing surge, plus lose a surge at the start of your turn (save ends)?