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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Urbannen" data-source="post: 1584618" data-attributes="member: 7643">I just ran an adventure from Dungeon 92 that takes place in a mind flayer prison.  The players did not like it because half of them were stunned half the time from mind blasts.  Although mind blast may seem like a good villain power on paper, in reality it makes for a very boring encounter.  What happens is that half the players get stunned and then the cleric has to try to run interference with the mind flayer using hand-to-hand combat until his comrades recover (while arcane spellcasters stand around feeling useless because of the creatures' SR).  Once PCs recover, they just get stunned again.Maybe it's just me, but a ability that can be used at will on many PCs at once and that robs those players on average of 7-8 rounds of action on a failed DC 17 Will save is just not fun.  I don't know if its unbalanced, but I do know that it makes the game very uninteresting for players, moreso than attacks that simply do damage. If I ever DM with mind flayers again, their mind blast ability is going to have to be altered.  I'm thinking making the mind flayer wait 1d4 rounds before using the ability again might be a good start, followed by decreasing the rounds of stunning to 2d3.  Another alternative would be that that a mind blast can only be used on one creature at a time.  What would be an effective way to revise the ability?______________________Other observations about mind flayers:  These creatures are good against all classes.  Their mental abilities are potent against rogues and fighters, they almost always ignore offensive spells, and their skills are so high that rogues have little chance of sneaking up or fooling them.  Mind flayers potentially make scarily good rogues.  They have key rogue skills as racial class abilities.  They have super-high Ints, meaning they catch up fast with any skills they don't already have.  They have Weapon Finesse and a racial Dex bonus.  A creature stunned by a mind blast loses Dex bonus to AC, and a mind flayer can make 4 attacks on a full attack action.  This means that a mind flayer with only one level of rogue can regularly expect to deal 4d6 sneak attack damage with a full-round action (Not even talking about the 4d4 tentacle damage and threat of extraction)  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" /></blockquote>

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