Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="moritheil" data-source="post: 3532531" data-attributes="member: 30610">Okay, first off . . . when I run beholders, they don't follow the MM script, because I think it stinks.  I lean heavily towards bringing the save-or-die rays to bear early on - all on the same person if at all possible.  Also, I tend to assume beholders are tactical geniuses because of their absurdly high int scores.  Thus, it's possible that my beholder encounters are a little more deadly than the norm.I'm not really suggesting that you not do it; I'm agreeing with Frank's assessment that people will die if the beholder starts out with the upper hand.  Think about it this way - 2 mages with fly spells up would TPK the party if they ambushed it, and a properly played beholder can be almost as good as 2 mages in terms of offense.I admire your (potentially misplaced) trust in that CR calculator.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  Are you sure that a 13th level mage, druid, or cleric wouldn't TPK your party if they started out with the upper hand?  Can you confidently say that two 11th-level mages with sudden maximize wouldn't kill or knock out at least half the party in one round if they won initiative?IMHO the beholder is best compared to a mage, or a pair of mages, optimized for dishing out damage.</blockquote>

Verification