What monster abilities do you hate and why?

[Wiseblood]

My freinds and I are playing the Council of Thievs AP. This stuff is hard IMO. We are currently in a dungeon in the latter half of The Six Trials and have been subjected to some sucky powers. I have left out specifics on these on purpose. It got me thinking. What is the most annoying to contend with?

 

[The Shaman]

A pretty much universal "Oh [insert-expletive-here]!" moment for the generation of gamers introduced to roleplaying games through the earlier iterations of D&D was encountering incorporeal level-draining undead.

Protection from evil 10' radius remains one of my favorite spells for just that reason.

 

[Herobizkit]

Ability Damage/Drain (for all the math involved)
Level Drain (3.0 - 3.5 fixed it, thankfully)
Hold powers
Incorporeability

Pretty much.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Anything that turns a PC or a monster into a bystander for more than one round.

Anything that makes a PC or a monster untouchable for more than one round.

Anything that takes to cool out of the fight/encounter/dungeon no matter how "logical" it is.

Anything that makes the other players play "Mother, may I?"

So quite a few, but most are on the player's side of the table. Some are monster territory, though.

 

[IronWolf]

Level Drain (3.0 - 3.5 fixed it, thankfully)
Incorporeability

I agree with these two. Level drain is just a pain and incorp gets frustrating after awhile without ghost touch.

 

[EroGaki]

Teleport without error. There is nothing more annoying than an enemy that can escape at will.

 

[FireLance]

From a DM perspective, any ability that is not intuitive and does not flow naturally when running the monster. This is obviously quite subjective and will differ from DM to DM, but some personal examples are:

1. Regeneration for lycanthropes in 4E. I keep forgetting to apply it since I come from a background of damage reduction (in 3E) or not being able to hurt the lycanthrope at all (in 2E and earlier editions) without using the right kind of weapon.

2. Recharge abilities in general. I keep forgetting to roll for the recharge since I come from a background of monsters having either at-will abilities, or abilities that are limited by a fixed number of uses per day.

3. Certain triggered abilities. Again, if the flavor attached to the interrupt abilities is not strong enough to fix it firmly in my mind, I often find myself forgetting to use them when they are supposed to be triggered.

 

[Runestar]

The 3.0 phane (ELH) had this ability which let it turn back time by 4 rounds.

Till this day, I have absolutely no idea how to run this ability, since it would involve everyone taking detailed "snapshots" of their stats at the start of every round. Nor am I am fan of "resetting" combat.

If anyone has used this ability with some degree of success, please let me know.

 

[GlassJaw]

Creatures with improved grab, constrict, and other grappling abilities. Grappling is a huge pet peeve of mine in 3ed. The basic grapple rules don't actually bother me that much - it's all the abilities tied to grappling.

The wording is unbelievably inconsistent and I constantly go back and forth to try to figure out what the developers actually intended rather than what they wrote.

<shameless plug>Stay tuned for the Trailblazer monster book. I have left no ability or stat block untouched and have essentially rewritten the entire monster book for consistency and clarity.</shameless plug>

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

A hearty second on the interrupt abilities of some critters in 4E, at least from the DM side of the screen as I keep forgetting about them, thus making the combats easier than they ought to be.

I've also run into severe player resentment in nearly all editions whenever a monster uses a charm or dominate type ability...basically anything that gives even partial control of the character to the DM. I've actually had players walk out of the game when powers like that came up.