What monster abilities do you hate and why?

[Celebrim]

As a DM...

1) Any ability that involves an absolute effect. Improved Grab is a case in point, but I'm also not a fan of Immunity to Fire and similar effects. The problem with them is that they tend to create situations where specific effects are uncounterable except by specific other effects. This makes balance hard.
2) Save or Instant death effects. These are just really hard to balance. You don't dare bring them into play until the PC's are virtually immune anyway, because then they are no fun. The other usage of these effects is to put them somewhere behind a lot of hints not to go this way, but then you have problems of players thinking you are using reverse pyschology, or simply being naturally curious and wanting to 'see what would happen'.
3) Teleport at will: This has always been a problimatic power on a conceptual level. For creatures that have it, you wonder why they bother with combat at all.
4) Summoning/Shapechange: Just because they slow the game down so much.

As a player...
1) Ability Damage: Just because its so hard to track all the changes.
2) Level Drain: Again, just because its so hard to track all the changes.
3) Permanent Maiming: There isn't much that does this in any edition but there are a few things, and anything that effects your character sheet which cannot be recovered (or cannot be recovered by less than a wish) is just like permenent character death without the clean grieving.
4) Incorporeal: This is just such a huge advantage for the monster its scary.

 

[Stoat]

But how does that differ from a fighter with a low Will save failing against a hideous laughter spell? Or confusion? Or any number of save or suck effects? At least with grapple you have a fighting chance?

Trust me, I totally understand the issue. I just see these things as a bigger issue rather than grapple specifically.

For my money, the problem with Improved Grapple and Grapple in 3.X is multifold.

1) as noted above, its terribly easy for a monster to get a grapple modifier so high that only specialized PC's can avoid the effect.

2) lots and lots of monsters have improved grab, which makes it a more common effect than, Frex Hideous Laughter.

3) The grapple rules are poorly written and focus too much on weird corner cases (frex, stabbing a guy with his own weapon). Grapple thus slows down the game more than something like Hideous Laughter.

So you have a common effect that's hard for a majority of PC's to avoid that slows the game to a crawl when it comes up. Ack.

 

[Roger]

I'd put my money on Telepathy. Like with the AD&D doppelganger, for example. It doesn't seem quite right for the DM to say "Hey, so if your character starts to think maybe there's something wrong with the little old lady, let me know immediately."



Cheers,
Roger

 

[roguerouge]

Domination. Especially in 3.0/3.5 where Fighters had low will saves and few incentives to bump up wisdom. Your hard eyed mercenary is also a weak willed fool around a spellcaster.

But it not only removes a player but forces the rest of the group to fight them. Very hard to balance and the idea that a 1st level spell was the solution (i.,e. Protection from Evil) was very annoying.

I love getting dominated.

Hm. That didn't come out quite right.

I like the opportunity to test my PC against others in the party, without the PvP campaign destroying possibilities. It's fun and you can blame the Dm.

 

[TikkchikFenTikktikk]

As a player: anything that ruins hours of gameplay with a single hit: ability loss, level loss, magic item destruction, etc.

As a DM: anything that doesn't have a pretty clear tie to fluff. I hate abilities that just arbitrarily deal damage or impart a condition without being able to describe how or why that happened. As a DM, role-playing the monsters is my turn to act, and I hate it when game designers try to take it away from me.

 

[lobsterGun]

I've always detested Spell Resistance. Fer crying out loud Saving throws are easy enough, a second one is just too much.

 

[malraux]

I love getting dominated.

Hm. That didn't come out quite right.

I like the opportunity to test my PC against others in the party, without the PvP campaign destroying possibilities. It's fun and you can blame the Dm.

For some reason, my characters always ends up being much more effective once I get dominated. I'm always impressed at it.



As for what I hate, I hate anything that takes me out of combat/the adventure. Ability drain, level drain, level loss are the main ones. Also some minor stuff like petrification or anything else that "kills" with a bad roll of the dice.

edit: The other major gripe I have is monster abilities that require special knowledge or luck with the right spell to counter.

 

[Psychotic Jim]

Both as a player and a DM... energy drain. Too much recalculations and too much of a downer. Ability damage/drain is a substitute that I'm ok with (not really great, but it'll do), it seems to get those fearful reactions while cutting down on energy's undesired traits.

 

[lobsterGun]

I love getting dominated.

Hm. That didn't come out quite right.

I like the opportunity to test my PC against others in the party, without the PvP campaign destroying possibilities. It's fun and you can blame the Dm.

I used to play in a campaign where I _hated_ Abner, the NPC wizard in our group. This wasn't an in character hatred. This was me as a player hating that NPC. The GM was constantly forgetting about him in the initiative order and always took ages to figure out what spell he was going to cast when he did remember.

Whenever we encountered any creatures with even a remote chance of being mind controllers, I always made certain to position Tor, my character, near the Abner in hopes that Tor would be mind controlled and be able to remove him from my misery.

After nearly a year of putting up with Abner, the keep that our group was defending came under attack. Somehow, as fate would have it, Tor and Abner were defending one of the towers when an Oger Magi flew in the window and cast the Suggestion, "Mighty warrior, your talents are wasted with these cur! Kill your friend and join me for Blood and Glory!" on Tor.

I was practically overcome with joy. That was to be the day Abner would die! The only thing that stood between Abner and the discard pile was for me to FAIL THIS SAVE!!!! <rolls> 20....crap.

I think it was the only will save Tor ever made.

 

[billd91]

In 1e/2e, I didn't like energy drain. Didn't like losing actual experience because of being hit by an undead creature. 3e fixed parts of it but the end effect could still be level loss. PF energy drain works about perfectly as far as I'm concerned.

Blasphemy is a bit too heavy a monster spell-like ability. A bit more broadly expanded upon, any power that has an effect more severe against lower-level characters than the expected opponent is problematic. Here, I don't mean something being tougher to resist or doing a higher % of full hp damage simply because defenses or max hp are lower. But an effect really more brutal. It means that you can't have the lower level PCs encounter a hezrou as a tense, not-necessarily-hostile encounter without knowing that the hezrou can instantly kill the PCs with a single standard action.

Improved grab... I like. Have a lot of fun with it.