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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6245030" data-attributes="member: 5143">They were in a Dungeon because they were asked to find an ancient magical item that was supposedly located at the bottom for a patron.They were in the inn doing the same thing everyone else does: Eating and sleeping.  They had nowhere else to do that.  They hadn't had a home in years having been adventuring for that entire time.They only planned on fighting 3 or 4 encounters a day.  Each one took about a round or so, if they cast 2 spells a round, they had the 8 slots to spare.  Even then, if they were running low for the last combat, they'd let the fighter do his thing for that combat.  They could teleport, so they could leave whenever they felt their spell slots were running low.I wasn't one to tell them what to do with their spell slots.  They decided to do that on their own.I don't know what he SHOULD say, only what he DID say.  This was a real game with real players.  I don't tell them how to feel.  I just ran it.  The player knew that they faced a EL 20 encounter and that was APL+3, also known as a fairly hard encounter.  The enemies they faced averaged APL+2 so this was one of the harder ones.I was running an adventure out of Dungeon Magazine in 2004: Return to Maure Castle written by Rob Kuntz and Gary Gygax.I ran the monsters that were in the dungeon as they were written.  The adventure is designed for Levels 15-19 or something like that.  It's been a couple of years.  They were 15 or 16, I think when they entered.They had gotten from 4th(we started at 4th level) to 15 by going through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil by Monte Cook.A lot of monsters have great ACs and no protection against magic, however.  It is a side effect of the process used to create monsters in 3.5e.  Monsters that were the "Brute" monsters were almost all so vulnerable to magic that they were nothing more than a speed bump.  At the higher levels, a large number of monsters were just Brute monsters.  In order to protect yourself from magic, you pretty much needed a large number of magic items or the ability to cast spells yourself.  If the monster was non-intelligent it pretty much precluded it from having any of those abilities.Even the ones that do have protections against magic, their protections can be bypassed fairly easily.  Resistance to elements?  Use force damage...no monster has resistance to it.  Spell Resistance?  Just cast spells that don't allow Spell Resistance.  Really good saves?  Simply cast spells that are touch attacks that don't allow saves.  Most monsters touch AC was WAY below their normal ACs.  As an example: Horned Devil: AC 35, Touch AC 16.  Marilith: AC 29, Touch AC 13.  Tarrasque: AC 35, Touch AC 5.Orb of Force was a popular spell in that it was a touch attack with no spell resistance or saves allowed.  A Maximized, Empowered one did 75 points of damage.  Which is about 50-75% of creatures hitpoints when they are a "caster" variety(low hitdice with lots of magical abilities).Against creatures with low ACs and lots of hitpoints, you instead would resort to Save or Die spells that targeted Will if possible since these creatures almost always had low Will saves.  Take, for example: Behemoth Gorilla.  CR 19, 366 hp.  Will save: +16.  At level 17, I assume most Wizards will have a spell DC of 38 on their level 9 spells.  Also known as "enemies need to roll a natural 20 or they die" with any spell level 6 or higher.  In this particular case it has spell resistance but there are other high level monsters without it that aren't in the SRD.</blockquote>

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