WoTC Rich: Beholder!

[InfernalistGamer]

All I can say is, this conversation has inspired an entire dungeon adventure. Thanks guys!

 

[lukelightning]

I'm getting tired of super monsters. Yeah, beholders are tough, they're supposed to be. But so many people feel the need to take the iconic beholder action... float in and zap, and add to it all sorts of speclal lairs and environmental craziness with little regard to how this should affect the difficulty of the encounter. It seems as if you don't provide the beholder with an army of charmed monsters and explosive bombs to chuck with TK then you're playing them wrong.

The rules of how beholders can use their rays are designed so that it's not always a TPK. If a beholder can bring 10 rays to bear on a single target, kiss your party goodbye.

Heck, even kobolds have turned into some sort of uber monster. Where the heck are the hordes of wimpy monsters? It used to be things like kobolds were a threat due to their numbers, but now they've been fanboyed up into an unbeatable challenge. It's not a big leap to think "kobolds are physically weak, therefore they'd use ambushes and missile weapons" but the current thinking seems to be "kobolds are weak, therefore they are ninjas with poisoned arrows, firebombs, and gold credit cards to pay for all their ACME brand super traps."

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'm getting tired of super monsters. Yeah, beholders are tough, they're supposed to be. But so many people feel the need to take the iconic beholder action... float in and zap, and add to it all sorts of speclal lairs and environmental craziness with little regard to how this should affect the difficulty of the encounter. It seems as if you don't provide the beholder with an army of charmed monsters and explosive bombs to chuck with TK then you're playing them wrong.

One thing that got lost from my post above was the question, exactly how much do you plan to increase the CR of the encounter when you add all these deathtraps to the lair specially built by the beholder to squeeze maximum advantage from each of its abilities?

Because if I had that information, it would change the tools at the disposal of the party since they'll be bumped up a few levels as well. If a wizard has access to 8th level spells, for example, all he needs to do is step outside the antimagic cone and whip off a Power Word: Stun and it's game over.

Certainly, we could put the PCs at the bottom of a 100' pit in an antimagic field and put all the monsters at the top with an infinite supply of heavy boulders, and the monsters would tend to win. But that's not the way the game works. Monsters have their shticks, and PCs are supposed to have the tools to overcome those shticks, with varying degrees of ease. My original point is that wizards tend to fall too heavily on the ease end of things because they have access to spells that can render just about any sort of attack useless. I'm looking forward to the 4E wizard, since he won't be completely undermining the monsters. He'll be hurting them and inconveniencing them, making it easier for the rest of the party to take them down--without making the rest of the party obsolete.