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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2880313" data-attributes="member: 30001">Given enough time wouldn't any demon lord of any level eventually get killed?  At some point maybe the idea of a Chaotic Evil plane with a relatively stable set of "lords" for the last 1000 years is unrealistic.  Who says how long Yeenoghu has been ruling?However, I guess I'm cherry-picking what parts of reality and fantasy I would use in order to set up the situation.  For whatever reason, if the number of Yeenoghu's followers exceeds that of a Balors, I don't see the situation as being untenable.That's not the case in 1E.  I don't know where else the demographics of the Abyss are addressed, so maybe the possibility that there are only 6 or 12 balors contradicts some basic tenet of 3E.I'm not saying stats don't matter!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />   I'm saying stats aren't the ONLY thing that matters.  Maybe once every thousand years Yeenoghu battles it out with a Balor just to show who's boss.  Is it possible that he'd lose?  Well, yea, but one assumes that because he's showing up in the rules that he hasn't so far.  But it seems that luck (and were not talking great amounts of luck here) is something that some folks are just loathe to apply as a reason for success.Yeenoghu is CR 20, isn't he?  It sounds like you guys think he's CR 3 or something.  There are tons of demons in the SRD that have almost no chance of beating Yeenoghu on a good day.  If your Abyssal demographics has Balors being as common as flies, then I would agree that Yeenoghu must have better than CR 20.Perhaps at the beginning of time Yeenoghu and a Balor could have been squaring off for dominance of an Abyssal layer and beginning with roughly the same resources.  Clearly it's a coin-toss then, but since we're reading about Yeenoghu, one has to assume that he won the contest.  Perhaps Yeenoghu could count on support from Orcus at some critical moment, clearly an advantage vs. a creature (the Balor) who has a poor reputation among the lords and princes.In any case, millenia later, it's no longer a case of comparing apples to apples.  Yeenoghu would have a well-developed (by Abyssal standards) followers, spy-network, fortresses - a significant home-field advantage.  Some wandering Balor moving into his territory is going to be at a severe disadvantage.  So even if it would be a fair fight within a featureless 30x30 dungeon room, that's almost irrelevant.  I'm not saying that people are insane for wanting to jack up the CR of a demon lord.  I'm saying that perhaps it's wise to understand how these other factors are involved in a creature's power before doing so.  Of course it depends on circumstances that are a matter of the particular campaign.  If someone says that in THEIR Abyss that lords like Yeenoghu started out on equal footing with 100 other Balors on his plane, then it seems implausible that none of the planes are ruled by Balors.  In fact, you would have to assume that only 1 in 100 planes would be ruled by non-Balor demon lords, since all things are equal.</blockquote>

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