What sort of D&D enemy would be roughly as challenging to fight as a tank?

d20pfsrd.com/equipment/vehicles/land-vehicles/tank/
>tank
>Colossal
>1,920 HP

archivesofnethys.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Animated Tank
>Animated tank
>Huge
>144 hp

Really makes you think.

Why is this allowed?

Some kind of earth-elemental dragon

>intead of fire / poison / whatever breath it sprays a narrow cone of pure kinetic force
>can summon boulders
>combine the above to let it launch heavy projectiles
>could also summon a steady stream of small rocks if you wanted to have a 50cal or 12.7mm machine gun equivalent
>able to coat its body with layers of stone and earth to form dense armour at the expense of manueverability. Maybe it's earth elemental stuff also extends to naturally forming ceramics e.g. chobham armour, or metals for depleted uranium armour
>might have a cult of human followers, or subjugate a goblin mob, or something like that to act as infantry for combined arms

The Tarrasque

Power levels in DnD are so fucked that there's not really anything that can compare. Throw a grunt fresh out of boot camp against something and he will hit it x times a second. Throw in that same soldier after a decade of fighting on the front lines in an active war zone and he will be a little tougher, a little smarter, maybe he'll be stronger too.

But he won't be able to take three times as many attacks while also gaining a huge amount of accuracy like he would in DnD. And he won't have 80 more hit points.

Even a 12th level wizard with a weak CON who has spent the last year gaining levels through study and carefully regulated summoning duels would have more HP than a 2nd level barbarian with a CON of 18 (38 vs 27) and be more effective in melee thanks to his higher BAB than the barbarian (if the enemy doesn't have DR)

This is my tankfu. Please be nice to her. Or don't, it's not like you can even dent her.

lets assume its a WW2 era sherman tank for the purposes of the game, since its steel armor is something more in line with what the rules are for, composite armor can make things messy

a sherman tank is ~30 tonnes, and (assuming is is a perfectly shaped like a brick) takes up a 19 x 8 x 9 ft volume, so it is is the ball park of huge, giving it D10 hit dice, and its steel armor gives it 19 AC. the DMs manual also states that a huge object shouldnt be able to be hurt with a normal sword, since it has armor ranging from 0.5 to 7 inches, abstracted to 3 inches, this makes a good case for immunity against hand weapons within common sense

a sherman has a ~50% chance to be knocked out by a penetrating hit from a 75mm shell or panzer faust, meaning that its average HP should equal the average damage from a hit from these weapons, since a generic "stick" of dynamite deals 3d6, while a medieval cannon deals 8d10 damage, so the the HP of an M4 sherman should be about 10d8

>Why is this allowed?

IIRC it's for a module called "Rasputin Must Die!" where the PCs find themselves facing off against WW2-era Russians.

Good thing that we all playing a game of pretend then.

its armor at its thinnest can resist a 30 calibre bullet, so it must have at least 17 (2d6 max damage + 5 dex mod) dmg threshhold, deducting that damage from all sources

>GUTEN TAG!

That's fine. But OP is specifically trying to compare the pretend monsters to real life monsters. A tank is a tank is a tank. Whether you are a high school nerd or a 5 star general, you vs the tank will end in the tank winning every time.

But in DnD an encounter that is unbeatable to a 2nd level character might be so easy that it's not even worth rolling for a 12th level character. So, what was a tank to 2nd level characters is more like a child armed with a makeshift spear to a 12th level character. And what is equivalent to a tank for a 12th level character would be more like an F-16

To be totally fair as long as you get up on a tank without being seen, you can destroy one with the right amount of explosives, or with a single grenade provided you can bait the operators into opening up the turret hatch.

/k/ here. tank turrets are not "held on by gravity". They are bolted down to a set of interlocking rings making it very unlikely to separate from the chassis. Tanks that have exploded from a penetrating round usually have their turrets still attached, even after an air strike.

armored troll

Pathfinder's stats are stupid. That's a ridiculously overinflated HP.
Understand that a tank is not a solid fucking mass of metal. The armor could be cut straight through by a dude wielding an adamantine dagger.

For what it's worth, there was a Ravenloft splat called great war project in 3.5 (basically Gothic Earth in the great war).

Typical HP for the tanks are slightly above 100 (a Mk VIII had 130), with hardness high enough to not take damage from most bolt-action rifle shots.

>Turret is held on by gravity

One easily available ATGM can wreck tanks in a single shot in real life.
Of course, that would be fucking boring and lackluster in a game of pretend, so good DM don't do that.

HP aren't meat points though. They represent things like stamina, luck, and divine protection.

Which the tank, a vehicle rarely have?

That really depends on context, if that was the players intention then thats what should happen with proper preparation.

If they are mook tanks, sure, just like mooks henchmen.
For boss fights, of course not.
It's a game.

To be fair older designs did or used a simple keyway to secure them, partially because that's how they did it on warships and also because it sped up maintenance which was a huge deal in WWII.

Well, yeah. One hit kills imply surprise, if a gm's boss character is dumb enough to get surprised he deserves a 1HKO just like the mooks.

>open up the hatch
Not even. Part of the M1A2 upgrade package was skirts that covered lower and closer to the road wheels, because jihadis kept disabling them with grenades. There's also a few videos of guys with brass balls dropping grenades down the barrel of Syrian T-72's since they're so prone to catastrophic ammo cook-offs.

It is my dream to one day get around to finding and or creating some statistics for tanks for D&D 5e so I can finally run my cozy post-magic apocalypse setting with the ruins of giant mechs and megacities littering the landscape, being slowly encroached upon by the greenery. No one knows how to use the magitech anymore, but some people can sometimes figure out parts of it. So the PC's ride out on their MAGITECH TANK and travel the world in search of SECRETS and MAGIC and TREASURE.

But I don't know how to make 4 people manning a tank not boring.

I was talking the top hatch of the tank, drop one down there and everyone inside is fucked.

Surprised or not, tanks die to one hit to ATGM in real life that is fired by retards trained in less than a week.
In a game of pretend, it is for of course different.

No matter where they're hit?

The warheads are designed to penetrate armor.

Now when you say "mounted T-Rex's", I get two images.
One is a knight riding a T-Rex.
The other is a T-Rex knight, on an appropriate mount. I don't know which is cooler.

If it hit the cupola of a tank that had one then the damage would probably be minimal to the tank but there might be a dead guy if someone was in it.

Ignorant or bait, either way you missed OP's point. Sounds like you don't know anything about tanks, go read.

To be unfair, and correct, OP's picture indicates he wants a modern tank to be abstracted, not antiques.

Earth Elemental.
Earthglide is a bitch.

>Colossal
Are they fucking retarded?

A tank is not larger than 20 FEET by 20 FEET.

A modern tank in a fantasy setting absolutely dumpsters low level characters and even mid level martial characters but anyone with any kind of magic that lets them kill the crew or just ignore armour is gonna do fine. so i guess the best d&d equivalent is a enemy with resistance to physical damage from nonmaigc weapons

Sleep is low-level, and incapacitates the whole thing almost istantly. Then the party just climbs into the turret and murderstomps everyone.

toss a wizard up there too for good measure

Doesn't sleep need line of sight to work?

Not really, but I checked and realized it requires a clear line of effect to work (solid barriers block a spell's line of effect). Apparently I've been doing this wrong the whole time. Good to know.

One drives, one controls the main gun, one sits in the commanders' turret and controls the secondary gun, and the last controls the arcane systems.

They each have different actions. The driver can work the throttle, hit the nitro boost (x/times per day), ram enemies, do awesome drifts with their Vehicle Proficiency skill and whatnot. The gunner can change ammo types, choose targets, rotate the turret and can fire the wave motion cannon (x times/day). The commander has the best LOS and is in the best place to make decisions (I would feed them information via whisper or whatever), and has a secondary gun they can use. And the Arcane Operator can raise different types of shields, work the arcane sensors and countermeasures, repair the tank and so on.

Well, most tanks.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte

Why not just a big ass monster-truck or a caravan of vehicles so you don't have to justify not allowing the players to use the cannons to trivialize their combat?

With a caravan of vehicles, players also get to customize their own vehicles with Apocalypse style bullshit and it works better when you want to run a vehicular battle.

Sentry bots

>Fucking fast
>Fucking small
>Fucking gatling-missiles combo
>Motherfucker can tank missile directly to its face
>Can fucking strafe and eurobeat you to death

This thing is a fucking nightmare.

oh wait, you've said D&D

A tank.

>A remorhazz could boil the people inside with fire.
Yeah that won't work. I guess you could starve them to death but you won't kill the crew with fire.

Tanks aren't airproof nor liquidproof, user.

>never built
HMMMM
I WONDER WHAT EVENTS COULD'VE PREVENTED A FUCKING 1000 TONNES VEHICLE FROM BEING PRODUCED, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY PREVENT A 1000 FUCKING TONNE DEATH MACHINE FROM BEING BUILT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LARGEST WAR OF THE 20TH CENTURY, WHAT A FUCKING MYSTERY.
Hitler was a fucking jackass.

Some tanks are, cold war era they had amphibious, and sealed tanks to protect against chemical and nuclear attacks.

With a modern tank the crew compartment is gas tight for NBC protection, and the engine air intakes will be designed to keep burning liquids form getting inside.

Actually they are, modern tanks are air tight in order to allow them to fight even while under attack from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Hell most modern tanks can actually drive on the bottom of rivers they just need a giant snorkel attached to the turret.
youtube.com/watch?v=He9KXalXnv8

I would probably set a modern tank alone as CR 8 or something. Disabling a tank in all honesty isn't too hard. Wizard casts some sort of explosion spell right next to the tracks and the tank is immobile, rogue sneaks up on the tank and fucks up the barrel through some means, barbarian tanks any machinegun fire from the coaxial MG and any remote weapon station and rips off the RWS and bends the coaxial with his bare hands.

Now if you gave the tank an infantry escort it would be much harder because the second anyone detected someone trying to get close to the tank they would have two machineguns and 10 assault rifles emptying into them.

A tank would be a troll who can cast some moderate range damage spells.

>Disabling a tank in all honesty isn't too hard.

Fuck off you absolutly don't know what you are talking about.
youtube.com/watch?v=EVJqBSr_FEs

>Barbarian tanks any machinegun fire from the coaxial MG

youtube.com/watch?v=mD5_OOdD-m4

>and bends the coaxial with his bare hands.

Fuck off.

no.

>Fuck off.
>
>no.
>I don't understand heroic fantasy
Granted, it should be somewhere between CR14-17 but still, adventurers aren't normal people.

For a machine that is completely mundane and mass-producible, a tank armed with a 120 mm cannon actually fares pretty favorably versus a level 20 fighter, and is certain to take him out in four hits.

Now, when you get into casters it becomes an oversized target, but casters are able to dominate dragons and lesser deities at will, so you can't really fault poor ole' tanky for not being able to destroy something that ridiculously OP.

Well let's see. if going by the 5e system, a tank still probably has an AC of like 30 and is immune to auto crits on nat 20(meaning you still have to hit its AC normally with at least a +10 modifier to do damage)

To be fair though if you sit or stand on the tank, you render it useless. And you can probably cast a spell or throw something down its barrel and it would be bad news for the crew.

With supernatural strength I'd allow a chance for that to happen but only at stupidly high levels and with stupidly high rolls.

He has a point though in the sense that a +5 modifier in any stat is *just* on the cusp of being supernatural. AKA being that you are beginning to reach the highest pinnacle of HUMAN greatness. but take for example, The Mountain with his amazing +5 or even +6 strength mod in real life still doesn't have the strength to flip a tank however. DnD is still a realistic setting. I'd consider a tank to be more of a puzzle and exercise in creativity on how to destroy it than anything.

unless you're all just like level 30 and fucking Kenshiro. In that case go HAM

So FF6?

>D&D isn't realistic!
No shit? But I play it for the realistic campaigns in 16th century Germany!

Oh wait that's GURPS.

Ff6 was more one industrial superpower who knew how to build Mecha and use magician, while most of the rest of the world was stuck in 14th century tech (except for Figaro, the desert city state rules by engineers, on a fucking subterranean railroad track which allowed them to relocate it at will).

5egmegaanon.github.io/5etools/bestiary.html#Death Knight
dragonlancenexus.com/lexicon/index.php?title=Palanthas_(City)
The death knight stats are for Lord Soth specifically. This 20 str motherfucker tore down the gates of Palanthas solo.

First, how challenging to fight is a tank? Is it something only the most hardcore badass on the planet is capable of, or could a group of fighters work to take it down?

Reading this thread makes me think that if you aren't using a standard/elite/solo system for monsters like 4e you're just doing it wrong.

>+5 modifier in any stat is *just* on the cusp of being supernatural
No its not, its fully into supernatural capabilities. An ogre has a +4 with 19 str and are incredibly well known for their brutish, superhuman strength combined with their greed and gluttony. A 20 in a stat isn't an olympic athletes' level, you reach that between 14 and 16.

My level 12 unchained monk fought an actual golemized tank.

And soloed it.

This is probably a result of me playing 5e so I kinda just assume everything is severely underpowered and not realizing the amazing feats these characters and monsters are SUPPOSED to have...

The only reason I say that professional strongmen are at least +4 str and sometimes +5 or even 6 is because of carrying and lifting capacities. The one thing that can actually be quantitatively measured and compared. at 20 str the max deadlift is like 1000 pounds and overhead press is like 400(both being very difficult but something achievable by humans)

I don't honestly consider 5e to really be canon though. In the sense that I wholeheartedly believe that the world of DnD is 100% unbounded and stats are supposed to go waaay past those numbers in high levels

>quantitatively measured and compared. at 20 str the max deadlift is like 1000 pounds and overhead press is like 400(
This is why you let em roll either str or athletics and then multiply the carry rules by the modifier they roll. So a 20 str guy can push, shove, or lift 600 lbs and he does a str check to shove a boulder rolling a 16 so you multiply that 600 by 3 for dat sweet 1800 lb heroic exertion to save the day like a true mythic barbarian.

That sounds like some monster hunter shit. I love it.

Trolls can throw boulders, so it works out.

I don't think that can unhatch during operation now unless you do specific actions.

This is a fantastic monster hunter monster
>Blue sharpness or lower bounces on most of the dragon's body
>Massive damage breath weapon
>Reliable ranged attacks that could inflict Mud or Bleeding status
> Can call to summon juveniles/ smaller pack members/ males from its harem

I could see a badass hammer and heavy bowgun, and an armor set with Defense Up, Stun, and Halve Stamina being made from this thing.

If you can't kill something with fire, you're not using enough fire, user.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_B1#The_one-man_turret
>Similarly, in his book Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian related an incident, which took place during a tank battle south of Juniville: "While the tank battle was in progress, I attempted, in vain, to destroy a Char B with a captured 47-mm anti-tank gun; all the shells I fired at it simply bounced harmlessly off its thick armor. Our 37-mm and 20-mm guns were equally ineffective against this adversary. As a result, we inevitably suffered sadly heavy casualties".[4]

Shots fired, but to no avail!

A juggernaut is pretty much exactly a fantasy tank.

> Will leave behind a trail of destroyedGerman tanks and field guns.

>Which the tank, a vehicle rarely have?
You just need an orthodox priest.

>D&D
>Martials being challenging
Come on user

I really like this, great ideas. Thank you. I actually have only three players, so I might make the driver an NPC? He can take direct orders from the commander.

this is good too, but I might save it for later in the campaign. At first I want operational tanks to be pretty rare.

combat would be roughly divided 50-50 between tank warfare (on the fields, in the streets of crumbling megacities) and traditional dnd fighting (inside old skyscrapers, rundown mechs, underground bunkers)

I guess I should finally get around to playing FF6

Nazi scientists were on some hard drugs.

Are you fucking retarded? Follow the link and read the description. The colossal tank isn't a normal tank. It has a crew of 10 and 2 internal decks.

What does FF6 have to do with my post?

quoted the wrong person. excuse my filthy phone posting.

Why not just use those jet engines to you know...just push the whole plane instead

88 tho, would still wreck it

>he thinks D&D is a realistic combat simulator

>using one of your heaviest at guns to penetrate an early war tank
wehrmakek

A modern day high bypass engine only has the push form the jet engine itself as a secondary thing, most of its thrust comes form strapping large fan to the main turbine axis and having that work as a propeller would.

The result is a much better fuel economy, because you get thrust from momentum, speed times mass (fort the air you move). So a little air going fast (running just the jet engine) gets the same result as a lot of air moving slowly (high bypass where the engine isn't focusing on blasting shit out, but on turning the bypass fan), but it consumes a lot less energy to do so, and thus a lot less fuel.

This thing looks like it hoped to us that effect, it just went full acid trip on how. And/or the goal was to use jet engines that couldn't get it flying on their own.

And if anyone wonders, a modern day fighter jet doesn't use high bypass engines because it's too much drag at the speeds they want to reach. So they just crank up the fuel bill instead.

>A tank is not larger than 20 FEET by 20 FEET.
Yes they are. A M1 Abrams is 32 feet long and 12 feet wide.