ITT: Surprisingly difficult enemies
You might laugh at this, but I've seen a level three party of five almost get three of its members killed and two NPCs crippled by a few darkmantles. That grab attack, some bad luck and the darkness spell is nothing to fuck with in 5e.
ITT: Surprisingly difficult enemies
Oliver Ross
Jack Harris
Mutants. They might be poorly equipped and terrible shots, but they can take a surprising amount of punishment and can easily cripple a low level Dark Heresy character if they get in close.
Dominic Allen
Justin Williams
Thorn blights in 5e. That's is a lot of damage to deal to a level 1 character.
Elijah Wright
My players kept dying trying to go out hunting.
When one (or several) of them decided to go hunting, I'd look up some random encounter charts on the internet, do some rolls and set it up.
Then one of them ruffles up a territorial boar, gets charged and dies.
The next one failed to notice a giant spider hiding in the trees who dropped down on him and poisoned him to death.
The randomly generated wildlife has some nasty 1 hit kill potential.
Kevin Walker
Wights from 3.X. You'd think that a CR1 creature wouldn't be that difficult for a low level party to defeat, until you realize that they can paralyze with a touch and turn party members into more Wights if you don't destroy the corpse before midnight.
Oliver Wood
...And that's how Dex Star got his red ring.
Josiah Thompson
Blue Slime
HP: 14, Atk: 1, Def: 0
Party of a fighter, wizard, priest, and thief almost wiped on a pack of 5 of these.
Ryan Sullivan
Literally the same in 4e and 5e.
Except 5e has that for literally every monster, since its trying to be more classic.
Xavier Cox
I hate and fear ropers, since one of them has fucking butchered our party once.
Owen Allen
I know every time people say 3.x's CR ratings are accurate, you bust out the Monstrous Crab.
It's CR 3, so it's supposedly a 50/50 fight for a party of 2 Lvl 1's, or it's a throwaway encounter for 4 lvl 3's. For something supposedly as difficult as an Ogre, it will party wipe or at least kill 1-2 PC's.
Jace Mitchell
Josiah Sanchez
Can concur. Ropers are party-destroying bullshit in 5e. 50-foot reach, 4 tentacles per round, bite that can 1-shot spellcasters and 2-shots everyone else, 20 AC, high Wisdom, and literally impossible to tell apart from a normal stalagmite no matter how good your Perception roll is. Seriously, fuck these things.
Ethan Turner
>20 AC
Lolwhat
Dominic Smith
What the fuck is this horrible nightmare?
Joseph Lee
You think I'm joking?
roll20.net
Jackson Phillips
3.5, right?
16 strength, double grapple damage, fights in darkness
I've had trouble with them too. PF lowered their strength to 11, so they actually would look like your pic rather than mine
Aaron Green
That's a roper.
Juan Garcia
ah, I can't read
well they're tough in 3.5 too
Adam Nguyen
>literally impossible to tell apart from a normal stalagmite no matter how good your Perception roll is.
I seem to never hear good things about 5e
Angel Powell
Succubi are pretty hardcore. Depends heavily on context and the GM, but the ability to basically insta-gib a party member if they catch them alone, combined with the ability to dip in and out of the ethereal plan at will makes them really nasty for their CR.
James Nguyen
This is Veeky Forums, when do we ever talk about things that are popular in a positive light?
It'd be like describing the positive qualities of water, or air, or jam sandwiches. I mean, why?
Isaiah Jones
jam sandwiches are ok
Eli Perry
Exactly. They're fine. Presumably they have some good qualities otherwise they wouldn't exist. But why talk about them?
Christopher Parker
Because the kind I make are better than yours.
Brandon Sullivan
No-crust fags should be shot
Aaron Wood
Death to grape jam.
Landon Rivera
Maybe you and I are't so different after all
Owen Brown
>aggravated wound
What the fuck?
Christopher Myers
Thank god it's jelly
You jelly?
Nathan Bell
>Water
Overrated. Only drink it because it is a biological necessity, 3/10 cannot actually recommend.
>Air
See water, except less bland since it sometimes brings fun smells along for the ride. 5/10 could be worse.
>Jam sandwiches
Jam is alright, depending on flavor (raspberry best jam). It is better if it comes along with peanut butter for the ride. 7/10 pretty gud
Ryan Butler
>if it comes along with peanut butter
No. jam goes with jam, peanut butter goes with peanut butter. You and your demented kind promoting condiment mixing have ruined what are supposed to be simple, enjoyable snacks. I can only imagine you are the same strain of degenerate that have made it impossible to expect a plain/pepperoni fucking pizza at parties. You all need to be removed. Forever.
Lucas Brown
the one time I fought these as a player, I was a neanderthal in a prehistoric campaign. I had a level of barbarian and 18 str. We were in a cave system and came across an area of magical darkness. We sent in one member to scout the path ahead, with a troll-gut rope tied around their waist and the rest of us hanging on to it back in the light. They got attacked, and we hauled them out and then gangraped the darkmantle still grappling them. They got fairly hurt, so I volunteered to see if there were any more. I go about 30ft in and one grapples me, so I rage and use my own grapple action to drag them back out where the party (namely the ranger with a battleaxe and my riding dog companion) were ready to attack it. It took me a couple turns, because you can only move half your speed when grappling and half your speed when blinded (so a quarter for me).
We took some fairly heavy damage, but we made it.
Ayden Ramirez
>It's CR 3, so it's supposedly a 50/50 fight for a party of 2 Lvl 1's,
its CR3
this means its a REASONABLE FIGHT
for A PARTY OF 4 CHARACTERS WHO ARE ALL LEVEL 3
strawberry
and strawberry jalapeno jam only
I could go either crunchy or not on the PB
agreed
in WoD there are several kinds of damage.
you only have so many(10? or 15?)
regular damage heals fast-ish it represents, say, scratches, abrasions, and blows to the head.
Aggravated damage takes a LONG time to heal its things like Burns, its what faries take from Iron, or Vampires take from sunlight.
its also what happens if you take too much HEAVY regular damage.
>I was a neanderthal in a prehistoric campaign.
I would not mind hearing more about this. just because
Jackson Jenkins
giantitp.com
myth-weavers.com
the campaign was basically a long string of ambushes as we walked from place to place
notable things for me were using the trollgut rope to cross a fast-moving river and getting grappled by some fish monster and hauling myself to safety while somebody threw a spear at it
our camp getting attacked by like 30 twig blights and me fighting them off with no armor while two-handing a club
me fighting a terror bird basically by myself while the rest fought off a death dog, getting it low on hp and then casting speak with animals and healing it and giving it food so it would show us the entrance to the dwarf cave
one of my teammates was a halfling centaur favored soul, which I thought was just cool as hell
Jack Long
Got party-wiped by a disguised golem because we assumed the treasure behind ten skeletons and a locked door was sufficiently guarded. Any enemy can be deadly in the right circumstance, I would suppose.
Isaac Nguyen
It's a urophion. They're half-ropers, half-illithids.
Jaxon Thompson
That sounds fucking horrifying.
Ryder Lopez
Robert Gutierrez
I didn't find that creature you speak of
Carson Bell
what game
Leo Phillips
Level two party almost wiped by a giant centipede here. turns out the DM did double its' health though, it's balanced originally by being a one round kill but it's attacks are likely to take out a character a turn. High init roll and a couple rounds of combat means half the party bleeding out.
That same party then killed a challenge rating 8 NPC in the next session. My current campaign has been... Odd.
Ethan Ward
They might mean Needle blights.
Robert Morales
CR3 != a 50/50 fight for four level 3 adventurers. In 3.5, it's a fight that's meant to use up approximately 1/4 of a level 3 party's resources, IIRC. The other user's assessment of fight difficulty is accurate, at least according to the book.
James Morris
To date, I have nearly killed my entire 5e party with:
>Flameskull
>Stirges
>one Bulette
Jose Myers
Body snatchers. Swap bodies with whoever is a min maxxing faggot and watch as they all die or kill a party members character.
Isaiah Flores
In that vein, doppelgangers. They're a versatile lot.
Specifically, use three tiers of them. Lessers, Equals, Superiors.
Lessers you make the creepy one. Grossly exaggerate all features and flaws. Make stats half of what the PC has. Make powers actually stronger, but much more prone to failure. Use these to make the PCs uncomfortable and on edge.
Equals are 1:1s, the usual ones. Fun for a one time fight or scenario. Usually only different by their need to murder the PCs (and vice versa) or avoid being fucked by the originals.
Superiors are the real fun. You make them PC+. Hugely scaled up stats. Flaws at a minimum, other features at a maximum, maybe with one hidden extreme flaw or corruption. Make them an ideal the PC may never obtain, and the Superior can CRUSH them in a one on one. They're everything the PC but so much better, and motivated to ruin the 'inferior copy' and take over their lives to ruinous effect.
Camden Phillips
could just be the dice always FUCK the party
Jonathan Martinez
Brandon Harris
>its CR3
>this means its a REASONABLE FIGHT
>for A PARTY OF 4 CHARACTERS WHO ARE ALL LEVEL 3
"Reasonable" as in, the party is supposed to be able to handle several such fights in a single day without anyone dying.
Wyatt Brooks
>(raspberry best jam
that's not chokecherry
Liam Wright
Yeah, this. Sorry.
Elijah Jackson
Everything can easily cripple a low level Dark Heresy character, especially in 1e where full auto makes you more accurate
Jason Carter
I've found that any optimized PC is an absolute terror for the party. In REDACTED edition DnD, I made an equal level PC to the party as a bad guy NPC who fought them all when they were at full resources.
>This was a party of 6 level 7 PC's with all their resources going 6 on 1 vs a level 7 NPC.
>After he was done defeating 5 of them, he came to a 1 on 1 with the party's Fighter and used the old
>"You might be able to defeat me, but not before I kill your unconscious friends, we should end this fight."
>Then he turned to leave and climb his escape ladder.
>The party fighter, my best friend irl, does not appreciate losing. So he threw his sword at his back, and
>fucking ofc rolled 20 and ended up killing him.
It's very important for a DM to understand and use terrain both in support of the monsters and against the monsters for players.
Kayden Long
>fucking ofc rolled 20 and ended up killing him.
I love stories with happy endings.
Evan Perez
Wights are a fucking joke in 5e, why do they even exist?
Bentley Myers
90 effective hp is not all that bad, user A group of them can be pretty terrifying.
Cooper Hernandez
Can we not?
Ryder Gray
This was in 2e specifically, where you're slightly less of a complete fucking scrub when you start.
Levi Sanchez
Cameron Parker
Go back to /sand/, your kind isn't welcome here
>Inb4 get called a Sandwich of the Coast shill
Carson Davis
Dragon Quest. It's kind of an obscure game from a time before D&D became so overwhelmingly popular and there were other mainstream rpgs.
Google it, you might be able to find an old PDF showing you how to run it.
Colton Ross
That AC is dusgusting. Fuck these monsters
Liam Garcia
Ah yes, currently replaying DQ 1, 2, and 3, NES versions. Good games, though somewhat tedious at times (the grinding for god sake whyyyy!!!!), but thought you might find this interesting.
This is something I've been working on for a bit, really currently its just a quest for my cousin's (15-18y/o) group, but you might want to do something with it
set to expire in 1 week
note that this is more 1 specific quest, than a whole system (though it is a work in progress).
Hunter Reyes
>all that shit
>CR 5
Just fuck my shit up
Nicholas Hall
I can't speak to the darkmantle, we have a house rule that being in the presence of large amounts of light (medium to advanced light spells, sunlight, a bonfire, other things of that sort) actually weakens all of their stats by a few points, so my encounters with darkmantles are probably a little easier to deal with than average, what I can tell you is a huge pain in the ass is Fomorian Thieves and Fomorian Assassins. Their motto is 'You won't see or hear us coming'. We're using older editions so they have the foot padding rule in play, meaning all of a Fomorian Thief or Assassin's walking movement is rolled like it's sneaking as a level 4 thief.
Hudson Wright
I think I'll save this statblock until I can use it somehow.
I'm thinking a golden beetle that needs to be caught as part of a deliberately impossible task.
Gabriel Adams
of the normal, run of the mill creatures, bugbears have caused parties I am involved with more trouble then anything.
Aaron Gray
Trolls will kill the unfamiliar rather quickly , shadows are great though
Ethan Reed
Banshees are CR 4 but has that Wail attack that can TPK an entire unlucky party in one round.
>(1/day) all creatures within 30 feet must make a DC 13 Con saving throw. On a failure, a creature drops to 0 hit points.
Nathan Morris
Heres a fun way to make almost any enemy surprisingly difficult, I admit I borrowed it from early diablo, but essentially it's a use of the epithet system. Here are 13 that I use regularly in most fantasy adventures, and while some common sense is usually used, anything can have any epithet.
>Brutal - Criticals are upgraded to maiming, mutilating, or instant fatality injury inflictions.
>of Doors - All dodges successfully attempted are 0-cost teleports that are an effortless and free action, only successful dodges are this.
>Crystalizing - Injuries inflicted by the user of the epithet change to gemstone masses.
>Melting - The creature is infused with so much pure evil it is physically melting down into fluids.
>Brain-eater - bearer eats brains to instant-gain exp levels or instant gain between 1/4th and 1/12th of a level.
>Sanity-blaster - bearer beams telepathic insanity out in a level-number of feet radius. If user is a level-0 being, range is 5 feet.
>Salty - bear sheds bitterly dry salt-cloud in a continuous short-range flood during battle, the cloud very slightly heavier than air and covering level-number feet / 5 feet if level-0.
>Frosty - So cold visible ice forms and sheds off of the bearer in a continuous slow form and shed cycle, during combat.
>Cursing - a cloud of continuous screaming howls swear words, taunts, and confusing double-talk in a radius of feet around the bearer of this epithet.
>Levitator - the bearer levitates 3 feet off the ground and is capable of aerial unaided motion forward back etc, during all combat.
>Securer - beings who share the same alignment as the bearer within range receive a telepathic message that battle has started, if any combat begins.
>Antique - bearer is over 10,000 years old and has very numerous exp levels.
>Mythic - bearer is over 50,000 years old and has extremely numerous exp levels.
>Epic - bearer is over 100,000 years old and is one of the most powerful beings in the world.