Hot answers tagged monsters
30
They don't actually need it.
I realize this is radical, but bear with me. We need to not expect them to be masters of wilderness survival --in all honesty, they aren't. Animals die in the wild all the time. They starve, they freeze, they get lost, they fall in caves and can't get out. That said, they're actually not awful at Survival and the way they're ...
25
Study, Study, Study
Information is really the only way to overcome this problem, and it comes in a few varieties:
Know Your Players - This one is the most important. You should familiarize yourself with the capabilities of the PCs and with the tactics they tend to favor. Do they search a room when they walk into it before they do anything else? Does the ...
23
tl;dr
The weakness that prevents vampires crossing running water is derived from Bram Stoker's Dracula, but found only in D&D 3.0 and 3.5.
Advice from AD&D suggests that vampires should charm people and use them to circumvent weaknesses.
What is the history of the D&D Vampire's "running water" weakness?
The D&D vampire seems to be ...
22
What you could do is run with their inability to combat the wasps, and turn it into plot. The first time they encounter the wasps, they get severely injured and are forced to flee. You then have a followup of them looking for a way of combating them: be it fire weapons, magic bug spray, or whatever.
Just try to make it clear to the players that they're ...
16
Creatures' skills are listed at the bottom of their info sheet/card.
Creature sheets have ability modifier + half level, which is what you should be using, already calculated at the bottom of the sheet.
For example, a level 14 lich necromancer has the following ability stats at the bottom of his/her monster sheet:
Skills: Arcana +18, History +18, Insight ...
14
MANDATORY STUFF
Crowd Control Immunity: By early paragon, a few classes can have stunning encounter attacks, and many have stunning dailies. Solos need to be either outright immune to stun & daze (and possibly blind), or have some easy way to get rid of them (like an at-will interrupt to negate a just-applied effect, or an extra save at the beginning ...
12
Okay, let's take a look.
Other
This article provides a list of vermin to select 'animal' companion from. Note that it actually does not prohibit a non-vermin druid to select vermin companion. Also please note that vermin companion is actually considered magical beast.
Watchspider is a wonderful magical beast located on page 140 of City of Splendors: ...
11
Just use flesh to stone and then rock into mud, scoop them into a pot and plant a tree in them.
Doing it that way stops resurrection because
The subject, along with all its carried gear, turns into a mindless, inert statue. The creature is not dead, but it does not seem to be alive either when viewed with spells such as deathwatch.
They could be be ...
11
Focus Fire: Don't spread out damage any more than you have to. It's far more effective for most of the monsters to concentrate on a single target. If you can get a player down, that's that much less damage per round Team Monster is taking, and the party is suddenly on the defensive to try to save the downed player (only particularly nasty monsters should ...
11
The Dresden Files is a different paradigm in RPGs than Pathfinder. The concept of statistics doesn't enter into the picture. What you would probably want to do is to take a vampire in Pathfinder, then take the spirit of the Vampires of the Courts in Dresden.
Black Court Vampires (OW85) would do very well as standard Pathfinder vampires; from the Dresden ...
10
First and foremost, that bodak's mount doesn't look like it is a special mount or fiendish servant or something. Just a cool construct, bound to him by a property of the construct, not by a class feature or feat.
As for special mounts, let's take a look what DMG says.
PALADIN COHORT MOUNTS
At the DM’s option, she may allow a paladin or other ...
10
A failed save means the target has no idea that the effect has taken place. A successful save gives the target an idea that they’ve been targeted by a hostile mental effect, but beyond its hostility and the fact that they resisted it, they gain no more information (i.e. no indication of the source, the direction it came from, the nature of the attack, ...
9
Whether something is a Wild Card or an Extra is a matter of game plot and story, not about the fictional game world. It is entirely possible to have adults Rocs that are Wild Cards right beside other adult Rocs that are Extras, so long as that makes sense for the encounter design. The default Roc in the book happens to be a Wild Card, but it's not a rule ...
9
Her domains are Death, Fate, and Winter.
So aside from the obvious raven iconography, consider the vultures who "hold no pity for those who suffer and die, for death is the natural end of life."
She is prayed to during funeral rites, so consider fire elementals flavored as funeral pyres.
Perhaps chain golems, chain guardians, and other such constructs are ...
9
This is one of those situations where the players have to try to shape the combat. There are three major situation types where a dragon or dragon-like creature might land:
1. It is compelled to by the players.
This category includes solutions that range from magic that can hold the dragon's wings, to creating clouds of dangerous gases or acids to make the ...
9
Mundane, real-world wasps do hate smoke. Objects that produce smoke in quantity shouldn't be too hard to come by, thought the surprise element certainly works against the characters in this regard. Smoke wouldn't necessarily kill the wasps, but it might disperse the swarm (and thus "defeat" the swarm encounter). I'm not sure if there is any game mechanic ...
8
I’ll toss a 3.5-specific answer in there: yes, and it’s pretty trivial if you can justify a fair bit of knowledge of its defenses and vulnerabilities, as well as those of a select few creatures and items in the world. The Tarrasque in 3.5 is basically a puzzle monster: it’s immune to a ton of stuff, devastating in melee, and can only be ...
8
Unfortunately I have not found any specific references to what does and does not reflect in D&D. I have looked at a monster manual for editions 2-4 and each of them only says one thing "casts no reflection in a mirror". Although, the AD&D book said "no reflection in glass" if you needed to be specific, so a steel mirror could technically catch ...
8
There is no easy way to do this.
Which doesn't mean there's NO way to do this, mind you. It's just that it's going to be a rough and toothy thing on you. I'm afraid the proposed answer involving shaving the defenses and the like is more of a stop-gap solution than it is a long-term way to convert the monsters.
Now, the absolute 100% best thing to do is to ...
8
Since you're the DM, you could just decree he has it and maybe fill out his backstory a little because of it - after all, it's not like he existed in a vacuum until the PC's stumble across him.
Maybe as a little fiendling he was trained in the seductive arts by a coven of his overlord's captive succubi, or maybe he was granted an enchanted silver tongue by ...
8
What you describe sounds like the Nilbog, which is the oh-so-clever "Goblin" spelled backwards. Wikipedia and DnDWiki say it originates from White Dwarf, which seems about as crazy as the creature itself. As far as I'm aware, it first appeared in the original AD&D Fiend Folio (p. 67 of my copy). The two above entries both reference the Llort, which ...
8
Generally, template describes the situation if there will be any Hit Dice size change . Wizards online Types and Templates defines this as follows (along with changeing Constitution score)
Before applying any Constitution changes, check the Hit Dice and Hit Points entry in the template. Some templates change the number or size of the creature's Hit Dice ...
7
@Kryan hit the nail on the perverbial head, however, there is another aspect not yet addressed.
A sucessfull Skill: Spellcraft check of 25+spell level allows the character who made a saving throw against them to determine what the spell was.
Note that this doesn't say they are required to see the caster casting the spell only make a saving throw. ...
7
Mixing weapon and natural attacks is a mess. Fortunately, it is not what happens in this example.
Here you see 2 full attack options: one for 4-hand multiweapon fighting (iterative attacks from main hand, single attacks at highest BAB from off hands, no penalty for multiweapon fighting due to racial ability) and one for all-natural full attack (several ...
7
The Survival skill allows a character to survive in any biome. Most animals only know how to survive within their natural habitat.
If extreme weather is common in their homeland, they instinctively know how to deal with it. If it's a freak storm, they have no idea what to do and are potentially stuffed.
When you take them out of their natural habitat, ...
7
No, they were invented by Wizards of the Coast. There are a number of creatures in 3.x that never existed before and have no lore in either real myth or in earlier editions of D&D.
After converting the classic AD&D monsters that they wanted to keep and figuring out their CR, they found that there were CR numbers that had too few creatures for ...
6
Here are some of the tactics that I've collected in my research so far:
Three-Pronged Attack
Forward skirmishers advance to take center and flanking positions, while artillery hangs back and provides covering fire.
Dog Fight
Made famous by the Mongols, have the forward monsters panic and flee after being wounded; when the party pursues, they find that they ...
6
I am not sure this is a complete answer, but Yes, there are a number of sci-fi/fantasy references to wraiths stealing souls/energy/feed from living individuals. Below I have included some references:
TV show Stargate Atlantis:
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Wraith
he Wraith are a vampiric hive-based species that harvest the 'life-force' of other ...
6
No, they are not available online.
Although the DDI Compendium (and by extension, the Builder) tends to have some or all of the flavor for player mechanics, the DDI services are otherwise solely concerned with providing access to the mechanics of the game. Leaves a reason for you to still buy the books.
EDIT: I should point out that much of the ...
6
No, in D&D 3.5, animal companions do not grow in size due to bonus HD. It does not clearly state this in the core rules but is explicitly stated in a Skip Williams rules article on animals on Wizards's site.
Like many things, this was improved in Pathfinder, where specific size increases are defined per animal companion type explicitly in the rules.
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