How to guarantee a successful DC 20 CON save to maximise benefit from the Bag of Beans Item "explosive egg"? [closed]

Question

Planting one of the 3d4 beans from within the magic item Bag of Beans gives this result about 10% of the time:

A nest of 1d4 + 3 eggs springs up. Any creature that eats an egg must make a DC 20 Constitution saving throw. On a successful save, a creature permanently increases its lowest ability score by 1, randomly choosing among equally low scores. On a failed save, the creature takes 10d6 force damage from an internal magical explosion.

The point? One could gain up to 20 in any / all scores pending enough successful Con-saves. That said, simple & easy constitution saving throws are hard to come by. Given vast time, energy, money &/or magical resources (dragons, vampires, elf lords, etc.), how would they prepare? The 35 damage (approx.) is not the issue - a failed save appears to give no ability bonus.

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Basic Question: How can one improve &/or guarantee successful constitution saving throws given infinite time, money, support &/or magic to prepare?

All tricks are welcome / hook or crook: be that by advantage, use of luck, rare feat, class or race skill, potent-portent class features, advance preparation, or stacking spells. Even the stress wish counts. Anything.

Note / FYI: This is of great interest to ültrapowerful creatures that have one 'flaw' ability. Take most ancient dragons (lacking dexterity), Beholders (low strength and dexterity), giants (often low dex) - or even some demon lords (Yeenoghu is a bit stupid, relatively speaking).

Answer 1

Hire a Divination wizard

You've written:

given infinite time, money, support &/or magic to prepare

so a good solution is to hire a second-level divination wizard and keep them on retainer. Every day they will roll two d20s for portents; there is some chance that they'll roll high enough for you to make the save. When that happens, you eat an egg, and they use their portent to make sure you succeed.

(In-character, this will probably be represented by the wizard saying: "I have had a vision that today you will have good fortune if you eat one of those eggs!" or something like that.)

The best feature of this method is that it requires very little of the creature that is eating the eggs. It will work for any creature (including, as OP wrote, "dragons, beholders, giants, or even some demon lords"), and not just for characters that have very high CON scores and very specific sets of class levels.

(Note also, as Cireo wrote below, that many dragons-et-cetera have legendary resistances and can just choose to succeed at the save.)

If you're worried about the eggs going bad while you wait, one solution is the chest of preserving, a common magic item that prevents food from spoiling.

Answer 2

Be a high level barbarian with a cloak of protection standing next to a paladin

There are probably complicated methods, but a high level barbarian can have 24 CON, for a +7, and a +6 proficiency. That is already +13.

A paladin aura can add +5.

The cloak of protection adds +1.

That is +19, and you can't roll below a 1 on the save.

I can actually think of quite a few other suggestions, but this doesn't even have limited uses and you can save your stress wish for trying to get your ability score cap increased.

Yeenoghu, as referenced in the question already actually has a +15 CON save, all he needs is a loyal sidekick (a paladin of his own faith can't be hard for him to find) and he can eat these all day long.

Ancient black dragons have a +14, so again just need a paladin.

Beholders and giants are a different case, they need a few more tricks, the beholder specifically will need to start with someone to feed it, since the poor thing has no arms.

Answer 3

I want to add cheap option that adds considerable kick to your Con saving throw: a single level of Sorcerer with the Favored Soul origin. That gives you access to Resistance or Bless (you can only concentrate on one) and Favored of the Gods, for a whopping +3d4 (or +7.5 on average) to any saving throw once per hour (available while spell slots last).

With it, you could have a 1st level party with a Lucky Human Favored Soul with good Con, a Bard and a Cleric who can use Resistance or Bless (whichever you don't have) and and already get up to 1d20 (with reroll from the Lucky Feat) + 3 (16 con) + 2 (Favored Souls are proficient in Con saves) + 1d4 (bless) + 1d4 (resistance) + 2d4 (favored of the gods) + 1d6 (bardic inspiration) and get B(2d20)+5+4d4+1d6 for an average of about 31.

Anydice analysis of this distribution says that your chances of succeeding on a DC 20 saving throw are 98.69%.

Answer 4

Get a save mod of +19 or more

In order to always succeed on a DC 20 save, we need to boost our minimum to 20. The lowest we can roll on the d20 is 1 (note that nat 1's have no special effect on normal saving throws) so we need to boost our mod to +19 (or higher) for a number of rolls.

There are a lot of different ways to achieve this, especially since you don't need it to be static (if you run out of the resources to do guarantee the roll you can just not eat any more eggs until you have them back). 6 levels of Paladin, 7 of Artificer, proficiency in the saving throw and a Charisma, Intelligence, and Constitution score of 20 gives a modifier of +19 for a roll even with a proficiency of +4. If getting those scores out of the gate is too tricky, you can even have allies have those levels and scores, and it'll still work. Any additional or alternate methods which boost generic constitution saving throws by a static modifier (rerolls and replacements may not apply) or by adding a die such as Bardic Inspiration, bless, resitance, warding bond, rings or cloaks of protections, rotor of return, staff of power, luckstone, luck blade, ion stone of vitality, and/or robe of stars.

If you can't get your character to guarantee saving, consider casting invulnerability on yourself to guarantee the damage doesn't hurt you.

Answer 5

Be a creature with legendary resistances

You mention legendary creatures might want to take advantage of this. A common feature of these creatures (Dragons, Demons, not Beholders or Kraken) are legendary resistances, which would let you automatically succeed on 3 eggs each day.

Note also that a bag of beans will on average only net you just over 4 eggs, so if you want to increase several attributes to 20 you will need a supplier.