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Creatively Murdering PC's (D&D 3.5 DM thread)
DevoutlyApathetic
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
We have no thread for those of us who want creative and dangerous monsters/npc's to inflict upon players. So I made one.
I also happen to be running a single session game this weekend to fill in for a few hours of open space in the day. They'll be 13th level, I don't know party composition yet and I'd rather not gear the baddies to the party anyways.
I'm definitely using Mearls revamped Beholder. It's what started me on this whole thing.
Current ideas include Rakasha with 3 levels of Abjurant Champion, a pair of Pixie Spell thieves and a finale fight with a blue dragon of some sort. Possible with Ninja levels because I am cruel and such.
I'm aiming for CRs of 13 or so. I'm looking for honest 13s so I don't plan on adding a level of Warrior to lower CR or saying that levels are non-associated when the clearly are.
The only guys I'm thinking look weak out of the gate are the pixies. Spellthief is great for them but that starting 4 CR really hurts them.
I'll post some more once I work out actual stats for these guys.
I also happen to be running a single session game this weekend to fill in for a few hours of open space in the day. They'll be 13th level, I don't know party composition yet and I'd rather not gear the baddies to the party anyways.
I'm definitely using Mearls revamped Beholder. It's what started me on this whole thing.
Current ideas include Rakasha with 3 levels of Abjurant Champion, a pair of Pixie Spell thieves and a finale fight with a blue dragon of some sort. Possible with Ninja levels because I am cruel and such.
I'm aiming for CRs of 13 or so. I'm looking for honest 13s so I don't plan on adding a level of Warrior to lower CR or saying that levels are non-associated when the clearly are.
The only guys I'm thinking look weak out of the gate are the pixies. Spellthief is great for them but that starting 4 CR really hurts them.
I'll post some more once I work out actual stats for these guys.
Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
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First, the background: I had my players fill out index cards with stats, AC, saves, etc. so that I had a quick reference in front of me for each character. One of the slots I had was racial hatred, intended for rangers. One of my (non-ranger) characters decided to be a smart-ass and filled in "small furry creatures with 27 legs" and informed me that should he ever run across such a creature, he WILL go out of his way to kill it.
So, I asked a friend who is much better at these things than I am to design me one.
It's an empathic parasite. It feeds off nearby emotions, the stronger the emotion, the stronger it is.
Let's see... you HATE these things? :twisted:
I had a game the night before that was amazing and epic.
Basically, a group of nongood hired muscle ordered to assassinate the king of breland as an aside to a long-running campaign set in bizarro-Eberron. Just for the hell of it, he lets us go nuts on the munchkining at level 10, to the point where he actually let a Warlock PC into the game.
In any case, the DM doesn't pull any punches, and for the most part we get through only because of our munchkin-ness and luck. And we manage to get ourselves through and then finally do the deed. There's a suitably epic fight between my cleric and a rather large, frightening construct, and then a good-aligned cleric using the same sequence of buffs I had run out of minutes before, as well as the warlock going toe to toe with the king himself on a disintegrating airship.
And that's when the train came rushing through.
The changeling assassin ended up missing the flight after making the jump check but not-quite-meeting the climb check to get on, leaving her stranded on the landing platform, albeit invisible and surrounded by angry guards. Considering all of the magic items and abilities she had in regards to infiltration, it was entirely possible she could've gotten out eventually. However, the first thing they do is that they know she didn't get onto the ship, so they bring up a mage to area dispel, or at least a reveal spell. Before she could even react to it, the entire contingent of guards immediately surround her and simultaneously attack. Needless to say, she died right away.
Later, we have to flee the ship. We have a mage, who is currently invisible and carrying a ring of feather fall, jump off and free-fall to the ground. Straight away, surrounding airships start shooting her somehow, with cannons (as said, Bizarro Eberron). Cannons, shooting an apparently invisible character with a +26 to hit. With no miss chance. She actually survived despite sorceror Hit die, but that kinda stretched the suspension of disbelief.
I apparently missed a will save, one above my roll, though I get the feeling it'd have been one above my
roll had I gotten a natural 20 with a cleric will save. Which resulted with me being paralyzed long enough for the authorities to arrive after the classic employer betrayal... but that doesn't really bother me that much.
All of this felt really, really cheap, though. And kinda marred an otherwise amazing session. Honestly, it'd have probably felt better if he just told us we died in a certain way and not go through the trouble of rolling all the dice.
[/rant]
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
In fact, many people would argue that it's underpowered if you're not constantly getting into combat.
An example might be a fighter complaining that he can't hit some monster, and they must have some +AC spell on. Well, the next version of that monster does. They wonder how some NPC survived some disaster, and toss out that maybe he's a were-creature and regenerated. Well, he is now...
Players can think up much worse fates for themselves than you can. Especially if they're the paranoid type.
Probably, but the player who made him and the DM are absolutely convinced it is.
Now that's some scary stuff.
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
Level 7, +14 Diplomacy check (no ranks), +22 bluff check, +24 intimidate check.
How the hell??
Behold Flip Mats! What are they? Some card stock with a grid and neutral color on it that've been laminated the hell out of. You can write on these things with damn near anything you like and it'll come off pretty easy. They fold down to easily travel with your D&D books and best of all are pretty damn cheap. I've got a couple so I can pre-draw maps and just swap them out.
Tact-Tiles look pretty neat but are pricey and harder to transport.
The classic solution is a large vinyl map and wet erase markers. This is outdated tech at this point. Wet erase stains your hands something fierce and vinyl maps are a little pricey and quite easy to completely fuck up if the wrong marker comes near them.
I also like RPtools if you want to use a computer to manage things. One thing if you're just starting out I'd suggest is booting that thing up and looking at how it draws Line area of effects. They implemented that correctly which is pretty rare.
I have a rool up map with hexes on one side and squares on the other. It can be written on with dry-erase markers. This works great (I would say is indespensible for 3.5) with either minis or counters. If you poke around online there are a lot of good PDFs out there with counters you can print and cut out.
Oh yes. Like that Shadowrun campaign I ran once. One player didn't want to tell the other players (or me) where he got all his money from.
So one day the mob turned up and wanted their cash back. With interest.
Flip mats look awesome. I think I will end up ordering a few (since they are rather cheap). The Tact-tiles look really nice, but seems a little too expensive for me.
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
It isn't the Yakuza if they're not pulling machinery out of someone's head in order to settle a debt.
Bah, what's the point of diplomacy if you can kill everyone in the room, teleport to a completely different room, and then kill everyone in that room as well, all in one round? (Note: you may or may not actually be able to do that all in one round. Lemme go look up how Time Stop works.)]
Edit: Yep, Time Stop for 3+ rounds, Cloudkill (it has a duration, so you can still cast it during Time Stop and have it take effect when it ends), Greater Teleport, Cloudkill. Any other area of effect spell with a duration will work as well.
Because occasionally you disagree with people and yet still do not wish to bring about their imminent demise?
Be a Sorcerer then, and you can do both.
....so it is sometimes useful to talk to people? I'm having difficulty figuring out what your point is. Now a sorcerer is going to suck compared to a warlock at talking to people simply because they don't have the class skills needed and besides that if you actually play high level stuff Time Stop isn't that good. Shapechange is where it's at. Granted a Animal/Trickery cleric gets both and has diplomacy as a class skill along with Divine Insight.
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
That helps quite a bit. Index cards are good for that, because then if you use the same critter again in another session, you've already got it set.
Basically, what you want to do is plan out who / what they'll meet / fight if they do exactly what you expect them to do. Then throw that page away, because you probably won't get to use it.
Seriously, though, prepare your main adventure, plus a couple of random encounters for "just in case", and have a few generic NPCs at hand for things like innkeepers, etc. And have the WHOLE thing planned out even if you don't think you'll get more than halfway through it in one session, because you never know what your PCs will do. -- We really frustrated our GM a couple of weeks ago, because we snuck in thorough a second floor window of the vampire's keep and came at the whole thing from behind (skipping a good number of guards) rather than waltzing up to the front door and trying to bluster our way in like he was expecting.
Another thing that is helpful is to have your PCs' important stats in front of you so that you can make secret rolls if necessary, and you can fudge things if you need to keep from wiping them out with a lucky roll. (If you know the wizard only has 5 hp and you roll 6 points of damage on him, you can fudge it down to 5 so he goes unconscious but doesn't start bleeding to death, for example.)
I've been itching to make a version of the Lich that is a Divine rather than an Arcane spellcaster (sort of like a "Thoth-Amon" or "Red Priest" type of character from R.E. Howard's Conan stories). It seems to me that a Cleric of Nerull would be as likely candidate for serving his lord in undeath as any Necromancer.
Anyone else done this already? Would love to get some ideas.