Warning Shot
My table doesn’t mess around with scarecrows. Not anymore. Not since… the incident. Of course, it wasn’t just the trauma of an ignominious character death (follow by an even more ignominious reincarnation) that triggered our paranoia. That honor goes to the horror of artwork related. Laurel, being an enormous chicken, now gets twitchy whenever we drive past cornfields.
These sorts of things happen to every group. The dice go wrong. The monster nearly causes a TPK. The GM’s description triggers some kind of IRL phobia. Suddenly, something as innocuous as an ochre jelly becomes the bane of your party’s existence.
“Wait… It’s an ooze!? What color is it? Please tell me it isn’t Dijon flavored this time!”
If you happen to be a GM in these situations, you’ll want to take special notes. Your players have attached special significance to this monster, and will now lose their shit every time it appears. Mimics are the poster children for I’m-never-getting-got-again paranoia, but I find that it tends to vary between groups. All the contents of the living room can traumatize players in exactly the same way.
Shock and surprise aren’t strictly necessary though. For example, thanks to one memorable encounter with a very lucky goblin, my megadungeon party firmly believes that monsters with exactly 1 hp left are extra dangerous. This makes the deathwatch spell a constant source of amusement for yours truly.
And so, in the spirit of Ellen Ripley, what is the one monster that you dread to face? Why do you fear it so much? And upon reflection, is that fear warranted? Tell us all about your most hated nuke-it-from-orbit nemeses down in the comments!
The undead, full stop.
Well… that and creatures that spam Enchantment spells.
There was this Blackguard in the epic (quality, not level) Ravenloft game I was in who I’d have liked to slow-roast… and don’t get me started on the Dread Doppelganger Cleric that served as the Big Bad.
Nothing stops the fun as quickly as a few otherwise easy-to-deal with vampires that just spam days-long domination spells until someone fails.
Ghouls/ghasts likewise continue to be an absolute hassle until you get enough levels to just ignore their paralysis (the DCs are rather low) and not have to worry about a TPK because they can instakill you with coup de grace rules (paralysis is practically a ‘save or die’ effect because of this).
I gather that your group collectively invested in pants of mindblank or whatever.
I took Inscribe magic tattoo and hit up the whole party with tattoos of Protection from evil, actually. ^_^
“Ooh… yeah… This lich is more morally ambiguous than average? Ima need you to go ahead and make that save.”
Oh no, the Annoying Office Manager creature. I’d take a Kraken worshipping death priest over that guy any day.
“Ooh… yeah… This lich is more morally ambiguous than average? Ima need you to go ahead and make that save.”
No, Protection from Evil explicitly makes you immune to possession, charm, and compulsion effects from anything, regardless of alignment.
Ahh, Rise of the Runelords, you’ve traumatized so many with your corn fields and clock towers.
As far as ‘shoot on sight’ goes, it’s always a safe bet to use a ‘disrupt undead’ cantrip on any corpses you come across. If nothing happens, good, it’s not undead (it could be an illusion, or infested, or a construct, or some other corpse-like shenanigans, of course) and doesn’t disturb any traps or such much. If it is, you avoid getting surprised by it when it suddenly leaps up to attack.
Playing Mummy’s Mask, we very quickly learned to shoot or attack statues on sight, or bring along a golembane scarab (which detects golems), as most of the statues will attempt to rip off your heads when the party triggers them.
We also got a groaning dislike of elementals. The buggers serve as ideal meat shields and tedious encounters, being big, durable (with DR/- and immune to crits (which particularly annoys my Gunslinger that relies on them).
As for ‘monsters I dread facing’, anything with permanent/long lasting ‘save or die/lose’ effects (gorgon’s, medusa, chaos spawn, ghouls, vampires), or one of the many ridiculously dangerous monsters of Pathfinder, of which the Sceaduinar I was forced to face SOLO at level 7 takes the cake (I barely survived by running back to the party).
https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Sceaduinar
Playing a 1-20 game as a Wizard in Return of the Runelords had us facing’ many, many such nonsense creatures I had the privilege of telling my party how it might murder us all (and prepping my kill-spells to deal with them). If I didn’t, we’d probably not last for half as long as we did.
Disrupt undead is just detect undead with benefits.
Detect Undead is just Detect Evil with less ambiguity.
Detect Evil is just Smite Evil with liability insurance.
In pathfinder the monster that’s on this particular pedestal for me are mosquito swarms. https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/vermin/mosquito-swarm/
The damn things are only CR 3, has all the standard swarm immunities, including being small enough that it’s utterly immune to normal weapons, and a whole 31 hit points, which is quite a lot for something like that.
offensively it does 2d6 damage with it’s swarm, plus 1d6 bleed, meaning it’ll get you even if it attacks someone else next turn.
The damn thing is even faster than you, so running away isn’t really an option, even if you weren’t forced to stop and heal to prevent the bleed, the best hope is to scatter and run so that it’ll only get a few of you instead of trying to fight it.
In general swarms small enough to be immune to your weapons at low levels where you don’t have a bunch of counterplay yet are terrifying, but mosquito swarms are the ones that stand out as the worst of the bunch to me.
They also give free Malaria!
I would say that this swarm is a bit overtuned compared to reality – even if swarms of mosquitos did aggressively attempt to murder you and suck you dry, you wouldn’t be left bleeding from the ordeal or taking nearly as much as damage every six seconds. Not unless these mosquitos are ‘Land of the Lost’ size (at which point, they’re practically stirges instead).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab35qS6GfW0
Exactly; swarms are nasty at low levels. I remember a Skull and Shackles game where we faced one of those (I think the mosquito swarm). Me and the sorcerer were the only ones who could even scratch the bugs (him with burning hands, me with kinetic blasts), which meant that we actually stuck around to fight the swarm, unintentionally sacrificing ourselves to buy time for the rest of the party to escape…and have almost the entire rest of the party, including the sorcerer’s player’s next character, die to everything else on the island.
Yeah that’s the thing with mosquito swarms. Most smaller than tiny swarms are real nasty at low levels, but if you have a wizard/sorcerer with burning hands, a kineticist or an alchemist or something similar, and a couple of flasks of acid/alchemist fire for everybody else, you can make it through. Multiple of those and you probably got this.
With the mosquito swarm all those alchemist flasks are doing is fooling you into thinking you have a chance so you don’t run, scatter and hide and so the swarm get to kill more than one of you. (or perhaps none if you are lucky with the terrain).
I remember reading threads about, “How the hell do you fight these?” when the Skull and Shackles AP came out. If your best bet it “deal 1 fire damage with a torch,” it’s probably better to run and hide in a tidepool until the swarm goes away.
Monsters one dreads to face? Have a compiled list of them from Reddit. Going through Pathfinder APs, we faced a good chunk of that list, with a few monsters as recurring threats (those bloody floating skeleton archers with paralysis arrows).
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/8ef582/a_list_of_the_worst_most_powerful_monsters_ever/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body
Is that your thread?
…
Heh. Cave lion. That was the 2nd PC death in my megadungeon. Had to triple check that its text said “murder one at-level PC of your choice.”
Not my thread, but I did have nasty experiences with a good chunk of them and can see why the rest are scary stuff.
For the group I DM, its the Gelatinous Cube. I have even imported that slowly moving square of jelly into other systems (a particularly crowning moment was in my Dark Heresy campaign, when investigating a weird phenomena in a corridor, one of the players even said “at least it can’t be a Gelatinous Cube”, mere seconds before ‘impact’).
I don’t know what it is about the cube that just causes all tactics and common sense to evaporate, and a full scale farce to proceed, but every time it does, without fail.
For the group I regularly play in, its Stirges. Don’t know why the little buggers are a constant thorn in our side, but we even had a TPK once caused by half a dozen of the things. The groups DM rather smugly describes them as “good value for xp”.
Oh man… You just reminded me of my gelatinous cube that ate a teleportation pad. It’s been forever since that thing showed up as a random encounter (before teleporting away mid-fight).
I wonder if it’s finally time to bring in the big guns with a triumphant return?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/oozes/living-lake/
Imagine having some goodly druids or clerics worshipping that thing and it becoming a ‘plausible’ LG or NG deity that offers quests to the PCs.
Ah, the gelatinous cube. Nothing more simultaneously frustrating and funny than seeing your bard go ‘nope, this corridor’s empty!’ take one step forwards… directly into the waiting cube, who he’d been 1 off spotting on his perception check. It happened to us twice.
The same bard.
In the same building.
Though not the same ooze!
Less of a monster, and more of a situation, but I hate haunted houses in tabletop games. I have never had a positive experience playing through one (Either in or out of game). At this point my response to them is to either advocate we simply ignore it or burn it to the ground from the outside, nothing good ever comes from going inside.
Haunted castles, on the other hand, are completely fine.
As for monsters I fear the intellect devourer more then anything else. It is one of the few creatures that even in 5e can make you go from totally fine to totally dead with just two rolls. That and they give me flashbacks to the flying brain monsters I once met in a Call of Cthulhu haunted house game.
For my players, it is the Boneclaw, after I had one stalk them for quiet some time. Now they go from joking around, to totally serious everytime the see something moving in the shadows.
How about haunted palaces? Where do those fall on the continuum?
You’ll have to ask Q, 😉
Haven´t yet encountered a haunted Palace, but it sounds pretty classy. Would likely lump it in with the Castles.
The fact that castles and palaces tends to have actual loot, and not just pain and misery, also helps. That and with some legal finagling and some good rolls, you stand a decent chance of laying claim to the building if you exorcise it.
My main group has a table-wide fear of horses, developed after one incident where the paladin’s mount saved everyone and several where enemy horses nearly caused TPKs. It’s not like they punch much above their CR; it’s more that the dice seem to like them.
As for monsters I dread personally, I’d say anything with effectively-lethal conditions that can’t be fixed at the levels you’re expected to encounter them. Some examples from 5e include gas spores (CR 1/2, but inflict a terminal disease that takes a 2nd-level spell to cure), mummies (CR 3, but you can’t learn Remove Curse to cure mummy rot until you’re at least level 5), and most egregiously, basilisks (CR 3, but any party under 9th level risks losing members permanently to petrification). I don’t want to suffer inevitable doom because of a botched save against something the group couldn’t possibly have the tools to deal with.
What’s the matter? CHICKEN!?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/new-recruit
5e cockatrice isn’t actually that bad since the petrification wears off on its own – sure, you’re out of action for a day, but tomorrow you’ll just have the munchies instead of being a lawn ornament. 3.X and Pathfinder cockatrices are a more formidable threat, though.
I actually just looked up the Pathfinder 2 cockatrice statblock and discovered something horrifying: There’s no duration listed for the calcification’s slowing effect. I assume it’s an oversight and it’s meant to be 1 minute like the basilisk and medusa, but if not, that means it can permanently slow characters with petrification as the only cure. That’s nasty.
Ropers. They were one of the first monsters I ever laid eyes upon when I first delved into the 3.5 monster manual, and the art scared the heckin’s out of me. While running 5e modules, I’ve tossed some at my party, and they actually proved surprisingly dangerous for the level they were at, taking most of the party down from full-and-freshly-rested to almost zero each time they were used. So my fear is somewhat justified, though they still proved stoppable in the end. I’ve never faced them as a PC, and am dreading when that time comes
Kite ’em if you can. Those beasties are wicked slow.
I don’t fear the fae. I just get really annoyed by them. It was either very good or very poor roleplay by the DM at the time (combined with poor Will saves from most of the party) but I’ve been aggravated by the fair folk ever since.
Also, I’m definitely borrowing the Dijon slime idea. Ancient, moldering Underdark food court, anyone? Those condiments are way past the expiration date…
What are the stats for a mayonnaise ooze…?
The two-weapon swordsman in my current party has an understandable fear/loathing of quicklings, a small and VERY fast fae creature. The first time we fought one, he couldn’t hit the damn thing as it stabbed him (for 1d3 damage) over and over again. And then…
Dick shot. The little bastard dashed in and booted the fighter right in the family jewels. At that point, my wizard, who was flying above the fight, said “Okay, NO.” and unleashed Toppling Magic Missile on the quickling, smacking him to the ground. The fighter managed to get in a few hits before the fae ran off to nurse its injuries.
And then there was the time the party had to fight an evil fae…princess?…or something, and we ended up in a “dark” pocket-dimension. There was a giant tree with gongs hanging from all the branches, and at one point our two-weapon fighter (same guy, before the fae nut shot) almost drowned because a water fae french kissed him and filled his lungs with water. Good times.
The worst thing about quicklings is RPing them. I can’t talk that fast! What am I, an auctioneer?
Trees. This is not a joke about dwarfs.
In retrospect, I may have traumatized my second ever play group a bit too much. Our very first game was a horror game. It was based off It, but instead of a single cosmic horror haunting hte small town it was a collective folk horror, in the form of an ancient vampire trapped in a tree and its legion of travelling-carnival blights.
I normally like to have clearly defined rules of what an antagonist can do, but here I threw all of that out of the window. I’d only been running games for three years at the time, but it’s still one of my proudest. I messed with the lights. I scratched the table. I had a co-operative minion tap on the outside windows. I did some fairly severe body-horror with the fate of one of the PC’s brothers. At one notable moment, I left “to go to the toilet,” waited until I could hear them getting really nervous, and then menacingly crawled in through a side door dressed in a full-body cloak, causing one of them to jump into another’s lap.
They never faced a tree monster again, but they also never stopped being afraid to walk into a forest – or, indeed, preparing fire spells.
At some point, you stop playing an RPG and start playing Scare Tactics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIKEKIfrgDU
Well, you know, the players have to understand how frightened their characters are!
Also, it was fun…
Darkmantles. They may be low level enemies, but they have almost killed me multiple times.
The first time was when I was a level 1 Paladin. It was an easy mission, clear the sewers. We were still learning the ropes you see. Well, I led the group because I had the highest AC, the best BAB and the most health.
Then the damn thing fell from the ceiling, filled the corridor with magical darkness and got me down to 1 HP because my friends kept hitting me in the dark to get it off.
The second time, I was a halfling wizard, level 3ish, standing in the middle of the group. A less generic training session again because we had a new player, but that was fine. Since we were advancing as a group, the darkmantle waited until it had the perfect target and fell on my head again. Again I almost died from my allies weapons.
Is the damage from allies thing a homebrew call? Or are we talking cloakers here?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/aberrations/cloaker/
For me it’s threefold , all from the same two modules, Grasp of the Emerald Claw and the Intro to Eberron one in 3.5e. First we had to track 2 rival down vampires, which was HIGHLY annoying with how we kept almost killing them but the moment we’d hit em they’d panic and mist out. After we beat the first module and captured the first vampire, we entered the second were we’d have to explore a giant’s temple the second vampire was in.
The second majore trauma point in this was a trap my rogue tried to disarm, we were level six at the time, you know what this trap was?
Wail of the Banshee. The 9th level instant death in a 30 foot radius spell. We were lucky i entered the room alone, so only i failed the massive fortitude save. DM felt terrible about this, both since it was my first campaign and the fact it was a spell meant for far more powerful adversaries, so after a session of mulling over what to do he said i’d could keep using my character. It didn’t matter though since we got a TPK a session later to a skeletal giant who started the battle by one shotting the paladin. We later rolled up new characters, went back, beat it by summon spamming, found the vampire, realized it was a changeling pretending to be a vampire, murdered him, end campaign.
That’s… Some odd encounter balance. My megadungeon players didn’t encounter a wail of the banshee trap until level 11, and even there it scored a player death. Were you somehow unusually bull-in-a-china-shop about triggering it?
I was scouting the rooms for traps and enemies trying to find the staircase. I saw the pressure plate and tried to disarm it but rolled really low (I think it was like a 2 or a 3), activating the pressure plate. The only other object in the room was a door. Grasp of the Emerald Claw felt very weird in terms of balance, and its what really soured my opinion of modules.
Having run that module three times, the encounter balance is kind of wonky. Some of the fights are normal, some are crazy, and then there is the entire Mournlands section where no magical healing works. That whole module is bonkers.
I always end up changing the encounters.
Easy answer for me. Oozes. Our group has encountered three so far (two black puddings and an Ochre Jelly) and they have a feature in common that REALLY makes me unhappy… their acid makes you lose AC! Permanently! (unless you get it fixed of course, but… what if… )
As a Warforged player, when I take damage to my AC, it is not armor, it is ME! And it takes more to fix me than to just get a new piece of armor…
Fight from range you might say? The comic literally is giving that piece of advice. Yeah, the others in the group probably agree, except I am a monk! I “can’t” fight at range! (Well, I sort of can now, but when we last encountered those things I couldn’t, and not everyone can!)
Yeah. Oozes. Do not like.
Where’s your shuriken at!?
I am a tank. A pacifist monk, who gets in to present a target. I don’t have ranged weapons because they are not honorable… or at least they weren’t. I now have a few options some 12 levels later 🙂
Way of the Open Palm, get in close, warn them that they should not fight us, stand in defense stance (now augmented by the Sanctuary effect on me) and if they try to get away I react with a sentinel attack!
Does 5e not have unarmed ranged attacks for monks along the lines of PF2s Wild Wind Stance?
Only for a Sun Soul.
our gaming group is still somewhat traumatized by The prison of Harrowstone in the Carrion Crown AP:
Corridors upon corridors with lots off doors with horrible things behind them.
So whenever an AP features a corridor with more than one door, one player feels obligated to go theatrical with „oh, noes!! DOORS! we are doomed!1!!“ or something similar.
This is perhaps the most relatable of the bunch. Doors are easily the most terrifying thing in gaming.
My current game is just about 2/3 of the way through the last book of Reign of Winter.
So…witches? No, we can handle them. Ice elementals? No sweat. No, if you’ve played the AP, you know.
/Trees/
EVERY time a tree is so much as mentioned in that AP, it is absolutely, without a doubt, unquestionably going to attack the party, and very frequently it’s going to be a nightmarishly dangerous monstrosity.
I don’t know what the AP’s writers have against trees, but none of our characters are ever going to be comfortable in a forest again.
The orcs of Isengard had to find work after that whole ent debacle. Some of them wound up copy writing for Paizo. But you know what? Good for them, says I! Workplace diversity, etc.
https://i2.wp.com/www.tor.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/DadOrc.jpg?type=vertical
Camel. Regular variety.
It was the first encounter I set up for friends, as a on-the-spot demo of D&D. Very informal, on a corner of the kitchen’s table, really just to show how to make a PC and how it’s run.
So I picked-up an irate camel, which charged the PCs.
And the damned beast crit’ and one-hit-killed the Paladin.
Well, now we have been playing together for 15+ years, and we have learned to pick up our foes more carefully.
For some reason, I give all my players an extra 6 HP at first level.
I hope the next paladin was Arabian Nights themed and chose the camel mount.
The old 2nd ed Piercers traumatized my group enough that if the description of a room included stalactites they would almost refuse to enter it. And many innocent ancient cave formations and formerly sharp swords were sacrificed to their paranoia.
You ever see the art for the Spikefield Hazard card from Zendikar Rising?
https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/art_crop/front/a/6/a69541db-3f4e-412f-aa8e-dec1e74f74dc.jpg?1604198070
This comic reminds me a bit of the videogame DUSK, where enough of the scarecrows come to life and attack you that eventually I wind up either avoiding or shoot all the scarecrows I come across
And who says video games aren’t educational?
Beholders. one used a charm spell to turn him against the party and he nearly killed the “cleric” trying to stop everyone from fighting him, and then he got petrified
I think you’re missing a words in this comment. Who is ‘him?’
Hmmm… Either swarms or incorporeal undead. Swarms because they only show up at levels where you never have the equipment or spells available to deal with them and incorporeal undead because they’re fucking nightmares to deal with at any level. The Danse Macabre and banshees in particular can fuck right off.
There’s a reason my starting characters have alchemist’s fire.
Absolutely, but it’s just so expensive for what it does 🙁
If everyone springs for an alcehmist fire, you can survive your first swarm / incorporeal encounter. That buys you enough time to get the gp for a more permanent solution. And “not dying” is a pretty strong effect for the cost.
Oh boy, I get to tell one of my favourite stories for this one; the nearest miss we ever had from a TPK and how one player acquired a permanent fear of black puddings.
During a 3.X Underdark exploration to sus out a collective of mind flayers with some evil plot involving the Annulus (because if the DM needs an overpowered Psionic artifact, it’s always the damn Annulus), we entered the ancient ruins of an underground city. lit from above by a colossal magic crystal, we meandered through the ruins until the random encounter tables provided us with an enemy: two black puddings. The combat went rather shorter than expected however, as one of the puddings stuck my character, a Pyrokineticist with a penchant for explosives and craft/profession skill ranks in demolitions. The following line from the pudding’s Acid ability was our downfall: ” the opponent’s armor and clothing dissolve and become useless immediately unless they succeed on DC 21 Reflex saves”
So, while my backpack immediately dissolved, the hundred pounds of black powder, alchemist’s fire, and other assorted explosives contained within did not, and alchemist’s fire being typically contained in fragile glass bottles, what followed honestly shouldn’t be terribly surprising.
The resulting explosion vaporized my character, plus the fighter and both black puddings. It unfortunately also destabilized the cavern. Which caused the aforementioned colossal light crystal to fall from the cavern ceiling and explode. At this point the only surviving party members were the Cleric and the Wilder, the latter of which being chronically skittish, was rapidly burning through casts of Dimension Door to keep far ahead of the now incoming lava wave. The cleric, burdened by heavy armour, was somewhat less lucky. The Wilder, now out of power points and suffering from fatigue due to continuous sprinting, had one final obstacle remaining before reaching relative safety; a 10ft gap across a frigid underground river we had crossed much earlier. An unfortunate 1 on the jump check however meant for a rather dangerous waterside experience, compounded when the hot lava contacted the cold water, turning the river into a powerful steam jet. The Wilder was violently ejected through a rough river channel, out a waterfall, and into a small underground lake, with exactly 0 hp. Of course, swimming to the shore was physical exertion, causing her to collapse on the beach at -1 hp. She stabilized at -6 and survived (only to be captured by Drow slavers, of course).
The moral of the story is that while black puddings should probably not inspire such dread (to anything but your coin purse from replacing equipment); pyromaniacal party members loaded with explosives perhaps, should.
I can think of a different moral: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
I don’t get the alt-text. I would get it if Riot asked you about Fiddlesticks 😛
Scarecrows are fun. I remember in Jeepers Creepers II that scene on the field where the Creeper is posing as a scarecrow and a child think he is one until he sees the Creeper’s clawed feets 😀
There really need to be more harpoon pickup trucks in my games.
Pretty sure Fighter would love to have one 😀
For my son and nephew, their weeping angel-style encounter with gargoyles in a room full of statuary was nothing compared to their dread at a hall of chandeliers infested with brass snakes. (The archer now destroys nearly every hanging light fixture he sees, “just to be sure”)
For my own PC, the cleric of Heracles, I drew the line at demons. The party wanted doors opened and rooms explored, and we fought traps, undead, monsters, and curses galore. One DM even pitted us against personifications of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War, Death, Pestilence, & Famine are concepts the priest could wrap his head around.) –but I calmly explained that there are no angels or demons in Greek mythology, and so the huge priest refused to face anything completely alien to his pantheon. If the PCs wanted to face it, he would help in the fight, but he would not be the one to open the door.
To this day, the one door in the dungeon marked with a demon’s face remains unopened, its seals intact…
I hope Swash and Buckle never find this comment. You’d break their poor little hearts!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/natural-habitat
I don’t, but if I did it would be one of two things:
Mimics – I love them, so innocuous is the chair, the cloak, the staircase, the yawning portal… and when it’s revealed that the whole room is made up of mimics, well, now, what can a PC trust? Is their sword still their sword? Has their very armor been switched whilst they slept and even now it gnaws on their anesthetized flesh?
My Players hate mimics. I don’t know why…
Specially Designed To Defeat The Party Monsters – You know the ones, they have defenses specific to all your best spells and weapons, moves specific to bypassing your best defenses, or target your parties weaknesses.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s one thing if the monster of the week has Willpower Save attacks and your specific Character has a weak Will, it’s another when the common weakness of the party is Will and you keep fighting Willpower based attacks monsters, week after week. Or every time your group shores up one weakness, the next monster is geared to exploit the next most common Weakness.
Or as specifically happened with one group of mine, my Ranger, our Rogue, and the Party Leader Cleric all started taking “we’ve fought this type of monster too much, let’s gear/stat up to deal with it more decisively”, initially it was Humanoids, but once were aligned to be most effective against them our most common enemy became Undead and we barely ever saw Humanoids (as enemies). After a few levels we were set up to tear through Undead like hot knives through wet paper, suddenly no more Undead now it’s Constructs. As soon as we were set up against Constructs… the game ended. But we knew, the next common foe would not be made up of humanoids, undead, or constructs.
There’s a reason I go for generalized builds. It’s the same reason I wrote this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/less-favored-terrain
For me? Well…. let’s just say there are a couple of episodes of Doctor Who that I refuse to watch and a little statue in my front yard that I tend to give the side-eye when I’m outside. But not really anything from a game though.
But one of my characters, Tamarie, ended up nearly getting killed by a swarm and now has a mild phobia of bugs. This phobia is about to be enlarge to include robot bugs due to an encounter last week. She actually has a mechanical disadvantage when vermin are near. The robot-bug phobia will be purely RP.
Invest. Stonks. etc.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/c-d/clasp-swarmbane/
That’s the plan. Though I’m going to have it merged with the Necklace Of Ki Serenity so it’ll cost more.
BTW, you guys going to AWA this year?
Laurel handles most of the con stuff, so I don’t recall whether we’ve definitively scheduled that one.
I do know that we’re going to be at Southern Fried Gaming Con though.
Well, if you do go, I’ll see you there.
Just asked Laurel. She says we are applying. Hope to see you there!
😀
In my group the one monster that caused long-lasting paranoia was the babau demon. No one in the party had darkvision and they had really no counter against a creature that was able to create magical darkness, teleport to cut off their escape route (which was even easier eith its reach weapon), see them even when they’re invisible, and had resistances against elemental attacks. Eventually, two of the party managed to escape, and the remaining two were left in the dungeon. The babau took its time with the remaining two, who spent their last moments, in the darkness, trembling in fear, listening to the footstep of slowly approaching babau.
The Babau King in my megadungeon forced a retreat. As it turns out, darkness is one of those scary spells when you don’t have a good counter to it.
Plot idea: farmers in the region are being attacked by animated scarecrows. Our brave heroes must investigate the source of this menace.
The culprit? An Awakened crow, who hopes to make the humans so paranoid about scarecrows that they stop making them.
Dammit, Druid!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/awaken
It varies from character to character. One thing I’ve noticed is that for all that rolls are supposed to be random, when you play D&D, rolls have themes, sometimes deliberately trolling ones.
My dad had a barbarian that could kill literally any Demon (back in OG D&D days, but he managed something like 3-4 nat 20s in a row to basically exponentially crit and oneshot a demon that should have been a TPK, but if it’s a dragon? Dead. Repeatedly. Newly born hatchling was able to kill him with a burp. Frost Dragon finally ended up being his permadeath.
Derrik Darkluster Gentleman Adventurer! could face off against basically anything, but if the enemy was an orc it would inevitably crit, and if it was a spellcaster with a hold person spell or any other ability that paralyzed, Derrik would inevitably fail the save against it and typically die in the process.
But still, there’s nothing quite like D&D to drive him the uncomfortable truth that maybe there are some legitimate reasons for profiling/racism to exist. There will always be something dangerous that hits the party often enough that the party stops waiting to confirm that it’s dangerous. Doesn’t matter how much WotC dumps into cleansing alignments and negative racial bonuses from their books.
And there will always be dickbag GMs ready to say, “But it was a good [evil thing] this time! You lose your alignment, Mr. Paladin! Mwahaha!”
I mean, GMs that do that make me absolutely sick….
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/tolerance
Gather round kidlings and you shall hear the fabled story of the dread Ninja Zombie.
So there we were, in my living room, in the flesh, rolling actual dice. It was a strange barbaric time when Nokia had a stranglehold on the cell phone market and the average TV was a giant box as deep as it was wide. Larry the Cable Guy wandered free range.
We’re playing Palladium, and for those of you who don’t know, every combat roll in Palladium is an opposed D20 roll, essentially. Opening round of combat, the players kill 5 of the 6 zombies I attacked them with, but they ran out of attacks for the round. Our lone survivor, with his +3 bonuses survives 15 seconds.
The next round comes, and no one manages to roll a hit on this guy. He either manages to avoid weak rolls, roll N20 when he needs it, or the party just rolls poorly.
This continues for five melees. I look over at my best bro who’s playing the OP archer, and I’m all “Dude, it’s a zombie with +3. Can you freakin’ FINISH this already?”
Something went right. He channels all of his power. N20. Gets super excited, rolls his damage. Dice are comin’ up sixes. Looks like this is going to do it.
The zombie rolls, for the I’ve-lost-track-of-how-many-times-this-encounter another N20 dodge. And I’m like… y’know what… Let’s play with that. I laugh nervously…
“Alright. Corliss-your shot is perfect-and it hits the zombie dead on! …but the sound the arrow makes when it hits him is wrong. You hear a thunk… there’s a puff of smoke. A small log falls to to the ground with your arrow embedded on it.”
The shouting about how stupid my dice is has died down. I now have every eyeball in the room.
“The mist parts a little further in the forest. You see the zombie you have been shooting at… he pulls out a strip of cloth. Seems to say something though you can’t make it out… and ties it to his forehead. His eyes begin to glow an infernal shade of red.”
They never killed the Ninja Zombie. It is said he still roams the wilds of my universe to this day, looking to become someone else’s sudden raid boss.
Friggin’ ninja goblins and their 1 hp!
It depends on what character I’m playing, honestly.
I tend to play characters who are good at a wide range of things, but have a crippling weakness in one category.
Example, I’m playing a crowd control wizard in Agents of Edgewatch. I’ve used Sleep to nullify entire encounters, I’ve used color spray to turn the tide- but the problem is, nothing in my spell list does ANYTHING to undead, oozes, constructs, or swarms. I’m a sitting duck. And almost this entire last dungeon has been undead, constructs, and swarms. Or constructs that explode into swarms. And a construct that explodes into an ooze. I was safe from that particular encounter because as soon as I saw the golem walking up the hall I just said ‘have fun guys’ and hid a room over and used Hand of the Apprentice to bounce my staff off its head a few times.
On the other hand, I’m playing a Cleric of Sarenrae in an extinction curse game- and she’s very well-rounded except that almost all of her damage is fire. Troggs? burn. Random aggressive wildlife? burns. bandits? burn. Demons… don’t burn. I’m just waiting for the gm to drop a red dragon token on us and laugh.
The create pit line is pretty strong for immune-to-magic constructs.
Sadly not in pathfinder 2nd edition yet… hopefully secrets of magic brings it back.
My players have had several dangerous to lethal encounters with hags.
Now they start twitching every time I describe a female NPC as old/haggard/with a toothless smile/grandmotherly appearance etc.
They actively avoid grandmothers now, even helpful ones like Nanny Pu’pu. I love to press that particular button.
It’s the toothless smile. So much guile!
Also of note, there’s a great “sea hag” grandma in “Luca.” Just saw that one last night, and she’s got some of the best lines in the film, even if she’s only a bit part.
Bodaks. Mummy’s Mask has a room with six of them with absolutely no lead-up. You just walk in and Bam, Gaze attacks that deal Negative LEvels.
My players were shocked an appalled to learn that there are no saves vs some negative level effects.
“You mean the listed save is just to remove it the next day!?”
No happy campers that day.
With my group, it’s ankhegs. The DM even had a particular song in the random shuffle playlist that became known as “the ankheg song.”
Ima need a link to that song.
I ran a reflavoured false hydra once. Didn’t think I was doing a good job of it but my players disagreed. They succeeded on enough wisdom saving throws that they were able to figure out what was going on (this thing was bewitching and eating giants and they’re slaves). The party ended up getting what they came for, sparking a slave revolution and then noped the hell out. Any time there was a mysterious disappearance or an abandoned town for the rest of the campaign they all concentrated to check if they could hear faint singing/humming and were looking for holes in the ground where the hydra would come out of.
We did a wrap-up session about 2(real time) years later where I asked what the party wanted to do. The cleric decided to cal in EVERY favour he could and bargain with every powerful entity that they knew of, including a hive of vampires to go back and root out that infestation.
It’s like trying to fight Slenderman. Sometimes those SCP style monstrosities are just impossible to deal with.
The players in my campaign feel that way about the Fey, for SOME UNKNOWN REASON…heh.
Fey have smug, punchable faces. It is known!
When I ran Reign of Winter it was the trees that never provided a worthwhile fight. The gnome fighter got swallowed by plants a few times, but she enjoyed that sort of thing.
They always managed to spot the fighty ones early?
Another second hand story from my Living Greyhawk days. One of the regions apparently had a series of mods that included awakened animals (often rodents) with rogue levels. Players from that region began shooting all small woodland creatures on sight.
More generally, it’s not uncommon for experienced players to shoot a dead body just in case.
Evil spellcasters because those are the ones that usually have the save or die spells (including Disintegrate), any drain characteristics or levels enemies that can cripple a party for a good while, usually leading to a TPK, and Dominate or any mind control alike spells because i have yet to find a DM that know how to play them well.
I have a PC that i roleplayed as scared of Ilithids, because he got to face one at lvl 1 when all he faced till that point and before lvl 1 were animals and more common humanoids, who stomped through half the party and almost dominated my PC before fleeing.
Later on the campaign, he is also scared of a at least lvl 13 (we are lvl5) spellcaster the DM surprised round on us at the end of a combat even though he came from far away making lots of noise, that killed a full health with lots of HP PC with a single spell, and because trustworthy NPCs pretty much confirmed his power later.
5e Shadows. Because of Strength Drain, when fighting them, you essentially can never have more than 24 hit points without magic items. Only barbarians can reach that much. So, despite the fact they’re basically stabbing you with daggers, two of them can kill an unlucky 20th level barbarian in six rounds. A lucky one might survive, but will be almost completely neutralized in combat. Any other character should immediately either drop a max-level fireball or take off running.
No, I will never reconsider