Good game today. I learned a couple of somethings today. One, the Lasher prestige class from Sword and Fist is pretty sweet, although it is better suited as a support role, with a big nasty fighter in front of it. And two, Nycaloths are badass.
Now, a lot of monsters have to be field-tested in D&D. You see, some creatures don’t provide the challenge that their difficulty that their CR indicates. Some of them are far more powerful than their CR indicates. Some require special circumstances. Driders, for instance, are very poor random encounters. In my experience, if the drider hasn’t had time to prep some spells and prepare an ambush position, they won’t live up to their CR.
Nycaloths, by the way (MM2) earn their CR of 10 in spades. They definitely go down in the book of ‘Use This Monster Again.’
As a side note, I am getting really really tired of demons failing their roll to summon other demons. I’ve only ever seen it work once.
But the real reason for this post is this: I’m through fucking around.
No, I’m serious. Ever since my beginning as a DM, there have been some lines I have been unwilling to cross. Some abilities I have looked at in the Monster Manual and always said “Hmmmm…that seems too powerful. It’d just wipe the entire party.”
But here recently I have had one too many encounters where a big nasty boss went down without a proper fight. And so now I find myself like a hockey goalie wading into a fist-fight. The gloves are coming off baby! All those monster abilities that I found to be more dangerous than I was willing to use, they’re all fair game now. Negative levels, paralysis, huge poison damage, Insanity, Dominate Person, you name it, I’ll use it. The only way to find out if it is too powerful is to actually wipe out a party with it.
Oh well, omelets and eggs and all that…
I think it all comes down to fear. In the past, I was too afraid to use legitimately dangerous abilities against the PC’s. Well, the hell with it. Time to nut up and bring the pain.
Cue up ‘Eye of the Tiger’, ‘Princes of the Universe’, or ‘Let the Bodies Hit the Floor’. Which ever one floats your boat. Because from now on, we’re playing in a world where the safety features are disengaged, and the PC’s are staring down the barrel of no-shit, for real monsters!
You so want to be single again, don’t you?
I do have the title of a Killer DM. I don’t fudge dice, and let the chips fall where they may. Welcome brother and congrats on your upcoming first TPK.
I used to fudge the dice a little one way or another mostly to save them from full wipes. I prefer to not fudge though sometimes I have found I really should fudge it to save them.
Play by Posts can be really good place for you to test out some monsters and if you ever decide to, we could totally use another dm on the forums.
Oh, Jim doesn’t fudge dice. He’s kind of a strict DM. Natalia’s died twice and I give him grief when my companions die or are hurting, but he doesn’t budge at having monster attack them if that’s what they’d do. He’s very firm about that stuff. I think there are certain things some monsters (or whatever) can do according to the book that he thinks is OP, so he doesn’t use them–but he recently decided “screw it, I’m using it.”
He did it, by the way, in the last game. It was ugly, but we made it. Barely. Corin, I think, died twice, though, and we very nearly did have a TPK. But I’m glad I got to experience the monster “as is” rather than a watered-down version.
[...] when I remembered Jim’s post that he had written not too long before this game called “No More Kid Gloves.” Damn. So this is what he was talking [...]