The Gaming Den

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the tarrasque is probably the most overrated monster in the game, despite the pathological fear and misplaced awe most people have of it.

Aside from the tarrasque (who is a little punk if you have +1 magic beast bane weapons pumped by GMW), are there any other monsters in this game with a grossly inflated (or understated) CR?

I thought that the 3.0E aboleth's CR was rather low if your party had not been min-maxxing (creating characters like the DMG says a character should look like, domains of good and healing and all) or have an 'average' grounding in tactics.

Let's talk undervalued monsters...

Cranium Rat Swarms. You might be able to live as a fifth level party - it requires that you pass a lot of saves and put up magic circle agaiant evil and be loaded down with alchemist's fire.

The Cranium Rat Swarm is immune to physical damage from direct attacks, and takes extra damage from area effect attacks. But it has more hit points than a wizard of its level can pump out with fire balls. In the mean time it can mind blast and make its physical attack every round - and its physical attack causes a save vs. Nausea (which means: no actions), so if it gets into melee you have to make two saves a round just to act next round while it's entirely probable that the sum total of all the damage the entire party can dish out to it in a day under ideal circumstances is not enough to kill it.

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Dragons.

An old one and a good one. Dragon cR is calculated differently from other CR. Their power level is defined as the point where they have a fifty fifty shot against the party of their CR without massive preparation on their part.

Which means that for Dragons with a cR of four or higher - they are playtested for the same power level of other creatures with a cR four higher than that. A CR 2 dragon means the same thing as a CR 4 Minotaur. A CR 6 dragon means the same thing as a CR 10 Fire Giant, and so on.

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Lantern Archons.

They have the angelic package of abilties. They fly, they have a ranged attack, they have DR, they teleport. They are also very weak and have a small number of hit points. But that doesn't matter because 2nd level players don't have any ranged attacks which penetrate their DR (in either edition, in 3rd ed it required magic arrows, while in 3.5 it can be done with a bow, but requires an evil aligned bow, which just aint happening at 2nd level no matter who you are).

So it's really a question of whether the party wizard can take down the Lantern Archon with a magic missile (Lantern Archons have like 4 hit points each) before it blows the mage away with its lasers (which can do 2d6 a round).

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Shocker Lizards. One's not bad, but the damage they do to an entire party goes up linearly with regards to the number present, while the CR goes up logarithmically. 16 of them can kill the whole party of their level in one shock attack. Of course, the wizard can kill their whole group with a fireball, hope you win initiative, neh?

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Other monsters are situationally under valued. A Closet Troll will probably kill half a 5th level party. That's actual killing, not simply beating them up.

-Username17

On the underpowered/overrated side we have:

The Shreiker: effectively an Alarm spell trap - save that there might not be anyone listening. Still worth XP despite being immobile and having no attacks at all.

The Greater Stone Golem. It's supposed to fight 16th level parties and yet it is unintelligent, cannot harm creatures more than 15 feet away and moves at a speed of 20'/round. While it is conceivable that a 16th level party might have some difficulty beating one in combat, it would have to be a very contrived encounter which would make a 16th level party work at all to bypass or evade one entirely.

Gelatinous cube. A 3rd level party laughs at the 3 AC and can dance around the slow speed and mere +1 attack bonus. The most difficult part of the encounter is the initial spot tjeck.

Hellhounds (3.0 only): About a point of CR overrated - especially in packs, as their breath weapon was too little to matter.

Zombies. If you can move more than 30, or go around a corner, they CANNOT hurt you.

Josh_Kablack at [unixtime wrote:1076648450[/unixtime]]
Gelatinous cube. A 3rd level party laughs at the 3 AC and can dance around the slow speed and mere +1 attack bonus. The most difficult part of the encounter is the initial spot tjeck.

Don't tell my group that.

As a joke, I threw one of them against two level 8 characters.

It came really close to killing both of them.

If it's within 30 feet of you when combat begins (and it will be), it will move through you - that's a DC 13 reflex save followed by a DC 16 fort save. If you fail both you are stuck and take a d6 damage per round for 3d6 rounds or until your party kills the cube.

It's slam attack is meaningless, but its engulf attack has a not-inconsiderable chance to simply kill the entire party at 3rd level.

If you get paralyzed you are in for about 35 points of acid damage, and of course you have to make 10 saves in a row against paralyzation or the duration extends - which will absolutely kill just about any 3rd level character unless they get rescued within a fairly short time frame.

Most of the time a Gelatinous Cube does absolutely nothing, but its chances of pulling a TPK are shockingly high.

-Username17

Josh_Kablack at [unixtime wrote:1076648450[/unixtime]]Zombies. If you can move more than 30, or go around a corner, they CANNOT hurt you.

Most Zombie-centric missions, especally at low levels, are going to be infestation scenarios. This area has a bunch of dead people walking around, and we'll give you this money if you go make them go back to sleep. Running from zombies isn't an option when you're paid based on your ability to destroy them.

-Desdan

But running with a sling in one hand is.

Unless you are on a contrived timeframe or in extremely specific terrain, there is a single strategy available to beat zombie encounters - stay out of melee range and use ranged attacks.

And since even a gnome in full plate is capable of moving farther than any zombie in a round, (45' at a run vs 30' partial charge) staying out of range is generally easy.

Ah, but there are more custome zombies being made these days with the 3.5 templates and all. I would not just assume that the average zombie you run into these days is your book version 3.0 zombie. Beware the 50' Movement zombie!

With the 3.5 charge rules you are pretty safe. All you need is a chair.

Position the chair directly between you and the zombie as move action, take a five foot step back, and throw a rock. The Zombie has to charge directly towards you by the closest possible line and if there is a chair in the way his charge failes.

Zombies can't move and attack, so if there is a chair on the shortest possible line between you and it (even if they can draw a straight line between you and them that bypasses the chair by going to the side a bit), they can't attack you at all.

They have to charge the chair, which they may well destroy - after which you can take a move action to be partially around a corner - giving the zombie cover and you total invulnerability to it.

The 3.5 charge rules are so incredibly ungenerous that they can have a movement of 90 feet - they'll still never catch you.

-Username17

No, see, they have to overrun the chair..........nah.

Essence at [unixtime wrote:1077922465[/unixtime]]No, see, they have to overrun the chair..........nah.

According to the PHB errata, they have the choice of either overrunning the chair or making an attack at the end of their charge. They can't do both.

I don't know anyone who plays that way, but Andy Collins is quite adamant about it.

-Username17

...I guess that means that the Jackie Chan school of combat is allowed? Hoo-Hah - chair parry! That does seem like a basically good idea.

One thing I was wondering, though; what effect does that initial shot check/initiative/saves have to do vs CR of a critter?

Some critters can be chumps, unless the players miss a roll or vice versa... Is that intentional, or even fun?

-Crissa

Ah the Ooze\Pudding conundrum.

This critter is a chump, unless you miss your spot check, have fun losing all of your equipment.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1076783857[/unixtime]]With the 3.5 charge rules you are pretty safe. All you need is a chair.

Position the chair directly between you and the zombie as move action, take a five foot step back, and throw a rock. The Zombie has to charge directly towards you by the closest possible line and if there is a chair in the way his charge failes.

And despite the arguments on This Thread. There is a scene in the Dawn of the Dead remake where Anna escapes a charging zombie by throwing a chair in it's path.

Thanks, Frank, I was the only guy in the theater laughing at that.

Ghouls and ghasts. I had a TPK because no one happened to be an elf. X(

How's that now, Rapa?

-Des

The paralyzing touch of ghouls and ghasts has a high chance of inflicting total party kill, unless the characters have some sort of resistance to ghoul paralysis. At the very least, a ghoul should not be a CR1 creature.

The paralysis is made worse by the fact they get multiple attacks.

Well they did drastically reduce the paralysis duration to a mere 1d4+2 rounds in 3.5. It used to be 1d6+2(or +4 for a Ghast) minutes, which basically made it a save or die effect.

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1078302959[/unixtime]]One thing I was wondering, though; what effect does that initial shot check/initiative/saves have to do vs CR of a critter?

Some critters can be chumps, unless the players miss a roll or vice versa... Is that intentional, or even fun?

-Crissa

It's a throwback to classic D&D. The theory was, you went through dungeons 5' at the time, poking w/ 10' poles for traps, monsters, and whatever. Yeah, you actually had to take 10' pole everywhere and touch things with it.

Because it was assumed you had so little going on in your life that you could blow 4 RL hours searching a small room, it was also assumed that you would find most everything. For some monsters, that carried over to the CR system. For some, it didn't. That's one reason CR is a guide.

"...1d4+2 rounds..."

I believe this makes the problem slightly worse in case of only person paralyzed as there is more incentive to coup de grace them out of battle... but other than that I suppose it is a decent fix. Although the party in question would probably still have died.