I love this theme of Runesmith saying he's gonna roll on some tables he makes for his point and then actually rolling and going "wow I should not have done that"
The key to a good table is that it NEVER is "just random". You preselect between 6 or 8 things and then throw 2d4 or 2d6. For example, I would limit myself to choosing by CR (1/2 -4) and by locations suitable for "lairs (caves-ruins-dungeons)": 2d12 2-3: Choker 4-5: Mimic 6-7-8: Goblin 9-10: Minotaur 11-12: Nothic
I just homebrew a bunch of shit, give legendary resist and actions whenever I feel like an enemy needs it. I like making a single enemy fight a group, makes them memorable.
Legendary actions are super cool and a really smart design thing. Legendary resistance is dumb. I might make legendary resistance give +10 to a given save in the future, to make it theoretically possible to fail the save. Exceptions may occur if the targeted entity is like a demigod or something. Like if my players decided that tackling Zariel head-on was a good idea or something. Even then, maybe the PCs are demigods themselves at that point. Hmmmmm.
@@jon9828 Legendary Resistances are very much NOT dumb. What's dumb is when your players fight a Demon Lord BBEG that rolls a natural 1 on his CHA save and gets banished in the 2nd round of combat and the encounter ends, and your BBEG is not a threat for another 2 years until some other cult gathers up to summon him again. Yes, automatically succeeding on a saving throw from your very powerful spell is probably not very enjoyable for someone who cast the spell in hopes of succeeding, but the success on a save from a legit roll stings just as hard, and that's just a feeling that you often get while playing this game and it's not the end of the world if not everything goes according to your plan because dice were not on your side this day. But 5e, or D&D in general, is filled with a bunch of dumb, overpowered "save or die" spells that have very little in terms of defense measures for their targets, and it's much easier to recover from an unsuccessful spell due to a lucky roll or a Legendary Resistance use than it is to recover the tension of a narrative or the threat of a boss introduced months ago that falls down to an ultimate BS spell with no means of counterplay. And yes, sure, you can break concentration on a wizard sometimes and everything's fine, but not every encounter should need henchmen to save the BBEG, makes him seem less lethal and dangerous if he can be taken down without a group of kobolds stabbing on enemy wizard to stop their spells from working. Sometimes a singular enemy makes more sense in a narrative, sometimes even this one guy alone is enough threat in circumstances where no BS spells are used so you shouldn't necessarily provide him with more NPCs that increase the encounter CR by another 5 only to serve as a countermeasure for when the one character MAYBE uses one dangerous spell. Sometimes having a lone boss is way more intimidating that he can take on the party by themselves without anyone's help, like an ancient vampire lord or a powerful dragon. But it's difficult to create intimidating villainous figures like that without legendary resistances, when a level 8 wizard can take them down by themselves just because they're lucky like that. What was all the fuss about to create a campaign around this one supposedly powerful dude the god killer the destroyer of worlds the baron of carnage if he cannot even beat a 4th level spell? Doesn't sound very legendary to me.
@@jon9828 You'd have to make it so that you add the +10 before you roll, otherwise you'd only add it whenever you know it would make you succeed on the save. Anyway, when a creature would have your type of legendary resistance it would succeed almost any PC DC with its inherent save bonus and a +10, so it would be the same as a regular legendary resistance. Also, Zariel already has three saves that are almost +20 against the most debilitating types of magic AND advantage on those saves, so I don't think she'd ever even need to use her regular LR.
@@Deltajugg it kinda sounds like banish is a little too powerful. Legendary resistance often just becomes "I have to cast my Spell X times before it even has a theoretical chance of kicking in". That sometimes makes it useless to cast that at all against that boss. It's fundamentally a feel-bad mechanic. If you're unaware of it, it blindsides you and invalidates your spell without even rolling a dice, feels bad. If you're aware of it you know that you have to see it used X times before you dare throw your big cool spells, feels bad. It's a brute force, inelegant solution. It may the only viable solution but I've still seen plenty of frustration from players around my table regarding the binary nature of legendary resistance. Counterspells have a similar problem, key difference being players can traditionally get access to counterspells. Sadly I am a dumb and so my plus 10 thing was the only thing I could think of to make legendary resistance less binary. Not a good solution either, but it at least FEELS like they could fail, like you're given a chance, however small (and yes, said +10 would have to be before roll to not make it just a reskin). About banish, it's not just me thinking it's a bit busted right? Make the BBEG, if extraplanar, bind their essence somewhere on the material if they get the chance. That way banish is a 1 minute prep or a retreat for the party rather than an instant win button. I have a weakness for extraplanar origins for my NPCs so I've had to struggle with this. TLDR: Legendary resistance may be the only solution, but it still feels bad and I don't like it, so I'd like to make it less feel-bad. Banish is a little too strong. Extraplanar villians are cool, keep them safe from banish.
Honestly, 'monster lair building' needs to be a minigame for the DM, with guidelines and random tables and maybe even an internet-based auto-generator.
The main problem I have with it is inspiration. What does a giant slime that lives in a pit of skeletons use for a lair action? Sure, it can bring some skeletons to life, and maybe it can eat a skeleton to regain HP, but what else does it do? The usual approach to building a dungeon is create a lair and then populate it with monsters, and doing it the other way around is difficult to wrap your head around.
@@cthulhufhtagn2483 The slime takes in a pile of scattered bones, moving them about it's body to the raised pseudopod, which then whips through the air before it, launching countless shattered bones in an arcing spray. The intact bones however, remain within the slime, until enough can be collected to construct a functioning skeleton, at which point they lumber forth, dripping in flesh melting ooze. Drawn in by the rumbling of combat, or even by the smell of living fear, the smaller slimes that lurk in the murder holes of the walls and ceiling start to dribble toward their latest prey, making it seem as if every surface is slick with a malevolent, hungry mucus.
@@cthulhufhtagn2483 pit of skeletons is the lair, have the slime "slip" down into it and attack from below. They'd have to run or get VERY clever, fast
It could just come down to, say, an "alpha" of a pack commanding its minions to harry the party. An encounter with a tonne of beasts nipping at your ankles as you have to escape to a certain location, that could just be an ambush. If you fail saves you could take damage, become hobbled etc. I think good area effects, especially for low level adventurers, could be fear or anxiety induced ones. Walking into a monsters lair, especially if you are a newcomer to adventuring and not a borderline immortal arcane juggernaut, would be worrying, you would be scared for your life. Mirror that with actions such as movements out of the corner of your eye, hearing or seeing awful things that are perhaps only an overactive imagination. I think there are plenty of different ideas you could implement, and of course you could Homebrew whatever you want.
@@talonus202 then again I tend to have a talent for doing this sort of thing, and it is a good way to add difficulty to a fight without overpowering the party
I once made a legendary medusa who overcame her species dreaded kryptonite: mirrors. So she had them placed around her sunken temple abode, allowing her to try and snipe the back party members with her paralyzing gaze using geometry. This was after a Dark Souls fog gate of steam mephits. Lots of hissing. It was rad.
Oh man, that's actually a genius encounter. A medusa is pretty scary on it's own, but then you add in not even being able to use more conventional hiding tactics and the fight turns into a true battle for survival. How did you telegraph to your party that the medusa was trick shooting her gaze around? How did they react after they figured it out? Like, just entering a temple and seeing a fuckton of mirrors is already offputting imo. I can imagine a party trying desperately to break mirrors outside of the mirror's "line of sight" with a 10 foot pole or with well placed stone throws. Imo, a sling might be the ultimate weapon in this kind of situation since I'd rule that ball bearings would count as viable ammunition for breaking a mirror even if they wouldn't count as ammo for a normal ranged weapon attack.
Don’t you have to physically look at Medusa for the effect to work? I thought the point of the shield was to still see her without getting stoned, not that she was afraid of them.
Daniel Witt in D&D the Medusa can be killed by looking into her reflection as it’ll turn her to stone. So by those rules she can trick shot people with mirrors if she got over the weakness.
@@ethanrajczak3041 Eh, his game, his rules. I think it is a neat idea, even if I personally think that the stone gaze should also affect the medusa, like in the Greek myth.
A Hippogriff nest might be atop a huge mountain peak, so a lair action might be a massive gust of wind that sweeps through the battlefield every round on initiative 20. Any Medium or smaller creature (Hippogriff is Large, so he's fine) who fails a Strength save is pushed 10 feet toward one end of the battlefield, which considering the terrain, might be the edge of a cliff. It would also disperse cloud-based spells. Maybe the cliff is small, only a 10 foot drop that deals a little fall damage and that you have to climb back up, but the Hippogriff hangs out near that edge, making engaging in melee combat more risky.
Yep, fine idea. Even a small drop will have the effect of splitting the party temporarily, which shifts the action economy and damage output in favor of the horsebirds. Strong wind should also interfere with non-spell ranged attacks - archery and random wind gusts do not mix well. I'd also be tempted to throw in competition showing up - an NPC hunting party that's after the foalchicks to sell to beast tamers - but that might be more of a second chained encounter than a lair effect.
Check some nature documentary shows or the Rangers in action, when they close in on a bird's nest... especially the birds of prey. A hawk's not the biggest thing in the forest, but you get close to its nest, and you're in for trouble! They dive-bomb at you. They'll grab at "sensitive parts" of your head, even yanking out tufts of hair... If they get ahold of your jacket, or find a stable enough purchase anywhere else, they'll tear right in and shred whatever they can get to... Those beaks are sharp! AND damn the book, a hook-shape like the hippogryf would play HELL with jaw pressure. Remember this things on a creature roughly the size of a horse!!! They don't have to be particularly tough or smart. A human only really needs one good swing to connect and the Hawk is down... done for the day kinda down. Ten bucks still says YOU won't willingly climb up there for an omelet! ;o)
I mean technically even high level humanoid Big Bads could have active lairs, like a Bandit King who has clockwork crossbows that fire during combat or trap doors
Really just a matter of how smart that bandit king is. After all, the lairs are more meant to give a challenge and spice things up with dynamics, not necessarily to make life worse for your characters Damn cool idea tho
Or for an evil wizard botanist, plants that can heal or damage adjacent creatures, or even alter the terrain by creating acid pools or setting things on fire.
An Ogre cave so littered with bones that they threaten to trip you every round while they just crunch under the ogres feet. A hedge witch whose hut it so filled with hung, shelved and piled curios that each sword swing triggers something from a random table as you smash through them. Classics like kobold Laura riddled with traps. A giant centipede lair so riddled with tunnels that at any moment the party might fall through into a pod of hungry larval young. Straight up atmospherics like the waist-deep snow while fighting a snow snake.
Narrative plot and descriptive action and parameters makes the wrapper for the numbers that provide just enough structure to keep everyone consistent... the way things should be. We've RP'ed combat for a LONG LONG time... It's not quick, but it's a WHOLE LOT more fun, letting the PC's make cinematic actions and mix acrobatics and swashbuckling with the efforts to destroy enemies. The technical rules are simplified a bit, to make way for consistent action economy, BUT the kinds of epic scenes that come out of it make everything "sacrificed" worth the expense... ;o)
Yes exactly. Why not make the gouts from the Azer’s forges just waves of heat? Anyone who’s caught in them takes a -1 circumstance penalty for a round. Why not have the Beholder’s realm have a continuous Third Man Effect giving everyone disadvantage on simple tasks? Nothing to cripple them, but always reinforcing the thematics.
One of my very favorite things the Witcher 3 did was contract missions. They would take enemies you have probably encountered up to that point (in some cases not), and themed a hole mission on them. The creature faced was mechanically the same, but it was physically altered (different color, larger or a unique shape), a beefier foe, and usually had a unique arena or mechanic that made it harder or more complicated to fight. I LIVE for that shit. Dont make the party have to go kill some goblins. Make them fight El Tres Diablos, three goblin pranksters who have been loose in the town for a week and are wreaking dangerous mayhem. Make them chase these fuckers through allies, through people's houses, dodging stink bombs, tripwires and alchemist's fire to corner these cretins and give them the business. Give them character and make your players tell stories about that encounter.
Think of any spell or effect in any book, and a Hag will probably have some otherwise mundane looking piece of "crap" laying about that will do it... once. One could even be forgiven for letting some of those "one-pop wonders" self destruct spontaneously in some horribly distracting manner... I don't know... like flashing into a brilliant fire and throwing bits of molten or flaming shrapnel everywhere... D4 - D6 per hit/20% chance of clothing catching fire from it. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 "As you crash against the shelf, a mummified hand wrapped in tattered bandages latches to your arm. As you watch, your veins begin to blacken and dry."
@@clickpause8732 OR... "As you're thumbing through the shelf of aimless bits of driftwood, a makeshift mortar and pestle, and happen upon the dried skin (long discarded) of a local snake, the head end of the snakeskin lashes around suddenly, sinking invisible fangs into your wrist. In panic, you yank the hand away, only succeeding in pulling out the two or so feet of dried, but highly animated snakeskin along with it... As you're screaming in pain and panic, you see the rot beginning to manifest in the veins and spreading up and down from the wrist, infiltrating the arm and down to the fingertips, as the hand shrivels almost instantly, and the flesh up to your shoulder is already passing blue into the 'black' territory..." Remember, relatively mundane things, can hide in plain sight. The under-estimated or the things that inspire a curious sense of "WTF" are the things that can pose the greatest threat. Good try, though. Workable in-game... just depends on how "out of place" you plan to start... that's all. ;o)
Be in my DND group: Fight a drunk at session 1 and beat him. Come back 2 sessions later after dealing with some bandits. Bar keep sends for the party. We show up and he says the drunk we beat wants a 1 on 6 rematch. He has been "training" (drinking). So we start the fight against what the party has dubed the drunken master. Welp after 4 turns we haven't hit him due to his slipperyness the someone hits. He uses a legendary action to negate the damage. Note he has 4 hp. This fight continues for over an hour. Till we beat him and he is taken away on a stretcher. We all had a good time and we may see the drunken master again. Who knows. We were also level 2 at the time.
@@tatersalad76 I love the orb in Red Rescue team that makes the dungeon a MASSIVE empty square room. Then just buffing up and AOE-ing the whole level, then just grinding until the winds of anti Grinding tell me to get out.
I actually love the idea of a beast getting an action surge type ability that triggers when something moves for its child. I'm gonna have to play with this.
I'm curious if certain, non-monstrous creatures might qualify for lairs with the right setup, like an archdruid so attuned to their forest/swamp/mountain of choice they can call upon the land to more actively aid them in its defense (things like entangling brambles or mire pinning down a target, maybe a one time elemental summon, things like that). Back to monsters, I think one of my favorite lair actions was having a sahuagin priestess in a sea cove invoke an eldritch water deity/patron, raising the water in the cave or sending a burst of fell energy through the water at random players as her lair actions. The damage if it connected wasn't a lot, but it paired nicely with her subjects' sahuagin blood frenzy to escalate an encounter with the suddenly emboldened enemies and fewer safe spots as the fight went on
I entirely agree! Another way to do this ( with slightly more effort) is lair actions based on certain groups of people. The only examples I have this are the Cult of Rakdos and the Golgari Swarm from the ravnica setting, but if your homebrew evil cultists have enough power they can definitely mold the area around them.
@@Streken7 its a Magic the Gathering joke. EDH is a style of play where each player has one legendary creature as their commander, with the deck geney being built around said commander
I've been using similar stuff a lot lately! Itll really help balance out the action economy I learned One I've used a few times now is giving Hag a cauldron in there lair that activates magic effects over time Like it launching out some boiling water at a close enemy The cauldron starts letting out a dark smog obscuring the area Spawning some mephits And it just being a boiling pot of water that a freakin strong hag will just pick someone up and throw them into lol Also ads an extra bit of interest to me, that the party can actually disable it by destroying/ knocking over the cauldron
Bird nests often have to be cleaned by the parents for avoiding parasite outbreaks. Maybe if the party fights the hippogryph within its nest, when a party member (preferably with fur or feathers) goes prone inside the nest, it risks picking up some sort of louse or flea that affects the player in the long run if they fail to notice it. Like once per day it undergoes another symptom, eventually maybe even adding points of fatigue. It would keep confusing the heck out of the players until someone makes a successful investigation or medicine check on the victim's body.
Legendary Resistance is kind of a necessary evil, as otherwise any high-level encounter against a supposedly epic monster can be won in a single round with only the spellcaster actually needing to do anything.
Absolutely. It’s a mechanism for maintaining dramatic tension when a monster could be randomly one-shotted by high level parties. The problem being that a lot of DM don’t realize that and just use the legendary abilities continuously when they really shouldn’t be used.
Said by someone who has never known the simple joys of buying a confetti cake and eating all themselves. (For enhanced enjoyment do so while watching Spongebob)
Let a monster itself give a little word to the wise: Swamps are the schtuff. They take care of all the work for you, so as long as you can worm your way around it, you can lure people inside without even engaging in an encounter. If you're the more sedintary type, however, you could just settle down some abandoned ruins and pick the bones off of rats. Whatever suits your individual style!
Loved lair actions. I actually use them for a lot of things. Like one time combat broke out in a huge museum. I used lair actions so at the top of initiative so that: bits of the museum would crumble and cause the landscape to change around them as every round started. In another instance I used lair actions as a ship burned and let the twisted mass fall apart. Slowly and methodically my players escaped the ship as the mast fell apart and the holes got bigger in the hull. Lair actions are really great for traps as well. Just in general. If something takes a few turns to decay or change just lair action it at the top of initiative.
In my first ever game as a DM, the final fight was above a stage play across the beams and such. I had two lair actions in that which meant random targets may get hit by swinging bags of sand or blinded by a flashing strobe light. Was fun stuff!
Personally I'm using a homebrew version of LR that deals damage to the creature when they use it. Not an insignificant amount either, 1/6 of their max health(. This doesn't solve all issues(like in your video, attempt a banishment and the dragon has enough health remaining to LR? still a feelsbadman). This is mainly just a patch to fix the "two health bars" issue I've found where LR effectively functions as a secondary health meter, seperate from HP. And it really feels bad when you've been chipping away at one of the health bars only to have the other one run out. Dragon fails on Polymorph after you, the fighter, spent ages getting its HP low? Wow, anticlimactic. You finally burn through the last LR only to have the dragon die to damage? Guess you wasted all those slots on nothing! So, merging those health bars fixes a few issues, in that now: Doing damage contributes to failed saves, and vice versa, so you won't feel like your contributions were useless as much. This isn't without issues(might need to increase boss HP a bit, don't go too much though or you'll have issues), but I feel like it helps get rid of the "Well I guess I can't do shit" feeling on a caster when a monster has LR. Works well enough in my games. Also, I'd really love it if you made a video on how you'd fix legendary monsters and Legendary resistance, I really want to hear different people's solution to the issue!
To fix Legendary Resistances in D&D if you don't like the 3 auto-successes (which I agree there are problems with as they function like an HP system, which is never a good thing because HP systems kinda suck): (Brainstorming ideas choose and combine as appropriate for your table) Replace them with X# of rerolls (optionally variable to how legendary the creature is to keep your players on their toes, but 1-6 should be good, keeping in mind that it might not work so 3 rerolls is going to be less powerful than 3 LRs) basically giving them the luck feat. Make them unable to roll under a certain number (10 seems a common one for D&D systems and thematically, not being able to roll low enough for lower level characters to ever get the creature to fail a save feeds into the big damn heroes aesthetic) (Probably not a good one, but perhaps may inspire someone else to think of something better) have the use of a legendary resistance have some other non-hp consequence (such as not being able to use a lair action). This would have to be well telegraphed to properly bring into the game rather than being something you're just doing behind the screen/being super metagamey and be rather situational to find things that would be appropriate AND could throw off the design of the fight (which even if you're not super concerned about balance could be making the fight less interesting) And, actually, try playing other systems. You'll go back to D&D with something useful, find a system that does what you want better, or both. Playing more than 1 system is something more people should do.
I like that idea, but one prior idea I had was to have LR be unlimited but cause the monster to gain a level of exhaustion. That way eating through LR does more than just get you closer to a successful spell, and feels more satisfying.
@@Jpteryx that is a _much_ better variation of my poorly developed 3rd idea! I knew there was something better in that general concept that I was missing. I'm glad you figgured out a superior way of achieving that general goal.
For hippogriff add previous offspring acting guardians learning from the parents. Or an NPC having added traps to protect the nest as that’s where their mount came from.
Or the griffs also dive bombing with their own faeces adds a definite flavour to the battle. You imagine how it would feel to have a couple of pounds hitting you in the face.
Love this! I have never used lair actions for the party’s benefit. Once an outpost in the feywild would volley off arrows each round slowly weakening the monsters. This helped the party and they were able to defeat higher CR monsters
Geezer here.... Great vid, thanks. I go back to before D and D was ever advanced. Everybody needs a home, the funky effects are great. We never bothered to roll. But in most campaigns area about the lair gave us a clue. Saved our backsides more than once, served up many a red herring as well. Game on.
For Hippogriff lair actions what if the hatchlings act up and flap their wings radically, causing strong winds to push from the origin. Also the nest likely isn’t going to have a solid floor so there is a good chance a adventure would get their feet stuck in the nesting material. (PS I’ve never played dnd so I’m just going off what was said for what layer actions mean, apologies if this makes no sense)
I like this idea might do it myself Edit. I ended up doing it with gnolls every round I have him summon a hyena and every 3 rounds he inherently cast Tasha's hideous laughter instead... I couldn't come up with a third
Eagles hunt turtles by picking them up and dropping them to break their shells. Have the hippogriff do that to the armored fighters/paladins, freaks them the fuck out.
I think the coolest lair action I stumbled on was for one of the metallic dragons; copper, I think. As the party gets close to the lair they start to see footprints and the tracks always lead them away but to something objectively more important; like an oasis in a desert or shelter from an impending storm.
One of the best DM tip videos I've seen on this channel. This idea meshes well with Matt Colville's video on "villain actions", which are essentially legendary actions for lower-level monsters. I look forward to using this in my campaign soon. Lair actions for a fell-touched owlbear, anyone?
I have made a bunch of lairs for random creatures over the years. Dire Wolf super pack lair was pretty fun. The Lair itself often being inside a cave surrounded by a snowy forest. I also had two region effects and three lair actions. First was a 10 mile radius around the lair was completely devoid of all animal life beyond the smallest of bugs (and the dire wolves themselves), with an eerie silence and an untraceable faint smell of blood during the day and the occasional distant and untraceable howling of wolves at night causing a sense of impending doom in anyone who entered the region. This made resting difficult with all rests not working to remove and prevent exhaustion, but working like normal for all other magical and mechanical purposes. Meaning players will start getting points of exhaustion the longer they spend inside the region as if they were not taking long rests. Second was random encounters with small "Scout" packs of roughly 4-6 Dire Wolves throughout a 10 mile radius around the lair. These "Scout" packs will at first try to kill anything that is not also a dire wolf, unless one of them die. If one of the "Scout" pack dire wolves die all of the others will try to run away and alert others. If the players let any member of the "Scout" pack leave, they will return within 1 hour with another "Scout" pack. With this continuing for some time. The cave entrance to the lair was covered in bones of creatures so broken it is not possible to identify the remains unless through magical means. Inside the cave the ground is covered in broken bones, bone bits, and decaying fur, except for a narrow path that is roughly the width of a horse (Dire Wolves are roughly the size of a horse). The cave is at first a long shaft and along the walls of the cave are bone piles with 8-12 Dire Wolves hiding underneath, once the players get to the half way point all of these hiding Dire Wolves will jump out and ambush the players from all directions. Once the players get through the cave shaft they will enter a very large round chamber that is a dead end. In this chamber are piles of bones of thousands of creatures, 36 Dire Wolves (Or 4 Dire Wolf Swarms), and the Dire Wolf Alpha. A Dire Wolf Swarm is fun to up-level these guys for later level players. The Dire Wolf Alpha has the lair effects and has some beefed up stats. First lair action is Call the Pack, the Alpha howls and summons 1d6 more Dire Wolves (Or a single Dire Wolf Swarm). Second is Bone Dust, the Alpha kicks up a bunch of bone dust into the air which limits vision (cutting any darklight/light ranges in half) and requiring the players to make con saves or be blinded for 1d4 rounds. Third being Pack Pounce, where (for as long as there are other Dire Wolves in the cave) the Alpha makes a distinct howl and all of the Dire Wolves in range try to tackle the nearest player to the ground doing 1d6 slashing damage each, but also requiring a strength/dex save or else be knocked prone. The best part of Dire Wolves is that even if the players kill the Alpha, that just means the next strongest Dire Wolf is now the Alpha. So the only way to get rid of the boss character of "Dire Wolf Alpha" is to kill every single Dire Wolf.
For the Hippogriff I'd base it on dropping/bucking PCs and causing hazards. Probably make the "arena" where the players are fighting a thin spot where the Hippogriff's nest is and some thin lines of difficult terrain to represent the various cliff edges at the jagged peak the monster made its nest to avoid other creatures that would bother its sleep or harm its children. You could have it drop rocks to try and hit one player and, even if it misses, it causes a small rock slide that hits other nearby PCs below. That sort of thing. Another interesting idea could be it has a stash of shiny goods, like magic items, in its nest. Maybe it has unknowingly activate one or two to some disastrous effect.
Lair actions are also super helpful for keeping combat to move quicker. Does your crime boss have a bunch of henchmen? Instead of making them separate creatures or just a big mob, make them a lair action of the boss.
Lair of a Faerie dragon Location:In trees with places for the dragon to sit Treasure hoard:Magical gems that create illusions and silk Illusion:If the creature reaches their treasure hoard they will use magic to make the colors of the forrest within 120 ft match it’s color creating camouflage that makes it basically invisible Meet my friends:Every 4 turns 1d10 pixies will show up to help defend the dragon Lair size:2 miles
For highly skilled soldiers, one of their Legendary Actions could be to make an attack using the table for Battle Masters. As a Lair Action, an elevated platoon of archers can fire a volley at the party.
If the hippogriff is high up on a cliff or among the peaks of a valley, have harsh winds be a act as a sort of weather event which occurs every few rounds. Perhaps there's thick and thorny bramble along the climb that could pose problems or incur skill checks.
A hippogryph lair action could be something like herds of prey animals stampeding in the parties direction, the birdhorse curbstomping ledges to either obstruct the parties movement or cause them to fall to their dice roll, or even just the hippogryph lifting a character in their talons and using certain terrain to exploit fall damage like many actual birds do. You can have the coolest armour in the world, but if you crit fail the wrong dice roll, and your character gets dropped from 50ft in the air onto jagged rocks; you're going to have a bad time.
Those are some good ideas! I had a mad alchemist's clockwork laboratory with a room full of large containers with Slaad tadpoles in them. Of course a fair amount had escaped and were hunting around the room like a pack of frog-like pirahna rats. The frantic ambush of a fairly large amount of anklebiters got pretty crazy, especially as I would have the large containers be stupidly breakable if nat 1s were rolled or if a player missed in the direction of several unbroken ones. To top it all off the floor was coated in a thin (no higher than a boot), yet gross liquid (normally inside the containers) that would damage players whenever it touched an injury and would get higher and higher the more containers were broken. Of course my players acting as they do, decided that instead of treating the combat seriously, they were going to kick or throw slaad tadpoles at each other despite taking significant damage from doing so. It almost made me a bit nervous about the green slaad boss battle that they didn't rest before going into, but hey, it's not my fault they decided to push on ahead like they weren't still bleeding and covered in acid.
Using lairs for weaker monsters is an awesome idea. Reminds me of The Witcher. Using lots of them could give a way of giving players a story/combat section every one-shot very easily.
If you're already modding the hippogriff with legendary and/or lair actions, you can also go a few steps further. Give it some magical powers, more powerful attacks (one comment below mentioned that their hooked beaks can deal devastating damage), and maybe set the fight in unstable terrain. It could be one special hippogriff as the boss, with other hippogriffs effectively being scenery or hazards. Maybe one of the lair actions has the boss call in an extra hippogriff (or 1d4+1 or something), and each hippogriff flies around out of the party's reach dropping rocks they hold in their talons - or the bodies of prey. Ranged characters can kill them, but adding more creates a danger the party needs to keep looking out for
Kobold Lair actions: The number of traps per 5x5 square can be multiplied by the result of a 1d4 roll Kobolds can poison/disease 3 traps or 15 individual weapons Fortunate Son begins playing from seemingly nowhere in particular the moment a medium sized or larger creature enters their lair
Just did a one shit with a hag final boss. Her lair action was to pull a random one time use maguc item from the shelf and use it. They came in three flavours. Attacks, defensive or spawning
I like the way Brennan of Dimension 20 uses Lair actions, where he applie them to non-lair situations (see: the ship combat in season 2 of Fantasy High, or the sinking boat in Crown of Candy). He's using the lair action mechanics to just cover potent environmental effects.
You could also give collective lair actions when there are big gatherings of a specific creature in another video, like in a rakdos carnival on page 250 in the guildmasters guide to Ravnica!
The Hippogriff should always be in the mountains. The bit you explained about dropped corpses around, should be foreshadowing. The Hippogriff is in the same family as say Rocs or Griffins and the idea should be that they nest on jagged peaks full of loose terrain and rocks, but also snow and ice. The Lair actions of avalanches, rockslides, and loose boulders should stay. But likewise have it capable of grappling players and if they can't break away, it dropping them and letting gravity do the heavy lifting sounds like a thing. Parental Adrenaline can count too, but also give it wind abilities. It being able to cast Gust or Gust of Wind sounds like the way to go, maybe some ice and snow spells too or reflavored fog. These wouldn't be "spell" spells. But rather things that the Hippogriff can do with its wings to the terrain around it. It has homefield advantage and so should be taking advantage of it. I feel like a massive fount of inspiration for this could be White Wolf's *Beast The Primordial* in that game Beasts are player characters and each of them have these soulscapes that are basically lairs for their inner monster. Those lairs have keywords and each of those gives you an idea of what to expect from that lair. You could reflavor almost all of them to D&D monster ecosystems. wodcodex.com/wiki/Lair_Traits
For a hippogriff, you could have some of the prey it kidnapped try and escape when you start distracting it, maybe make a strength save to avoid getting trampled and dragged?
Lair actions for lower CR works best imo in chaotic large groups. I did a Ravnica campaign where the party went to a couple Rakdos shows (giant murder circuses) and I had lair actions like random spouts of fire, magical bloodlust they needed to resist, and enemies randomly exploding (I had a separate table for what they exploded into from blood to smoke to confetti). You can get really crazy with lair actions if you make them harm the monsters too. Now you can throw like 30 goblins at your 1st level players because half of them will be taken out by the boulders rolling past!
Goblin lair actions is what came to my mind. First is a 1 time encounter with the Nilbog. Second advantage on stealth checks from a hide action to hide in prebuilt nooks and cracks in the room. Lastly a simple poison dart attack from a hidden trap. That makes goblin layers more alive but also built around their ambush nature. Goblins would retreat here to the relative safety
I think its a homebrew sheet I came across, but its for an Ulfhedinn - basically a legendary Northern strain of werewolf that can no longer shapeshift back into a human form that Im making a campaign around. It has a regional arctic influence on weather and can increase the hostility of native wolves towards travelers. Sounds pretty cool to me.
I think this is actually a really cool idea for even simple monsters, but I'd say, specifically monsters, no Crab Lairs, unless it's a hyper intelligent crab, or some sort of wild magic crab (like a wild magic mage got turned into a crab) because it can kind of give players a geralt of rivia vibe when they go to hunt it down, especially if they don't know it's a hippogriff before-hand (example, the starter mission in the witcher 3, yes, I know that's a Griffon but it's still relevant)
My plan for legendary resistance is legendary resistance just adds +10 it means that on God rolls and aweful defense rolls still can mean a failure. This doesn't help against "save for half damage" spells but still better than "nope"
I ran a CR 5 gnome bandit that had two mounted corssbows that he could fire (or reload) with a bonus action, and lots of things written in Arcane on the walls - 3 of these spots would heal him when touched.
Honestly, I think that if the DM uses a Legendary Resistance specifically to screw over players having a rough time with an encounter, there's a bigger problem than just the legendary monster and its lair.
So... If weird shit starts happening while a beholder sleeps. You could make mistery quest along the lines of: a bunch of your player's weapons, at night, turn magical and have cool effects, they discover that the beholder got greatly injured by some adventurers, so he dreamed about a group of misfit hero-mercenaries were plotting to kill him... unconsciously making it true. The weapons and gear might wither away afterwards.
If he’s evil he might have installed one of those trap doors in front of the throne that drops people he doesn’t like into the dungeon. Guards could pull the tapestries (that in reality can weigh upwards of a ton) down as an area effect that knocks people to the ground and force them to crawl out from under them. The lighting would be provided by massive chandeliers of candles suspended by ropes. Guards would know where those ropes are anchored and could drop them for a 10’ circle attack with 1 point splash damage. The only limit is imagination.
Okay, here is my defense for both legendary actions and legendary resistances: 1. Legendary actions, like you mentioned, are absolutely *necessary* for a one-vs.-many boss battle against the party to even be a worthwile encounter. Without them, the monster would either need to one-hit K.O. most of the party on turn 1 (with a very overtuned breath weapon or the like) - or be completely trounced by 5-7 player characters all taking an action, bonus action an (potentially) reaction *each* (not counting buffs like Haste) while it gets only 1 of each. 2. Legendary resistances are also *necessary* for the same reasons. A party of 5-7 mid to high level adventurers ("high level" meaning lvl 11+ since most campaigns don't go past lvl 15) could simply spam their control effects over and over to prevent the monster from taking its legendary actions if it didn't have legendary resistances - this would lead us back to problem #1, meaning a monster would need to have massive one hit AoE abilities to even be a challenge for a larger party.
Azer: on IC20- A pool of heater water/ lava spills out from a crack in a elevated or lower platform in the lair spreading out in a 20' diameter causing 1d10 fire and it is now difficult terrain. Hippogriff: IC20- A cluster of eggs in random spots around the room hatch... and feast on the food/PC's in the room, taking 1d8 piercing and is considered obscured. (Both would require a DC 14 of either con or dex to save for half. These are what immediately come to mind when thinking about low level creatures.
I once had my players adventure near the lair of a gold dragon and instead of fighting it, I had them come across the aftermath of a young dragon dying in combat. They found the corpse and it was riddled with arrows and I dealt like the lair effects created tension which was welcome in taking combats seat.
"Only legendary monster below CR 10" Bol'bara, Fleecemane Lion, Felidar, Thessalhydra, Yestabrod, Thousand Teeth, Maw of Sekolah, Rezmir, Obzedat Ghost, Vampiric Jade Statue, Auril, and Lorthuun all say hi. For real though, this is cool. I'm getting all these ideas now for regional effects and lair actions for evil mages and mad scientists and stuff. I was thinking of having some dryads in my campaign just show up with a bunch of awakened plants, but giving them regional effects and lair actions sounds way cooler. (also yes I know a bunch of those monsters weren't out when this video was made and also a bunch of them are adventure NPCs but whatever; you can always tweak them to suit your campaign)
I dunno, I usually just made stuff up for monsters with what the book gave me or what I reworked monsters. Like, I redid guard drakes to be either tamed beasts or wild pack predators. Group I had without asking the villagers went down into this pit where just so happened the guard drakes were nesting. I reworked them to be somewhat like burrowing monsters. The minotaur guy got his ass beat and lost a horn to one of them before splitting that one's head in half with a crit. Their lair abilities just being depending on what color they were they could duck their head into the holes in the cave and do a rather weak breathe attack Or they could attempt to move around in the cave system and do a lunge and pin.
Hippogriff lair ideas: Forrested mountainous region - Constant threat of rock slides. High elevation weather effects such as thunderstorms and snow. Thunderstorms increase the chance of rockslides and the terrain is difficult. At high elevation breathing becomes difficult so actions might be met with con saves to avoid penalties and/or passing out. Other threats may include local floura/fauna as well as possible climb checks based on the party's route to the nest. As the party gets closer to the nest the hippogriff may harass them by dropping animal carcasses on them (maybe have this interfere with skill checks such as athletics or climb depending on how the party is traversing the mountiain). Encounter - The party is under constant threat of being thrown from the nest as the hippogriff combines attacks with forced movement such as grapple and bull rush attacks. Depending on the nature of the quest there could be other issues as well such as a mate, hungry chicks, inability to perform certain actions withought harming the eggs and losing the quest reward, the hippogriff is enlightened or has some elemental status (recommended for subjugation only quests). The encounter could be affected by mountainous weather conditions such as thunderstorms having a chance at shocking players, fog lowering visibility, snow creating a slippery surface, down or up-drafts that effect fall damage.
Same on the more lairs ideas I've made a simple on that was left by a Kobolt Necromancer that used it as a corpse holding machine where at initiative 20, a 1d6 is rolled and; 1- Nothing Happens 2- 1d4 Kobolt Zombies 3,4- Creatures 10 feet from the walls must make a DC 13 dex check, on a fail it's 2d4 fire Dmg from flying sparks. And half of a success. 4- Three Zombies closest to the dark power core on the ceiling are received at 1 HP 5- Nothing Happens 6- 1 Zombie Ogre The machine stops when the boss of the room dies (Zombie Lizardfolk). Or the players remove the power core. And afterwards the machines dark magical core can be claimed by a few checks. Planning to run a campaign for my friend whenever i get the chance of we finish our current two.
Idea for random events for horse eagle, due to the amount of hunting these things have done larger bigger beasts may just interrupt the fight trying to take over the nest since their the only food around, maybe after the fight if their carrying food about it'll gain the attraction of lesser animals in swarms even as small as extremely starved rabbits and having a role determine what swarm comes at them during the night, maybe due to the constant new creation of their nests carved out of the stone from their claws certain bits of the mountainside might fall off within a certain role subtract 1d4 to the number of rounds or turns for thunder and lighting, force, damage may damage it more revealing tunnels or having party members strategically plan a collapse on something charging them / forgetting it's there and being jump scared as their caster gets buried under the rubble (Side note maybe toss in some weaker mobs in the tunnels that would attack both sides, maybe a spider that was planning on ambushing a hippogryph at night for free meals). Maybe they dug their nests into the side of a statue worshiping a nearly forgotten rain god who is honestly The Big Anger at these birds and in it's blind fury random strikes of lighting can go off around the battlefield. Also maybe have a group of dumb kobolds or goblins who thought they could tame a weak one just interrupt the fight and try to mount a weak one to try and kidnap it / tame it / ride away with it thinking the party of adventures weakened it up for him and he can sneak off with a powerful pet before it freaks out and rampages around the battlefield trying to shake off the goblin
Something I don't understand is why black dragons live in poisonous swamps when they have acid immunity, wouldn't it be better if "the water and air is so polluted that it breaks down anything in contact" or "the BD's aura has corrupted the clouds so bad that acid falls from the sky". Idk, a poisonous environment sounds more like what a green dragon should look up to (maybe it has a constant cloud of toxic spores idk)
Hippogriff (or other mindless beasts) actually could be used by BBEG as a guardian ( for a buried treasure for exemple) so its lair could reflect that by magic traps or alarm mechanisms.
I wonder what percentage of the comedic genius of these videos I miss by not being able to read the pop-up text fast enough and not wanting to pause/rewind the video.
That's part of why Legendary Resistance only crops up in high CR monsters. At that point, it makes perfect sense for an enemy to be at least _temporarily_ able to call your OP bull, whatever it may be.
@@clickpause8732 yeah... could just imagine how unthreatening the fight becomes without it... "You all come across a dragon" "I cast hypnotic pattern so it stays still for 10 turns doing nothing" Epic stuff that...
I remember seeing someone homebrew legendary resistances in a way that casting high-level spells like that still hurts, by just letting the monster negate the effect at the cost of a large chunk of HP.
Is it weird that as soon as I heard that description of the area near the azer outpost I immediately thought “oh it looks like Minecraft near their outposts, because that’s what “oddly symmetrical tunnels, unnaturally directed lava flows, and mine carts” sounds like to me
I have the idea that underneath my Campaign's capitol lives an Otyugh. The elves have enchanted the sewers and disposal system to dump into its den, allowing it to gorge and devour the waste. What are some ideas for an Otyugh lair and lair actions? I have some ideas.... but I'm curious if anyone else has any to make this a memorable and challenging fight.
When it comes to legendary enemies -just have your dm homebrew one. Mine had us fighting a shade assassin at lvl 3 and it worked well. We didn't even have to kill it to defeat it - we just knocked it prone with a door slam to the face so it couldn't use it's legendary action to teleport.
One thing I've been wanting to do for my games is make a system where legendary creatures don't get a legendary resistance but have a decreased effect by anything that would or pretty much would outright stop them. Something like banishment would only remove the creature for a certain number of turns, a stun would instead only stagger the creature, etc. Essentially it's what Warcraft and WoW did for heroes / elites.
Wind tunnel lair action - The hippogriff beats its wings to cause a wind tunnel usually used to launch itself out, but can be used to blow adventurers into walls or out of lairs. (The Pokemon move whirlwind)
For the Hippogryph, why not go with random gusts of wind that might make movement difficult or even throw people off the edge of the nest? I mean, it would make sense for them to have their nest someplace with favorable winds for flying, and since they are high above the ground that could lead into some very nasty falls.
Have a random lair for 1 goblin. Just as a goof, have some goof weapons in there as loot as well. Something like a gold sword he found d that he thought was cool but turns out its brass. Or a pile of "wands" which are just actually sticks he stuck ornaments onto. If the players are more lighthearted let them adopt him as a companion and even integrate him into the town as a local merchant.
Hearing you talk about legendary resistances gave me war flashbacks to MMOs. "So what you are tellin me is that none of my cool abilities, that set me aside as unique and valuable, work against any boss monsters and the only way to actually contribute to the fight is to make sure that I can either tank rlgud, heal rlgud, or minmax my dps for faze clan? Guess I'll just abandon all creativity and chug the gamerfuel to collect all the numbers for the rat race that my fun hobby has become."
I made a roper with a lair action of having piercers fall out of the ceiling on the players. Thematically relevant and cool as heck. Should do a roper with legendary actions next time :P
I came up with a few monster lair actions of my own, using this video as inspiration. The video I made includes blights, gargoyles, and ghasts/ghouls (and has a link back to this video). Thanks for the inspiration!
I love this theme of Runesmith saying he's gonna roll on some tables he makes for his point and then actually rolling and going "wow I should not have done that"
I've definitely found, if I'm not going to stick to the tables there is no point rolling
Random Tables: Great for inspiration, TERRIBLE for rolling.
Nothing is more D&D then that decision making.
The key to a good table is that it NEVER is "just random". You preselect between 6 or 8 things and then throw 2d4 or 2d6. For example, I would limit myself to choosing by CR (1/2 -4) and by locations suitable for "lairs (caves-ruins-dungeons)":
2d12
2-3: Choker
4-5: Mimic
6-7-8: Goblin
9-10: Minotaur
11-12: Nothic
Yeah, tables are if you’re looking for inspiration or just don’t want to work when wrighting a character.
I just homebrew a bunch of shit, give legendary resist and actions whenever I feel like an enemy needs it. I like making a single enemy fight a group, makes them memorable.
Legendary actions are super cool and a really smart design thing. Legendary resistance is dumb.
I might make legendary resistance give +10 to a given save in the future, to make it theoretically possible to fail the save. Exceptions may occur if the targeted entity is like a demigod or something. Like if my players decided that tackling Zariel head-on was a good idea or something. Even then, maybe the PCs are demigods themselves at that point. Hmmmmm.
Like when they are fighting a boss or mini boss of a dungeon?
@@jon9828 Legendary Resistances are very much NOT dumb. What's dumb is when your players fight a Demon Lord BBEG that rolls a natural 1 on his CHA save and gets banished in the 2nd round of combat and the encounter ends, and your BBEG is not a threat for another 2 years until some other cult gathers up to summon him again.
Yes, automatically succeeding on a saving throw from your very powerful spell is probably not very enjoyable for someone who cast the spell in hopes of succeeding, but the success on a save from a legit roll stings just as hard, and that's just a feeling that you often get while playing this game and it's not the end of the world if not everything goes according to your plan because dice were not on your side this day.
But 5e, or D&D in general, is filled with a bunch of dumb, overpowered "save or die" spells that have very little in terms of defense measures for their targets, and it's much easier to recover from an unsuccessful spell due to a lucky roll or a Legendary Resistance use than it is to recover the tension of a narrative or the threat of a boss introduced months ago that falls down to an ultimate BS spell with no means of counterplay.
And yes, sure, you can break concentration on a wizard sometimes and everything's fine, but not every encounter should need henchmen to save the BBEG, makes him seem less lethal and dangerous if he can be taken down without a group of kobolds stabbing on enemy wizard to stop their spells from working. Sometimes a singular enemy makes more sense in a narrative, sometimes even this one guy alone is enough threat in circumstances where no BS spells are used so you shouldn't necessarily provide him with more NPCs that increase the encounter CR by another 5 only to serve as a countermeasure for when the one character MAYBE uses one dangerous spell. Sometimes having a lone boss is way more intimidating that he can take on the party by themselves without anyone's help, like an ancient vampire lord or a powerful dragon. But it's difficult to create intimidating villainous figures like that without legendary resistances, when a level 8 wizard can take them down by themselves just because they're lucky like that. What was all the fuss about to create a campaign around this one supposedly powerful dude the god killer the destroyer of worlds the baron of carnage if he cannot even beat a 4th level spell? Doesn't sound very legendary to me.
@@jon9828 You'd have to make it so that you add the +10 before you roll, otherwise you'd only add it whenever you know it would make you succeed on the save. Anyway, when a creature would have your type of legendary resistance it would succeed almost any PC DC with its inherent save bonus and a +10, so it would be the same as a regular legendary resistance. Also, Zariel already has three saves that are almost +20 against the most debilitating types of magic AND advantage on those saves, so I don't think she'd ever even need to use her regular LR.
@@Deltajugg it kinda sounds like banish is a little too powerful.
Legendary resistance often just becomes "I have to cast my Spell X times before it even has a theoretical chance of kicking in". That sometimes makes it useless to cast that at all against that boss. It's fundamentally a feel-bad mechanic. If you're unaware of it, it blindsides you and invalidates your spell without even rolling a dice, feels bad. If you're aware of it you know that you have to see it used X times before you dare throw your big cool spells, feels bad. It's a brute force, inelegant solution. It may the only viable solution but I've still seen plenty of frustration from players around my table regarding the binary nature of legendary resistance. Counterspells have a similar problem, key difference being players can traditionally get access to counterspells. Sadly I am a dumb and so my plus 10 thing was the only thing I could think of to make legendary resistance less binary. Not a good solution either, but it at least FEELS like they could fail, like you're given a chance, however small (and yes, said +10 would have to be before roll to not make it just a reskin).
About banish, it's not just me thinking it's a bit busted right? Make the BBEG, if extraplanar, bind their essence somewhere on the material if they get the chance. That way banish is a 1 minute prep or a retreat for the party rather than an instant win button. I have a weakness for extraplanar origins for my NPCs so I've had to struggle with this.
TLDR: Legendary resistance may be the only solution, but it still feels bad and I don't like it, so I'd like to make it less feel-bad. Banish is a little too strong. Extraplanar villians are cool, keep them safe from banish.
Honestly, 'monster lair building' needs to be a minigame for the DM, with guidelines and random tables and maybe even an internet-based auto-generator.
Like a DM-specific game of Lexicon.
The main problem I have with it is inspiration. What does a giant slime that lives in a pit of skeletons use for a lair action? Sure, it can bring some skeletons to life, and maybe it can eat a skeleton to regain HP, but what else does it do? The usual approach to building a dungeon is create a lair and then populate it with monsters, and doing it the other way around is difficult to wrap your head around.
@@cthulhufhtagn2483 The slime takes in a pile of scattered bones, moving them about it's body to the raised pseudopod, which then whips through the air before it, launching countless shattered bones in an arcing spray. The intact bones however, remain within the slime, until enough can be collected to construct a functioning skeleton, at which point they lumber forth, dripping in flesh melting ooze. Drawn in by the rumbling of combat, or even by the smell of living fear, the smaller slimes that lurk in the murder holes of the walls and ceiling start to dribble toward their latest prey, making it seem as if every surface is slick with a malevolent, hungry mucus.
@@lordopotamus9109 I now regret not asking this question before running the combat.
@@cthulhufhtagn2483 pit of skeletons is the lair, have the slime "slip" down into it and attack from below. They'd have to run or get VERY clever, fast
Runesmith: Why do only high CR monsters get lair actions?
Also Runesmith: Boy it sure is hard to think of lair actions for this low CR beast.
It could just come down to, say, an "alpha" of a pack commanding its minions to harry the party. An encounter with a tonne of beasts nipping at your ankles as you have to escape to a certain location, that could just be an ambush. If you fail saves you could take damage, become hobbled etc.
I think good area effects, especially for low level adventurers, could be fear or anxiety induced ones. Walking into a monsters lair, especially if you are a newcomer to adventuring and not a borderline immortal arcane juggernaut, would be worrying, you would be scared for your life.
Mirror that with actions such as movements out of the corner of your eye, hearing or seeing awful things that are perhaps only an overactive imagination.
I think there are plenty of different ideas you could implement, and of course you could Homebrew whatever you want.
@@talonus202 I came up with twice as many in less than half the time so yeah it really isn't that hard
@@talonus202 then again I tend to have a talent for doing this sort of thing, and it is a good way to add difficulty to a fight without overpowering the party
@@NobodyDungeons This is such a weird flex, I do not understand it
Well.. In my opinion only creatures that aren't beasts or at least are sapient should have lairs. Plus lair actions would bump up their cr a bit
I once made a legendary medusa who overcame her species dreaded kryptonite: mirrors. So she had them placed around her sunken temple abode, allowing her to try and snipe the back party members with her paralyzing gaze using geometry. This was after a Dark Souls fog gate of steam mephits. Lots of hissing. It was rad.
Oh man, that's actually a genius encounter. A medusa is pretty scary on it's own, but then you add in not even being able to use more conventional hiding tactics and the fight turns into a true battle for survival.
How did you telegraph to your party that the medusa was trick shooting her gaze around? How did they react after they figured it out? Like, just entering a temple and seeing a fuckton of mirrors is already offputting imo. I can imagine a party trying desperately to break mirrors outside of the mirror's "line of sight" with a 10 foot pole or with well placed stone throws. Imo, a sling might be the ultimate weapon in this kind of situation since I'd rule that ball bearings would count as viable ammunition for breaking a mirror even if they wouldn't count as ammo for a normal ranged weapon attack.
"Simple geometry."
Don’t you have to physically look at Medusa for the effect to work? I thought the point of the shield was to still see her without getting stoned, not that she was afraid of them.
Daniel Witt in D&D the Medusa can be killed by looking into her reflection as it’ll turn her to stone. So by those rules she can trick shot people with mirrors if she got over the weakness.
@@ethanrajczak3041 Eh, his game, his rules. I think it is a neat idea, even if I personally think that the stone gaze should also affect the medusa, like in the Greek myth.
A Hippogriff nest might be atop a huge mountain peak, so a lair action might be a massive gust of wind that sweeps through the battlefield every round on initiative 20. Any Medium or smaller creature (Hippogriff is Large, so he's fine) who fails a Strength save is pushed 10 feet toward one end of the battlefield, which considering the terrain, might be the edge of a cliff. It would also disperse cloud-based spells.
Maybe the cliff is small, only a 10 foot drop that deals a little fall damage and that you have to climb back up, but the Hippogriff hangs out near that edge, making engaging in melee combat more risky.
Hippity hoppity this idea is now my property.
Amazing idea. Like, that's really scary.
Yep, fine idea. Even a small drop will have the effect of splitting the party temporarily, which shifts the action economy and damage output in favor of the horsebirds. Strong wind should also interfere with non-spell ranged attacks - archery and random wind gusts do not mix well. I'd also be tempted to throw in competition showing up - an NPC hunting party that's after the foalchicks to sell to beast tamers - but that might be more of a second chained encounter than a lair effect.
Just a 20 feet drop for a little damage and an Athletics roll (CD 12) to climb up again and the party would be scared
Check some nature documentary shows or the Rangers in action, when they close in on a bird's nest... especially the birds of prey. A hawk's not the biggest thing in the forest, but you get close to its nest, and you're in for trouble!
They dive-bomb at you. They'll grab at "sensitive parts" of your head, even yanking out tufts of hair... If they get ahold of your jacket, or find a stable enough purchase anywhere else, they'll tear right in and shred whatever they can get to... Those beaks are sharp!
AND damn the book, a hook-shape like the hippogryf would play HELL with jaw pressure. Remember this things on a creature roughly the size of a horse!!!
They don't have to be particularly tough or smart. A human only really needs one good swing to connect and the Hawk is down... done for the day kinda down. Ten bucks still says YOU won't willingly climb up there for an omelet! ;o)
I mean technically even high level humanoid Big Bads could have active lairs, like a Bandit King who has clockwork crossbows that fire during combat or trap doors
Really just a matter of how smart that bandit king is. After all, the lairs are more meant to give a challenge and spice things up with dynamics, not necessarily to make life worse for your characters
Damn cool idea tho
Or for an evil wizard botanist, plants that can heal or damage adjacent creatures, or even alter the terrain by creating acid pools or setting things on fire.
An Ogre cave so littered with bones that they threaten to trip you every round while they just crunch under the ogres feet. A hedge witch whose hut it so filled with hung, shelved and piled curios that each sword swing triggers something from a random table as you smash through them. Classics like kobold Laura riddled with traps. A giant centipede lair so riddled with tunnels that at any moment the party might fall through into a pod of hungry larval young. Straight up atmospherics like the waist-deep snow while fighting a snow snake.
If you do that, you basically want nothing to do with the party and just want to TPKing them so you can kick them out of your house
The real takeaway from the video is to make combat thematic and unique, rather than a numbers game.
Narrative plot and descriptive action and parameters makes the wrapper for the numbers that provide just enough structure to keep everyone consistent... the way things should be.
We've RP'ed combat for a LONG LONG time... It's not quick, but it's a WHOLE LOT more fun, letting the PC's make cinematic actions and mix acrobatics and swashbuckling with the efforts to destroy enemies. The technical rules are simplified a bit, to make way for consistent action economy, BUT the kinds of epic scenes that come out of it make everything "sacrificed" worth the expense... ;o)
That feel when "that guy" only cares about mix-maxing 'playing pretend with dice'.
Yes exactly. Why not make the gouts from the Azer’s forges just waves of heat? Anyone who’s caught in them takes a -1 circumstance penalty for a round. Why not have the Beholder’s realm have a continuous Third Man Effect giving everyone disadvantage on simple tasks? Nothing to cripple them, but always reinforcing the thematics.
One of my very favorite things the Witcher 3 did was contract missions. They would take enemies you have probably encountered up to that point (in some cases not), and themed a hole mission on them. The creature faced was mechanically the same, but it was physically altered (different color, larger or a unique shape), a beefier foe, and usually had a unique arena or mechanic that made it harder or more complicated to fight. I LIVE for that shit.
Dont make the party have to go kill some goblins. Make them fight El Tres Diablos, three goblin pranksters who have been loose in the town for a week and are wreaking dangerous mayhem. Make them chase these fuckers through allies, through people's houses, dodging stink bombs, tripwires and alchemist's fire to corner these cretins and give them the business. Give them character and make your players tell stories about that encounter.
remember how hags make all sorts of weirded one use items and the such? you just found the mother of all lair actions
She can grab a jar and attempt to capture a spell you cast at her to use later on (or maybe have a familiar/thrall use it)
When Furniture Attacks!
Think of any spell or effect in any book, and a Hag will probably have some otherwise mundane looking piece of "crap" laying about that will do it... once.
One could even be forgiven for letting some of those "one-pop wonders" self destruct spontaneously in some horribly distracting manner... I don't know... like flashing into a brilliant fire and throwing bits of molten or flaming shrapnel everywhere... D4 - D6 per hit/20% chance of clothing catching fire from it. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 "As you crash against the shelf, a mummified hand wrapped in tattered bandages latches to your arm. As you watch, your veins begin to blacken and dry."
@@clickpause8732 OR... "As you're thumbing through the shelf of aimless bits of driftwood, a makeshift mortar and pestle, and happen upon the dried skin (long discarded) of a local snake, the head end of the snakeskin lashes around suddenly, sinking invisible fangs into your wrist. In panic, you yank the hand away, only succeeding in pulling out the two or so feet of dried, but highly animated snakeskin along with it... As you're screaming in pain and panic, you see the rot beginning to manifest in the veins and spreading up and down from the wrist, infiltrating the arm and down to the fingertips, as the hand shrivels almost instantly, and the flesh up to your shoulder is already passing blue into the 'black' territory..."
Remember, relatively mundane things, can hide in plain sight. The under-estimated or the things that inspire a curious sense of "WTF" are the things that can pose the greatest threat.
Good try, though. Workable in-game... just depends on how "out of place" you plan to start... that's all. ;o)
Runesmith: "I'll just roll on a table."
5 minutes later: "This was a horrible idea."
Lmao not even, 2 seconds later
Be in my DND group:
Fight a drunk at session 1 and beat him.
Come back 2 sessions later after dealing with some bandits.
Bar keep sends for the party.
We show up and he says the drunk we beat wants a 1 on 6 rematch.
He has been "training" (drinking).
So we start the fight against what the party has dubed the drunken master. Welp after 4 turns we haven't hit him due to his slipperyness the someone hits. He uses a legendary action to negate the damage. Note he has 4 hp. This fight continues for over an hour. Till we beat him and he is taken away on a stretcher. We all had a good time and we may see the drunken master again. Who knows. We were also level 2 at the time.
Wow the DnD version of the can't hit me guy from Yakuza/Judgement. Nice.
He should become a drunken master monk, turn it into a deadly fighting style where he can K.O. entire parties.
"Oh no, it's a Monster House"
"Porygon-Z used agility"
"Altaria used Dragon Dance"
"Altaria used Dragon Dance"
"Altaria used Dragon Dance"
"Altaria used Earthquake"
"Main Character fainted"
"Reviver Seed used"
"Main Character's sidekick fainted."
*Dungeon Failed*
Everyone: "...FFFFUUUUUUUUU-"
Ah a man of culture
"Porygon-Z used Discharge!"
@@tatersalad76 I love the orb in Red Rescue team that makes the dungeon a MASSIVE empty square room. Then just buffing up and AOE-ing the whole level, then just grinding until the winds of anti Grinding tell me to get out.
[Dialga's Fight to the Finish intensifies]
Honestly love the parental adrenaline Action Surge idea, not saying I’m stealing that but it has definitely been acquired by an unnamed entity
I actually love the idea of a beast getting an action surge type ability that triggers when something moves for its child. I'm gonna have to play with this.
2:20 I've been lied to my entire life... The "elder Guardian" is just a beholder...
Oh... wow.
The endings just keep getting more and more awkward and it is beautiful
I'm curious if certain, non-monstrous creatures might qualify for lairs with the right setup, like an archdruid so attuned to their forest/swamp/mountain of choice they can call upon the land to more actively aid them in its defense (things like entangling brambles or mire pinning down a target, maybe a one time elemental summon, things like that).
Back to monsters, I think one of my favorite lair actions was having a sahuagin priestess in a sea cove invoke an eldritch water deity/patron, raising the water in the cave or sending a burst of fell energy through the water at random players as her lair actions. The damage if it connected wasn't a lot, but it paired nicely with her subjects' sahuagin blood frenzy to escalate an encounter with the suddenly emboldened enemies and fewer safe spots as the fight went on
Black dragon's only living swamps queue Shrek loosing his sh*t yelling at donkey to get his kids under control.
For the griffon. Birds nests are often infested with mites so getting close to the nest could trigger a swarm or sapping sting
If it’s a bird the size of a horse, maybe they’re mites the size of small birds.
I entirely agree! Another way to do this ( with slightly more effort) is lair actions based on certain groups of people. The only examples I have this are the Cult of Rakdos and the Golgari Swarm from the ravnica setting, but if your homebrew evil cultists have enough power they can definitely mold the area around them.
Legendary monsters can also be used as your commander in EDH.
EDH?
@@gavinlopez6258 Elder Dragon Highlander, as if that wasn't obvious from the abbreviation :P
@@egregius9314 the hell is that?
@@Streken7 its a Magic the Gathering joke. EDH is a style of play where each player has one legendary creature as their commander, with the deck geney being built around said commander
Legendary resistances are why your wizard should always have Maze
I've been using similar stuff a lot lately! Itll really help balance out the action economy I learned
One I've used a few times now is giving Hag a cauldron in there lair that activates magic effects over time
Like it launching out some boiling water at a close enemy
The cauldron starts letting out a dark smog obscuring the area
Spawning some mephits
And it just being a boiling pot of water that a freakin strong hag will just pick someone up and throw them into lol
Also ads an extra bit of interest to me, that the party can actually disable it by destroying/ knocking over the cauldron
Bird nests often have to be cleaned by the parents for avoiding parasite outbreaks. Maybe if the party fights the hippogryph within its nest, when a party member (preferably with fur or feathers) goes prone inside the nest, it risks picking up some sort of louse or flea that affects the player in the long run if they fail to notice it. Like once per day it undergoes another symptom, eventually maybe even adding points of fatigue. It would keep confusing the heck out of the players until someone makes a successful investigation or medicine check on the victim's body.
Legendary Resistance is kind of a necessary evil, as otherwise any high-level encounter against a supposedly epic monster can be won in a single round with only the spellcaster actually needing to do anything.
Absolutely. It’s a mechanism for maintaining dramatic tension when a monster could be randomly one-shotted by high level parties. The problem being that a lot of DM don’t realize that and just use the legendary abilities continuously when they really shouldn’t be used.
"As cool as confetti cake when you're six."
Right... when I was six... Definitely not the awesomest cake in existence now that I'm a legal adult, no.
Said by someone who has never known the simple joys of buying a confetti cake and eating all themselves. (For enhanced enjoyment do so while watching Spongebob)
Let a monster itself give a little word to the wise: Swamps are the schtuff. They take care of all the work for you, so as long as you can worm your way around it, you can lure people inside without even engaging in an encounter. If you're the more sedintary type, however, you could just settle down some abandoned ruins and pick the bones off of rats. Whatever suits your individual style!
Put my party against a baby black dragon. The swamp did way more to them than the dragon ever did.
Loved lair actions. I actually use them for a lot of things. Like one time combat broke out in a huge museum.
I used lair actions so at the top of initiative so that:
bits of the museum would crumble and cause the landscape to change around them as every round started.
In another instance I used lair actions as a ship burned and let the twisted mass fall apart. Slowly and methodically my players escaped the ship as the mast fell apart and the holes got bigger in the hull.
Lair actions are really great for traps as well. Just in general. If something takes a few turns to decay or change just lair action it at the top of initiative.
In my first ever game as a DM, the final fight was above a stage play across the beams and such. I had two lair actions in that which meant random targets may get hit by swinging bags of sand or blinded by a flashing strobe light. Was fun stuff!
Personally I'm using a homebrew version of LR that deals damage to the creature when they use it. Not an insignificant amount either, 1/6 of their max health(. This doesn't solve all issues(like in your video, attempt a banishment and the dragon has enough health remaining to LR? still a feelsbadman). This is mainly just a patch to fix the "two health bars" issue I've found where LR effectively functions as a secondary health meter, seperate from HP. And it really feels bad when you've been chipping away at one of the health bars only to have the other one run out. Dragon fails on Polymorph after you, the fighter, spent ages getting its HP low? Wow, anticlimactic. You finally burn through the last LR only to have the dragon die to damage? Guess you wasted all those slots on nothing!
So, merging those health bars fixes a few issues, in that now: Doing damage contributes to failed saves, and vice versa, so you won't feel like your contributions were useless as much.
This isn't without issues(might need to increase boss HP a bit, don't go too much though or you'll have issues), but I feel like it helps get rid of the "Well I guess I can't do shit" feeling on a caster when a monster has LR. Works well enough in my games.
Also, I'd really love it if you made a video on how you'd fix legendary monsters and Legendary resistance, I really want to hear different people's solution to the issue!
I really like this idea because of what you explained with the LR's being like a secondary health bar.
To fix Legendary Resistances in D&D if you don't like the 3 auto-successes (which I agree there are problems with as they function like an HP system, which is never a good thing because HP systems kinda suck):
(Brainstorming ideas choose and combine as appropriate for your table)
Replace them with X# of rerolls (optionally variable to how legendary the creature is to keep your players on their toes, but 1-6 should be good, keeping in mind that it might not work so 3 rerolls is going to be less powerful than 3 LRs) basically giving them the luck feat.
Make them unable to roll under a certain number (10 seems a common one for D&D systems and thematically, not being able to roll low enough for lower level characters to ever get the creature to fail a save feeds into the big damn heroes aesthetic)
(Probably not a good one, but perhaps may inspire someone else to think of something better) have the use of a legendary resistance have some other non-hp consequence (such as not being able to use a lair action). This would have to be well telegraphed to properly bring into the game rather than being something you're just doing behind the screen/being super metagamey and be rather situational to find things that would be appropriate AND could throw off the design of the fight (which even if you're not super concerned about balance could be making the fight less interesting)
And, actually, try playing other systems. You'll go back to D&D with something useful, find a system that does what you want better, or both. Playing more than 1 system is something more people should do.
I like that idea, but one prior idea I had was to have LR be unlimited but cause the monster to gain a level of exhaustion. That way eating through LR does more than just get you closer to a successful spell, and feels more satisfying.
@@Jpteryx that is a _much_ better variation of my poorly developed 3rd idea! I knew there was something better in that general concept that I was missing.
I'm glad you figgured out a superior way of achieving that general goal.
For hippogriff add previous offspring acting guardians learning from the parents. Or an NPC having added traps to protect the nest as that’s where their mount came from.
Or the griffs also dive bombing with their own faeces adds a definite flavour to the battle. You imagine how it would feel to have a couple of pounds hitting you in the face.
Love this! I have never used lair actions for the party’s benefit. Once an outpost in the feywild would volley off arrows each round slowly weakening the monsters. This helped the party and they were able to defeat higher CR monsters
Thank you squarespace for sponsoring this video
Geezer here.... Great vid, thanks.
I go back to before D and D was ever advanced. Everybody needs a home, the funky effects are great. We never bothered to roll. But in most campaigns area about the lair gave us a clue. Saved our backsides more than once, served up many a red herring as well.
Game on.
Make a hippogriff an actual cross between a hippo and a griffin; basically a flying hippo with feathers.
Or a cross between a unicorn and a rhino than would be...a rhino...wait...
For Hippogriff lair actions what if the hatchlings act up and flap their wings radically, causing strong winds to push from the origin. Also the nest likely isn’t going to have a solid floor so there is a good chance a adventure would get their feet stuck in the nesting material.
(PS I’ve never played dnd so I’m just going off what was said for what layer actions mean, apologies if this makes no sense)
I like this idea might do it myself
Edit. I ended up doing it with gnolls every round I have him summon a hyena and every 3 rounds he inherently cast Tasha's hideous laughter instead... I couldn't come up with a third
Eagles hunt turtles by picking them up and dropping them to break their shells.
Have the hippogriff do that to the armored fighters/paladins, freaks them the fuck out.
Omg that's friggin hillarious
Ogres have lairs.
@Liam Johnson I have an idea. A legendary onion, with legendary actions and legendary resistance.
@@Adam-cq2yo Legendary enraged Donkey!
@@germangamer7377 action, you have heard all star and have to make a will save, succeed you get inspired, fail you take 1d6 physic damage
@@lunaticlurker7932 isn't music thunder damage?
Is it up to me to be *that* guy? You misspelled ogre.
Ionons have lairs too....
I think the coolest lair action I stumbled on was for one of the metallic dragons; copper, I think. As the party gets close to the lair they start to see footprints and the tracks always lead them away but to something objectively more important; like an oasis in a desert or shelter from an impending storm.
Almost all of my encounters use legendary actions and/or lair actions. Combat can become a drag after the first round or 2 if the fight isn't dynamic
One of the best DM tip videos I've seen on this channel. This idea meshes well with Matt Colville's video on "villain actions", which are essentially legendary actions for lower-level monsters. I look forward to using this in my campaign soon. Lair actions for a fell-touched owlbear, anyone?
I have made a bunch of lairs for random creatures over the years. Dire Wolf super pack lair was pretty fun. The Lair itself often being inside a cave surrounded by a snowy forest. I also had two region effects and three lair actions.
First was a 10 mile radius around the lair was completely devoid of all animal life beyond the smallest of bugs (and the dire wolves themselves), with an eerie silence and an untraceable faint smell of blood during the day and the occasional distant and untraceable howling of wolves at night causing a sense of impending doom in anyone who entered the region. This made resting difficult with all rests not working to remove and prevent exhaustion, but working like normal for all other magical and mechanical purposes. Meaning players will start getting points of exhaustion the longer they spend inside the region as if they were not taking long rests.
Second was random encounters with small "Scout" packs of roughly 4-6 Dire Wolves throughout a 10 mile radius around the lair. These "Scout" packs will at first try to kill anything that is not also a dire wolf, unless one of them die. If one of the "Scout" pack dire wolves die all of the others will try to run away and alert others. If the players let any member of the "Scout" pack leave, they will return within 1 hour with another "Scout" pack. With this continuing for some time.
The cave entrance to the lair was covered in bones of creatures so broken it is not possible to identify the remains unless through magical means. Inside the cave the ground is covered in broken bones, bone bits, and decaying fur, except for a narrow path that is roughly the width of a horse (Dire Wolves are roughly the size of a horse). The cave is at first a long shaft and along the walls of the cave are bone piles with 8-12 Dire Wolves hiding underneath, once the players get to the half way point all of these hiding Dire Wolves will jump out and ambush the players from all directions. Once the players get through the cave shaft they will enter a very large round chamber that is a dead end. In this chamber are piles of bones of thousands of creatures, 36 Dire Wolves (Or 4 Dire Wolf Swarms), and the Dire Wolf Alpha. A Dire Wolf Swarm is fun to up-level these guys for later level players. The Dire Wolf Alpha has the lair effects and has some beefed up stats.
First lair action is Call the Pack, the Alpha howls and summons 1d6 more Dire Wolves (Or a single Dire Wolf Swarm). Second is Bone Dust, the Alpha kicks up a bunch of bone dust into the air which limits vision (cutting any darklight/light ranges in half) and requiring the players to make con saves or be blinded for 1d4 rounds. Third being Pack Pounce, where (for as long as there are other Dire Wolves in the cave) the Alpha makes a distinct howl and all of the Dire Wolves in range try to tackle the nearest player to the ground doing 1d6 slashing damage each, but also requiring a strength/dex save or else be knocked prone. The best part of Dire Wolves is that even if the players kill the Alpha, that just means the next strongest Dire Wolf is now the Alpha. So the only way to get rid of the boss character of "Dire Wolf Alpha" is to kill every single Dire Wolf.
I love how he just casually lets us know he somehow has time to play League while also being Runesmith.
For the Hippogriff I'd base it on dropping/bucking PCs and causing hazards.
Probably make the "arena" where the players are fighting a thin spot where the Hippogriff's nest is and some thin lines of difficult terrain to represent the various cliff edges at the jagged peak the monster made its nest to avoid other creatures that would bother its sleep or harm its children. You could have it drop rocks to try and hit one player and, even if it misses, it causes a small rock slide that hits other nearby PCs below. That sort of thing. Another interesting idea could be it has a stash of shiny goods, like magic items, in its nest. Maybe it has unknowingly activate one or two to some disastrous effect.
Lair actions are also super helpful for keeping combat to move quicker. Does your crime boss have a bunch of henchmen? Instead of making them separate creatures or just a big mob, make them a lair action of the boss.
Lair of a Faerie dragon
Location:In trees with places for the dragon to sit
Treasure hoard:Magical gems that create illusions and silk
Illusion:If the creature reaches their treasure hoard they will use magic to make the colors of the forrest within 120 ft match it’s color creating camouflage that makes it basically invisible
Meet my friends:Every 4 turns 1d10 pixies will show up to help defend the dragon
Lair size:2 miles
For highly skilled soldiers, one of their Legendary Actions could be to make an attack using the table for Battle Masters. As a Lair Action, an elevated platoon of archers can fire a volley at the party.
If the hippogriff is high up on a cliff or among the peaks of a valley, have harsh winds be a act as a sort of weather event which occurs every few rounds. Perhaps there's thick and thorny bramble along the climb that could pose problems or incur skill checks.
A hippogryph lair action could be something like herds of prey animals stampeding in the parties direction, the birdhorse curbstomping ledges to either obstruct the parties movement or cause them to fall to their dice roll, or even just the hippogryph lifting a character in their talons and using certain terrain to exploit fall damage like many actual birds do. You can have the coolest armour in the world, but if you crit fail the wrong dice roll, and your character gets dropped from 50ft in the air onto jagged rocks; you're going to have a bad time.
Those are some good ideas! I had a mad alchemist's clockwork laboratory with a room full of large containers with Slaad tadpoles in them. Of course a fair amount had escaped and were hunting around the room like a pack of frog-like pirahna rats. The frantic ambush of a fairly large amount of anklebiters got pretty crazy, especially as I would have the large containers be stupidly breakable if nat 1s were rolled or if a player missed in the direction of several unbroken ones. To top it all off the floor was coated in a thin (no higher than a boot), yet gross liquid (normally inside the containers) that would damage players whenever it touched an injury and would get higher and higher the more containers were broken.
Of course my players acting as they do, decided that instead of treating the combat seriously, they were going to kick or throw slaad tadpoles at each other despite taking significant damage from doing so. It almost made me a bit nervous about the green slaad boss battle that they didn't rest before going into, but hey, it's not my fault they decided to push on ahead like they weren't still bleeding and covered in acid.
Using lairs for weaker monsters is an awesome idea. Reminds me of The Witcher. Using lots of them could give a way of giving players a story/combat section every one-shot very easily.
If you're already modding the hippogriff with legendary and/or lair actions, you can also go a few steps further. Give it some magical powers, more powerful attacks (one comment below mentioned that their hooked beaks can deal devastating damage), and maybe set the fight in unstable terrain. It could be one special hippogriff as the boss, with other hippogriffs effectively being scenery or hazards. Maybe one of the lair actions has the boss call in an extra hippogriff (or 1d4+1 or something), and each hippogriff flies around out of the party's reach dropping rocks they hold in their talons - or the bodies of prey. Ranged characters can kill them, but adding more creates a danger the party needs to keep looking out for
Kobold Lair actions:
The number of traps per 5x5 square can be multiplied by the result of a 1d4 roll
Kobolds can poison/disease 3 traps or 15 individual weapons
Fortunate Son begins playing from seemingly nowhere in particular the moment a medium sized or larger creature enters their lair
Phoenix RQ the leader gets an extra action if a gome is in the party maybe
@@andrewthegeek6522 as serious as your reply was I was making a joke aout the Kobolds being the DnD Vietcong
@@phoenixrq9139 Party members when the cave starts speaking Draconic: "Ah shit, here we go again."
Just did a one shit with a hag final boss. Her lair action was to pull a random one time use maguc item from the shelf and use it. They came in three flavours. Attacks, defensive or spawning
I like the way Brennan of Dimension 20 uses Lair actions, where he applie them to non-lair situations (see: the ship combat in season 2 of Fantasy High, or the sinking boat in Crown of Candy). He's using the lair action mechanics to just cover potent environmental effects.
You could also give collective lair actions when there are big gatherings of a specific creature in another video, like in a rakdos carnival on page 250 in the guildmasters guide to Ravnica!
The Hippogriff should always be in the mountains. The bit you explained about dropped corpses around, should be foreshadowing. The Hippogriff is in the same family as say Rocs or Griffins and the idea should be that they nest on jagged peaks full of loose terrain and rocks, but also snow and ice. The Lair actions of avalanches, rockslides, and loose boulders should stay. But likewise have it capable of grappling players and if they can't break away, it dropping them and letting gravity do the heavy lifting sounds like a thing. Parental Adrenaline can count too, but also give it wind abilities. It being able to cast Gust or Gust of Wind sounds like the way to go, maybe some ice and snow spells too or reflavored fog. These wouldn't be "spell" spells. But rather things that the Hippogriff can do with its wings to the terrain around it.
It has homefield advantage and so should be taking advantage of it.
I feel like a massive fount of inspiration for this could be White Wolf's *Beast The Primordial* in that game Beasts are player characters and each of them have these soulscapes that are basically lairs for their inner monster. Those lairs have keywords and each of those gives you an idea of what to expect from that lair. You could reflavor almost all of them to D&D monster ecosystems.
wodcodex.com/wiki/Lair_Traits
like a wing buffet that also sends a shower of deadly ice shards.
Oh I realize I can homebrew this into my heist setting as guards and such.
For a hippogriff, you could have some of the prey it kidnapped try and escape when you start distracting it, maybe make a strength save to avoid getting trampled and dragged?
Lair actions for lower CR works best imo in chaotic large groups. I did a Ravnica campaign where the party went to a couple Rakdos shows (giant murder circuses) and I had lair actions like random spouts of fire, magical bloodlust they needed to resist, and enemies randomly exploding (I had a separate table for what they exploded into from blood to smoke to confetti). You can get really crazy with lair actions if you make them harm the monsters too. Now you can throw like 30 goblins at your 1st level players because half of them will be taken out by the boulders rolling past!
Goblin lair actions is what came to my mind. First is a 1 time encounter with the Nilbog. Second advantage on stealth checks from a hide action to hide in prebuilt nooks and cracks in the room. Lastly a simple poison dart attack from a hidden trap.
That makes goblin layers more alive but also built around their ambush nature. Goblins would retreat here to the relative safety
I think its a homebrew sheet I came across, but its for an Ulfhedinn - basically a legendary Northern strain of werewolf that can no longer shapeshift back into a human form that Im making a campaign around. It has a regional arctic influence on weather and can increase the hostility of native wolves towards travelers. Sounds pretty cool to me.
I think this is actually a really cool idea for even simple monsters, but I'd say, specifically monsters, no Crab Lairs, unless it's a hyper intelligent crab, or some sort of wild magic crab (like a wild magic mage got turned into a crab) because it can kind of give players a geralt of rivia vibe when they go to hunt it down, especially if they don't know it's a hippogriff before-hand (example, the starter mission in the witcher 3, yes, I know that's a Griffon but it's still relevant)
My plan for legendary resistance is legendary resistance just adds +10 it means that on God rolls and aweful defense rolls still can mean a failure.
This doesn't help against "save for half damage" spells but still better than "nope"
I ran a CR 5 gnome bandit that had two mounted corssbows that he could fire (or reload) with a bonus action, and lots of things written in Arcane on the walls - 3 of these spots would heal him when touched.
Honestly, I think that if the DM uses a Legendary Resistance specifically to screw over players having a rough time with an encounter, there's a bigger problem than just the legendary monster and its lair.
So... If weird shit starts happening while a beholder sleeps.
You could make mistery quest along the lines of: a bunch of your player's weapons, at night, turn magical and have cool effects, they discover that the beholder got greatly injured by some adventurers, so he dreamed about a group of misfit hero-mercenaries were plotting to kill him... unconsciously making it true.
The weapons and gear might wither away afterwards.
I feel like you could give a Nobel lair actions like calling a few guards to help them or something like that
If he’s evil he might have installed one of those trap doors in front of the throne that drops people he doesn’t like into the dungeon. Guards could pull the tapestries (that in reality can weigh upwards of a ton) down as an area effect that knocks people to the ground and force them to crawl out from under them. The lighting would be provided by massive chandeliers of candles suspended by ropes. Guards would know where those ropes are anchored and could drop them for a 10’ circle attack with 1 point splash damage. The only limit is imagination.
@@andrewjohnson6716 your a bloody genius
Okay, here is my defense for both legendary actions and legendary resistances:
1. Legendary actions, like you mentioned, are absolutely *necessary* for a one-vs.-many boss battle against the party to even be a worthwile encounter. Without them, the monster would either need to one-hit K.O. most of the party on turn 1 (with a very overtuned breath weapon or the like) - or be completely trounced by 5-7 player characters all taking an action, bonus action an (potentially) reaction *each* (not counting buffs like Haste) while it gets only 1 of each.
2. Legendary resistances are also *necessary* for the same reasons. A party of 5-7 mid to high level adventurers ("high level" meaning lvl 11+ since most campaigns don't go past lvl 15) could simply spam their control effects over and over to prevent the monster from taking its legendary actions if it didn't have legendary resistances - this would lead us back to problem #1, meaning a monster would need to have massive one hit AoE abilities to even be a challenge for a larger party.
Tucker's Kobolds would definitely use Lair actions for half the traps in those running fights.
last time I was this early, AD&D was the hot new thing.
Azer: on IC20- A pool of heater water/ lava spills out from a crack in a elevated or lower platform in the lair spreading out in a 20' diameter causing 1d10 fire and it is now difficult terrain.
Hippogriff: IC20- A cluster of eggs in random spots around the room hatch... and feast on the food/PC's in the room, taking 1d8 piercing and is considered obscured. (Both would require a DC 14 of either con or dex to save for half. These are what immediately come to mind when thinking about low level creatures.
I once had my players adventure near the lair of a gold dragon and instead of fighting it, I had them come across the aftermath of a young dragon dying in combat. They found the corpse and it was riddled with arrows and I dealt like the lair effects created tension which was welcome in taking combats seat.
"Only legendary monster below CR 10"
Bol'bara, Fleecemane Lion, Felidar, Thessalhydra, Yestabrod, Thousand Teeth, Maw of Sekolah, Rezmir, Obzedat Ghost, Vampiric Jade Statue, Auril, and Lorthuun all say hi.
For real though, this is cool. I'm getting all these ideas now for regional effects and lair actions for evil mages and mad scientists and stuff. I was thinking of having some dryads in my campaign just show up with a bunch of awakened plants, but giving them regional effects and lair actions sounds way cooler.
(also yes I know a bunch of those monsters weren't out when this video was made and also a bunch of them are adventure NPCs but whatever; you can always tweak them to suit your campaign)
I dunno, I usually just made stuff up for monsters with what the book gave me or what I reworked monsters.
Like, I redid guard drakes to be either tamed beasts or wild pack predators.
Group I had without asking the villagers went down into this pit where just so happened the guard drakes were nesting. I reworked them to be somewhat like burrowing monsters.
The minotaur guy got his ass beat and lost a horn to one of them before splitting that one's head in half with a crit.
Their lair abilities just being depending on what color they were they could duck their head into the holes in the cave and do a rather weak breathe attack
Or they could attempt to move around in the cave system and do a lunge and pin.
Hippogriff lair could have strong breezes occasionally coming through. The bones of various prey could create trip hazards.
Hippogriff lair ideas:
Forrested mountainous region - Constant threat of rock slides. High elevation weather effects such as thunderstorms and snow. Thunderstorms increase the chance of rockslides and the terrain is difficult. At high elevation breathing becomes difficult so actions might be met with con saves to avoid penalties and/or passing out. Other threats may include local floura/fauna as well as possible climb checks based on the party's route to the nest. As the party gets closer to the nest the hippogriff may harass them by dropping animal carcasses on them (maybe have this interfere with skill checks such as athletics or climb depending on how the party is traversing the mountiain).
Encounter - The party is under constant threat of being thrown from the nest as the hippogriff combines attacks with forced movement such as grapple and bull rush attacks. Depending on the nature of the quest there could be other issues as well such as a mate, hungry chicks, inability to perform certain actions withought harming the eggs and losing the quest reward, the hippogriff is enlightened or has some elemental status (recommended for subjugation only quests). The encounter could be affected by mountainous weather conditions such as thunderstorms having a chance at shocking players, fog lowering visibility, snow creating a slippery surface, down or up-drafts that effect fall damage.
Can’t wait to play out a specific Kobold lair Encounter I have planned
Same on the more lairs ideas
I've made a simple on that was left by a Kobolt Necromancer that used it as a corpse holding machine where at initiative 20, a 1d6 is rolled and;
1- Nothing Happens
2- 1d4 Kobolt Zombies
3,4- Creatures 10 feet from the walls must make a DC 13 dex check, on a fail it's 2d4 fire Dmg from flying sparks. And half of a success.
4- Three Zombies closest to the dark power core on the ceiling are received at 1 HP
5- Nothing Happens
6- 1 Zombie Ogre
The machine stops when the boss of the room dies (Zombie Lizardfolk). Or the players remove the power core.
And afterwards the machines dark magical core can be claimed by a few checks.
Planning to run a campaign for my friend whenever i get the chance of we finish our current two.
Idea for random events for horse eagle, due to the amount of hunting these things have done larger bigger beasts may just interrupt the fight trying to take over the nest since their the only food around, maybe after the fight if their carrying food about it'll gain the attraction of lesser animals in swarms even as small as extremely starved rabbits and having a role determine what swarm comes at them during the night, maybe due to the constant new creation of their nests carved out of the stone from their claws certain bits of the mountainside might fall off within a certain role subtract 1d4 to the number of rounds or turns for thunder and lighting, force, damage may damage it more revealing tunnels or having party members strategically plan a collapse on something charging them / forgetting it's there and being jump scared as their caster gets buried under the rubble (Side note maybe toss in some weaker mobs in the tunnels that would attack both sides, maybe a spider that was planning on ambushing a hippogryph at night for free meals). Maybe they dug their nests into the side of a statue worshiping a nearly forgotten rain god who is honestly The Big Anger at these birds and in it's blind fury random strikes of lighting can go off around the battlefield. Also maybe have a group of dumb kobolds or goblins who thought they could tame a weak one just interrupt the fight and try to mount a weak one to try and kidnap it / tame it / ride away with it thinking the party of adventures weakened it up for him and he can sneak off with a powerful pet before it freaks out and rampages around the battlefield trying to shake off the goblin
Sorry for the seperation, sort of rant typed all of this as fast as I could
Something I don't understand is why black dragons live in poisonous swamps when they have acid immunity, wouldn't it be better if "the water and air is so polluted that it breaks down anything in contact" or "the BD's aura has corrupted the clouds so bad that acid falls from the sky".
Idk, a poisonous environment sounds more like what a green dragon should look up to (maybe it has a constant cloud of toxic spores idk)
"Fighting to the death using math" oh man that's a great quote about D&D
Simple yet awesome, one aspect of the regional effects that’s really nice as well is the foreshadowing of something to come.
Now, combine this video with Zeebashew's "making enemies more witchery" video, and you got a good game
Hippogriff (or other mindless beasts) actually could be used by BBEG as a guardian ( for a buried treasure for exemple) so its lair could reflect that by magic traps or alarm mechanisms.
I wonder what percentage of the comedic genius of these videos I miss by not being able to read the pop-up text fast enough and not wanting to pause/rewind the video.
Legendary resistance is so the monster doesnt just fail a check and die
"This is my last spell slot" suuuure it is...
Yea youre unlikely to use your last spell on a legendary resistance.
That's part of why Legendary Resistance only crops up in high CR monsters. At that point, it makes perfect sense for an enemy to be at least _temporarily_ able to call your OP bull, whatever it may be.
@@clickpause8732 yeah... could just imagine how unthreatening the fight becomes without it...
"You all come across a dragon"
"I cast hypnotic pattern so it stays still for 10 turns doing nothing"
Epic stuff that...
I remember seeing someone homebrew legendary resistances in a way that casting high-level spells like that still hurts, by just letting the monster negate the effect at the cost of a large chunk of HP.
@@celestialtree8602 or like... Could use it the way it is already
Is it weird that as soon as I heard that description of the area near the azer outpost I immediately thought “oh it looks like Minecraft near their outposts, because that’s what “oddly symmetrical tunnels, unnaturally directed lava flows, and mine carts” sounds like to me
I have the idea that underneath my Campaign's capitol lives an Otyugh. The elves have enchanted the sewers and disposal system to dump into its den, allowing it to gorge and devour the waste. What are some ideas for an Otyugh lair and lair actions? I have some ideas.... but I'm curious if anyone else has any to make this a memorable and challenging fight.
You might like Not So Legendary Actions, which is a small PDF that does all the work with regard to giving low-CR monsters Legendary Actions.
When it comes to legendary enemies -just have your dm homebrew one. Mine had us fighting a shade assassin at lvl 3 and it worked well. We didn't even have to kill it to defeat it - we just knocked it prone with a door slam to the face so it couldn't use it's legendary action to teleport.
One thing I've been wanting to do for my games is make a system where legendary creatures don't get a legendary resistance but have a decreased effect by anything that would or pretty much would outright stop them. Something like banishment would only remove the creature for a certain number of turns, a stun would instead only stagger the creature, etc. Essentially it's what Warcraft and WoW did for heroes / elites.
Wind tunnel lair action - The hippogriff beats its wings to cause a wind tunnel usually used to launch itself out, but can be used to blow adventurers into walls or out of lairs. (The Pokemon move whirlwind)
For the Hippogryph, why not go with random gusts of wind that might make movement difficult or even throw people off the edge of the nest? I mean, it would make sense for them to have their nest someplace with favorable winds for flying, and since they are high above the ground that could lead into some very nasty falls.
Have a random lair for 1 goblin. Just as a goof, have some goof weapons in there as loot as well. Something like a gold sword he found d that he thought was cool but turns out its brass. Or a pile of "wands" which are just actually sticks he stuck ornaments onto. If the players are more lighthearted let them adopt him as a companion and even integrate him into the town as a local merchant.
Hearing you talk about legendary resistances gave me war flashbacks to MMOs.
"So what you are tellin me is that none of my cool abilities, that set me aside as unique and valuable, work against any boss monsters and the only way to actually contribute to the fight is to make sure that I can either tank rlgud, heal rlgud, or minmax my dps for faze clan? Guess I'll just abandon all creativity and chug the gamerfuel to collect all the numbers for the rat race that my fun hobby has become."
I made a roper with a lair action of having piercers fall out of the ceiling on the players. Thematically relevant and cool as heck. Should do a roper with legendary actions next time :P
I came up with a few monster lair actions of my own, using this video as inspiration. The video I made includes blights, gargoyles, and ghasts/ghouls (and has a link back to this video). Thanks for the inspiration!
I always spice up any major encounter with unique actions that I think are appropriate, but I might just start doing this with lair actions too.