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Top 10 D&D 5E Monsters Most Likely to Cause a TPK
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ส.ค. 2024
- This week we are ranking all D&D 5E monsters in order of the most likely to cause a total party kill and wipe out everyone at the table! Avoid these creatures if you're a DM who doesn't want to kill your players (or their characters). Some of the most dangerous D&D monsters are not what you'd expect!
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0:00 - INTRO
01:05 - RANKINGS
I remember facing off against a mindflayer that always got his psychic blast in a campaign not too long ago. Bear in mind, everyone in the party, which we lovingly dubbed the "Himbo Troupe", had a score under 10, so we were all at a disadvantage.
My barbarian fighter, someone that should have been the most susceptible, kept rolling and meeting the save and wailing on the mind flayer.
We played it off as him being too angry to be stupid
Love a good "Too angry to die" barbarian XD
I really enjoy the phrase "too angry to be stupid"!
😆
In 2'nd Ed, flayers were grossly over powered, and under rated. They had a 90% magic resistance just for being themselves, and couldn't be hit with non magic weapons. Even if the party was well equipped, two flayers blasting away could drop parties notably higher in level than the 7 hd the flayers have.
On the other hand, they are NOT immune to poison. I had a party once saved the blowgun that I had kobolds shooting at them in a much earlier adventure. There was a knockout poison, with an easy, low difficulty save to negate. Later in the adventure, they had randomly rolled a blowgun +2... You can see where this is going, I'm sure...
I built up this mysterious mastermind evil over multiple sessions. The PC's didn't know it was an illithid. However, they finally managed to track down where the strings were being pulled from, and invaded its lair. In the final showdown, the party rogue decides "Hey, I still have these kobold darts, I'll shoot him with one". My flayer rolled a natural 1 on his save from the poison, and fell unconscious.
I love DND stories 😃
What a game \o/
CR is a perfectly balanced system in 5e. 5e is a great system that requires no extra-work whatsoever from the DMs.
people keep complaining about broken homebrews, but never compare then to the strongest for each CR
*Has an ability that downs the entire party if they get unlucky*
Hmm yes this creature is suitable for a party of adventurers in that awkward state when they lack abilities, CR 4.
*Can turn invisible has massive Dex and 19 AC and the ability to insta-die a downed foe*
_Yes adventurers can handle this after their first level-up_
Are you being sarcastic?
@@kronos6711 Heavily Sarcasm in the original post.
I assume you were enjoying a lovely cup of delicious Yorkshire tea as you were typing that comment.
"Banshees can only use wail once per day"
Suddenly, 4 banshees
We had a similar encounter in Avernus. Me (cleric) and the bard were left and after each cry we had to heal someone to get them back up, so it wouldn't be a TPK. After the third it was just me and I had to cast mass healing word to get everyone up. (we were lucky that not all people with healing spells went down)
there is a room of three banshees in DotMM
There is a spell in 3.5/pathfinder called "wail of the banshee".
Level 9.
It does 10 damage per caster level. 40ft AOE.
There is a 4th level spell called Phantasmal killer.
Single target.
Roll will and fortitude save.
Fail the will but pass the fortitude, take 3d6.
Fail both will and fortitude....die. instantly.
Level 4 spell.
@@samhall5096 >Me when I'm wearing a helm of telepathy.
>Okay, but no you.
The really scary thing is Mindflayer often has intellect devourers as pets, and it is not uncommon to have to face both at the same time.
This, and the f*ckers live in Underdark, which in itself is not a very hospitable place to live, IMO.
Can confirm lol
Indeed, and it's typically how I work them in my games. Bad combo... for the party.
Yah mindflayers often have pets or other Frontline fighters with them that they have controlled.
Yeah, if I was a mind flayer, I'd keep these things around. They only do everything:
- find my food;
- stun my food;
- keep me informed of those pesky adventurers trying to sneak on me.
Intellect devourers are great.
Banshee with a willow wisp swarm following her could be both thematic and incredibly dirty
Always take Faerie Fire! One of the best low level spells in the game, it can turn combats around completely.
There's a dungeon in Skyrim that's essentially that. It's an absolute meatgrinder if it's your first time playing the game and you don't know what you're walking into.
The intellect devourer is a bit overwhelming, in cases where I want to deploy them without killing the party I make weaker versions of them. Instead of devouring the brain I make them latch into the creatures head, like the head crabs in half life.
Attacking them in this state will cause the character to take half damage for the intellect devourer, and they can be pulled out with a good STR check. It still makes them powerful. But more manageable at lower levels.
Although the sheer fear of seeing an unchanged intellect devourer is a feeling hard to achieve in DND
Makes a ton of sense. Lore-wise, this might be a juvenile state of these creatures.
Wait... "head crabs"? Where do these hell-spawned creatures live, so I can make sure never to go there?!?
@@hoi-polloi1863 Half-Life
@@liambellew1299 Thanks! I think I misread original comment as "real life" instead of "half life"... ;D
These guys were actually a lot worse in AD&D (2nd Edition). In second edition, they resisted almost all damage and were immune to non magical damage to an extreme. To the point that even if you hit them with a magical weapon, you only did damage equal to the magical damage bonus on the weapon, (IE, hit them with a +2 weapon, you do 2 damage total. No str bonus or damage roll).
Almost had a TPK to a shadow dragon. 2/3 lvl 10 players turned into shadows. Final character with 8 HP remaining survived only because of the assistance of his gargantuan duck companion.
gargantuan... duck?
@@ultimazilla9814 yeah! Armond the Giant Duck. Someone you want in your corner.
@@JeremiahLiend 🤩
@@JeremiahLiend Fuck. Yeah.
Who would win?
A giant shadow dragon that turns people into shadows and wipes out entire groups of legendary adventurers trying to take it down
or
A duck
Some members of my party used to game with another DM... and have been conditioned to react to an Intellect Devourer with absolute panic. We're talking up-cast Fireballs cast by two different casters on the same Intellect Devourer while screaming "NONONONONONONONONO!", ignoring whoever else might be in the AOE.
Cast Meteor Swarm on yourself and T-Pose.
if you can inflict this kind of ptsd on your players you are DMing correctly!
@@thomasbrovont4114 I'd argue you aren't. I mean to each their own but this just seems like someone DMing from the perspective of trying to kill the party instead of actually providing a good game experience. To me the DM/Party relationship should never be adversarial.
@@lagg1e legend!
Ha-HA!!
Well trained.
The only TPK I've enacted was at the end of a one-shot. The (3 third-level) characters desecrated a goblin altar to discover it was actually a sarcophagus. Unable to resist, they opened it up and tried to take the sword that was in the grip of a dessicated corpse, but the sword was holding a stake in place, so ... out popped a vampire. She made very short work of those three.
Oh _Nooooooo_ haha. Sometimes its best to walk away while you still can.
Would be cool to use something like that as an intro to the BBEG of a campaign.
@@aliteralmoth2243 oh I hope so a one shop becoming the start of your next major canpign BUT it happens after the part is established ie a little over 5
_Vampires_ live in sarcophagi?
@@darthkek1953 every culture throughout history had a vampire legend. And a sarcophagus is a casket really.......
4 level 1 players. First combat encounter of the campaign. Figured I was taking it easy, seeing as my players were all seasoned. 4 wolves and 1 slightly bigger wolf. Some bad rolls from the party and a couple rounds of standard trip-gang up wolf strat and everyone was prone, near dead, or dying. Nobody had been able to kill any wolves.
I felt so bad. 🤣
I almost had this happen to a party (3) of level 2 characters with only 3 wolves. I even set it up so that they could ambush the wolves right from the beginning, being hidden in bushes, but even after hiding they still decided to charge in there. It was pretty bloody. Luckily in that campaign I have a mechanic where you can come back to life ONCE but at the cost of a deceased loved one's soul being destroyed permanently. So yeah, they lost their souls over some wolves.
@@beardalaxy " I have a mechanic where you can come back to life ONCE but at the cost of a deceased loved one's soul being destroyed permanently."
Evil campaign? To me, that would require an immediate alignment shift from any player who claimed they were good. I would assume even neutral characters would normally not use this option.
@@TheMemo659 it's not something the characters decide, it's something that the soul of their loved one decides. they sacrifice themselves so that the character can continue to live. there is still a punishment for death, but the player gets to keep playing their character at least for the time being.
Always assume the PCs will roll like garbage lol
@@beardalaxy If I was playing a good or neutral character in your campaign, I would refuse the rez if at ALL possible, or roll play the character as having debilitating guilt and depression from that day on.
Like, how would that not be worse than death for anyone with a conscious?
If you are just going for video game mode, a powerful patron that can rez if needed is a lot more story-line friendly.
I’ve become infamous for what my players refer to as “the will o wisp/banshee trap”
Dragon of icespire peak dragon slayers tomb moment
One I would also say is a little too strong is the Zombie Beholder. Unlike the normal beholder the zombie variant is a lower CR at the cost of having weaker stats and only 4 eye stalks. While this sounds balanced one of the stalks it keeps is the death ray which now instead of having a 1/10 chance of happening now has a 1/4 chance meaning it dishes out way too much damage for the level of the party it would be up against.
I would edit what stalks the zombie beholder has access to in order to include a different ray to the death ray. Make the fight a bit fairer.
Seen it happen just last week lmao
Funny how it always happen to the newest players
The way I did mine in my homebrew was I rolled a d4 to decide which eyestalk to use. Surprisingly enough, the death ray never rolled and my party managed to take it down pretty quickly with some heavy hitting crits.
If you think that’s bad, then my guy you’ve never heard of a Gas Spore which is DnD’s way of saying “Screw you for not having a Paladin or cleric”
Yea I once deployed that monstrosity against my players and half the party died, the other half had single digit HP at the end
Over the years, I've killed a rather disproportionate number of characters with kobolds. This includes one adventure where the same small group TPK'd the party twice.
Would like to hear some storys, intelligent kobolds or goblins using tactics are something to be feared
@@deathstreak1156 The incident I referred to in the initial comment was the opening encounter from "The Sword of the Dales" published adventure. I played the encounter exactly as presented but with the kobolds using intelligent tactics and luck not being kind to the PCs, I wiped them out in 2 rounds. No problem - the players just changed the names on their character sheets and started over; assuming that the new party was friends and family of the missing group retracing their steps to find out what happened to them. For the second attempt, there were fewer kobolds because I didn't replace those killed in the first encounter. Same result - the kobolds destroyed the party even though the PCs now outnumbered them. My take on it was that the author didn't expect me to play the kobolds intelligently.
Since then, I've always written all my own stuff, rarely using published adventures, but I've always liked using packs of kobolds or goblins against mid or even high level parties. In the first campaign I ever wrote, I was giving my goblins class levels (long before WOTC did it in 3rd-edition). Most recently, I've used packs of kobold mercenaries in a campaign where the main adversaries are demons (13 succubi - concubines of an imprisoned balor which the PCs have to prevent the succubi from releasing).
@@mpeterll Oh no, not succubi!! D:
@@MasterZebulin Why not? They are awesome opponents, appropriate for a wide range of PC levels. Best of all, role-playing their intelligence and alignment accurately means using any dirty trick I can think of and being as vindictive as possible. The first time I ran that campaign, one of the players created a paladin character (and actually role-played him properly), so the relationship between them became personal. Instead of killing the paladin when she had the chance, the succubus made his life a misery; killing those he was sworn to protect; destroying his reputation; framing him for murders then posing as a rich relative of one of the victims in order to have a huge bounty placed on his head; eventually causing his fall from grace by tricking him into killing an innocent women by mistake.
@@mpeterll Getting raped and/or drained by an evil, naked demon lady isn't my idea of a pleasant time. 😬
I've made an Intellect Devourer as a player character before. It's honestly a really fun concept to only keep your mental stats while basically being a body- and class-snatching purse dog.
also really really op as you just make your class a mental stat based one then go and find the most beafy dude and become them allowing ya to dump all ya physical stats hard
So in short, damage to stats is what most easily can destroy a party one by one, or at the very least destroy single characters in a very short time.
Pretty much! Ability damage is pretty rare, and for good reason it seems.
@@DungeonDad Makes me miss the racial variant vampires from AD&D 2e Ravenloft. Each was not only a vampire, but had drain attacks that did permanent ability damage. They were super brutal to use, but definitely added to the horror aspect of the setting. I'd also like to note that in AD&D 2e, goblins often would keep black puddings trapped inside of clay jars and would hurl them at enemies. Good times.
@@DungeonDad "Sits with custom campaign full of monsters that do ability damage by default" Granted players had a chance to prevent this, and failed, so now they gota do it the hard way.
Reminds me of the time I put together an ability damage handbook for one of those 3.5 charop boards. Good times.
To really put this into perspective: a pack of shades can kill Tarrasque. Because they are incorporeal and the big T isn't immune to statdrain.
So yeah, statdrain is really dangerous stuff.
My party actually got super scared when I had a mind flayer take root under a town, with an Ooblex under it's control, bringing people down for it to feed on before it starts an actual colony. Luckily there was a local paranoid wizard who tossed some info the player's way that let them figure out what they were originally tracking, (The Ooblex). They freaked when they saw the mindflayer, but luckily jumped it in it's home because it was like only a Week since the flayer set up shop.
They were hunting down this ooze, saw the purple tentacles digging out dirt and freaked *The fuck* Out, But they survived without any casualties, due to their caution.
Rn my part just entered a great library That is run by friendly mind flayers, My level 7 ranger barbarian multi class really hopes they stay that way
I like that the Marut can just spirit you away to Sigil, if you somehow manage to survive that 1v1 and not anger the Dabu's or the Lady of Pain you're going to have a heck of a time trying to find your way back to your party. Marut the rudest monster in DnD XD
They're also usually sent to collect on broken contracts. So they're the embodiment of "If you want to play dirty, I'm getting downright *nasty.*"
@@maromania7 Is it any contract, or do they have to be magical or divine contracts of some kind?
Otherwise you could justify a Marut knocking on the bedroom door of little Jimmy for breaking a pinky promise.
@@Nudhulit has to be a contract made in the hall of concordence, basically big courthouse in mechanicus
Are you Gorgleborgle the barbarian?
"Yes?"
You've been served
"Wait wha-"
I was once in a monster game where we had an intellect devourer with a mimic sword. I think his name was Bob, because it was that kind of game.
God, i would love to do a monster game for the lol
⦁ 1:05 black pudding
⦁ 3:00 banshee
⦁ 4:10 dracolich template
⦁ 5:24 marut
⦁ 8:09 will o' wisp
⦁ 9:55 mind flayer
⦁ 12:35 shadow dragon template
⦁ 14:14 shadow
⦁ 16:24 solar
⦁ 19:19 intellect devourer
I want someone to add an "Ancient Gold Shadow Dracolich" to do a light bit of tomfoolery on the party.
We call Black Puddings “Duck Puddings” now. The polymorph spells can ~easily~ turn them into cute farm animals. Then, just let them swim in the nearby pond.
Once the spell wears off, they will forever long for their previous pond-paddling, peaceful existence. This should even satisfy the cruelest members of your party.
Wabbit Pudding!
They are immune to polymorph though, like all oozes.
@@Ishlacorrin Could you cite where that is written? I've looked in the Monster Manual and can't find it listed in their immunities or anywhere else for that matter.
@@Ishlacorrin Haven’t read that anywhere. Citation? Edition?
Having run into the intellect devourers before, I agree with them being number 1, My party was on a quest to recover a scroll from a small dungeon, the NPC that gave our party the quest sent his scribe with us. The dungeon itself was a walkthrough for our party level, we retrieved the scroll, found some nice treasure and were about to head home when three of these dam things showed up, the scribe froze in fear and pissed himself, our Barbarian charged them followed by our Ranger, my PC being a cleric of knowledge and very well-read (INT 17), made a knowledge check, nailed a natural 20, the DM let me see the DMG page on this creature, My PC shouted we needed to leave now, it was at that time we saw our Barbarian had killed one of the creatures and was now just standing there like he was in a trance. our ranger and thief just made their saving throws, our party minus the Barbarian wounded a second one of these things before grabbing the scribe and running for the hills, our Barbarian got one attack on our ranger before we got away.
I think ghosts also hit incredibly hard for their CR. Possession, yes, and so if you have no good way to drive them out you have to kill your friend. With the ability to pass through walls, and the being a tortured undead who cares only to torment the living, I ran an encounter where:
Ghosts come through the floor boards. Drop Horrifying Visage and to try and possess the party.
Party knocks out possessed PC.
Ghosts immediately pile on to kill the downed ally. The Ghost in the body of a PC held by Hold Person can even leave the body as a bonus action, attack the downed PC as action too.
Not caring about AoO, slip back through the floor boards to retreat to recharge possession.
Rinse and repeat. Ghosts have all the time in the world. This is how I used 4 CR 4 creatures to kill a level 15 PC.
Yeah the ghost was definitely one of the runners up. They are just brutal
Their aging effect can also be real nasty for the shorter lived races
@@SDawnfire Humans beware, you're in for a scare
Incorporeal undead in general are extremely nasty if your party lacks the tools to deal with them. In 3.5, I think it was the Allip that was the most infamous.
@@darklordmathias9405 no goblins orcs dragonborn and aarakocra beware they are short lived races, goblins dont normally live past the age of 12 orcs are rare to see live past 25 aarakocra live to be 30 and dragonborn live to be 45
I definitely TPK'd my party of three fourth-level adventurers with a solo banshee encounter-thanks DoIP! All three failed their con saves, and even though I then had the banshee leave their unconscious bodies alone, two of the three failed their death saves and boom, one traumatized party member to serve as a through-line for the new PCs.
Though I agree flayers punch above their weight class, in all due fairness to it, I don’t see a single mind flayer as a solo encounter, they’re just too smart to act like a grunt, so it would be simply weighing into a larger encounter which often might tend to balance the CR and are often themed and the party would tend to be more prepared for that type of fight… sometimes
Yeah, they’re definitely way to smart to knowingly put themselves in danger
They will have some Intellect Devourers with them 😆
okay yeah but also consider...if youre encountering one as part of a themed encounter there is a fairly high chance of there also being one or more intellect devourers around.
Also, an elder brain
* Clarota flashbacks intensify *
Fought some shadows the other week in a foundry campaign, when something odd happened, because of variant encumbrance the strength drain ended up reducing my speed by 10. What an unexpected turn of events that can make a scary monster even scarier
We got TPK’ed at the end of a 3.5 one-shot by a Hellcat. They’re lion-shaped Devils that are invisible except in total darkness.
I, the pre-generated wizard, had been given Fairy Fire to combat this. However, the Hellcat ambushed our party, used its Pounce ability to charge me & get 3 attacks the first round. I went down like a sack of bricks, and everyone else soon followed.
DM idea: a mutated, "Super-intellect-devourer" that is very large, sapient, telepathic, and can sense any being within 2000 feet who have an intelligence stat of 15 or above. Meaning it physically cannot perceive the presence of anything with an intelligence stat lower than 15.
Could make for a funny encounter where the party's wizard or whathaveyou is singled out by the dungeon's big bad from the start, so you finally get to the end of the goblin infested dungeon and find this giant brain monster invading the wizard's mind and saying something like, "Fool! You thought you could defeat me all alone? Why, with such impressive intelligence could you not figure out this empty dungeon was such an obvious trap?"
Meanwhile the rest of the 6-Int-and-below party members casually walk up to the thing and stab it to death as it confusedly philosophizes its own existence and sudden inexplicable fatigue.
That's just an elder brain with legs.
I'm.
Gonna.
Shamelessly steal this.
@@drakegrandx5914 all yours
@@majoraswrath1417I've never even played D&D, let alone DM'd but I am also gonna steal this.
Look at the "intellect glutton" or "intellect predator" from 4th edition
I've got a funny TPK story: It was a group of friends (there were only 3 of us) but all just started it was our first game. The DM kept rolling really well, and us players kept having terrible rolls, somehow we couldn't even kill a pack of goblins, they killed us... we restarted the combat as it was the first time and we wanted to keep going... we died again. So the goblins didn't finish us off, we just lost all our gear.
Thanks for watching everyone! See ya'll in the next one!
The only pseudo TPK I've ran as a DM was in fact with a Solar. They were a lawful over good sort of authoritarian, and had made an alliance with the campaign's Lawful Evil BBEG. Of course, they hadn't actually showed up to kill the party. They were extending an offering to the party's Aasimar to join them.
The players decided to take a risk and knowingly hit a little above their paygrade so that they wouldn't have to deal with the Solar later. Ended up with two characters dead by arrows and two escaping with Transport via Plants while the Aasimar held him off (the Solar ended up knocking him out and leaving him there).
I accidentally TPKed my players by pitting them against a Beholder. A great tip when DMing is that fudging rolls in tough times is completely valid as your players won't know and appreciate the challenge, but not the consequences. I did not fudge a single roll and accidentally death lazered three of the players. They were well equipped to deal with it, it just got really great lazer rolls and they got bad saves. Probably gonna think twice before I throw another one their way, because playing a Beholder requires the DM to play smart (which immediately serves as a challenge for the players because you are now actively targeting them). Great video!
There are some monsters that you can throw against PCs earlier than the CR would suggest. This makes them feel strong. And there are some monsters that really should wait until their CR is 100% appropriate. Beholders are monsters that really punish slightly lower level PCs that think they are ready for a tougher challenge.
Ouch :) (for your players)
The beholder is one of the few encounters that I've fudged rolled with.
A Beholder is like an Intellect Devourer, a Mind Flayer or an Ancient Red Wyrm. On paper it doesn't seem all that scary at the appropriate CR level. In practice it can still mop the floor with the party even at the appropriate CR level.
was waiting for someone to acknowledge the value in occasionally fudging a roll to prevent a game ruining result. DnD isn't a combat simulation, it's a social activity. Too many DMs I've played under acted like TPKing was their ideal result, when it ought to be running a game that everyone is enjoying... I've gotten so sick of Dnd sessions grinding to an awkward, tense, quiet halt and groups breaking up because our asshole of a DM treated his homebrew campaign as an exercise in competitive encounter building and wouldn't stoop to fudging a roll to keep the party from wiping. seriously, build tension, drop players here and there if you feel like the group takes it well, but don't sit there and let the entire party die just because "the dice have spoken". It's not fun for anyone but the supergenius who came up with the encounter. You're not an evil mastermind. You're telling a story, and more importantly, you're hosting an activity with friends.
I've always imagined Solars as Dragonball Z characters. They are super fast and can teleport, they have hard hitting meele and insta kill long range. They even look like straight out of Dragonball or Jojo in the artwork.
Have you heard of a comic called Kill Six Billion Demons? It has a very weird take on angels that really roll with that concept.
In older editions, the Intellect Devourer was also scary. It was a higher-level monster. That only took damage from +3 (different scale of magic) and only 1 hp at a time. Holy swords did normal damage with no modifiers and almost magic works on them. Plus it still has psychic powers.
I had a very unfortunate TPK in the first game I ever DM'd. It all began when a goblin rolled crit on one of the party members dealing 16 damage. He only had 12 hitpoints max and only had 4 left. He died instantly.
In an effort to resurrect their friend, the party travelled to a section of the map designed for much later on where I had to roll for random encounters. I rolled for the type and number of enemies. They had to fight 5 hobgoblins. There were only 3 of them left carrying the corpse of their dead tortle friend. They fought valiantly but hobgoblins are quite expert at dispatching level 1 party members.
It was actually relatively close and if they had got lucky they could have lived. What's worse is I rolled to see if they would've had to face any enemies on their last day of travel just for fun...
They would have to have fought an Owlbear.
Just because a party encounters a creature doesn't automatically mean its a fight. As the dm you have the power to throw them a bone. The owlbear can be a "lion with a barb in its paw" situation, the hobgoblins could be any number of things: traveling merchants, wounded soldiers returning from a fight, a courier and two guards, one hobgoblin could be leading two captured hobgoblins from another tribe back to camp, a troupe of minstrels (monsters of the multiverse recontextualizes hobgoblins for all of these to fit).
@@nnurk Kinda with you on this one. If the party is level one, then maybe they shouldn't throw 5 hobgoblins at them as a combat encounter in the first place.
And that my friend, is how the Gods tell players to change their characters
People really need to get in the habit of rolling temporary characters for this sort of thing. Lore-wise, resurrection is rarely going to be an option for early-game player deaths.
At level 1, my daughter shot an arrow at a manticore. Nearly gave a dirt nap to the party. The manticore decided to put my mage to sleep first.
In my first campaign, which is still running to this day, our DM threw some Intellect Devourers at us but we made it out with no casualties. Now I know just how lucky we were that night
Here's a few more for your list, Dad: Swarm of Rot Grubs (VGtM, CR 1/2), Literally anything with Possession, both Rak Tulkhesh and Sul Khatesh (E:RftLW, both CR 28), Flameskulls and Quicklings (VGtM, CR 1).
Quicklings are deadly, they fight above their cr level. 3 attacks, +8 to hit, +6 damage, ac 16 and majority of times characters will be at disadvantage to hit that ac, speed of 120.
Sul Khatesh is unreasonably strong. Who's idea was it to give a monster an antimagic field it could cast through jesus
yep remember rot grubs from first d&d game they absolutely horrible
@@NoNo-tl9gb to be fair, Sul Khatesh being fully free is, lore-wise, roughly similar to Tiamat being fully free and powered up. Sul Khatesh was one who dominated dragons for millennia and swatted even ancient dragons from the sky when they rebelled. She’s probably the one who taught the god of magic how to cast spells…it makes sense that she’s nearly a god.
@@jlaw131985 Ya know, yeah, I'd believe and trust in all of that. I'd even vouch for her power... If she wasn't the most toxic cr 28 in the game lmfao.
I guarantee you most parties will have more trouble with her than any other diety or statblock, INCLUDING Tiamat (No, that isn't her avatar, she's not weakened, the book itself calls her a real deity). That's bonkers.
Half of the monsters in this list I have used or I am planning to use in my games and every time I did it was a near death situation. No TPKs yet though mostly because my players are smart most of the time. They must be like "DM why are you like this?!" lmao
Hey, what doesn't kill them only makes them stronger amirite?
So the barbarian is on watch and the intellect devourer stealths up on them.
Now you have a fully rested barbarian to contend with
The opposite of a TPK happened to me once and it was hilarious. I can't remember what the exact combo of abilities was because it was so long ago, but I basically had an djinn lieutenant of the bad guys in a huge campaign with multiple evil armies allied under Tiamat with an army of evil dragons and a crazy powerful party about ten player characters. The djinn went into a shadow form to escape and regroup, but the cleric had a spell that could trap and destroy non-corporeal evil energy and used it to literally one-shot the djinn, completely annihilating him and thus cancelling every single questline related to that particular bad guy. I always have XP values ready in advance just in case and the party got a big boost from that.
Reminds me of the time that I beat a mist-form vampire flying home by casting Skywrite on it to turn it into a comma in a very small font. Probably doesn't fit entirely within the rules as written, but that was a satisfying moment.
The fact that you often find "Intellect Devourers" and "Mind Flayers" together is bad ass.
Me, a foolish newbie DM, wanting to run an undead centric campaign. Party is into it. Party doesn't have a cleric yet. Nearly wiped a level 5 party against two shadows. Oops.
Amazing list, thank you for the great video
Thanks for watching! I had a nearly identical situation when I first started DMing 5E as well. At first glance they don't seem THAT bad but as anyone whose had a run in will happily tell you, shadows are scary as heck.
Local strong wizard who was making fireworks for a coronation to be held the next month was assumed to be aiding the local goblin raiders by my party because the goblins had been using firecrackers to scare the local peasants and steal stuff in the confusion. The group decided to sneak attack his tower by rushing in while another character dropped a black powder grenade down the chimney to distract the wizard.... Character rolled a 1, BUT ha ha ha, halfling luck.. he proceeded to roll another 1. Pfff.... Grenade exploded setting off the alchemical mixes in the tower causing the tower to explode.. all dead.
WTH LOL
That's some juicy world building for your next campaign lol
Treat it like ground zero and have a sigil there describing the malicious terrorist attack by 4 supposed goblin spies whose alchemy mixture surely couldn't have melted the steel bricks.
What were they rolling for?
I remember the first time I ran into a black pudding.
Low-int Half-Orc pally. I decided to give him irrational ooze fears afterwards because of how badly he got rolled
Hahahahah my player did that, but agains giant rats. It was a loong campaign and at lv 25 the epic sorcerer could call meteor swarm... he choosed to run scared as hell from a mere giant rat on the street.
The intellect devourer has certainly earned its spot. It can take out any level character with above average intelligence in one round. A pack of them could wreck a party.
Only ever had two TPK that has happen in my campaigns: one from Hoarde of the Dragon Queen and second one in a campaign in a similar setting. First time, the players did not heed my warnings about the dragon and got TPK. The second time I gave one of the players this ridiculous knife that acted as a normal knife except required a d20 roll every use. If a 20 was rolled, then whatever it hit was vanished from existence and if a 1 was rolled then the user was vanished from existence. I only ever told the player that using this knife could promise great reward or ultimate peril. They used this knife for around 5 to 6 sessions, never rolling either a 20 or a 1. It was during a boss battle that the player finally rolled a 1 and was vanished (leaving only the fainting memory of them to the other players). The other players in an attempt to make things right, attempted to use the knife against the boss monster trying to get that 20 roll, hoping it would reverse the effects. Two of the other players rolled a 1 with the knife, leaving the last player alone and they ended up getting killed by the boss monster.
Why would you give your party such an item, thats like giving a baby a gun to play with 😂
@@CuffsJNW if you can't give a nuke to a baby are you dming to your full potential?
@@christophermurphy8117 Just a nuke?
Also for the solars, often enough they’re good aligned and though they don’t give two damns about mortal forms, they can definitely easily raise the dead and could potentially be seeing death exactly the same as a stunning attack or a time out
(Pardon the double post but watching during my short breaks at work)
Just imagine being wiped out and then raised again, just to hear: "Have you learned your lesson?"
That makes me imagine a Solar who is known for messing with people by killing them then immediately raising them AS A PRANK! He just shoots them then raises them so they don’t even stay dead for a few seconds.
I remember something like this happening when I was at university. We spent a whole year building up our characters and went into the final battle with some excitement. We cast all our protective spells and such, and entered the lair of Tiamat, the dragon. She immediately breathed fire on the whole party. Almost all of us made our saves, but in those days that meant we took only HALF the dragon's hit points in damage... which was enough to kill all but two members of the party, who were both left with less than 10 hit points. It was rather anticlimactic.
As a DM/GM, I always made sure my villains were challenging, but didn't have the capacity to instantly and unavoidably wipe out everyone. If there's no defense, there's no game.
Soooo in a nutshell, encounter any of these beasties...
"...Haaaand me a character sheet."
I was totally expecting a swarm of rot grubs to be on this list.
They are BRUTAL, and I came SO CLOSE to putting them on the list. Had I gone to 11 monsters they'd be here. My thought process was that their speed is SO low, and the only real way you would actually get hit by them is if they were kind of set as a trap. I suppose mean DM could always have them traveling on the back of a skeleton or something since they're a swarm creature.
But yeah, they are certainly a worth addition to a list like this!
@@DungeonDad That is fair, Only way I have seen them used is in a trap. Put them in a jar that is high up and have it fall on the party if they stumble on the trip wire.
Loved the Top 10 video format btw and would love to see more of these.
@@DungeonDad think the trick would be have sacks with or chests with treasure in have them be specific about how the get the treasure out have nothing but normal stuff for several levels... maybe just a poison trap or two... than when they think they are fine than do sack with coins and rot grub swarm in it....be real evil and make them mutant rot grubs with flying....
What the heck? Are you me am I you? Doppelgänger doppelgänger!
One monster I didn't expect to nearly wipe my party was a Quickling. I had made it the messenger of a Hag the party was hunting down and despite a +8 stealth the Wizard caught eyes on it and shot off a Fire Bolt, missing. The Quickling, after the surprise, was at the top of the turn order and proceeded to drop the wizard immediately with its 3 dagger attacks. From there the party engaged and with it's advantage against ALL attack rolls it just started mopping up. A lucky crit from the Blood Hunter saved everyone's bacon just in the nick of time.
intellect devourer, died several times to them in one campaign(underwater cave exploration that was muddy so couldn't see them until you were on top of them) on top of that the dm used the matt mercer spell casting so couldn't cast spells because of underwater. and glad you mentioned shadows our dm had us fight recently 6 or so shadows with simulacrum the simulacrum used psychic scream and only one of the players succeeded on the save... the dm had to deus exmachina us out of the situation.
"Matt Mercer"? Um read your spells. If there is no verbal component you can cast it. Matt only stops spells if they cannot use a component. If a spell needs specific hand signs, verbal commands and specific ingredients and you don't have 1, you cannot use that spell. I've watched from the first episode til now and he let Liam use fireball under water cause he had water breathing.
@@incitingariot9925 most spells are verbal at least for clerics did see there are a few that are not for other classes still not many
Only TPK I was ever in was a Githyanki one shot where they had to fight Star Spawn in the Far Realm. We all had to make saves Vs Confusion at the start of each round.
Their was a sorta TPK where two of the players in Dragon Heist showed up drunk and started a prison riot. One player got away, the two players died, and the rest were executed later. But I’d swollowed the Stone of Galor as my goblin wizard so the Casalanters never got and my Order of The Gauntlet contact picked it up from my cadava. My guy died a total of 3 times in that game and was resurrected twice. When theirs no more room in Gahenna, Wirt shall walk Toril once more!
This is exactly what i was looking for, too many just talk about the biggest damage but knowing the pitfall monsters like this can really help when picking monsters for encounters.
I appreciate how you went for more unique and creative picks rather than just going for the easy ones like beholders and dragons and various undead
Imagine deciding to actively create a relatively generic enemy and then deciding it should share the same role as an instant death pit in a platformer game except that pit also leads to hell after you die... That's the vibes I'm getting
I had a party of bugbears hobgoblins and goblins, we were having a bit of a lark with the idea of a goblin Troup dissolving and having to resort to adventuring instead of crime. Excellent dynamic and fun social interworkings to play with. I had worked in the forge of fury moduel to take over part of the game for a bit to work on some backstory driven stuff and act as a base of operations for a bit. Everything was fine, orcs were no issue with some sneaky poisoning of meals and a fun bit of illusion magic tomfoolery from the hobgoblin wizard... then the ghost. Ghosts have a fun ability that has a "DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or be frightened for 1 minute. If the save fails by 5 or more, the target also ages 1d4 x 10 years" normally this isn't an issue, a quick trip to a cleric and an easy fix... but for a creature like a goblin or bug bear with an average lifespan of 50-60 years? That's 2 players instantly dead, one player anemic and a total party kill. I tried to see if they wanted to roll back the deaths but the party all took it in stride and laughed it off swapping to a party of dwarves peeved at a group of goblins stealing all the glory.
*Last session I threw a Bodak at my party* of 4 LvL5 players as the final boss of a '5 room dungeon'. _(the bodak got 2 ghoul minions per round and statues randomly sprayed acid in certain areas)_ .
3 of my 4 players went down during that fight, and 2 of those downed players were at the verge of death with 2 failed death saving throws (huray aura of annihilation!).
The warlock in the party did 6 damage with his eldritch blast right before the bodak would get it's turn and slaughter the party and guess what. THE BODAK HAD 6HP LEFT!
This was by far the most emotional, hyped-up, tactical and epic session we played so far. Everyone felt both humbled yet like a hero at the same time.
Great list! I'd like to see your Top 10 from other editions as well :)
There's a band of bugbears and goblins, some of whom are controlled by Intellect Devourers, in one of the early levels of Dungeon of the Mad Mage. My character was the only survivor of that encounter, and that's only because the DM had allowed me to play the ridiculously OP UA Mystic. Not only did I have to kill the bugbears, and the goblins, and the intellect devourers, I also had to take out the rest of my party when they got turned into meat puppets. I count it as a TPK because even though I won, that character retired immediately after
This really makes me want to get my old group back together to run a demo battle of, say, 2 Intellect Devourers VS the level 6 party.
The fighter has 5 int and I think the Paladin has like 9 or 10
I'd like to give an honorable mention to the Alkilith. It's bascially supposed to be a door and kind of a mcguffin creature that a DM might think doesn't deserve it's CR of 11 but it has one very serious trait. 3 attacks at 4d6+4 acid dmg. This means that if even one of the three attacks crits it can eviscerate a caster in one turn from full to zero! It also has magic resistance as a demon. So it is pretty much hand crafted to kill squishy mages. My druid got crit and lost an arm to massive damage. Almost died in the process. Good times!
Welp, thank the algorithm.
First, just wanna say you're absolutely right about Shadows; I played a low level cleric in 3rd edition, evil, necromancer, a friend ran a one on one campaign for us one weekend, came across a group of shadows and managed to bring one under my control. Barely survived but it was worth it. In 3rd edition the shadows raised from the strength drain were under the control of the shadow who killed them, which was the shadow I had brought under my control. Farming XP became a breeze when you have a small army of shadows attacking from inside the ground. I burned so much XP and gold making wondrous items for me and my skeletons that pulled my wagon. I never gained another level after level three and ended up being cocky, taking on a white dragon, and I just got obliterated by a breath weapon then a full-round attack the next round. I burned a church full of commoners alive I tricked into hiding in the church by telling them an undead army was coming (not a lie, the army was just my army) and the church being holy ground was the safest place to hide, then turned their delicious experience into magic items.
Anecdote aside, however, the real point of my comment:
This video gave me an idea for a campaign that will result in very strong characters: a party of intellect devourers. Start the campaign off where the party are intellect devourers that have assumed control of a tribe of goblins, and while they're chilling at their cave-lair with their tribe of goblin raiders a party of heroes comes in and starts slaying their minions. The players then command and organize the goblins to resist the adventurers but, of course, the tribe of goblins doesn't stand a chance. Making their "last stand" in their defended and trapped vault (give the party some lair actions or something, just to make the encounter fun for them) the players wear the adventurers down and capture them. Make sure the adventurers focus down one of the players to cause them to eject from the goblin they're riding, giving you an RP reason to have the "heroes" flip shit, freak out, and stop behaving tactically (it's the campaign intro after-all) so the party eventually wins.
The players then each choose a new body to jump into, given that the tribe of goblins has been wiped out, and then start the campaign proper. Have it focused around a fairly high-magic city with lots of NPCs of varying power level, plenty of warded/consecrated/otherwise magically defended areas where they can't enter without some clever play, and the goal, of course, is to have the party eventually take over the kingdom's leadership and usher in an era of oligarchical decadence and tyranny. Perhaps the players want to establish a hatchery to infuse the city guard with intellect devourers loyal to them, maybe they target the local monastery and infiltrate the clergy, possibly infiltrate and subvert the thieves' guild or mercantile class.
Just thinking of all the ways a player could take advantage of them being an intellect devourer of above average stats (let them use point buy to stat out their intellect devourer because why not, who cares) hopping into carefully chosen targets (maybe you built your intellect devourer to prefer spellcasters with high mentals but are weak outside of bodies, or you set your devourer's stats so they prefer melee brutes so their clever and perceptive to outsmart their favored prey) until they achieve whatever goal it is they want to achieve.
The great thing is, they're intellect devourers, so they don't gain XP, there's no leveling up, and the politically powerful NPCs are all weak as hell (the noble is pathetic stat-wise, but also the heir to the Throne of the Four Winds, Master of the Golden Sea, and Holy Emperor of the Dalrathian Empire or whatever not-a-stat power and authority you give them). Yeah, there are powerful NPCs, too, but they are personally powerful, so the players have to choose between what kinds of power they want, how to use that power, and then they get to deal with the consequences of their actions which would probably be horrifically destabilizing, possibly leading to revolt... and when you're in the noble NPC's body, maybe a bunch of commoners is actually kind of a threat. Maybe you done fucked up and escape becomes your all-consuming purpose, and that's kind of hard to accomplish when even your own guard has turned on you because you had one of their family members flayed publicly for stealing food to survive after you squeezed all the wealth out of the economy because you let greed cloud your reason and the short term gains blinded you to the long term potential. Who knows, depends on the players, I suppose.
Yes, I know this comment makes me sound like a psychopathic monster between burning a village of people and flaying the starving poor and whatnot. Sometimes it's fun to go dark and change the pace from saving the kingdom/world/multiverse and just be a power-hungry, utterly selfish bastard. I think it helps to make better villains in future campaigns when you have experience with how a villain might actually rise to its position of dominance. To experience the inebriations of unbounded ambition and the ease with which we slip into a mindset which views sentient life as pawns for our own benefit, to see the sociopathic perspective, and embrace it. I think it's easy to make villains who are righteously wrong, motivated by some good twisted by a trauma, seized with delusion that they can fix reality, but it's a lot harder to write a believable sociopath when you don't regularly put yourself into the mindset of a petty, power-hungry, selfish, amoral deviant. Someone who rather than make a save right before killing the NPC talking shit in some elder scroll game then loading the save file after like a fantasy you play out and never intend to actually act on IRL, this person makes a mental note of the person who slighted their ego, maybe follows them for a little while, finds out their routine, sees where they live, waits for the guards to change shift and the neighbors to be asleep and then sneaks into their house and smothers them in their own bed with their own pillow right after waking them up just to make sure they see the face of the person who is killing them over nothing more than a passing comment. Now put that monstrous personality into a creature that can take over sentient creatures bodies, consuming their memories and lives, and unleash them in an urban sandbox.
Thanks for the great video, sorry for the novella.
The party I was in accidental went into a dragon layer at level 2. Also another party I was in had to fight 2 black dragons in a row at level 8. Some how both parties survived the encounters.
One of the first games I played in used shadows pretty early in the campaign. (It was 3.5E but the ability damage was similar iirc?) We were low level, moving through a narrow stone corridor in the dark, trying to sneak. Three of those things whisper out of the walls, and (being inexperienced players as well as low level PCs) we had no idea what we were in for. Started trying to hit them. Then the first character took strength damage and we all had the moment of "...oh shit. Oh this is BAD."
They dropped 2 PCs and took a bite out of everyone's strength scores before they finally died, and we all developed a Very Reasonable fear of dark corridors.
The fact I still remember a lot of the battle like 15+ years later tells you how effectively they can be used to make a memorable encounter.
Also, yeah that challenge rating is busted.
Fun thought I just had but technically you could abuse the black puddings ability to split to kill it faster. Say we have a level 5 or so party and two black puddings, a fighter could cut them both with a great sword making four at half health, action surge to cut two of the four and make a total of six, two at 50% and four at 25%, then the fighter just needs to tank the wizard/sorcerer/light cleric/ fiend warlock fire ball
These are monsters that teach the virtue of “run away to fight another day”
Managed a TPK with a hydra once. Now hydra alone aren’t exactly threatening for their CR but the group decided to not bother with purchasing any alchemical fire to throw at the beast after removing a head or two, and the party setup made no users of fire magic AT ALL. It was also being used as a harder encounter as they were level 6 vs it’s CR8, and was technically avoidable as it was a wanted bounty quest. They knew ahead of time that they would be fighting a hydra and that bringing fire would be recommended, but player pigheadedness and faith in their characters to be able to brute force something can be legendary. Suffice to say, when the party creates a 9 headed hydra by the time they were TPKed they learned a little bit about how a party might need some tools to shore up their weaknesses.
Death is a good teacher in dnd
Now I want to make a character I'll call "The Intellect Devoured": a character who was the poor sap who fell victim to an intellect devourer's brain eating, and now is host to it. So long as it can control the body indefinitely, it, could be an interesting experience.
Shadows. It was an arena combat scenario I was running. A character hid in an area of heavy obscurement to ambush the next wave, the next wave was shadows spawning right where he was. Dead next round after 4 shadows hit him.
An honorary mention should be the catalyptus, it is a cr5 with a lot of bells and whistles. A cloud of stink that can force the poison condition, an attack that can stun on a hit, and the finishing touch is their death stare. All that rolled up into dc15 for all those abilities, if you fail the death stare by five or more it just does Max damage 64. If that damage reduces you to zero you straight die. A barbarian with 16 Constitution will only have on average 55 hit points at fifth level.
I home brewed a gargantuan beast, and had it kill several npcs. Then the players saw this thing kill another one. The party was only level 5. I sent it at them to keep them running, and then they decided to go and fight it. This was a party of five with a min maxed paladin. Two of them went to fight it. They died. Easily. Then the rest of the party tried fighting it. Another one died. Great.
I'll never understand when a party doesn't understand the DM is signaling to them that this is a 'run-away' encounter. I'm a generous DM, but one of my rare TPKs was the Strahd haunted house where the party missed the 'run away' cues and tried to kill a Shambling Mound at 2nd level. Like I said, I'm a generous DM, but if you're gonna suicide yourself, I'm not going to stop you.
Yeah, Shadow Dragon was my favorite. Back when I played AD&D, they also had shadow travel and their breath weapon was not only a HP drain but a level drain of half of the current level with a successful resistance roll. With failed resistance roll you loose 3/4 of your current level. That meant your abilities drop and most of the spellcasters spells just vanish from memory. with three breath attacks, a ridiculous level 64 character is reduced to level 8 when lucky. Without luck he is reduced to level 1. Don't know if in new D&D that changed. couldn't figure from your explanations :)
I don't play D&D for nearly 30 years now. But I still use monsters from AD&D when I lead other RPGs :)
3:58 that’s a pure meme material face right there
like she just walked in on a Bard and another creature doing the “deed” and now she can’t unsee it
I'm glad to see the Intellect Devourer on the list. I love this little bugger. I had a player, who always kept his distance from the rest of party by at least 10 feet and to the extent of not entering a room till the rest of the part had entered and the room described. Despite my gentle nudges, the gnome wizard always made sure the fighters took the brunt of whatever was lurking in the next room first, leaving himself "safe" in the previous room, far enough to the rear to avoid traps, but this also left him out of position to support the fighters as he should. I tried sneaky goblin attacks, but it didn't change the behavior.
At this point, the gloves were off and I unsheathed the Intellect Devourer. With little effort and a whole lot of surprise, the gnome was finished. I didn't reveal the effects till, he was reduced to 0 hp and tried to roll death saves, which I promptly explained that he couldn't and described the devourer crawling from his cranial cavity to search for a new host. Dead! The gnome was dead, it was no more, kaput, ceased to be. It may have been a cruel wake up call, but the player finally took the hint.
Night Hags in a coven. A lone Night Hag is a nuisance, a Night Hag in a coven with other hag types can be shut down by killing the other hags, but a trio of Night Hags, with the full coven spellcasting, can easily escape any encounter with the party and then rotate watch over each character, one by one keeping them from ever resting. If they go for clerics and wizards first, the ones who are likely to have Protection from Good and Evil, they can keep those casters from preparing it if they didn't already have it. If the party can't muster any defense, the party dies slowly and pathetically. Even if they CAN keep the hags from doing permanent damage, then until the DM gets bored of implementing Hag Tax on the party's resources, the party is still unlikely to be able to actively retaliate and the Coven will be the biggest problem the party is facing, hamstringing their ability to actually adventure.
I don't see the point of ever putting my players in this scenario, seems very unfun for the players and basically impossible to counteract without meta gaming
neat theorycrafting, but like someone else said, why would you ever do it if the players can't respond to it? Just to punish them for picking you as a DM?
@@ditch_magnet two whole WotC published adventures do this. Rime of the Frostmaiden hides a whole coven of Night Hags behind a portal such that the party will be pretty much face-to-face with the trio with little to no warning, and Curse of Strahd has a Night Hag coven encounterable as early as level 3, though Curse of Strahd does at least have the decency to warn the players of thr danger
Wow! you really picked some good ones. The entire list felt properly placed and for all the right reasons. Very nice!
I love using those low CR TPKillers against high level parties because they do still scare them. They probably wont kill the party but they might get close to taking out on of the players and scare the rest
need a tag team tpk....willow wisp and troll....was one of my fav for shits and giggles
Great list!
I put 2 shadows in a room with an opened Eversmoking Bottle. The only person with good AC was waiting for the rogue and another player to search the room and call an all clear. The rogue got hit, -4 str down to like 5, the other player got hit, -3 str down to 9. In the first 2 rounds, I managed to get the rogue to 1hp and downed before the party could even get any hits on the shadows. This is when I learned just how horribly overpowered shadows are for their CR. The party managed to pull off a win, but just barely
Illithids & intellect devourers are on my "Oh hell no!" list for good reason.
In a past campaign one of my characters commissioned a magic ring teleports him back to the last tavern he stayed at due to illithids. Another part member had another ring that mine would lock onto for returning to the party.
Interesting that your #5 killer is the Mind Flayer and #1 is the Intellect Devourer - both very deadly critters fully deserving to be on the list. Now consider 'Waterdeep: Dragon Heist', In the Introduction we read, 'Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure designed for characters starting at 1st level.' In Chapter 1, it is noted at the conclusion that '...the characters advance from 1st to 2nd level when they return to Volo after having explored the Xanathar Guild hideout.' So they are FIRST LEVEL when, in the Xanathar Guild Hideout, they run into good 'ol #5, a Mind Flayer AND #1, an Intellect Devourer (and a magic-using half-orc, but... seriously). Given that the Mind Flayer can nearly ignore the group, but this is the makings of a TPK fer sher; and comes close nearly every time I run the campaign.
In the mad mage dungeon there several monsters that actually have intellect devourer already in their heads just a bad place to be to kill them out pops devourer and roll instantly to eat nearest pcs head which is probably a fighter type who drop int on his stats and is now going to pay for it
@@wyrdword1246 Right? The ecology of Undermountain is so weird and Waterdeep would not be long for this world with some of the stuff it has stored in its basement. I've run a couple campaigns there now based on the Aboleths (particularly horrific if fully considered and wildly dangerous if played well) deciding to try to take over the city. These have been consistently spectacular.
Were rats are also pretty deadly against low level groups
I got to sick a Solar on ONE of my players, not the whole party, ONE of them. He had gotten to the location early and was bored and wanted to fight some things. Mind you this PC had gone off the deep end due to a man eating deer he tamed and then pushed off mount Olympus (different story different time) . He, realizing there was nothing overly powerful in the forest decided to burn it down!
The Lorax, which I used the Solar stat block for was not happy and wiped the floor with the PC.
He was revived by the other PCs, and then in the battle which was why they were there to start he tried to betray the party and got one shot by the Bardarían
Honestly, even the humble bugbear is super deadly. It’s a CR 1 that does an average of 11 damage on a hit. That’ll down most level 1 characters. And on the off chance the bugbear manages to get surprise, it gets 7 more average damage. A non-raging barbarian with a 20 Con couldn’t take one of those hits and keep standing.
With some bad luck on the players’ parts, one bugbear could be a nightmare.
Yeah, the bugbear is a real sleeper. No matter how many times my players encounter them, they forget the possible damage output and go wide-eyed when one does say 17 damage in one hit, taking out a melee or nearly insta-killing a clothie.
Always love a good ol fashion ranking
You gotta give the people what they want
@@DungeonDad this is the first time I've felt like my vote (patreon) effected real change in the world (rip my vote for ndp every election)
@@Fromaginator Yo, next time they got it for sure though
I got instakilled by a succubus early during the first campaign I ever played, the dm thought a cr 4 creature would be fine for a group of 4 level 4 characters, drain kissed my hp enough to knock me out of bear form (moon druid) and killed me outright reducing my max hp to 0 in one turn, needless to say the dm didn't expect to roll that well or for me to fail the save...
That case is just pure fate, assuming otherwise that is probably the one time the cr system works properly lol, in theory a cr 4 monster should be a fair challenge to 4 level 4 pcs
This might sound hokey, but I had a party struggle *hugely* against a group of about 15 horse archers. Their bows were based on a Mongol design whose range was 200-300 *meters* while the go-to Fireball and Lightning Bolt spells reach out to 100-150 *feet* only. The archers would pelt the party with arrows for several rounds until the heroes started getting close, then would trot away to extend the range. Rinse and repeat. It got ... ugly. The players only survived by having the wizard go invisible and the rest of the party running away. When the archers gave chase to the rest of the party, they strayed into fireball range. Ouch!
Regarding the willow wisp, we went up against a bunch of them with some fairly high level characters for the encounter. Our (evil) party was traveling through swamplands while we were out capturing monsters to chain up in our dungeons when our large cart got stuck in a sinkhole and we needed to pull it out to progress. Progress was slow so our VERY Large and VERY Violent orc barbarian got irritated and handed his greatsword off to one of the skinnier party members with instructions to guard it with his goddamned life or else, so that he could help pull and speed things along.
Random encounter happens during this and we have to fight a pack of wisps that descend upon us. A surprise at first but we quickly developed some tricks to find and take them down with relative ease in exchange for a bunch of hitpoints. Encounter seems to be over, the cart gets pulled out and our orc goes to retrieve his sword from the party member only to be told that in the confusion he dropped it in the muck and doesn't know where it is. WHAM, he gets hit in the face by a great big orc fist and falls unconscious, and the barbarian leaves him there and goes to search around for the sword. A few minutes later he finds it and we go to haul the unconscious guy out of the muck and get moving again, except, he's dead, and the wizard can't find any sign of a soul in him...
Whoops.
I'm in a campaign rn where the leylines to other realms are closed, so gods (non-dnd-lore ones) are a commonplace. Most are nice, but also if any of them die (even said nice ones!), they pull a shadow and turn into a monster. a very scary has nearly tpk'ed us monster.
The worst monster i've ever faced playing D&D is my own 20D; not being able to roll 14+ in more than 10 rolls, or the countless times i've rolled a 1 on my 19 dex rogue while climbing a wall...
15:32
"If you're strength stat reaches 0, you die"
My 16yr old rogue with a 6 in strength: *sweating bullets*
I killed four level five players with three goblins, a rug of smothering and prep time.
These Goblins were absolutely galaxy-brained, by the way. Ma'ag, Krag and Thack by name; they took over an old abandoned root cellar and proceeded to wreak havoc (mild annoyance, really) on the nearby villages. They stole the occasional weapon, but mostly materials and food. And glue. Lots and lots of glue. Asinine amounts of glue. In the main hall that made up the cellar, they bisected it horizontally with thick wooden poles every foot; you would either have to squeeze under or balance on top, AND they covered them in glue. If you squeezed, there was a crossbow trap for the first person through (it also crit, coincidentally). That alone would have been bad enough, had they not also used a chest full of rocks to weigh down a Rug of Smothering in the next room. They also covered the CHEST in glue. A player touched it, and immediately assumed mimic; in their flailing they freed the rug. They were then ambushed by the goblins that had hidden in crates (that I described but they never searched).
Goblins with cover, a rug and prep time.
The worst idea to invade DnD is the concept that combat is the only way to solve an encounter, and the only way to gain abstracted experience awards.
That's literally what the game was about in the earlier editions my guy
It didn't "invade D&D", the game was about that
I think Beholders should be on this list, having an anti magic cone at all times with all those crazy rays can easily wipe a party.
Thats... have you fought a beholder?
Did your dm like slam a fourloko before throwing it at you?
@@keighne7650 Been playing D&D since the mid 90's...yeah bud, definitely fought one before. not sure what you're trying to imply here but if you don't think beholders are bad then I guess so.
@@xilliaz they really arent because they cant use their eye beams while their main eye is open
I remember a time when my Level 3 party were almost all killed by a single Gelatinous Cube and traps they ran into desperately trying to escape it.
Fun times. Except for the Warlock playing; they were completely dissolved in like, 2-3 rounds.
This reminds me of a group I had called the Monster Squad. Basically an Isekai based on some college kids who play a pirated version of a VR game, creating characters who are - you guessed it - monsters. Naturally they arrive as their characters. The Beholder's name was Bob (Robert). His black cat with white paws, Mittens, became a Displacer Beast. Robert was majoring in Theatrical Arts. His favorite eye cast a beam of light that was great for keeping him from being its favorite chew toy.
It's kinda weird for me, because all but 1 person in my current D&D campaign has high Int, because they all needed it for something and they're all casters. Mind Flayers are much less dangerous when that happens.