We're getting to the last few sessions of a 2 year campaign (beginning with dragonspear castle playtest mod). The setpiece will involve a tarrasque. I have plans but as Iserith has pointed out, the community here is great for ideas and workshopping. Party is an evocation wizard, a monk, ranger/rogue, barbarian, and cleric. Will be multiple encounters. First is for tarrasque to show players how impossible he is. Second is for players to find ways around its defenses. Third is for them to impliment what they've learned/use the new gear they've acquired.
Any ideas for making a tarrasque encounter more awesome, particularly as it relates to those classes, would be appreciated. I have loose pland but more ideas are always better and these boards have some of the most creative people I know. SO please, let it all hang out. Or even if its a one sentence thought. I will read and consider all comments and steal the best stuff and integrate it into what I already have. Needless to say, the tarrasque will be in an urban environment where smoke, dust, collapsing building and flying debris and a constant. Innocent civilians will be fleeing in all directions and fires will be burning and children will be screaming for their mothers, etc etc.
mbeacom wrote:
Synjin wrote:
Not because the monsters too weak/vulnerable to ranged attacks, but just because a FLYING one would be cooler.
CCS wrote:
The Monk will want to get Way of the Open Hand's L17 save-or-die power. He also needs everybody else to burn up all of Big T's auto-saves, then cast Most Bane-ed on it to mess up its future Save rolls.
In my (limited) experience with Barbs, melee is their big thing. He needs to locate an open space (the market square?) and lure Big T into it.
The Cleric can take a high-end divination spell (Commune?) to handle your Step 2.
So, as it turned out, the Monk pretty much had his way with the tarrasque. Monk was invisible the whole time (although now thinking about it, maybe Empty Body ends if he attacks?), attempting to stun the tarrasque over and over to wear down its legendary save power and subject it to quivering palm. Tarrasque had two choices, be stunned, or risk quiverying palm instadeath. Tarrasque was able to hurt the party but only once I started playing the tarrasque as smarter than he was. Monk is pretty OP in a boss scenario where instead of other baddies, I was planning on having the environment be the distraction. Also, the players took no interest in saviing civilians or the city from destruction, which I had not anticipated. The wizard was not particularly effective, the Barbarian was pretty good and the ranger/rogue ended up in the tarrasques stomach. The cleric mostly attempted to stay out of harms way but still ended up making death saves. By the end, 3 of the 6 were making death saves. But no one died. I was a little lenient on a couple of things. Had I run it "straight", there would have been one death for sure (the rogue/ranger) and a good chance of another (wizard or cleric). Monk felt super broken but I have to go back and listen to the audio because I may have allowed the monk to do things the rules didn't due to unfamiliarity with exactly how the monk extra attack and flurry of blows worked. The player running the monk had recently experienced a PC death and rolled up a monk at very high level so I never had a chance to learn the Monk through play, only getting to run for that class at the very end game. That being the case, the monk felt super broken OP.
Damn, didn't realize you were playing this so soon or else I might've thrown some suggestions in prior to your game.
Consensus of chatter is that Monks ARE the go-to option to deal with solo BBEGs. Now, suppose Big T had some spawn / minions / cultists around it to "watch its back" or increase the mayhem, and give the Monk other important things to do.
A Monk solo'ed The Tarrasque (with a little help from his friends)? I think my AL Monk/Rogue is going to limit his multiclassing so Quivering Palm is his character-L20 capstone power... 