the (actual) strongest monster in D&D

a long debate many dm's have with themselves is how can i challenge my 15th level players who destroy every monster in their path which is a very important question the obvious answer is uh tarask wow look at him he's got over 600 health immunity to everything and that is the biggest challenge rating i've ever seen in this book but a rogue with a magical weapon and sneak attack and a paladin with a divine smite that harnesses the power of the sun reduces this guy to no more than a big chunky piece of hit points a bite that does 36 damage wow a 20th level barbarian whose raging can take like 10 of those and be fine another obvious answer is to take strong thing and make like 10 of them that's not what we're trying to do today what we're trying to do today is to find one monster because action economy everybody knows that action economy is good screw action economy i know you're all probably wondering at this point hey jacob did you just run a game and there was a tarasque and uh they killed the taras really easily no not this time actually i didn't i've just stopped running tarasks like two years ago because they always die and they're not even really that strong and they're just really annoying and they just have like a bajillion hitpoints so there's not really that fun all the time i'm just saying and you know what an ancient black dragon could kick a tarrasque's reflective therapist into next week not only are tarasks unable to fly but they have no ranged attacks a black dragon could easily circle above a tarasque and just blast them with potent could blast them with potent nasty acid spray and the trask would just be like no but a black dragon could get knocked under the ground with a successful casting of earthbind and thus the paladin brings the power of the sun into his face this is a lot but over the countless hours that i've been dming and the 15 minutes that i've been writing this script i think that i found the strongest monster that could best any party before we talk about that though time for sponsor so maybe after your party's done fighting all those monsters and killing a whole tarasque they go to relax at a tavern chill out have a good time when they discover that the tavern itself is a dungeon filled with encounters monsters npcs war tavern lore and card games why go out and explore dungeons when we have roonsmith complicated they just actually have just been informed by elder mancy and logan himself that it's called trail seeker not runesmith gwent check out the seekers guide to twisted taverns this book has over 17 taverns that each have like 20 pages of content maybe a little more and it's just chocked full of stuff that you could throw into your dnd games you could pre-order the book right now in the link down below okay so big giant monster with a bunch of hit points is not always the best way to go the whole thing that the party can do really well is uh damage damn if it has a lot of hit points it's not like it's not like a challenge it's just like let's see how quickly those hit points can hit zero every monster in the monster manual has an ability or special thing that can typically be countered by a character's ability maybe except for like abolith goo abolith goo is weird oh and you know um just a heads up what i'm trying to explain right now is not uh the tutorial on how to kill your players as fast as possible because the answer to that is two liches who each have wall of force greater invisibility steal wind strike dispel magic counterspell and power word kill now what's way more fun is challenging your players give them something that they can't just steamroll from all that power that they've been building up throughout the entire campaign you want your big bad to feel strong powerful smart and to best your players but also you don't want to undermine the character's progression it's a slippery slope the problem is that high-level characters have a lot of abilities that kind of just let them do things like low-level characters it's like well maybe you can summon a fire elemental who knows he might just die or you could probably teleport but you might end up at the bottom of the ocean meanwhile 15th level character is like i talk to god and he tells me that the bad guy's weakness is his left pinky toe so i will cast 400 lightning bolts at his pinky toe there's not a lot of risk in high level d d because every character either has like a million attacks a ton of health a backup can trip a lot of spells or a plus 10 in every skill which is why like first a tenth level is like a plus d and d but that's a different video what you want to do is have a creature that can exploit the weaknesses of the party so that what they normally rely on can't be relied on anymore and they have to make different decisions with their characters but i may be wrong i may have found something that could work seriously i could be wrong this game is weird wacky goofy and wild and this could just break everything or you probably will just just hello sir but the most success that i've had is with the monster known as titivalus i can already hear my friends screaming at me titty violence is an archdevil that was released in mordenkainen's tome of foes i ran a campaign a little while ago it was called sunder and all of the archdevils were the big bad guys after my party steamrolled bail destroyed gary on disintegrated moloch i was getting worried for my queen zariel archduke of avernus love of my life second love of my life so i tried to go really hard with tativilus who was like the smart crafty 40 chess strategic archdevil of the bunch and it worked [Music] because i'm pretty sure the teleport is further than 60 feet so every tourney just gets out of my range uh how much i can do i don't know what to do i have to see you can do that with my connection with my she's my passive do i know and i think it's not really to divulus that made this encounter super strong it's more of the abilities that he had that you could really apply to any monster or the rules i was using that you could apply to any monster or just make your own monster you don't just have to use tativilus in every single one of your games to challenge your high level party but you could follow the basics and make something similar firstly to tivolis has one beautiful spell greater invisibility greater invisibility lets you cast invisibility and only lasts for a minute but you won't become uninvisible from casting a spell or attacking and the rules of 5v specify is really what i sound like right now um the rules of fifth edition actually the rules of iv specified that an invisible creature doesn't have advantage on stealth roles they're invisible making them an unseen attacker unseen attackers have advantage and creatures that are attacking an unseen attacker have disadvantage as if they were blinded so unless somebody has seen invisibility or true sight you're good to go secondly to devilis can teleport as his action but he can also teleport as a legendary action giving him tons of maneuverability so any time he's getting ganged up to tivoli disappears at the end of somebody's turn or reappears back in on his turn and uses his legendary action to either make an attack or he could attack his actions and teleport as a legendary action it's and he's invisible we're just getting started thirdly to tivolis can fly so he could be above the party and they would never know that he was there unless they heard the swift flapping of his wings fourth he has this little ability called ventriloquism basically if he's standing here he can throw his voice over here to make it sound like he's here so while he's invisible and he's teleporting all over the place he can throw his voice to make people think he's over here sending your party running in constant different directions these four things combined create one of the most frustrating and challenging encounters for higher level d d characters he appears in and out of nowhere he's completely invisible and impossible to track what this forces your party to do is to try to think logically they can use the room to their advantage they can think about using maybe aoe spells that may not necessarily hit him but try to reveal his location they can't just see the guy and go him that guy right there as soon as you take away what the party is supposed to be fighting and remove a target but create a target at the same time you force them to think in different ways ways only true anger can create basically what i'm trying to say is because a lot of character abilities like not all of them but most character abilities are focused on having a target taking away the target makes it really challenging now you may be thinking uh jacob this isn't going to be all that challenging because a lot of my players have aoe spells like necrotic death wave and a fireball and that's just going to give away his location and they could just do that constantly no matter what wrong he's immune to fire damage and i gave him counter spell because i really just hate my players for some reason one level spell is greater restoration [Applause] nice look you can only do it once per turn it's just a reaction and it's just one spell the one spell that will like reveal his plan or show where he is like see invisibility is a good one to try to counter spell or maybe an aoe spell that's a good one to try to counter spell eventually he's gonna run out so could to divorce take on a tarasque i don't know maybe probably not but he could certainly take on a group of powerful adventurers maybe he won't tpk them or kill them but that's not the point he could certainly challenge a lot of them or you know you could just let your players dominate your dnd game i mean really they've earned it they've made it all the way through through the dungeons encounters monsters slogging through all this game and maybe at that point they've earned the power of the sun and you don't need to make an annoying ass devil who's going to exploit every single weakness and make them feel like punks unless you took zugetmoy and you gave her more hit points and greater restoration and

Channel: XP to Level 3

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Keywords: dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, how to, tutorial, funny, monk, fighter, 5e, player, book, dm, dungeon master, roll, ranger, rogue, paladin, cleric, barbarian, bard, wizard, sorcerer, warlock, artificer, mystic, skits, idea, character, stats, build, new, tips, gm

Id: KxL_LrgbC_4

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021