Behind the Screen: Insane things are fun…

2008 May 21
by Dante

In case you can’t tell from Stupid Ranger’s last post, we had some fun with Deathshriekers (from the Monster Manual III) last session. For those of you that don’t know, their primary mode of attack is a scream that persists for three rounds.

Woo, what do they do?

Each round requires a DC 26 Will save, or else you suffer the following effects: round 1 – deafness for 1d4 rounds. Round 2 – stunned for 1d3 rounds. The final round (and the most delightful) is the spell Insanity as if cast by an 18th level sorcerer. This and this alone is what forced most of the party against one another.

That’s not all… because of the extreme power of our party, we elected to ignore the bit in the statistic block that indicates that these creatures are solitary and we threw two of them at our group.

Let’s just say it was entertaining results. Entertaining for us!

The result

The party lived through it, but they expended a considerable amount of resources. Several characters were killed, later to be revived by the Staff of Life that one of our PC’s bought with their in-between-campaign moolah.

As we’ve previously mentioned, this convenient return to life may be considered as unbalanced, but the more charges they use off of that staff the quicker it is removed from service permanently. Besides, shouldn’t the stakes be higher at epic levels? I think that they should.

The fact that our characters are internalizing the encounters in the way that they are indicate that we have a good set of roleplayers. They actually feel conflicted when a spell forces them to do something that they otherwise might not do, and this is a very good problem to have as a DM.

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