We're talking about the stat block, so combat analysis is the only thing that matters.
It's not really the stat block if you're only using it in combat. If you only use the abilities in combat, then it's as if Vecna doesn't have them 90% of the time.
If you read there entire post, you would see why your retort is a non-response.
Did you see the other post I made right above that one? (It's pretty long.) That one is not a "non-response."
In the end, I guess my counterargument to your point has boiled down to this: No, Vecna cannot emulate every spell just through other effects. He can do many, but some can only target the caster, and others, like wish, are incredibly hard to and expensive to replecate. Also "infinite spells" could help him do lots of extra things in and out of combat.
My argument is: why give Vecna the extra abilities if you don't want to use them? There are many things Vecna could do outside of combat to wreck the party with those spells, and with his intelligence score of 22, he would be able to use them. Why give him every spell, if you only use them in combat, which is 90% of the time, and where many of his spells would be most effective. If you want to give Vecna "additional powers," then sure. But at least use the powers how they should be used. Yes, this means you have to balance the ability, but if the ability your giving an enemy of your party, can easily wreck them, then don't give it at all.
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The only thing keeping this in check is that he can only Scry twice, it only lasts 10 minutes, and it doesn't get to bypass the ordinary saving throw rules for the spell. But he doesn't ever have to sleep, and his DC is quite high.
But there are still are abilities keeping this in check. If anyone gave Vecna "infinite spells" then it would not be balance at all.
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The only thing keeping this in check is that he can only Scry twice, it only lasts 10 minutes, and it doesn't get to bypass the ordinary saving throw rules for the spell. But he doesn't ever have to sleep, and his DC is quite high.
But there are still are abilities keeping this in check. If anyone gave Vecna "infinite spells" then it would not be balance at all.
The only thing keeping this in check is that he can only Scry twice, it only lasts 10 minutes, and it doesn't get to bypass the ordinary saving throw rules for the spell. But he doesn't ever have to sleep, and his DC is quite high.
But there are still are abilities keeping this in check. If anyone gave Vecna "infinite spells" then it would not be balance at all.
The point you keep missing is that there is no such thing as balance - game balance is an illusion created by the Dungeon Master who always has the ability to just annihilate players.
The reality is that “infinite spells” (a straw man argument no one is actually suggesting) is not any more broken than “Vecna decides to send Kas (who is still loyal to him at this time and likely has a CR over 20) to pay the party a visit with a hundred or so of his strongest followers”? Because that second option is not only allowed under RAW, it’s probably how Vecna of that era would deal with a meddling group of level 20 adventurers. It would be unbalanced, fatal, and completely allowed under the rules and narrative - but things like that simply do happen because the DM is not actually trying to make the game miserable for the players.
Your entire argument on this thread - which you keep doubling down on - is predicated on a DM who not only modifies Vecna’s stat block and spell list, but also magically forgets the social compact that keeps the DM from annihilating the party at any given second. That’s simply not how DMs in the real world operate - they do not get a new toy and forget how to DM.
RAW, Vecna is already fighting a losing battle against a barebones no subclass level 20 wizard. A necromancer wizard at that level will curbstomp Vecna. It does not matter how many Legendary Resistance he has, because if it is a finite number, a necromancer wizard will eventually enslave Vecna with their simulacrum army. Giving Vecna wish will close some of the gap at best so he will not be a complete push over. At worst, it will give your party a panic and scare before that one smug caster in the group use counterspell and deservedly win the spotlight and be the hero.
It's genuinely weird he isn't proficient in Charisma saves.
You need to subject him to 10 DC 19 Charisma saves he makes with advantage to have a greater than 50% chance (in this case, about 53.69%) of making him fail at least 6. If he were proficient in Charisma saves (which wouldn't raise his defensive CR at all, let alone his total CR), you'd need 45 attempts to have a 50.11% chance of enslaving him for an hour.
You can make him proficient in all saves and drop him from Legendary Resistance 5 to 3 and continue to leave his defensive CR alone, which likely to make him a more fun opponent to face in general, as the DM will need to concern themselves less with the standard problem of LR of knowing how much metagaming is appropriate for an LR rating. Because LR acts like effective HP in a CR calculation, his effective HP remains exactly the same with e.g. LR 0, 25 hit dice, and Constitution 30, which will also make him "feel" more undead in that he'll auto-pass DC 19 Con saves.
My take: DMs have no need to limit themselves to PC generation rules and the sooner they realize that the better they'll be as DMs. If you decide your Evoker knows Globe of Invulnerability because she's learned to protect herself from weenies whilst doing her job of Blowing Up Infantry? Just have her cast GoI. Decide on the spot that she gets one of them a day and don't worry about what else on her spell list you're replacing to do it. If that matters, it's something you can sort after the encounter if your Evoker is still alive, and if she's not then the players aren't really going to care if she cast an extra spell that didn't end up helping her in the end. If you-the-DM want to give a casty critter certain spells, give them those spells. Trust your judgment, remind yourself that you're not trying to screw your players over (unless you are, in which case stop it), and that whatever you're planning on will be fine. Actual game-ruining disasters of bad judgment are vanishingly rare, and casters' CRs in M3 don't take their innate casting into account anyways. All of a caster's Innate Casting stuff is basically side jobbies, their CR is calculated using their spell-like actions. So long as you're still primarily using those actions in a stand-up fight, you're golden. And if you're not? Well hell, you're the DM. Try shit, break stuff, and fix it in post. You don't have to run a perfect game, just a good one.
My issue with this is something I have personally experienced in a game, when a DM gave a standard enemy a spell reflection ability that sent a fireball back at us, hitting us with the damage. To be clear, this was not part of the enemy's stat block, which I looked up after the event, and was done purely because he didn't want his bad guy to get beaten too early. He was railroading the party and it was not in any way a fun experience.
My point- giving enemies random abilities on the fly can be gamebreaking and is also unfair. It can damage player agency, which is one of the most important things in a game. With a bad guy like Vecna, you can simply rule that he's cast Contingency on himself to establish defences when attacked, sure. But my take is that you should always have your villain's abilities clearly established and stick to them to give your players a fair shot. Yes, you should be as devious and evil as you can in establishing them, but don't change them once you have.
My issue with this is something I have personally experienced in a game, when a DM gave a standard enemy a spell reflection ability that sent a fireball back at us, hitting us with the damage. To be clear, this was not part of the enemy's stat block, which I looked up after the event, and was done purely because he didn't want his bad guy to get beaten too early. He was railroading the party and it was not in any way a fun experience.
There are creatures that have the ability to reflect spells though -- a morkoth, for instance. Your DM didn't even invent that one, they likely just transplanted it
More importantly though... good for them. DMs giving monsters extra abilities and features to make them bigger challenges is in no way "railroading" or "damaging player agency". It's part of their job description to come up with appropriate challenges for their party rather than just letting the BBEG be an anti-climactic pushover because that's what the book says
The issue here, if there is one, was you metagaming by looking up what you thought the monster was "supposed" to be. The DM can do whatever they want with the original stat block. It's your job as a player to overcome what's put in front of you, not wish it were something easier to beat
Now, if they misjudged how big a challenge it would be and that spell reflection ability led to a TPK, that's not great. But if it just forced the casters to get more creative instead of spamming fireballs to beat it, then your DM made a smart choice
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
There are creatures that have the ability to reflect spells though -- a morkoth, for instance. Your DM didn't even invent that one, they likely just transplanted it
More importantly though... good for them. DMs giving monsters extra abilities and features to make them bigger challenges is in no way "railroading" or "damaging player agency".
It does depend a bit:
The DM is under no obligation to use the published stat block for any monster.
If the DM knows that the players are highly familiar with monster stat blocks, he should definitely consider changing things up.
If the DM has already told the player how a given monster works, he should stick with what he told them unless there's a good reason it changed.
Changing monster stats in play is similar to die roll fudging, which is... controversial.
OK, you weren't there, so you don't have context. You don't know me, the group I play with or the DM of the group. He has a history of putting us into situations he doesn't intend for us to win and destroying things the group had earned and invested time in. He was also disrupting the game I ran that he played in and another game that we both played in, upsetting and angering players in both games and I was pretty tired of it. That encounter ended with us escaping with one or two of the characters unconscious due to the fireball, already being low on resources due to a long, grinding series of fights. But we didn't escape because we were clever or overcame anything, he threw in a bunch more enemies and then a deus ex machina rescue, possibly realising he'd mucked up or because in his head it was cool. As a player, it was a miserable and dispiriting experience and entirely typical of sessions he ran. Several players quit soon after, myself included. The same guy in a game I wasn't in decided to make all the opponents immune to stun just to prevent the monk from using stunning strike on them.
Metagaming would have been checking the statblock before or during FYI, not after. I wasn't using above game knowledge to help myself win, which is what metagaming actually means. I don't metagame. Even if I am well aware of the stats of an enemy, I'll check with the DM what is reasonable for my character to know.
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
I am curious - have you DMed 5e before? The reality is that 5e combat balancing is a disaster - CR is meaningless and it takes a while for even extremely competent DMs to get a feel for what the difficulty should be for any given party (each party requires different encounter balancing).
Changing the battle mid game can be bad DMing - as you indicate went on at your table - but it also can be good DMing. No player wants a boss fight where they just steamroll the bad guy (or get steamrolled by them); sometimes fights need to be adjusted (preferably with a subtle, narratively-justified hand) mid-fight to make up for how pre-combat balancing in 5e is little more than augury and gut feelings on the part of the DM.
Which, of course, isn’t to say that you didn’t have a bad example of it - merely that there can and often are examples where mid-combat modification makes things better for everyone, making up for a shortfall of the system itself.
OK, you weren't there, so you don't have context. You don't know me, the group I play with or the DM of the group. He has a history of putting us into situations he doesn't intend for us to win and destroying things the group had earned and invested time in. He was also disrupting the game I ran that he played in and another game that we both played in, upsetting and angering players in both games and I was pretty tired of it. That encounter ended with us escaping with one or two of the characters unconscious due to the fireball, already being low on resources due to a long, grinding series of fights. But we didn't escape because we were clever or overcame anything, he threw in a bunch more enemies and then a deus ex machina rescue, possibly realising he'd mucked up or because in his head it was cool. As a player, it was a miserable and dispiriting experience and entirely typical of sessions he ran. Several players quit soon after, myself included. The same guy in a game I wasn't in decided to make all the opponents immune to stun just to prevent the monk from using stunning strike on them.
OK, but you do understand that "giving monsters abilities that aren't in their stat block" is not actually one of the problems with that situation, right?
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The only thing keeping this in check is that he can only Scry twice, it only lasts 10 minutes, and it doesn't get to bypass the ordinary saving throw rules for the spell. But he doesn't ever have to sleep, and his DC is quite high.
But there are still are abilities keeping this in check. If anyone gave Vecna "infinite spells" then it would not be balance at all.
The reality is that “infinite spells” (a straw man argument no one is actually suggesting) is not any more broken than “Vecna decides to send Kas (who is still loyal to him at this
On post 38 in this thread someone essentially said that Vecna can have whatever spell he wants as long as he only has 1-3 uses of it. This is what I have been talking about when I said people suggested earlier that Vecna has infinite access to whatever spell he wants.
The only thing keeping this in check is that he can only Scry twice, it only lasts 10 minutes, and it doesn't get to bypass the ordinary saving throw rules for the spell. But he doesn't ever have to sleep, and his DC is quite high.
But there are still are abilities keeping this in check. If anyone gave Vecna "infinite spells" then it would not be balance at all.
Your entire argument on this thread - which you keep doubling down on - is predicated on a DM who not only modifies Vecna’s stat block and spell list, but also magically forgets the social compact that keeps the DM from annihilating the party at any given second. That’s simply not how DMs in the real world operate - they do not get a new toy and forget how to DM.
I think you misunderstood why I was saying what I have been saying. I was originally responding to other people talking about giving extra abilities to Vecna. This series of discussion started from my actual opinion on the Vecna stat block (post 33) and people essentially saying "You don't need to modify his statblock, you can just add things without balancing it since he's Vecna!"
And no, that is not my "entire argument on this thread," it is a counter argument against what others said about my opinion on this, and then others have continued whenever I countered those points.
Yes, I have advocated for anyone to be careful to balance any extra abilities to Vecna particularly ones that are unbalanced. And in response to what others have said, I asked why give them if you won't use them.
I feel a little disappointed, if I compare Vecna to probably the only other comparable character in any system Nagash from WFR Vecna seems a little, weak. It is hard to compare like with like across systems but I think if I ever pull a Vecna out of my back pocket I will have to buff him a bit to allow for more dead raising abilities.
I think it's a good stat block, but it doesn't really fit Vecna. It doesn't seem very much like an ancient and incredibly powerful lich, it feels like a powerful undead, just lich without everything that makes a lich: the spells. I understand he still has them, but very little. Acererak's stats felt more lich-y to me.
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
This is done all the time by dms, while yes, at times it can lead to fights ooc, due to both the possibilities of bad players and bad dms, generally, its perfectly fine to do especailly if you have an experienced dm with a group of folks they know playing
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
This is done all the time by dms, while yes, at times it can lead to fights ooc, due to both the possibilities of bad players and bad dms, generally, its perfectly fine to do especailly if you have an experienced dm with a group of folks they know playing
Yeah. For me at least, encounter design doesn't stop once initiative is rolled. If say, a boss has been unintentionally easy and anticlimactic, I might give it a new ability part way through the fight to put the players back on edge, within reason. That said, I don't do this with the intention of making the party lose, or to avoid any chance of the party failing. Nor do I do this to undercut creative solutions from the party.
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
This is done all the time by dms, while yes, at times it can lead to fights ooc, due to both the possibilities of bad players and bad dms, generally, its perfectly fine to do especailly if you have an experienced dm with a group of folks they know playing
Yeah. For me at least, encounter design doesn't stop once initiative is rolled. If say, a boss has been unintentionally easy and anticlimactic, I might give it a new ability part way through the fight to put the players back on edge, within reason. That said, I don't do this with the intention of making the party lose, or to avoid any chance of the party failing. Nor do I do this to undercut creative solutions from the party.
and thats the way it should be, like the other day, I played with my irl group, they are new to the game, but highly creative and have known eachother 30+ years, so they teamwork insanely well that even the shitty parts of their builds are amazing. They fought a giant ape and nuked him, so I gave him a pickaxe that glowed and an ability to armor himself fast. that fight went from easy, to a fun challenge they spent most of the session plotting and rolling to beat
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
This is done all the time by dms, while yes, at times it can lead to fights ooc, due to both the possibilities of bad players and bad dms, generally, its perfectly fine to do especailly if you have an experienced dm with a group of folks they know playing
Yeah. For me at least, encounter design doesn't stop once initiative is rolled. If say, a boss has been unintentionally easy and anticlimactic, I might give it a new ability part way through the fight to put the players back on edge, within reason. That said, I don't do this with the intention of making the party lose, or to avoid any chance of the party failing. Nor do I do this to undercut creative solutions from the party.
Personally I don't do this, if an encounter ends up being far easier then I expected I just chalk it up to experiance and move on, possibly having the story define that that boss was actually a mini boss and so create a different creature to attack at some point. I run Milestone so it is up to me when the players level so I am not so worried about them getting "free" XP.
I like spell lists for monsters. I have no problem with counter spell. I also like the new Vecna stat block and abilities.
My problem is when WotC chicken out and do half measures no-one is happy with. Either keep the old 5e style stat blocks and spell lists, or go full 4e - get rid of spell lists but remake everything and give every single monster, from goblins to Orcus, fun and varied abilities to get rid of the sack-of-hp syndrome.
I wish Vecna had higher intelligence score, I feel like 22 is a bit low for a super god of secrets. That's one less than a random archdevil who doesn't even own a layer of the nine hells (Hutijin, M3 page 157). Comparetively, I think Vecna should be smarter since he's supposed to be a literal superstrong god.
I bet the explanation for his int score being relatively lowish because it's his spellcasting ability. Maybe they were nervous about him having too high a spell attack bonus and save DC?
PS. Why is his wisdom sore higher than his intelligence? He literally was a wizard in life!
Edit: I know 22 is a very high ability score, but just to clarify, what bothers me is that for Vecna, a god, it seems slightly lower than it should be.
Did you see the other post I made right above that one? (It's pretty long.) That one is not a "non-response."
In the end, I guess my counterargument to your point has boiled down to this: No, Vecna cannot emulate every spell just through other effects. He can do many, but some can only target the caster, and others, like wish, are incredibly hard to and expensive to replecate. Also "infinite spells" could help him do lots of extra things in and out of combat.
My argument is: why give Vecna the extra abilities if you don't want to use them? There are many things Vecna could do outside of combat to wreck the party with those spells, and with his intelligence score of 22, he would be able to use them. Why give him every spell, if you only use them in combat, which is 90% of the time, and where many of his spells would be most effective. If you want to give Vecna "additional powers," then sure. But at least use the powers how they should be used. Yes, this means you have to balance the ability, but if the ability your giving an enemy of your party, can easily wreck them, then don't give it at all.
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HERE.But there are still are abilities keeping this in check. If anyone gave Vecna "infinite spells" then it would not be balance at all.
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HERE.Imagine that.
The point you keep missing is that there is no such thing as balance - game balance is an illusion created by the Dungeon Master who always has the ability to just annihilate players.
The reality is that “infinite spells” (a straw man argument no one is actually suggesting) is not any more broken than “Vecna decides to send Kas (who is still loyal to him at this time and likely has a CR over 20) to pay the party a visit with a hundred or so of his strongest followers”? Because that second option is not only allowed under RAW, it’s probably how Vecna of that era would deal with a meddling group of level 20 adventurers. It would be unbalanced, fatal, and completely allowed under the rules and narrative - but things like that simply do happen because the DM is not actually trying to make the game miserable for the players.
Your entire argument on this thread - which you keep doubling down on - is predicated on a DM who not only modifies Vecna’s stat block and spell list, but also magically forgets the social compact that keeps the DM from annihilating the party at any given second. That’s simply not how DMs in the real world operate - they do not get a new toy and forget how to DM.
It's genuinely weird he isn't proficient in Charisma saves.
You need to subject him to 10 DC 19 Charisma saves he makes with advantage to have a greater than 50% chance (in this case, about 53.69%) of making him fail at least 6. If he were proficient in Charisma saves (which wouldn't raise his defensive CR at all, let alone his total CR), you'd need 45 attempts to have a 50.11% chance of enslaving him for an hour.
You can make him proficient in all saves and drop him from Legendary Resistance 5 to 3 and continue to leave his defensive CR alone, which likely to make him a more fun opponent to face in general, as the DM will need to concern themselves less with the standard problem of LR of knowing how much metagaming is appropriate for an LR rating. Because LR acts like effective HP in a CR calculation, his effective HP remains exactly the same with e.g. LR 0, 25 hit dice, and Constitution 30, which will also make him "feel" more undead in that he'll auto-pass DC 19 Con saves.
My issue with this is something I have personally experienced in a game, when a DM gave a standard enemy a spell reflection ability that sent a fireball back at us, hitting us with the damage. To be clear, this was not part of the enemy's stat block, which I looked up after the event, and was done purely because he didn't want his bad guy to get beaten too early. He was railroading the party and it was not in any way a fun experience.
My point- giving enemies random abilities on the fly can be gamebreaking and is also unfair. It can damage player agency, which is one of the most important things in a game. With a bad guy like Vecna, you can simply rule that he's cast Contingency on himself to establish defences when attacked, sure. But my take is that you should always have your villain's abilities clearly established and stick to them to give your players a fair shot. Yes, you should be as devious and evil as you can in establishing them, but don't change them once you have.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
It does depend a bit:
OK, you weren't there, so you don't have context. You don't know me, the group I play with or the DM of the group. He has a history of putting us into situations he doesn't intend for us to win and destroying things the group had earned and invested time in. He was also disrupting the game I ran that he played in and another game that we both played in, upsetting and angering players in both games and I was pretty tired of it. That encounter ended with us escaping with one or two of the characters unconscious due to the fireball, already being low on resources due to a long, grinding series of fights. But we didn't escape because we were clever or overcame anything, he threw in a bunch more enemies and then a deus ex machina rescue, possibly realising he'd mucked up or because in his head it was cool. As a player, it was a miserable and dispiriting experience and entirely typical of sessions he ran. Several players quit soon after, myself included. The same guy in a game I wasn't in decided to make all the opponents immune to stun just to prevent the monk from using stunning strike on them.
Metagaming would have been checking the statblock before or during FYI, not after. I wasn't using above game knowledge to help myself win, which is what metagaming actually means. I don't metagame. Even if I am well aware of the stats of an enemy, I'll check with the DM what is reasonable for my character to know.
In any case my point is still that giving enemies new abilities mid-session is something I don't agree with, and that's clearly what he was doing.
I am curious - have you DMed 5e before? The reality is that 5e combat balancing is a disaster - CR is meaningless and it takes a while for even extremely competent DMs to get a feel for what the difficulty should be for any given party (each party requires different encounter balancing).
Changing the battle mid game can be bad DMing - as you indicate went on at your table - but it also can be good DMing. No player wants a boss fight where they just steamroll the bad guy (or get steamrolled by them); sometimes fights need to be adjusted (preferably with a subtle, narratively-justified hand) mid-fight to make up for how pre-combat balancing in 5e is little more than augury and gut feelings on the part of the DM.
Which, of course, isn’t to say that you didn’t have a bad example of it - merely that there can and often are examples where mid-combat modification makes things better for everyone, making up for a shortfall of the system itself.
OK, but you do understand that "giving monsters abilities that aren't in their stat block" is not actually one of the problems with that situation, right?
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
On post 38 in this thread someone essentially said that Vecna can have whatever spell he wants as long as he only has 1-3 uses of it. This is what I have been talking about when I said people suggested earlier that Vecna has infinite access to whatever spell he wants.
I think you misunderstood why I was saying what I have been saying. I was originally responding to other people talking about giving extra abilities to Vecna. This series of discussion started from my actual opinion on the Vecna stat block (post 33) and people essentially saying "You don't need to modify his statblock, you can just add things without balancing it since he's Vecna!"
And no, that is not my "entire argument on this thread," it is a counter argument against what others said about my opinion on this, and then others have continued whenever I countered those points.
Yes, I have advocated for anyone to be careful to balance any extra abilities to Vecna particularly ones that are unbalanced. And in response to what others have said, I asked why give them if you won't use them.
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HERE.I feel a little disappointed, if I compare Vecna to probably the only other comparable character in any system Nagash from WFR Vecna seems a little, weak. It is hard to compare like with like across systems but I think if I ever pull a Vecna out of my back pocket I will have to buff him a bit to allow for more dead raising abilities.
I think it's a good stat block, but it doesn't really fit Vecna. It doesn't seem very much like an ancient and incredibly powerful lich, it feels like a powerful undead, just lich without everything that makes a lich: the spells. I understand he still has them, but very little. Acererak's stats felt more lich-y to me.
SAUCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is done all the time by dms, while yes, at times it can lead to fights ooc, due to both the possibilities of bad players and bad dms, generally, its perfectly fine to do especailly if you have an experienced dm with a group of folks they know playing
Yeah. For me at least, encounter design doesn't stop once initiative is rolled. If say, a boss has been unintentionally easy and anticlimactic, I might give it a new ability part way through the fight to put the players back on edge, within reason. That said, I don't do this with the intention of making the party lose, or to avoid any chance of the party failing. Nor do I do this to undercut creative solutions from the party.
and thats the way it should be, like the other day, I played with my irl group, they are new to the game, but highly creative and have known eachother 30+ years, so they teamwork insanely well that even the shitty parts of their builds are amazing. They fought a giant ape and nuked him, so I gave him a pickaxe that glowed and an ability to armor himself fast. that fight went from easy, to a fun challenge they spent most of the session plotting and rolling to beat
Personally I don't do this, if an encounter ends up being far easier then I expected I just chalk it up to experiance and move on, possibly having the story define that that boss was actually a mini boss and so create a different creature to attack at some point. I run Milestone so it is up to me when the players level so I am not so worried about them getting "free" XP.
I like spell lists for monsters. I have no problem with counter spell. I also like the new Vecna stat block and abilities.
My problem is when WotC chicken out and do half measures no-one is happy with. Either keep the old 5e style stat blocks and spell lists, or go full 4e - get rid of spell lists but remake everything and give every single monster, from goblins to Orcus, fun and varied abilities to get rid of the sack-of-hp syndrome.
I wish Vecna had higher intelligence score, I feel like 22 is a bit low for a super god of secrets. That's one less than a random archdevil who doesn't even own a layer of the nine hells (Hutijin, M3 page 157). Comparetively, I think Vecna should be smarter since he's supposed to be a literal superstrong god.
I bet the explanation for his int score being relatively lowish because it's his spellcasting ability. Maybe they were nervous about him having too high a spell attack bonus and save DC?
PS. Why is his wisdom sore higher than his intelligence? He literally was a wizard in life!
Edit: I know 22 is a very high ability score, but just to clarify, what bothers me is that for Vecna, a god, it seems slightly lower than it should be.
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