Should I telegraph to my players that a creature I plan to deploy, the Bodak, has a power that will drop them to 0 hp if they look at it and fail the resulting save badly enough? I don't think any of the characters would have any reason to know about Bodaks or their powers. Is this something I should just let them figure out, perhaps giving them a little information when the first player rolls the save? I'm curious about the possible approaches here.
No way, one of those killed my 3.5e control wizard, only thing that did the whole campaign, we still talk about the Bodak encounter sometimes and it was years ago.
If I ever intend on giving the players an opponent who has a chance to insta-kill or instantly remove them from a fight, I will always foreshadow it.
I've been playing forever and many, many, many of the older modules would have mechanics that would instantly kill a player with almost no recourse. From traps which didn't fit the situation with triggers that made little sense, to monsters that had abilities the characters (and players) had no way of knowing about without reading up on the module itself, the MM had different stat blocks. I find it to be unfair to the players, but only in the sense of insta-kill type mechanics.
Give them an NPC who talks about nightmarish demons, have them find a tome that describes strange creatures, maybe they'll run into a retired adventurer who talks about a creature that wiped out half his party with naught but a gaze. Just a little something to get them thinking about what it is they might face. You don't have to give them the exact mechanic, but something to help them understand that what they're about to face is far more dangerous than a simple troglodyte.
Littering the lair with the occasional dead body that shows no signs of physical damage is a good way to telegraph that the monster might be more dangerous than normal.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
This kind of thing really depends on what kind of story scene you're trying to set up. If you're just throwing some XP at your players, not sucker punching them is polite, but if you're trying to ramp up the horror, you really want to describe its eerie appearance and let them get blindsided by its gaze power.
Right now they're in a dungeon that I have placed a cursed sword in. The sword is VERY obviously cursed, as it has wiped out a castle full of goblins and bugbears, and they are now fighting their undead forms. I'm pretty confident someone will try and use it anyways, at which point they'll become cursed. Assuming they survive the sword's curse and manage to cure it, the sword's creator, Orcus, will become enraged that someone destroyed his curse and survived. So he dispatches a Bodak to take revenge. I'm planning to have it show up as a sort of illusion that only the cursed player sees for several nights, watching from a distance and getting closer each night before finally attacking. So I'm definitley going for horror and want it to be a memorable encounter. So I think I'm leaning toward blindsiding them. I think that will really terrify them, especially if one of the first players to roll the save fails.
Thank for the suggestions!
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Should I telegraph to my players that a creature I plan to deploy, the Bodak, has a power that will drop them to 0 hp if they look at it and fail the resulting save badly enough? I don't think any of the characters would have any reason to know about Bodaks or their powers. Is this something I should just let them figure out, perhaps giving them a little information when the first player rolls the save? I'm curious about the possible approaches here.
Thanks!
No way, one of those killed my 3.5e control wizard, only thing that did the whole campaign, we still talk about the Bodak encounter sometimes and it was years ago.
If I ever intend on giving the players an opponent who has a chance to insta-kill or instantly remove them from a fight, I will always foreshadow it.
I've been playing forever and many, many, many of the older modules would have mechanics that would instantly kill a player with almost no recourse. From traps which didn't fit the situation with triggers that made little sense, to monsters that had abilities the characters (and players) had no way of knowing about without reading up on the module itself, the MM had different stat blocks. I find it to be unfair to the players, but only in the sense of insta-kill type mechanics.
Give them an NPC who talks about nightmarish demons, have them find a tome that describes strange creatures, maybe they'll run into a retired adventurer who talks about a creature that wiped out half his party with naught but a gaze. Just a little something to get them thinking about what it is they might face. You don't have to give them the exact mechanic, but something to help them understand that what they're about to face is far more dangerous than a simple troglodyte.
Littering the lair with the occasional dead body that shows no signs of physical damage is a good way to telegraph that the monster might be more dangerous than normal.
This kind of thing really depends on what kind of story scene you're trying to set up. If you're just throwing some XP at your players, not sucker punching them is polite, but if you're trying to ramp up the horror, you really want to describe its eerie appearance and let them get blindsided by its gaze power.
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Right now they're in a dungeon that I have placed a cursed sword in. The sword is VERY obviously cursed, as it has wiped out a castle full of goblins and bugbears, and they are now fighting their undead forms. I'm pretty confident someone will try and use it anyways, at which point they'll become cursed. Assuming they survive the sword's curse and manage to cure it, the sword's creator, Orcus, will become enraged that someone destroyed his curse and survived. So he dispatches a Bodak to take revenge. I'm planning to have it show up as a sort of illusion that only the cursed player sees for several nights, watching from a distance and getting closer each night before finally attacking. So I'm definitley going for horror and want it to be a memorable encounter. So I think I'm leaning toward blindsiding them. I think that will really terrify them, especially if one of the first players to roll the save fails.
Thank for the suggestions!