Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Then (a) it's not really using the monster in its Kaiju role, and (b) how long it takes to beat the Tarrasque is mostly irrelevant because it's going to do most of its damage before the PCs even arrive on the scene.
On Raulothim's Psychic Lance, it's kind of a broken spell, but it's not in the basic rules and the OP seems to have been doing a basic-rules-only run.
Your post assumes two things. First, you assume that you know where the Tarrasque will surface next. Second, you assume that you can get a team of 20th level wizards there before the Tarrasque kills a few thousand people. Everyone who thinks they have The Foolproof Plan® to defeat the Tarrasque are guilty of metagaming in the extreme. The Tarrasque is a creature of legend. Literally. It only surfaces every few centuries, so most people have never seen it and only know of its existence through tales and legends, most of which will be so gawdawful that the average person will assume them to be fiction. It may surprise people to learn that there is no copy of The Monster Manual in any of the libraries anywhere on Toril. So when this mythical monster suddenly burrows out of the ground in the middle of a city, hundreds of people will be dead before it even climbs out of the hole. And seriously, how many 20th level wizards are there in your world? Does literally every city, town, village, and hamlet have a team of 20th level people just hanging out hoping that a big legendary creature will attack sometime before they get sent to the Adventurer's Retirement Home? So when Mr. T. arrives, there probably won't be a team of 20th level anybodies sitting there waiting for it. By the time your team arrives on the scene, hundreds of innocent people are already dead. And your character won't know what its armor class is. You won't know it has Legendary Resistances. You don't even know what those terms mean. Maybe somewhere in the legends there was a line saying that its carapace can reflect spells back at the caster, but you'll have to make an Arcana check just to remember that one little footnote from one story you overheard in a bar twelve years ago about a thing you never thought you'd ever see. And while you're spending an action making that skill check, a dozen more innocent people died.
The Tarrasque is not a math problem. It's a catastrophe. And metagaming is bad.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Note that Incapacitated doesn’t stop movement, so in terms of stopping it in place it doesn’t, and the damage range goes from ~24 to 42 on average. Against a +5 save with advantage, call it slightly below even odds it makes the save. It’s theoretically possible you could plink it to death like this, but it’s rather reliant on consistently high rolls from the party and low rolls from the Tarrasque, plus a very atypical party composition. You can cheese pretty much anything with a custom tailored party that assumes it has ideal resources and won’t face any other obstacles
It might shock you to learn that there are Kaiju that don’t just placidly stroll across wide open terrain so they can be easily spotted and attacked in the middle of nowhere. If it doesn’t fit your personal vibe that’s fine, but that’s not the single authoritative instance of what a “correct” Kaiju is.
... What does this have to do with the price of milk?
I mean, if the Tarrasque appears, lays waste to the city, and is gone before anyone can respond, then its just a natural disaster and whatever. The players aren't responsible for what the Tarrasque did.
But this is a D+D world. There will be prophecies foreshadowing its return. It is far more likely a team of heroes has assembled before it appears than not. And it will be a team assembled to deal with it - they will pull the best heroes from all over the known world, and have time to do research beforehand. If the Tarrasque is just appearing unannounced in a random location in the world, you're using it wrong.
And it's a CR30 threat, of course it's a team of 20th level heroes. Lesser heroes are fully entitled to just walk away and let the disaster happen (although I think 17th level heroes can probably deal with it fine).
And Raulothim's Psychic Lance is a great spell. Psychic damage isn't resisted very often, and immunity is rare, with a good effect, and an int save (the best save to target at any level). And Incapacitated immunity is nearly non-existent. Even without checking the monster manual, it would be where I'd start with a supposedly hard to kill monster.
But it does limit it to normal movement. No dash actions. And no attacks. And we can add a restrained to the rotation if necessary (also not immune). But no one was plinking it to death; once it's disabled, we're throwing it through a prismatic wall several times per second as it bobbles atop a reverse gravity. Or I noted you could Petrify it, at which point it's not doing anything while you kill it.
I don't know, I've seen 4 wizard parties, or 3 wizards and a druid. (I'm sure I can find a Druid spell that will help burn the Tarrasque's legendary resistances). And this is the Tarrasque - we're talking a party assembled for the purpose of defeating it, probably in response to a prophecy. Something like the Tarrasque doesn't just appear out of nowhere.
And you're assuming the party has (1) no way to improve its save DCs (unlikely at level 20), (2) I don't just choose diviner for one or more of those wizards (even without a DC higher than 19, any portent 13 or lower causes the Tarrasque to fail a save. And there's probably at least one diviner, its probably the best wizard subclass), and/or (3) the wizards aren't packing Silvery Barbs (which they probably are). I'd assume the effective save rate on an int save is somewhere below 25%, but even at 50% it takes the wizard kill squad 1.5 rounds to disable all its legendary resistances, leaving plenty of wizard or simulacrum actions left to finish it in round 2.
You can use Tasha's Mind Whip to nearly the same effect. The lesser damage doesn't really matter in this context (nor does the fact it can choose an action instead of movement, nobody is staying in range for it to do anything on its turn).
I don't know there's a good basic rules way to deal with it, because int saves are really rare. There's only 5 in the PHB, one of which is suffered by the caster (Contact Other Plane), and three of them aren't in the SRD (somehow none of Mind Sliver, Phantasmal Force, or Synaptic Static are in the SRD), leaving only Befuddlement. None of them have useful effects against the Tarrasque (except possibly Mind Sliver for making other spells stick, but now we're probably taking 3 rounds, and it's not in the SRD.)
If you're trying to land a non-Int Save against the Tarrasque, Wis, Dex, and Cha are your next best options (mildly better than Str or Con). I'm pretty sure the only ways to improve wizard save DCs in the SRD are Ioun Stone of Mastery (+1 PB) and Robe of the Archmagi (+2). Strangely, Rod of the Pactkeeper is the only scaling bonus to DCs item that made it into the PHB '24, which only applies to warlocks (and it's not in the SRD anyway). But we're level 20 characters facing a CR30 threat, so assuming the few ways we can improve save DCs is reasonable, so our save DCs should be 22. That's still only a 36% chance to land a spell against Wis, Dex, or Cha with the Tarrasque's advantage. So yeah, it's going to take them a bit longer to land anything. (Round 3 is probably when legendary resistance gets burned out and spells start landing). I presume there's something useful that targets one of those saves and is actually in the SRD.
Again, you’re assuming a custom Tarrasque hunting party with no other build considerations, and ignoring LRs. That’s a complete non-starter as anything but an indulgent white room exercise.
Phantasmal Force does potentially have useful effects against the Tarrasque, depending on how you interpret "the target treats the phantasm as if it were real". It's not going to kill the Tarrasque, or even damage it significantly, but a distraction has value too.
If you can present something it will care about that fits in a 10 ft cube
I assumed nothing about build. No feats, no subclasses in the initial proposal (just noting diviners are really good, which they are). There's nothing weird here. It's not terribly custom, not even in spells chosen to prepare for the day (which the party absolutely could tailor towards a major incoming fight like the Tarrasque). Hardly customized for the Tarrasque. This is literally any 4 wizards making decent life choices.
I proposed using spells that are legitimately good spells that a wizard should have anyway. (and it only requires one of them to have any given spell originally - they can make a 'spellbook' copy with key spells to share with the others if they have time to prepare, which they should, see my response about how there should be prophecies around the reappearance of this beast of legend. Although the only spells they need to all have in their spellbook are Raulothim's Psychic Lance and Simulacrum, the latter of which is a near-certainty, and the former isn't terribly unlikely given how good it is).
And LR? Can't be long rest... legendary reaction? It's just legendary actions, which happen after a character's turn. And, by construction, the characters never approach within the 150' danger zone except briefly during their turn to drop a spell, and then they leave that area. This is why they attack from the air (so the Tarrasque cannot move toward them, because it doesn't fly). So the Tarrasque can literally not use Legendary Actions (productively) against them. So no, I don't ignore them, I factored them into my analysis implicitly. By the time anyone has to approach close enough they can't move out of the 150' bubble, the fight is basically over. (And legendary actions cannot be used while incapacitated).
Legendary Resistance- as in the 6 completely unbeatable “hah, nope” times the creature with magic resistance can pass a save.
And 4 20th level Wizards is an unrealistic game premise all on their own- how many parties like that have you been in?
Your arguments sound like the guy who claims to have a black belt in martial arts, and then says, "Here, I'll prove it! Come at me from this angle and attack me just like this, and I'll show you how easily I can deflect it."
You're metagaming.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
I explicitly factored in Legendary Resistances. Hence the Raulothim's spam, to burn the Tarrasque's legendary resistances:
Or to make it explicit: keep casting Raulothim's Psychic Lances until it runs out of Legendary Resistance.
And 4 wizards? I've seen several parties like that, and many more 3 wizards + 1 cleric/druid. I've seen it at most levels of play. (It was actually quite normal in 3.x, where anyone who knew what they were doing took a primary spellcaster unless those classes were explicitly banned: indeed, in 3.x banning primary spellcasters became somewhat normal in my play group solely to see classes other than wizards, clerics, and druids).
I literally just had a 5e con game with 3 wizards and a druid a few weeks ago (a vaguely adventure league-esque arrangement, 1st-3rd level game, played just fine).
???
I don't think I've ever made a wizard who didn't plan on taking Simulacrum right at 13th level (unless it was banned in the campaign, obviously).
The only wizards I've ever planned who weren't take Raulothim's Psychic Lance by 8th level were... special. It's one of the best 4th level spells in the game. And even knowing nothing, it would be my go-to opening spell for any creature with legendary resistances, because incapacitation immunity is virtually non-existent (there's one creature in the MM, and it's CR<1, all iirc) and is a great condition to impose, and it has good range and an int save (statistically the most reliably failed save).
Nor are any of the other spells I mention terribly unusual choices. Psychic Scream is probably the most unusual pick, and... it's easily replaced. It's just a fun spell that I rarely have reason to mention.
Regular access to non-concentration flight is a basic expectation of Tier 4 play.
This is bog standard wizard spells. Against a foe they will have forewarning of, and the ability to prepare against. You should expect a party to go into this fight having consulted sages, done library research, and cast a bevy of information-gathering spells on what they're facing (like Divination and Contact other Plane or Commune). It's not metagaming to know something about the prophesied beast of ruin that's about to attack the city, you've spent the last week of in-game time learning as much about it as you could. A 20th level party has easy access to expertise in the appropriate knowledge (Nature in this case, and with a 20 Int) for a +17 to the roll, with advantage no less (as necessary: Borrowed Knowledge, Enhance Ability, Skill Empowerment). Between that and copious divination magic, the DM might as well hand you the monster manual.
So you say metagaming. I say (1) this is well within what the wizards were going to do anyway, Tarrasque or no Tarrasque (5e is very forgiving on preparation, since you don't need to prepare every slot individually). And even if it was highly tailored (which its not), (2) it's not metagaming if your characters have done the research in-game. Which they absolutely will.
And indeed, the Tarrasque only has one way to come at you. Flight is an absolute counter to the Tarrasque's offense.