I mean some of the most common ones are some of the most dangerous. Our party (4 x lvl 11 players) attacked a summer eladrin who turned out to be an adult green dragon. It tore its way through our party and its legendary actions and resistance weren’t helping. Killed a player in the second round and downed another. We only survived by dimension dooring out of there. What’s worse is that it has forced us to travel with it while it wears the form of the pc it killed.
I ran the Sea Wyvern adventure from Dungeon Magazine 141 (Dec 2006) as 3.5. The Mother of All encounter forces casters to pass a concentration check to cast spells, poison spines with a high DC and constitution damage combined with high grapple checks.
The players are trapped in a sargasso sea amongst various ships. The seaweed is actually spawn of a large vine-like monster called The Mother of All (CR 8ish) with the ability to transport via plants to control the fight location. It's a very tactical fight with lots of ability checks needed to keep it balanced as the creature only has 105 hit points and would go down quickly if it was a straight fight.
When I ran it, the players kept failing grapple, concentration and other checks making it ended rather quickly. I had to fudge dice to prevent a TPK and let them escape.
If I ran it as 5e, I would up the hit points, lower the DCs, make the grapple checks easier to break and come from smaller creatures that are easier to kill rather than the Mother of All herself. I seem to recall the fight was action inefficient for the Mother of All if the players got a good streak going meaning it could've ended quickly the other way due to one or two dice rolls.
Surely Strahd shouldn't count since he's designed to be the capstone of CoS. But my regular group in that bunch most struggled with Baba Lysaga (mostly cause of her house!), and the yugoloth who consistently counterspelled their sorcerer. Until then he had never been counterspelled so he was horrified to see his nukes just nullified.
Outside of CoS, hands down my 100% favorite monster to run against the group was a chain devil (kyton). That thing was TOO FUN to play. The animate chains feature made the match so dynamic. Fun fun fun.
As a player, I think the wildest fight was against a Froghemoth that almost swallowed and digested our wizard and if not for a lucky nat 20 to try and jam its mouth open with a staff, would have been deadly. That nat 20 was rolled in a game store and MAN did that whole store know that we won that fight with all the cheering we did.
Lastly, I am running a new group through Sunless Citadel. I was shocked to see how nasty the troll hits--we originally thought it was an outright kill (at 6 HP with max 8, the hit was 15. it was so tragic until I remembered the Cleric forgot to account for Disciple of Life which still meant auto-lights out but it wasn't an outright kill!!). Then again, the troll technically shouldn't be easily accessible until late in the dungeon... but that's what happens when the rogue gets a 25 on an arcane locked door. 0_0
Way back when, I was part of a rough meeting with a Styx dragon. Obviously, we met her on the Styx. Aboard a galleon, with a crew of golems under the command of our party. (I was quartermaster) we met this nightmare great wyrm at level 18. The accursed thing sprayed a sticky acid over and over. We set it to flee, and were pulled along because of the half a dozen harpoons we had used. We finished the battle at it's lair, but only two out of the seven of us survived, but none of them died in the battle, all perished weeks later in Avernus, because the things attacks carried virulent plagues. That fact alone made it memorable.
In the first round of combat he attacked 9 times, which was more than double the number of attacks we could put out (4 PCs, no Extra Attack). Each attack was at +13, which was about five more than our highest attack bonus. Each attack also did staggering amounts of damage (one PC down to 0 before they even got to have their first action of the combat). Some of them had other interesting effects, like shoving 15ft. All were, of course, at 15ft reach. :-(
And the GM told us he has over 300 HP.
We did have a summoned elemental but the character who went to 0 was the one concentrating on it so now we have one less ally and one more foe.
We don't have magical bows or arrows so peppering him from range is pointless (he's immune to nonmagical damage, which also rules out the preferred spell for two of our casters, animate objects).
Our only hope is you, Obi Wan, *cough* I mean, our only hope is the Paladin with the Sunsword. A crit in the first round saw her deal over a hundred points of damage. If we can just keep her alive for two or three more rounds... Assuming she can hit the demon's 20+ AC... And she doesn't run out of spell slots to smite... And the demon doesn't teleport away from her...
The fight really shouldn't have been that difficult. We had a party of 6 level 14 players. But there was a narrow path, a lot of bad rolls and the fact my bard literally got caught with his pants down. Things didn't go great for me in particular. Specially as I somehow managed to get my Bigby's Hand engulfed by one of the cubes as well later on. I don't roll great.....
It couldn't really happen in 5e, but in 2nd edition our wizard lost a fight with a cat. He never played a wizard again.
For those who haven't played older editions, in 2e a first level wizard had 1d4+con mod hitpoints (max HP at 1st level was an optional rule), was unable to wear armor, one spell per day, no cantrips, and once they used that one spell they had to use a dagger or sling, likely with no attack bonus. Also the default rolling method was straight 3d6, so they were unlikely to have more than one or 2 scores with a bonus at all. And ranged attacks used strength, so getting an AC bonus was likely to prevent you from getting an attack bonus.
A cat had the same 1d4 hitpoints, but an AC of 6 (equivalent to 14 in 5e terms) and 3 attacks a round.
Nilbog, gave my lower level players a tough time. Part of it was they very much focused on him as the main target (and he is rather hard to kill in the first place) and as soon as he went down he took off and possessed the next nearest goblin. So they killed him three times, and when their little goblin guide tried to run away to avoid being possessed the group did the merciful thing. They broke his neck. But the Nilbog gave a group of lvl 3 players quite the entertaining fight with a pack of goblins to jump to.
"Where words fail, swords prevail. Where blood is spilled, my cup is filled" -Cartaphilus
"I have found the answer to the meaning of life. You ask me what the answer is? You already know what the answer to life is. You fear it more than the strike of a viper, the ravages of disease, the ire of a lover. The answer is always death. But death is a gentle mistress with a sweet embrace, and you owe her a debt of restitution. Life is not a gift, it is a loan."
The most dangerous monster I ever DM'd was Strahd in Ravenloft. Strahd is a vampire wizard. The old mod. actually stated something like "Strahd is a genius. Play him like one." He knows every inch of the castle. He would pop in cast a spell at range then get out until the party was weakened. He was just a bad@$$! The party that went through that dungeon all died except 2 very weak characters at the end. The people that went through it still talk about how thrilling that mod was 35 years after they went through it.
The freaking Venom Troll. It absolutely destroyed my group. We were level 7 (it's CR mind you) but because of how melee focused our group was the troll killed our alchemist three times (he had a dark gift that gave him self reincarnation three times, and used 2 in this one fight!) Knocked my own character out, nearly killed our rogue, and flat out killed our ranger.
And only because our characters didn't k ow to use fire/acid. We killed it three times over in the first round but our lack of character knowledge had it constantly self regenerating. Was an even more difficult fight than killing a green dragon to bring the ranger back to life!
The freaking Venom Troll. It absolutely destroyed my group. We were level 7 (it's CR mind you) but because of how melee focused our group was the troll killed our alchemist three times (he had a dark gift that gave him self reincarnation three times, and used 2 in this one fight!) Knocked my own character out, nearly killed our rogue, and flat out killed our ranger.
And only because our characters didn't k ow to use fire/acid. We killed it three times over in the first round but our lack of character knowledge had it constantly self regenerating. Was an even more difficult fight than killing a green dragon to bring the ranger back to life!
We just fought a mixed group of Venom, Rot, and Dire Trolls. Nearly wiped out a party of six PCs, mostly 7th level.
One of the first DMs I ever played with ran a campaign where we played chaotic evil minotaurs. It got ugly fast and we rolled battle dice for hours straight. It was brutal. But a battle worthy of Thanos, or at least Lobo.
Our DM decided to put our 9th level party of 5 characters against TWO Death Knights at once in the narrow corridors of a dungeon. As the Paladin I was splitting turns between emergency Lay-on-Hands revivals of downed party members and smiting until I was fresh outta spells. Nearly TPK'd that encounter if not for a couple of clutch moves from our Wizard.
In terms of the toughest I launched as a DM: the party was travelling upstream on a 10ft-by-50ft boat when they were ambushed by two Water Elementals. With the complete lack of anywhere to run/move, I could just hit-and-run them or go in for a welm attack and wreck their day that way.
I mean some of the most common ones are some of the most dangerous. Our party (4 x lvl 11 players) attacked a summer eladrin who turned out to be an adult green dragon. It tore its way through our party and its legendary actions and resistance weren’t helping. Killed a player in the second round and downed another. We only survived by dimension dooring out of there. What’s worse is that it has forced us to travel with it while it wears the form of the pc it killed.
I ran the Sea Wyvern adventure from Dungeon Magazine 141 (Dec 2006) as 3.5. The Mother of All encounter forces casters to pass a concentration check to cast spells, poison spines with a high DC and constitution damage combined with high grapple checks.
The players are trapped in a sargasso sea amongst various ships. The seaweed is actually spawn of a large vine-like monster called The Mother of All (CR 8ish) with the ability to transport via plants to control the fight location. It's a very tactical fight with lots of ability checks needed to keep it balanced as the creature only has 105 hit points and would go down quickly if it was a straight fight.
When I ran it, the players kept failing grapple, concentration and other checks making it ended rather quickly. I had to fudge dice to prevent a TPK and let them escape.
If I ran it as 5e, I would up the hit points, lower the DCs, make the grapple checks easier to break and come from smaller creatures that are easier to kill rather than the Mother of All herself. I seem to recall the fight was action inefficient for the Mother of All if the players got a good streak going meaning it could've ended quickly the other way due to one or two dice rolls.
Surely Strahd shouldn't count since he's designed to be the capstone of CoS. But my regular group in that bunch most struggled with Baba Lysaga (mostly cause of her house!), and the yugoloth who consistently counterspelled their sorcerer. Until then he had never been counterspelled so he was horrified to see his nukes just nullified.
Outside of CoS, hands down my 100% favorite monster to run against the group was a chain devil (kyton). That thing was TOO FUN to play. The animate chains feature made the match so dynamic. Fun fun fun.
As a player, I think the wildest fight was against a Froghemoth that almost swallowed and digested our wizard and if not for a lucky nat 20 to try and jam its mouth open with a staff, would have been deadly. That nat 20 was rolled in a game store and MAN did that whole store know that we won that fight with all the cheering we did.
Lastly, I am running a new group through Sunless Citadel. I was shocked to see how nasty the troll hits--we originally thought it was an outright kill (at 6 HP with max 8, the hit was 15. it was so tragic until I remembered the Cleric forgot to account for Disciple of Life which still meant auto-lights out but it wasn't an outright kill!!). Then again, the troll technically shouldn't be easily accessible until late in the dungeon... but that's what happens when the rogue gets a 25 on an arcane locked door. 0_0
Toremar, Paladin 6 / Dez, Gnome Wizard 5 / Perios, Elf Wizard 10 / Skadr, Dwarf Pugilist 7
Greed.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Tarrasque. Also slaad infect you, you forget you are infected, die/become slaad.
I stole my pfp from this person: https://mobile.twitter.com/xelart1/status/1177312449575432193
Way back when, I was part of a rough meeting with a Styx dragon. Obviously, we met her on the Styx. Aboard a galleon, with a crew of golems under the command of our party. (I was quartermaster) we met this nightmare great wyrm at level 18. The accursed thing sprayed a sticky acid over and over. We set it to flee, and were pulled along because of the half a dozen harpoons we had used. We finished the battle at it's lair, but only two out of the seven of us survived, but none of them died in the battle, all perished weeks later in Avernus, because the things attacks carried virulent plagues. That fact alone made it memorable.
Paper mario: the thousand year door had a pretty hard boss fight, I cant really think of any modern games that had a real hard boss fight
9Apps Lucky Patcher VidMate
Yeenoghu.
In the first round of combat he attacked 9 times, which was more than double the number of attacks we could put out (4 PCs, no Extra Attack). Each attack was at +13, which was about five more than our highest attack bonus. Each attack also did staggering amounts of damage (one PC down to 0 before they even got to have their first action of the combat). Some of them had other interesting effects, like shoving 15ft. All were, of course, at 15ft reach. :-(
And the GM told us he has over 300 HP.
We did have a summoned elemental but the character who went to 0 was the one concentrating on it so now we have one less ally and one more foe.
We don't have magical bows or arrows so peppering him from range is pointless (he's immune to nonmagical damage, which also rules out the preferred spell for two of our casters, animate objects).
Our only hope is you, Obi Wan, *cough* I mean, our only hope is the Paladin with the Sunsword. A crit in the first round saw her deal over a hundred points of damage. If we can just keep her alive for two or three more rounds... Assuming she can hit the demon's 20+ AC... And she doesn't run out of spell slots to smite... And the demon doesn't teleport away from her...
6 or so Gelatinous Cubes...
The fight really shouldn't have been that difficult. We had a party of 6 level 14 players. But there was a narrow path, a lot of bad rolls and the fact my bard literally got caught with his pants down. Things didn't go great for me in particular. Specially as I somehow managed to get my Bigby's Hand engulfed by one of the cubes as well later on. I don't roll great.....
"Toss a coin to your [Insert class here]"
Fought a necro troll today, took my BarBearian down from full health to exactly 0hp in one attack round.
I was healed back up and shifted a second time, he brought me back down again but it took a couple rounds this time.
It couldn't really happen in 5e, but in 2nd edition our wizard lost a fight with a cat. He never played a wizard again.
For those who haven't played older editions, in 2e a first level wizard had 1d4+con mod hitpoints (max HP at 1st level was an optional rule), was unable to wear armor, one spell per day, no cantrips, and once they used that one spell they had to use a dagger or sling, likely with no attack bonus. Also the default rolling method was straight 3d6, so they were unlikely to have more than one or 2 scores with a bonus at all. And ranged attacks used strength, so getting an AC bonus was likely to prevent you from getting an attack bonus.
A cat had the same 1d4 hitpoints, but an AC of 6 (equivalent to 14 in 5e terms) and 3 attacks a round.
Nilbog, gave my lower level players a tough time. Part of it was they very much focused on him as the main target (and he is rather hard to kill in the first place) and as soon as he went down he took off and possessed the next nearest goblin. So they killed him three times, and when their little goblin guide tried to run away to avoid being possessed the group did the merciful thing. They broke his neck. But the Nilbog gave a group of lvl 3 players quite the entertaining fight with a pack of goblins to jump to.
"Where words fail, swords prevail. Where blood is spilled, my cup is filled" -Cartaphilus
"I have found the answer to the meaning of life. You ask me what the answer is? You already know what the answer to life is. You fear it more than the strike of a viper, the ravages of disease, the ire of a lover. The answer is always death. But death is a gentle mistress with a sweet embrace, and you owe her a debt of restitution. Life is not a gift, it is a loan."
The most dangerous monster I ever DM'd was Strahd in Ravenloft. Strahd is a vampire wizard. The old mod. actually stated something like "Strahd is a genius. Play him like one." He knows every inch of the castle. He would pop in cast a spell at range then get out until the party was weakened. He was just a bad@$$! The party that went through that dungeon all died except 2 very weak characters at the end. The people that went through it still talk about how thrilling that mod was 35 years after they went through it.
The freaking Venom Troll. It absolutely destroyed my group. We were level 7 (it's CR mind you) but because of how melee focused our group was the troll killed our alchemist three times (he had a dark gift that gave him self reincarnation three times, and used 2 in this one fight!) Knocked my own character out, nearly killed our rogue, and flat out killed our ranger.
And only because our characters didn't k ow to use fire/acid. We killed it three times over in the first round but our lack of character knowledge had it constantly self regenerating. Was an even more difficult fight than killing a green dragon to bring the ranger back to life!
We just fought a mixed group of Venom, Rot, and Dire Trolls. Nearly wiped out a party of six PCs, mostly 7th level.
DICE FALL, EVERYONE ROCKS!
An entire angry village.
One of the first DMs I ever played with ran a campaign where we played chaotic evil minotaurs. It got ugly fast and we rolled battle dice for hours straight. It was brutal. But a battle worthy of Thanos, or at least Lobo.
Nuff said.
<accidental post/noob>
I agree.
Strahd was a badass vampire and he didn’t even sparkle.
Our DM decided to put our 9th level party of 5 characters against TWO Death Knights at once in the narrow corridors of a dungeon. As the Paladin I was splitting turns between emergency Lay-on-Hands revivals of downed party members and smiting until I was fresh outta spells. Nearly TPK'd that encounter if not for a couple of clutch moves from our Wizard.
In terms of the toughest I launched as a DM: the party was travelling upstream on a 10ft-by-50ft boat when they were ambushed by two Water Elementals. With the complete lack of anywhere to run/move, I could just hit-and-run them or go in for a welm attack and wreck their day that way.
The group I am in fought and beat a Mummy, but that might have been due to the fact that no Duddy was involved lol.