Awesome, thanks Grumman. So if Vaarsuvius hid in a forcecage with Roy and Belkar, and assuming the three high-level baddies stayed out of it … could Durkon beat that entire army by himself?
I guess it’s a case of Chekov’s dinosaur army. If one shows up, you have to use it.
I’m not up on challenge ratings. How many low-level grunts can Roy take on? Or is this a “rocks fall, everyone dies” sort of situation?
That’s a pretty thick rain of arrows coming in simultaneously, in this round. Durkon might be OK, Roy and Belkar, not so much - barring intervention by V.
I’d guess dinosaur bites do more than 11 points of damage.
Not all Bards play the support role. Elan’s built as a light melee fighter with utility spells, but something like a Sublime Chord Ultimate Magus might out-mage the mage. Or he could have said “Screw it, I want full B.A.B., full arcane spellcasting and full divine spellcasting!” and become a Fochlucan Lyrist.
Critical hits might still be a problem, but I’d still bet on Durkon. He only has to fight a dozen or so mooks at a time, and I don’t think they’d be able to hurt a vampire CoDzilla in full plate fast enough to take him down.
Of course, there are easier ways to kill an army. If Durkula’s got the Air domain, he could just summon a tornado-strength sandstorm and flay them alive.
I dunno. Maybe Vaarsuvius will be released by the fiends AND find that the emergent situation is sufficient to pull him out of his funk and into action AND have the magical chops to pull off a rescue.
I’d find it a bit more easy to accept Haley and/or Elan successfully persuading Tarquin to call off the attack, largely by encouraging him to use his Genre Savvy and consider the points Larry Borgia raises above.
ETA: Look at The Black Cauldron. Look at Willow. The day gets saved not by the warrior, but by the underpowered dude with all the moxie. Sure, it’s not the traditional trope, but it’s perfectly valid.
Maybe Elan will run down into the pit to fight alongside Roy and T will have to call off the rain of arrows.
A Tyrannosaurus does an average of 23 points of damage, but that’s still not enough. Durkula’s AC is at least 28, and he heals 5 points and gains 10 temporary hit points per round, meaning that he can tank three Tyrannosaurs indefinitely with no magic and no magic items. If he has at least an additional 5 AC from other sources (+4 full plate and a +3 shield, for example) he can tank twenty of them at the same time and take no damage.
Missed the window, but ETA AGAIN: Maybe Tarquin’s teammates will involve themselves in the persuasion. Are they aware (and okay with) the fact that Tarquin’s plan is really tailored to benefit Tarquin more than them?
I know Malack was (and was), but he had his own reasons to accept a supporting role.
New D&D is silly.
As opposed to old D&D, where it was just flat-out immunity to nonmagical damage, so no number of tyrannosauri would be sufficient?
Durkula can just go all misty, can’t he? Or do you need to be indoors for that?
Can psions cast Greater Dispel Magic?
No, expecting a supernatural being to be subject to mundane limits is silly.
I am comfortable admitting that I have no idea what will happen next. On the one hand, entering the rift makes sense as an escape route, but on the other I doubt Burlew wants to split the party again for an indefinite period of time. Or maybe he’s okay with that, it could be a different mix with different dramatic possibilities. Or maybe a dozen complications could subvert that. I have no idea, but I’m enjoying the ride and have confidence it will seem entirely sensible in retrospect.
As for Vampire Durkon, it’s probably true he could weather the grunts’ attacks with impunity, I doubt he would be cool with letting Roy and Belkar get obliterated in a storm of arrows. And besides, we’ve already seen that Durkon is vulnerable to grappling, and I’m sure Tarquin’s army has a creature capable of neutralizing him in that way, even if it means sacrificing a bunch of minions to set it up. One of the quirks of DnD is that monsters have far, far more options for boosting their grapple scores than most PCs.
As I recall, and I’m at work with no reference materials handy, foes over a certain hit die or damage amount bypassed immunities (in a scaling sense, so 10HD might be equivalent of +1 weaponry, 12HD/+2 etc). The whole idea was so you couldn’t drop a mountain on a lemure and have a 1HD lemure sitting unscratched underneath a mountain. Or have a ghast kill a bullette in 1-on-1 arena combat because the bulette lacked magical claws and teeth.
Looking at it another way, is a sudden rain of arrows a good cliffhanger to end a book on? Just hypothetically.
Maybe, but Durkon’s a monster now. One of those Tyrannosaurs could temporarily incapacitate him by eating him, but his slam attack would drain the life out of it in less than a minute and he’d climb out of the corpse none the worse for wear.
No.
And the ends of OOTS books are explicitly stated.
From the art, it looks like Belkar is still at very low HP from Durkon munching on him earlier. I don’t see how he possibly comes out of this alive.
According to the d20srd.org page on vampires, clerics who become vampires have access to two of the following domains: Chaos, Destruction, Evil, or Trickery. Anything useful he could do with those?