I decided to find that exchange with the Giant and his answer could be read as him doing a few strips in advance for that sequence. So maybe I read too much into it. Here’s a link to the exchange. My post is 1417, but you can find it fast by searching for my username. His post is immediately after and followed by some further exchanges about this with other posters.
I don’t know if it’s instructions would allow it to chase the Order if the Order were to leave the large cavern. But “Defend this area, this platform thing,” so long as it also kept anything from going through the orange portal, I’d think would allow to chase any character in the chamber.
As to moving it, it’s around 27 tons. With 48 Strength. I don’t think it’s getting moved unless it wants to. Another weird thing about the monster is that it burrows faster than it moves. I don’t think it can do it through stone though.
There are a ton of things it can do, but action economy, and it thankfully arriving only as the Order did, is going to ensure it’s not going to be able to do most of them. Jeez, imagine if it had enough time to spam deeper darkness throughout the cavern, summoned additional undead, and hasted itself and them?
EDIT: thanks for the thread link, dtilque. I’m surprised the speculation about buffers and his work habits went on as long as it did in that thread, given how testy he’s been about that subject in the past.
I’m now having flashbacks to 8-Bit Theatre and Fighter’s “Me-doken!” move.
OK, a couple things. Haley is attacking the earth elements, which is a better use of her bow than attacking the worm. A nightcrawler has immunity to cold, so her bow doesn’t do much damage to it.
Gontula poked his hand out of the orange barrier in order to cast the spell. Another indication that it blocks spells both ways. But his invisibily purge should have gone away, because it’s based on him. There’s one place where the Giant isn’t following the rules. But that’s probably just to make life harder for the heroes.
Is it realistic that Belkar could “take on these 2 scrubs” by himself?
Oops, my mistake on this. Once they attacked the worm, their invisibility goes away. Never mind.
Those are two Earth Elemental(Huge). Each has a CR of 7, meaning they’re roughly equivalent to an 8th level PC. Two of them should be roughly on par with a lone lvl 9 PC. The OOTS is what, 16, 18 by now ?
Mechanically speaking, they’re just two bags of 100hp at AC19, each with only a couple of relatively low dmg attacks. At his level, Belkar would need mayyyybe a couple of rounds to kill one, and three to kill both (assuming : first round charge, do 1 attack, Mr. Scruffy pounces, first elemental is at 3/4th health. Second round, both scruffy and belkar do their full iteratives, first elem dies, maybe one blow lands on the second. Third round belkar unleashes on the second one, kills it)
TL;DR : they really are chumps. And melee DPS guys like Belkar are really good at dispatching big discrete sacks of HP.
No more than Large size, since two were summoned and Summon Monster VII only summons multiples from the SM VI list or lower. Strange that the Exarggh, isn’t summoning from the Evil list instead of the Neutral one but whatever, RedCloak doesn’t seem to have any problems doing it.
Your points about the monsters being a pushover for Belkar or anyone else on the Order, are even more relevant, as Large EEs have a CR of 5. I don’t see in the SRD where EEs can throw rocks, but I’m guessing it’s similar to how giants do it. Large giants like Hill giants can’t throw very big rocks. The SRD lists a rock from a hill giant as doing 2d6+7, which isn’t a love tap, but isn’t that hard of a hit.
Haley can sneak attack elementals, can’t she? If someone was to fix their attention while she flanked them?
Mass Cause Serious Wounds might have been better than those two summons, especially if it were directed at Haley/V; still, the summons should occupy Durkon for a round.
Mass Hold Monster at DC 23 isn’t a lot of fun, is it? I’m mildly surprised the LDW got it to work without having to soften up the Order with some debuff beforehand.
So, we don’t know where Hilgya is—maybe she’s sneaking around the building somehow? I’d expect a cleric of Loki to have some way to misdirect attention and sneak around. We don’t know if Minrah’s been raised. Roy’s in midair, somewhere below the bridge. Belkar and Elan are held, but it doesn’t look like they fell. Durkon made his save. All four of them took some minor damage from the rock, V’s still pretty dinged up from the cone of cold, Haley’s untouched.
On the flip side, the Exarggh isn’t hurt, has a bunch of spells remaining, if no time to cast them, and the LDW has three pretty nasty looking wounds in it. With no means to heal them without eating something with class levels. Unless the Exarggh bothers to expose himself enough to cast a cause x wounds spell on the LDW.
L___ Death Worm… I’m missing what the L is.
Lovable/Likable. Named such at the GITP boards, probably because of its eager-to-please demeanor. Easier to type than Nightcrawler over and over.
An odd thing to think of when contemplating a creature of pure evil and malevolence, but Rich is a pretty good writer. His characterization is not how would have thought of a creature with 20s in Int and Wisdom, but it works.
Has Burlew mentioned his health recently? Because he’s slowed to one update a fortnight for some time now.
Likely Burlew is just working on other projects. He still has several Kickstarter promises to keep, for example. And I understand he’s doing more of those Monster For Every Season things, even though he didn’t promise any more. He just likes to do them.
About the Invisibility thing I mentioned a few posts up. If they just used regular invisibility, it goes away when they attack. But the last time V cast it (when fighting the Frost Giants in the mountain pass), it was Greater Invisibility for Haley, and that doesn’t go away like that. Since they’re likely to reuse the same spell, it is a violation of the rules. Of course the Giant doesn’t care about that; he mostly follows the rules, but violates them as needed.
Or he used something like Invisibility Sphere, so he could make both of them invisible with only one spell. Or Haley had a single-use item that gave her invisibility, and V. saved his fourth level spell slots for more damage spells.
Given their luck with vampire Dominate attempts, it seems par for the course that they’d all blow a Will save, Durkon excepted.
One thing is I think we can assume V has learned not to discount non-magic attacks since the fight with the black dragon. We saw some signs of that in V’s last fight with Zz’dtri.
I forget if it was the same in D&D 3.5, but in *Pathfinder *elementals are specifically immune to precision damage (which covers both sneak attacks and criticals). Since D&D had a weird hard-on about nixing the one combat feature rogues had at every conceivable opportunity, I strongly suspect they were immune to sneak attacks in 3.5 as well.
Actually, PF loosened up how many enemies could be hit by sneak attack. It went from:
Elementals, Oozes, Swarms, Undead, Plants, Constructs,
to:
Elementals, Oozes, Swarms, and Incorporeal Undead.
That might not seem all that different but allowing physical undead and constructs was a big deal as they were just common enough that it allowed the rogue to be a lot more effective.
As for myself, if they had ghost touch, I allowed it vs incorporeal undead. I think I made a feat to allow it for elementals as well, if the rogue player wanted it.
I know, PF made playing rogues *much *friendlier (on top of all the toys they’ve given rogues to play with to boot), that’s what I was saying. Allowing sneak attacks on undead is probably the most notable change in there since undead are so common even in campaigns that are not explicitly undead themed.
And allowing crits & SA vs undead made sense- since many undead are traditionally killed by a heart or head hit.