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Okay, this party has become powerfully magic-heavy over the course of the campaign. They're 11th level, and about to go deal with a demon lord of considerable power. They know it has tentacle-based grapple attacks (Snatch feat in addition to tentacles makes for a very dangerous opponent.)

Their plan is to cast Freedom of Movement on themselves and use teleport as needed to avoid the grapple. The teleport I can presumably block by tossing a dimensional anchor on the affected mage. But how do I stop Freedom of Movement? The moment the Big Bad has to default to casting dispel spells, he's purely defensive and they'll pick him apart. Which should not be something a player party should be able to do to a meaningful demon bad guy.

In the campaign, Hell itself was destroyed in the previous generation, so I actually don't have the ability to just summon random spawns of instant demonic monsters. There has to be a reasonable defensive force on hand to protect the demon. While he has access to some demon types which could disguise themselves in human society, they can't summon reinforcements, which means he has to logically have conventional backup.

I guess I'm worried they'll take what's supposed to be a significant challenge and turn it into a curbstomp. Anyone got any suggestions for enemy force builds to limit a magic-heavy party big on movement magic and Black Tentacles to screw the other side?

Thanks for the suggestions! The game adapted the Forgotten Realms, so it's probably safe to say it's deviating somewhat from PFS-standard gameplay.

That said, the GM loved the idea of the figment familiar. We've adapted the character so that she's like Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She's got this exotic pet-thing, which isn't a recognizable creature, demonstrates unusual movement abilities (because it's a projection of her imagination, and doesn't have to limit itself entirely to what's actually possible, right?) And she treats it like a cross between a favored pet and a divine messenger of her extraplanar fey mother.

But since no one ever actually *sees* this extraplanar mother figure, there's no guarantee she's not just insane, and projecting her insanity in the form of the familiar. Now, since it can't store spells, this raises a whole new list of questions. Namely, where is she getting her magic from, if the thing she's playing fetch with and tying little bows on is just a figment of her imagination?

There's a lot of room to develop that kind of opportunity, so I think that's where we'll take it. Thanks again for the suggestion!

I'm building a winter witch for a game I'm going to be playing in. I've got the character built, but part of her backstory is that she's the daughter of a dawn piper who spent a night with an arctic shaman, thus creating this girl who's got a natural affinity for winter and built-in resistances to cold.

All that is well and good. But she needs a familiar. Despite dawn pipers being in the list of possible familiars, the GM feels that the class is just too overpowered to be an acceptable familiar. So, now I'm stuck for ideas. The character needs more than just a pet creature. This entity is her link to her mother back in the fey dimension, and gets instruction from her.

I'd originally come up with the idea that part of her task was to help the dawn pipers filch pieces of the material plane, sending them back to the fey realm to stitch together something for themselves. But without access to the dawn piper creature, this gets harder. She was created by the piper to advance their ambitions and act as their agent. The familiar needs to be an essential element in that chain.

Anyone have any ideas?

Okay, here's the thing. Nothing as far as I can tell is actually illegal. But the player has built an archer who is so powerful at 10th, that there's no point in playing the game anymore. And the rest of the group is in no hurry to end things (neither am I, for that matter.)

He's got a couple levels in Wizard, for Gravity Bow. A couple levels in Arcane Archer, so that every nonmagical arrow he fires ignores defenses like Protection from Normal missiles. And he's got lots of levels in ranger, with species enemy of either Humans (he's elven,) or Undead, guaranteeing he'll almost always have +2 at least in bonus accuracy and damage.

The character is using a strength longbow, which in combination with Manyshot, Rapid Shot, Precise Shot, and his species bonus, means he's shooting four arrows a round at roughly 2d6+8 per shot.

Last session, the PC's were up against the big bad guy of the entire module arc. He was AC34, had about two hundred hit points, and was backed up with clerics who would pulse the group regularly, keeping the bad guys at high hits.

The archer starts off the round. He sort of looks up offhandedly from whatever he's doodling on, and comments in an equally casual tone of voice, "106 hit points damage on that big bad guy in the center."

I've torn into his character sheet several times over, and I can't see anything actually *illegal* with the build, but if I can't find some way of neutralizing it, he's going to run roughshod over the rest of the campaign. The only thing I could do in that fight was to have the big bad throw Disintegrate at him in an attempt to wipe him out as fast as possible. When he managed to survive that (raw hit points and luck,) the big bad fired *another* disintegrate at him the next round.

Yes, it works. But it comes across as heavy-handed. Is there any other solution I can use to limit the damage this player can inflict on my campaign?

Edit: Part of my problem is that I'm fairly certain he's cheating his ass off. He uses the iPad version of Hero Labs, uses virtual dice rolling software and this ring thing for die rolling. I have no clue if he's cheating or not, and his character sheet uses software no one else can use. (I have the PC version of Hero Lab, but a file from a different operating system won't play nice on the PC.)

On several occasions, I've called him on impossible comments, saves, and damage. He usually starts hemming and hawing, and then provides a much more reasonable result with, some lame excuse of, "Oh, I didn't see that..." or something like it. But because he's always slightly insulated from the group with his setup, I can't actually *prove* anything. It's frustrating as hell.