Eikl's page

Elki, as you yourself pointed out, you'll benefit from creatures with more natural attacks because of the +3d6 you get from your Amulet of Mighty Fists. In fact, you'll be even better off as a giant octopus.

Yeah, I'd normally do something like this, but I'm just enjoying the dinosaur thing so much I want to stick with that. It's very Calvin & Hobbes. It's also fun playing a Megaraptor with a Megaraptor companion and modeling them after my kittens.

I have some odd character themes sometimes.

Without the bonus damage to all attacks, the megaraptor and T. rex are basically a toss-up, IMO.

As base monsters, yeah, but as druid shapes, the Megaraptor's strictly better because most of the T-Rex damage comes from the massive strength, which druids don't inherit. It's a 2 point strength difference instead of seven. Without the amulet, I do more damage as a half orc with a big stick than I do as a T-Rex with teeth the size of volkswagons, which is just silly. If I could sucker my DM into letting me dual wield Flame Blades with the forelimbs it might be worthwhile for pure awesome, but for now, gaining pounce from the Megaraptor but not swallow whole from the T-Rex sets them pretty far apart.

The ommision was intentional, and in fact was my attempt to make the demilich a little less unfair. Making the demilich's ability able to punch through death ward is lame, in my opinion, especially in the case of something as powerful as this. For the version of the demilich we presented in Scarwall, I removed that line to make it so that death ward works just fine and provides total protection against the attack.

You should probably have been more clear about that. As printed, your version of the demilich totally ignores all death wards, scarabs of protection and the plot-device protection against a failed death save effect.

The occasional lethal encounter is great for verisimilitude, but it leaves the player without anything to do until his DM allows him to reenter with another character or his character is raised. Given the length of 3.5 combats (in real time) and the DM's acknowledged concern with "reality," this can often be a significant amount of time in which the player is, in fact, not playing. This is not fun.

Bingo. In this particular case, after getting eaten by the now-specifically-bypasses-death-ward-entirely souped up demilich (as opposed to a mere normal demilich we were way more prepared for), getting freed after killing it with frustrated metagamey cheese ("This is broken, just set off my Fire Seeds and kill it, they bypass SR"), the dungeon itself ate my character's soul so he couldn't be Resurrected without defeating all the other load bearing bosses. Instant kill is irritating and but tolerable, but combining it with the enforced sit-out-all-chapter game mechanic is directly anti-fun.

I'm sad that:

A) Megaraptor got nerfed down to large
B) They're still better than a T-Rex

For a while, my half orc druid was the only hitter and healer in my group of four. People initially thought he was a barbarian; it worked ok. I'm sad, though, at the way the new wild shape rules work. T-Rexes are huge. They should be better than Megaraptors because T-Rexes are Awesome and Megaraptors are lame. When I was able to turn into a Huge creature, I should have been able to switch from Megaraptor to T-Rex and do more damage. But I can't. T-Rexes aren't really very good compared to Megaraptors.

Please fix.

(My Merciful, Vicious Amulet of Mighty Fists +0 probably isn't helping.)

The epic level version is in the SRD... but that's too bad-ass to inflict on 13th-level characters. Heck... the ToH II version is maybe too bad-ass to inflict on 13th-level characters... hence the "Handle with Care" sidebar.

I'm a player, so I don't know what the sidebar said, but I came here specifically to complain about this encounter. It's awful.

Designing the encounter so that a basically unkillable monster can instakill a character a round is just poor. Designing it so that there's no way to raise the character without killing the unkillable monster, finishing the entire rest of the chapter and then finding a True Resurrection somehow makes me think that it's not just bad, it's bad on purpose. Removing the part of the instant death monster ability that is affected by death ward makes me pretty sure whoever wrote this encounter was just being a dick.

Dying in the second round of the first fight of the week then finding out I get to sit out for a chapter (at least) or start over with a new character isn't good fun, so as a player, this module sucks. Playing D&D shouldn't generally involve playing for 10 minutes then saying "uh, ok, call me if you need me for next month, I'm going to the gym."