In the entries for the Spawn of Kyuss provided in issue #126 and Monster Manual II, there are mechanics for dealing with attached Kyuss worms. Is just me, or are these mechanics a little...lacking?
The worms have AC 10 and 1 hp, implying they can be attacked while attached (and killed by the touch of silver). But what happens when a PC swings his greataxe to kill a worm on his neck? That sounds dangerous! What if the PC wants to just grab the worm and pull it off, or squish it? What if a wizard want to blast the worms off his companion with magic missles? Burn them off with a torch?
Almost all of these issues came up when I ran the ending of EaBK (except the torch one) a little while ago. I ended up making the following rulings "on the fly" (I hope I did Monte Cook proud :P )
- You can attack the worms with a weapon at a -4 penalty to avoid taking a chunk out of yourself. It didn't come up, but I'm thinking that attacks with light weapons could be made without a penalty.
- A succussful melee touch atttack against AC 10 allows you to grab a worm and the grapple check to pull it off or squish it automatically succeeds (since the worms should have a grapple modifier of -16 - Str modifier). This should provoke attacks of opportunity -- something which I may have forgotten in my session (can't remember). Of course, the worms could have a racial bonus to grapple....
- I ruled that magic missles would work fine, killing one worm per missle without threat to the PC the worms are on.
- I also ruled that if a Spawn rolled high enough on a slam attack to hit the PC's touch AC, it successfully transferred a worm onto the PC, despite doing no damage. Without this rule, the enounter would have been a cakewalk.
The easiet route among these is pretty clear -- my PCs ended up pulling the worms off with touch attacks. My players were terrified of the worms getting into them (heh heh), but because of the easy touch attacks, there was never any real threat of that happening. The PCs just ended up spending a lot of their actions pulling worms off instead of attacking the Spawn, who weren't able to hit very often with their slams. In order to really have a shot at infecting a PC, there would need to be three Spawn teaming up on one PC, with some other monsters keeping the other PCs occupied.
I'm interesting in hearing how others are handling the Spawn worm mechanics, and if you think mine make sense.