Last night my players fought the Mother Worm from Kings of the Rift. I loved the Kaiju template when I saw it in a previous issue of Dragon, so when I saw it was actually used, I thought, "awesome, this will be a fight of immense proportions".
But as it turns out, the Mother Worm could barely scratch the PCs. A couple of their ACs were up in the 40s, so it couldn't even power attack and have a chance of hitting. They also had DR (via stoneskin, righteous might, & some from shapechange), so when the Mother Worm did hit, it would typically only do 1-6 points of damage per hit. The only two somewhat daunting things, as it turns out, were its AC and the DC for its paralysis. But once the cleric was dishing out the freedom of movement, this immense aberration was suddenly laughably easy.
Has anyone else had to beef this encounter up?
I haven't looked at it in depth yet, as I am still in Spire of Long Shadows, but it seems that your players were simply "ready for anything," as they say. Even if you buffed it up, they probably would have made short work of the encounter.
I can't say how many times my best laid plans were undone by the careful execution of the players' strategy. What I thought would be a huge fight would turn into a brilliantly-thought out peace negotiation (with two titans!) or a quick romp with the help of the right spells being prepared for the day.
Creative Director
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The mother worm's one of those bad guys who's supposed to LOOK awesome and tough, but against a well-prepared party, it shouldn't pose too much of a problem. And therefore, the PCs get to actually FEEL high level when they take it down without much worry.
That said, it IS doing a 10 point power attack. If it's missing a lot, switching down its power attacks should help it out. And agaisnt a party that's NOT ready for it, the prospect of being hit by up to 8 DC 41 Fortitude saves to resist paralysis each round is pretty daunting, even for a high level party.
The party in my campaign actually had quite a hard time with the Mother Worm. The first thing the Worm did was take out the party's cleric, and after that things started going downhill from there. All the party except one dropped the paralysis, and it took some quick thinking to get them all to safety.
They were quite shaken up by the experience, and decided to take a different approach. The sorceror used the ghostform spell to fly inside the Mother Worm's stomach and find the key, then used a combination of forcecage, disintegrate, energy immunity (acid), and dimension door to snag the key and get out alive. I took a bit to look over the descriptions and couldn't find any immediate reasons why it shouldn't work, so I let them do it. Needless to say, an immobile cube of force suddenly appearing in the middle of the Mother Worm's stomach had a messy result.
The mother worm's one of those bad guys who's supposed to LOOK awesome and tough, but against a well-prepared party, it shouldn't pose too much of a problem. And therefore, the PCs get to actually FEEL high level when they take it down without much worry.
That said, it IS doing a 10 point power attack. If it's missing a lot, switching down its power attacks should help it out. And agaisnt a party that's NOT ready for it, the prospect of being hit by up to 8 DC 41 Fortitude saves to resist paralysis each round is pretty daunting, even for a high level party.
Okay I'm glad to know it's not entirely accidental.
I ended up having it not power attack at all, since otherwise it needed a natural 20 to hit. It ended up doing 1-6+16 per hit, I think, and when you have DR 15/evil, that's not much. I think the quote of the evening was "I've never felt so safe with so few hit points."
And yes, if the cleric or someone else didn't have freedom of movement to hand out, they would've been TPK'ed, no doubt. Not even the raging barbarian could make a DC 41 Fort save without a natural 20. I guess preparedness makes all the difference, in this case.
Wasn't that easy for us. Negotiations with the Hill Giant King failed and we had a big pitched battle that used up quite a few of our spells, then we rushed into the Mother Carrion room and were surprised. Two of our spellcasters were paralyzed right off the bat, and one was wearing the ring of invisibility so nobody could find and heal/unfreeze him! Our frontline warrior took 210 points of physical damage in one round. It's a testament to his preparation and, er, good career choices that he was still standing after that. Even my berserker, with the highest Fort saves in the party, was paralyzed and shredded by the third combat round. Those DCs are insanely high.
We are using variant rules though, so it's possible the GM beefed up the encounters somewhat.
As the party's 'tank,' I got paralyzed first attack in, then the cleric put me in a prismatic sphere and we sat there while the arcane trickster and archmage danced outside of its range and lesser orbed it to death.
With some highly mobile ranged attackers it seems to be eminently killable.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6
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Okay I'm glad to know it's not entirely accidental.
I ended up having it not power attack at all, since otherwise it needed a natural 20 to hit. It ended up doing 1-6+16 per hit, I think, and when you have DR 15/evil, that's not much. I think the quote of the evening was "I've never felt so safe with so few hit points."
Question - are you using the PH errata? Righteous might caps at DR 9 now, not 15 (I suppose there might be some shapechange targets that have DR 15/evil, but the one that leaps to mind is 10/evil)
Russ