I just finished running the end portion of Here There Be Monsters, and I had to skip the mob of fiendish baboons encounter because I couldn't figure out how to adjucate certain effects with it.
Can somebody please explain the whole mob anatomy to me? Can it be targeted by melee or ranged attacks? Do these target a specific creature or the mob as a whole? What about magic missile spells or spells that target individual targets? What about spells like colour spray? I think I'm just finding the text of this template a little confusing.
Basically I couldn't tell what effects imposed negative levels on the mob, and which effects just reduced its hit point pool.
Creative Director
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Think of mobs as swarms, but since there's less critters in a mob than a swarm, you can effectively whittle down a mob by killing single targets within it. A mob can certainly be targeted by ranged attacks; just do the damage as normal and subtract the hit points from the mob's total pool of hit points. This includes things like magic missile or scorching ray.
Spells like finger of death or color spray incapacitate creatures without doing hit point damage, and it's those that inflict negative levels on a mob.
Think of it this way: PCs can attack either the mob as a whole, or creatures within the mob. Their choice which. The mob as a whole disperses when it runs out of hit points, when it has negative levels equal to its hit dice, or when the number of creatures participating fall below the minimum threshold, as defined by the mob template.
If the PCs choose to target the mob as a whole, they deal damage to the big hit point value of the mob and they deal bonus damage with AoE attacks, but abilities like Cleave are not triggered and the mob immunities block abilities like Sneak Attack. The number of creatures still alive and their degrees of injury within the mob is undefined until the mob disperses.
If the PCs choose to target individual creatures within the mob, they can take them down one-by-one, eventually dispersing the mob but not unduly inconveniencing it until it is dispersed. PCs can Cleave, but the excess damage from Power Attack or Sneak Attack is wasted. The mob monkeys have no special immunities to anything, but deaths do not really affect the rest of the mob much.
I think James explanation makes sense, thanks! So basically anything that does hit point damage would subtract from the mob's pool of hit points, while anything that affects a certain number of hit dice of creatures would impose the negative levels.
Still, the 5d6 damage the mobs do is just nuts. No save, no attack roll, no resistance other than DR. I'm pretty sure this encounter would have resulted in a TPK, and since it wasn't exactly a mandatory encounter in the story, I removed it to speed along the adventure and save the party having to reroll new characters.
I think I'm prepared to run them in the future now though, thanks to the posters!