Creative Director
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What source are the demilich stats in Scarwall taken from?
Tome of Horrors III.
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.
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Difficult monsters are difficult for a reason. To be fair, your DM should have read the module in advance and known about this, along with seeing the side bar. If he knew how much you guys hated instant death effects, he could have toned parts down.
Blame the module all you want, but the ability to adjust encounters on the fly is up to the DM, not the book. No module works for every group.
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."
To be fair, I don't think that Eikl is claiming that he's sad because his character is dead and he has to make another. He is referring to a much more practical and real issue: if your character is dead, you don't get to play.
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.
Is it something that players occasionally have to live with, when dice, poor planning, or misfortune become involved in the game? Yes.
Should an encounter, particularly one tied directly into the plot (as opposed to the Raskova encounter in 7DttG), be intentionally written as an unavoidably lethal encounter? No.
I'm not saying this encounter is unavoidably lethal (I haven't read it in some time), but that is the crux of Eikl's argument.
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Creative Director
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Generally, we try to make sure that encounters aren't super deadly. For various reasons I'm not gonna go into here to avoid spoilers for folk who haven't read the adventure, this particular encounter is unusual in that regard; it's a TOUGH encounter, but the adventure itself is built to foreshadow and arm PCs with it. Yet it's still really tough, and that's why we put in a big sidebar to warn GMs about it; they know their players better than we do, after all, and should adjust as necessary.
pretty sure whoever wrote this encounter was just being a dick.I've been called worse...by my players.
Don't players say the sweetest things?
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Creative Director
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As the Eikl's DM I do have to voice a beef with the Demilich stat block as presented in the adventure. In both the epic level version and the ToH II version, there's a clause that "A potential victim protected by a death ward spell is not immune to trap the soul, but receives a +5 bonus on its Fortitude saving throw and is effective against the level loss on a successful save." At the time, I was just comparing the effect to the Trap the Soul spell (Conjuration [Summoning]) and I ruled that Death Ward had no effect.
I don't know if omitting that was intentional, but after Eikl got back from the gym, I ruled that it applied in this situation since it appears in both original sources. (side note: with that addition, the druid was basically immune to the demilich's soul trapping (couldn't fail the save except on a 1, and the Luck domain PFRPG cleric had a luck aura up, so even natural 1s weren't automatic failures)).
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.
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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.
Except, you know, his Wail of the Banshee effect. I'm pretty sure death wards and scarabs work against that. I'd expect said effect to kill more people than the one target/round Trap the Soul.
I do agree it is interesting Trap the Soul doesn't have the Death subtype, and that by removing the "+5 to fort saves against this with death protection up", it's actually making the demilich harder. My guess is the designers misread Trap the Soul as having the death subtype...that or they just did want him to be a killer. :D
I'm fine either way.
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Creative Director
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Death ward can certainly block the demilich's wail of the banshee, and will also block the negative levels that one gains if you make your save against the trap the soul effect. But we should have indicated that the entire effect is a death effect, since this effect does not duplicate the spell of the same name. The spell doesn't kill a character; you break the soul trap, the character emerges alive. The fact that the demilich version DOES destroy the victim's body in a way that is pretty much identical to that caused by destruction says to me that this version of the attack IS a death effect, and that it SHOULD be blocked by death ward. It's a case where something felt so obvious that it got omitted, unfortunately. It's certainly a case where the individual GM should step in and apply common sense to the encounter, I think...
Consider this official clarification for the ability: A demilich's trap the soul attack is a death effect.
Sorry for the thread necromancy,
But the new Pathfinder paladin (as compared to the 3.5 paladin) completely takes the threat out of the demi lich. Smite evil alone. Plus its low hitpoints still leave it vulnerable to a cleric's channel energy, save made or not.
I am running crimson throne with Pathfinder rules. The demilich battle was three rounds with one PC death out of six. The Cleric and Paladin were the only effective ones. If there was no paladin in the party, this encounter still would have proved challenging. Smite overriding DR is key. The level paladin required at this point of the AP makes the Demilich moot.
Sorry for the thread necromancy,
But the new Pathfinder paladin (as compared to the 3.5 paladin) completely takes the threat out of the demi lich. Smite evil alone. Plus its low hitpoints still leave it vulnerable to a cleric's channel energy, save made or not.
If you are using the Pathfinder rules (e.g. Paladin's smite evil, or Cleric's channel positive energy), you'll probably want to also use Pathfinder's Bestiary 3's version of the Demilich (e.g. channel resistance +5, and 142 HPs).