You misunderstood how the intellect devourers ability works, the 3d6 does not reduce your intelligence at all, it only does anything if the 3d6 is higher than the targets intelligence, if they roll less, nothing happens.
As far as shadows go, if you put a low level party in a field of magical darkness they can't dispel, then that's on you as the DM not the monster. Also as a fun fact that I looked up, a shadow can't see in magical darkness either so unless it uses it's bonus action to hide every round before attacking (which it could fail with a bad roll) it would only get a normal attack roll against the party and the party can attack normally against it. Blinded creature (rolls with disadvantage) attacks a blinded target (rolls with advantage) equals a normal roll. As for the intellect devourer, I agree that it is a deadly opponent. I've found that these creatures and mind flayers are about the only creatures that can reliable get at least one of the party members killed in combat. However one way for the DM to deal with this if you don't want to kill any of the players is to read the lore in the monster manual for the intellect devourer. These creatures prefer to target enemies with the highest intelligence first over the lower intelligence characters. This means the wizard in the party would be making the intelligence saves (which they would be more likely to succeed at) while the barbarian is free to wail on the enemy until it dies or targets them at of desperation. The lower your INT stat is the more deadly these enemies are, but it also makes them less likely to target you in the first place. The only other comment I have for this video is the way you go on and react to how deadly these monsters are makes me think you disprove of killing off of PCs all together, which I would disagree with. Not to say that I think DMs should kill PCs at every opportunity. I defensively don't think that a PC death should become a common thing at the table, however I do think it should happen from time to time. If the threat of dying isn't on the table the game becomes stall and boring. if anything this list shows me how under-powered some of the higher CR monsters are.
Will-O-Wisps could just "delete" death save successes and if the character doesn't have positive saves you get a fail instead. So no instakill and still quite hard
As a new DM, I found the rust monster and used 2 of them on a lvl 4 party. Long story short, I had to nerf them on the fly or it would have ended badly. Luckily, they had a druid who had no metal armor or weapon and a wizard, or even with the nerf...
I'm about to use willow wisps as a monster ahead of and together with a Hag. But I'm changing the ability to a charm effect. "You are charmed and use your turn to follow the wisp" is super scary and interesting, and gets the same "oh shit" out of the party, while still being fun
Since it's a bonus action, and an attack within 5ft is an auto crit while the target is unconscious, and a crit is an automatic 2 failed death saves on a dying target, this change is functionally making almost no difference at all as far as being a one-turn kill if the wisp is actually motivated to consume life. Does mean it needs to use its whole action economy, though.
I mean i get the point with the quicklings, but the whole story with those creatures is that they never intent to kill their opponent. They love to bully and annoy people, and give them nasty cuts. But they run away after. When facing them its never a direct fight, more like a hide and seek game. Or a game of tag. So yea they are strong but they'll never tpk the party.
Thanks for the video I really liked it But I disagree on your claims about the will o’ wisp Let say a character is down to 0 and the monster is not will o’ wisp but it is within 5 ft and it attack the downed character , it can easily kill him too , by the raw rules (advantage to hit , automatic critical…) So the will o’ wisp ability is not as strong as you made it. The will o’ wisp have ridiculous resistance and AC and it can be invisible, this is what’s make it dangerous.
The funny thing about the intellect devourer is it doesn't even say how you fix it if you lose your intelligence. Every other monster with a similar effect says specific conditions, such as end of long rest or Lesser/Greater restoration, but the only thing in intellect devourer is you are stunned until you regain 1 point of intelligence. But how do you do that? I'm pretty sure when I had a Potato PC ( he had 0 Int, so basically a vegetable) I made ita Greater Restoration, but I find it so funny that technically there's no real way to fix it other than getting like a level up Ability Improvement or a Headband of Intellect.
Greater Restoration do help you regain a lost ability score, but how in the Far Realm, The Nine Hell or the Abyss that lv 2 party can get their hand on that spell?
Parties that do not assess the situation and go "We need to drag this outside" or "Cleric, cast Radiant spells on it" or have the Paladin Smite it ... they have 16 HP ... and again ... that's 2 turns of a caster doing Magic Missile...if there's 4 people ... you can likely get flanking on it and take it down super quick... if you threw 2 of these at the party? That's a Hard Encounter ... not Medium... 1 is Easy. If you're War-Gaming? And Focus Fire down each person and alpha strike with even kobolds... yeah ... EVERYTHING is Deadly at every level.
The video is about to remind DMs to read the monster statblock carefully before using them, not just “Oh, this is a 1/2 CR creature, let’s throw 2 of this at my lv 1 party.” and realized what they have unleashed while the battle is happening. A shadow alone can potentially and very likely to one shot a lv 1 character, especially with a surprise round since they live in darkness, moving silently and Perception checks against them have disadvantage if they don’t bring torches. And yes, focus fire is a thing in real life, even animals like wolves, hyena or lions know this thing. And your kobold example is a terrible one, they have Pack Tactics built within their nature, of course they will gang up on 1 person
But the encounter building rules don't give a lot of guidance or warning to that point. And, there's even some officially published adventures that will throw these things at a party at low level. I think there's even more than one official module that has an encounter with multiple Shadows pretty early on, and the fact they're CR 1/2 signals even harder that they're intended to be encountered in groups. Which, just to be clear, a single Shadow in an encounter actually isn't so bad, since the chances of draining 8 of more Str is pretty unlikely and much easier to avoid, but they're never handled that way in printed content, so hard for a new DM to come upon that understanding. The perfect way to use a Shadow that can even work at low level is to have an antagonist using them on captured civilians to try to build an army, with the adventurers trying to stop them. NPC lives are a great way to put stakes and a time crunch on a situation without directly threatening to destroy the player characters. Honestly, you can have a whole dungeon filled with Shadows for its main thematic as long as they're limited to one per encounter and there's a few opportunities for short rests. They're just terrible in groups.
honestly I've started to just choose monsters that look cool and make sense for the adventure regardless of CR, and just monkey with the stat blocks to balance as needed (haha "monkey", get it?)
Yes, It sucks that DM have tools technically within the rules to handle those players that also are technically within the rules. These are deliberately misplaced to handle munchkins and other min/ maxer's. Yes, a DM could just alter anything but that would be using DM fiat which only justifies these game fun suckers.
That ??? is a Will-o'-Wisp ... and it's CR 2 ... not CR 1.... REALLY need to do your homework on these... But again ... 22 HP... you'd LIKELY only throw ONE of these at a party with it being CR 2 .... If you did more than one... again ... Bad DM'ing. Caster can do around 9-14 damage reliably with Magic Missile against things that seem 'op' because it's Force Damage. "Wizards of the Coast ... I'm going to offer my party a CR 1 fight" ... It's CR 2... Come on man.
And again ... if you throw an Intellect Devourer at a lvl 1 party? Stop DM'ing ... That's not even close to being balanced unless they SURPRISE one and can have all 4 people attack it and get it low ... in which case it'll probably try and run away. If you're playing them CORRECTLY, they would Not Target The Caster in the group ... they'd target the Fighter or Barbarian ... who doesn't have proficiency in Intellect... Since they just Smash Things... Brute Force and whatnot ... 3d6 will likely 1-hit their Intelligence score into 0 in 1-2 turns... But it cannot Nuke their Intellect and then body possess them in the same turn ... lol. A caster using One 2nd level spell slot can cast Magic Missile, 4 missiles ... 4d4+4... And this is assuming that they wouldn't just use something like Aganazzar’s Scorcher or Scorching Ray. The monster isn't as Threatening as you're making it seem unless you threw 1-3 of these at a party .... and they'd have to be Level 3 for it to be HARD ... You're scarin' people just for the views... Come on man ...
You misunderstood how the intellect devourers ability works, the 3d6 does not reduce your intelligence at all, it only does anything if the 3d6 is higher than the targets intelligence, if they roll less, nothing happens.
As far as shadows go, if you put a low level party in a field of magical darkness they can't dispel, then that's on you as the DM not the monster. Also as a fun fact that I looked up, a shadow can't see in magical darkness either so unless it uses it's bonus action to hide every round before attacking (which it could fail with a bad roll) it would only get a normal attack roll against the party and the party can attack normally against it. Blinded creature (rolls with disadvantage) attacks a blinded target (rolls with advantage) equals a normal roll.
As for the intellect devourer, I agree that it is a deadly opponent. I've found that these creatures and mind flayers are about the only creatures that can reliable get at least one of the party members killed in combat. However one way for the DM to deal with this if you don't want to kill any of the players is to read the lore in the monster manual for the intellect devourer.
These creatures prefer to target enemies with the highest intelligence first over the lower intelligence characters. This means the wizard in the party would be making the intelligence saves (which they would be more likely to succeed at) while the barbarian is free to wail on the enemy until it dies or targets them at of desperation. The lower your INT stat is the more deadly these enemies are, but it also makes them less likely to target you in the first place.
The only other comment I have for this video is the way you go on and react to how deadly these monsters are makes me think you disprove of killing off of PCs all together, which I would disagree with. Not to say that I think DMs should kill PCs at every opportunity. I defensively don't think that a PC death should become a common thing at the table, however I do think it should happen from time to time. If the threat of dying isn't on the table the game becomes stall and boring. if anything this list shows me how under-powered some of the higher CR monsters are.
That moment when you see this in your DM's watch history. 0.0
Oh nooooo
Man, just found you through instagram and I immediately had to sub! Looking forward for your fun content~
Thank you so much!
Will-O-Wisps could just "delete" death save successes and if the character doesn't have positive saves you get a fail instead. So no instakill and still quite hard
Hey what about make a subclass tier list per class?? Could be fun
I like that idea!
Amazing content, as always! Thank you so much for the effort you put in these videos :)
As a new DM, I found the rust monster and used 2 of them on a lvl 4 party. Long story short, I had to nerf them on the fly or it would have ended badly. Luckily, they had a druid who had no metal armor or weapon and a wizard, or even with the nerf...
I'm about to use willow wisps as a monster ahead of and together with a Hag. But I'm changing the ability to a charm effect.
"You are charmed and use your turn to follow the wisp" is super scary and interesting, and gets the same "oh shit" out of the party, while still being fun
For the will o whisps, I would just make the player mark in one death saving throw.
Since it's a bonus action, and an attack within 5ft is an auto crit while the target is unconscious, and a crit is an automatic 2 failed death saves on a dying target, this change is functionally making almost no difference at all as far as being a one-turn kill if the wisp is actually motivated to consume life. Does mean it needs to use its whole action economy, though.
Quickling... meet Magic Missle ... 1 cast.. Boom. Dead.... Next? ...
Why is that a HUGE threat? XD
I was just thinking I’d like to see a video like this! Great job with it!
happy to provide then!
I mean i get the point with the quicklings, but the whole story with those creatures is that they never intent to kill their opponent. They love to bully and annoy people, and give them nasty cuts. But they run away after. When facing them its never a direct fight, more like a hide and seek game. Or a game of tag. So yea they are strong but they'll never tpk the party.
will'o wisps and intelect devourers are built to be powerfull minons, and usualy wont attack alone anyways.
Still deadly tho
Thanks for the video I really liked it
But I disagree on your claims about the will o’ wisp
Let say a character is down to 0 and the monster is not will o’ wisp but it is within 5 ft and it attack the downed character , it can easily kill him too , by the raw rules (advantage to hit , automatic critical…)
So the will o’ wisp ability is not as strong as you made it.
The will o’ wisp have ridiculous resistance and AC and it can be invisible, this is what’s make it dangerous.
I feel like a trio of quicklings could kill my level 9 party. Welp let's see how they handle it
Technically yea, but quicklings dont kill their target.
I love the quickling so much
I've got a 10 on the subscribe roll. I guess, if it was a death save, but wait, my character has a gambler's blade +3 😂😂😂
"use shadows carefully" lol my level 3 group fought 5 while injured and 3 out of 5 of us had 10 or less STR
I love your insta content, happy to have found your RUclips ❤
Glad you do!
May I suggest timestamps? will make finding your stuff easier...
Timestamps are now in the description of the video :)
The funny thing about the intellect devourer is it doesn't even say how you fix it if you lose your intelligence. Every other monster with a similar effect says specific conditions, such as end of long rest or Lesser/Greater restoration, but the only thing in intellect devourer is you are stunned until you regain 1 point of intelligence. But how do you do that?
I'm pretty sure when I had a Potato PC ( he had 0 Int, so basically a vegetable) I made ita Greater Restoration, but I find it so funny that technically there's no real way to fix it other than getting like a level up Ability Improvement or a Headband of Intellect.
I suppose the consequences of failing both the INT save and the 3d6 is a new sidequest, and a suspicious carry-on.
Greater Restoration do help you regain a lost ability score, but how in the Far Realm, The Nine Hell or the Abyss that lv 2 party can get their hand on that spell?
Parties that do not assess the situation and go "We need to drag this outside" or "Cleric, cast Radiant spells on it" or have the Paladin Smite it ... they have 16 HP ... and again ... that's 2 turns of a caster doing Magic Missile...if there's 4 people ... you can likely get flanking on it and take it down super quick...
if you threw 2 of these at the party? That's a Hard Encounter ... not Medium... 1 is Easy.
If you're War-Gaming? And Focus Fire down each person and alpha strike with even kobolds... yeah ... EVERYTHING is Deadly at every level.
The video is about to remind DMs to read the monster statblock carefully before using them, not just “Oh, this is a 1/2 CR creature, let’s throw 2 of this at my lv 1 party.” and realized what they have unleashed while the battle is happening. A shadow alone can potentially and very likely to one shot a lv 1 character, especially with a surprise round since they live in darkness, moving silently and Perception checks against them have disadvantage if they don’t bring torches.
And yes, focus fire is a thing in real life, even animals like wolves, hyena or lions know this thing. And your kobold example is a terrible one, they have Pack Tactics built within their nature, of course they will gang up on 1 person
I feel like most of these should be used as low cr minions for a boss or later dungeon for higher level characters
They aren't for low level players, they are low cr indicating they must be in a group for higher level characters
But the encounter building rules don't give a lot of guidance or warning to that point. And, there's even some officially published adventures that will throw these things at a party at low level. I think there's even more than one official module that has an encounter with multiple Shadows pretty early on, and the fact they're CR 1/2 signals even harder that they're intended to be encountered in groups. Which, just to be clear, a single Shadow in an encounter actually isn't so bad, since the chances of draining 8 of more Str is pretty unlikely and much easier to avoid, but they're never handled that way in printed content, so hard for a new DM to come upon that understanding.
The perfect way to use a Shadow that can even work at low level is to have an antagonist using them on captured civilians to try to build an army, with the adventurers trying to stop them. NPC lives are a great way to put stakes and a time crunch on a situation without directly threatening to destroy the player characters. Honestly, you can have a whole dungeon filled with Shadows for its main thematic as long as they're limited to one per encounter and there's a few opportunities for short rests. They're just terrible in groups.
well, my roll was a 19.... close enough, you will get my abo
honestly I've started to just choose monsters that look cool and make sense for the adventure regardless of CR, and just monkey with the stat blocks to balance as needed (haha "monkey", get it?)
hahaha x)
Yes, It sucks that DM have tools technically within the rules to handle those players that also are technically within the rules. These are deliberately misplaced to handle munchkins and other min/ maxer's.
Yes, a DM could just alter anything but that would be using DM fiat which only justifies these game fun suckers.
4:16 I checked and got a nat 1
I did say 100% of the time 5% of the time ;)
Hey watch this *pulls out Frozen sick random encounter table* young rhemoraz... CR 7.... lvl 2 party... enough damage to one shot any lvl 2 character
I gave my lvl5 party a Run for the money with 10 quicklings
did they survive ?
@@MonkeyDM 3 surived and the other two roll god on the death safes
I like y’a accent where u from
French, lived in canada and now in Romania :)
That ??? is a Will-o'-Wisp ... and it's CR 2 ... not CR 1.... REALLY need to do your homework on these...
But again ... 22 HP... you'd LIKELY only throw ONE of these at a party with it being CR 2 .... If you did more than one... again ... Bad DM'ing.
Caster can do around 9-14 damage reliably with Magic Missile against things that seem 'op' because it's Force Damage.
"Wizards of the Coast ... I'm going to offer my party a CR 1 fight" ... It's CR 2... Come on man.
What? Monsters can kill adventurers? Nonsense... delete them from the database... Who likes to be challenged in a fantasy game, right? 😄
And again ... if you throw an Intellect Devourer at a lvl 1 party? Stop DM'ing ...
That's not even close to being balanced unless they SURPRISE one and can have all 4 people attack it and get it low ... in which case it'll probably try and run away.
If you're playing them CORRECTLY, they would Not Target The Caster in the group ... they'd target the Fighter or Barbarian ... who doesn't have proficiency in Intellect... Since they just Smash Things... Brute Force and whatnot ... 3d6 will likely 1-hit their Intelligence score into 0 in 1-2 turns...
But it cannot Nuke their Intellect and then body possess them in the same turn ... lol.
A caster using One 2nd level spell slot can cast Magic Missile, 4 missiles ... 4d4+4... And this is assuming that they wouldn't just use something like Aganazzar’s Scorcher or Scorching Ray.
The monster isn't as Threatening as you're making it seem unless you threw 1-3 of these at a party .... and they'd have to be Level 3 for it to be HARD ...
You're scarin' people just for the views... Come on man ...