Any tips on running a beholder?

[MrStabby]

I am considering a beholder encounter for my party soon. They kind of look a bit underwhelming for their CR unless you build lethal circumstances, play them in a really frustrating way or face a party composition with little ranged capability. I am wondering how to beef up the beholder through terrain/playing smart but without sucking the fun out of the encounter.

So far I think terrain on the ground is important, partially for the lair action but also to make it harder for casters to get out of the anti-magic ray (Although I assume the effect is suppressed in the ray). I think it's of difficult terrain on the ground will make it a bit tougher.

In practice how good is the control element of the beholder? 3 ray attacks plus 3 legendary actions at (from memory) a70% chance should be roughly landing one control ray per PC each round. Is it particularly difficult to balance an encounter given the random selection of rays?

I can imagine a high initiative roll or some surprise could result in a LOT of damage very quickly from some of the rays.

On the other hand the beholder looks weak. It is fragile and vulnerable to a number of save spells due to no legendary resistance. With a poor initiative roll I could see a party easily taking a beholder down in one turn, or at least stopping it from taking an effective turn. Modest stats, modest HP, modest DC, little by way of resistance or immunity... I could see the encounter going really differently based on a couple of rolls or changes in party resources.

[hymer]

I don't know how much use this is, but to get your creative juices flowing: I had a beholder lair in a recent sandbox campaign. The PCs avoided it, so I never actually ran the encounter. The beholder's main defence was a vertical shaft (made in the rock with disintegrate, then polished smooth by minions), which was of the correct length to make sure that all eye rays could reach from one end to the other (120' range, IIRC). The entrance is at the bottom, and the beholder can move in and out at the top. So it will either be sure to have its cone of antimagic turned on down (stopping Fly spells and the like, and preventing spell attacks), or it would use its rays, and it could move into cover as needed. In the latter case, it looks with the antimagic eye towards the shaft, so any big AoE effect gets cancelled.
A few traps in the shaft: Blades, which even if they miss would cut a rope or light ladder, and a spray of poison, IIRC. Important they are nonmagical, so they work even in the big eye's effect. Adding in something interesting which only gets dangerous when cancelled was an idea, but I never thought of anything.
Some minions at the top can drop things onto advancing PCs, especially in case they drive the beholder away and the encounter is getting too straightforward.

The idea was basically that the players would need to plan this encounter, and bring along the right composition of PCs to fight here (perhaps after an initially failed attempt). Nonmagical ranged attacks would be key in dealing damage to the beholder, and a system to traverse the vertical shaft should be thought of. A length of chain and a grappling hook could be helpful. Light could also be a big issue.

[The Glyphstone]

I always imagine beholder lairs looking like crazed anthills - vertical and horizontal passages criss-crossing and honeycombing in every direction. Cover the 'floors' of the tunnels with debris and spikes to slow movement, take full advantage of its knowledge of the layout to spring ambushes or hit+run attacks.

[Unoriginal]

One thing to remember is that, while insane, Beholders are true tactical and strategic geniuses. With an Antimagic cone.


The Beholder is not going to engage the PCs in a room that isn't to its advantage. Namely, the best they can have is a relatively narrow room with a very high ceiling, a way to escape near said ceiling (or on it) that's easily reachable only with flight, and piles of heavy/sharp items or rocks within reach.

A Beholder will always try to get its antimagic cone on as many casters as possible, and will not engage in melee unless it's certain to win. Most PCs will try to spread out to avoid the cone, which makes them vulnerable to the beholder's rays raining on them.

If the PCs stay in the cone, the Beholder will use its Telekinesis ray to throw the heavy items -prepared in advance at them.

If the Beholder is wounded in any threatening capacity, like if it has less than 70% of its life, it will retreat.

EDIT:

And like others have said, have the ground be prepared to be difficult, to slow and limit the enemies.




And don't forgot the beholder's Lair Action. Grappling tentacles, ray-shooting eyes, and slippery terrains all make the encounter much more difficult, especially if it forces the casters in the antimagic zone and/or the martials outside of it.

[stoutstien]

The first thing is what personality does the boholder have and why are the players entering it's lair.
Beholders are insane egomaniac. Maybe it talk to it self, that's right other berry. Or maybe he only communicates with ballads.
I know you probably had questions on combat but beholders are great for roll playing encounters.

[Umbranar]

As I read the beholder in the books one thing is important: whatever the party plans, the beholder in its paranoia has thought of it and set appropriate counter measures.
The beholder will first attempt to have the minions deal with the party, maybe watching from cover or in hiding and maybe even helping said minions by using his antimagic cone or rays. He won't get near the big fighters and will attempt to pacify the casters with said antimagic cone. Always have an escape near, there must be a very compelling reason for the beholder to stay when things seem to go south for him and not to flee to live another day.

[Malifice]

It has anti magic and can fly.

Ensure you target archers and winged PCs first.

[dreast]

...They kind of look a bit underwhelming for their CR unless you build lethal circumstances, play them in a really frustrating way...


Um... yes. If you don’t want to do these two things, you don’t want to run a beholder encounter.

[Unoriginal]

Um... yes. If you don’t want to do these two things, you don’t want to run a beholder encounter.

Basically. Beholders don't play fair.

[Malifice]

I am considering a beholder encounter for my party soon. They kind of look a bit underwhelming for their CR unless you build lethal circumstances, play them in a really frustrating way or face a party composition with little ranged capability.

They're CR13. They're designed to be encountered by approx 4-5 9th level PCs.

I dont know what the XP Adventuring day budget is for 9th level PCs, but a single Beholder likely isnt the only thing they're expected to fight that day either.

Firstly, have the PCs sent to recover a MacGuffin from the Beholder.

Hook: As night falls in the Town the PCs are in, an Archmage approaches them and hires the PCs to recover a Beholders central eye as an important component for a ritual. He has discovered a new Potion that [once drunk] provides resistance to damage from spells and magical effects for 1 hour.

He plans on conducting the ritual at midnight that night ... in just 3 hours time! He had an eye previously, but it spoilt. He hires the PCs to recover him one from a lair he has found out about [using divination magic].

He offers the PCs teleportation magic to [and from] the lair, and 1 x dose of the anti-magic potion per PC if they succeed [plus any treasure they find]. He provides them with a 'Teleport foci'; all the PCs need to do to be teleported back, is push the red button on the foci, and it will teleport them back to town.

Canny PCs should deduce the Archmage is desperate [DC 15 insight] as the ritual is scheduled to occur that night. Time is of the essence, and a DC 20 Persuasion check convinces the Archmage to also agree to provide the PCs with 1 x Rare magic item of their choice if they succeed.

Lair: Make it vertical. The Beholder has a disintegration ray and can fly. Part of the challenge should be navigating vertical chambers and tunnels of the lair. Go nuts.

Encounters: Presuming 4-5 9th-10th level PCs:

Encounter 1: A [I]Charmed monster of your choice guards the lair. Make it a hard one [Average party Cr+4]. The PCs are fully tooled up and rested, so shouldnt have much difficulty. Hit them as soon as the Archmage teleports them in [they appear near the beast, and it's angry].

Encounter 2: 1 x Gauth (CR 6) and 5-6 Spectators (CR 3) in the lair somewhere.

Encounter 3: 3-4 Gauth (CR 6) as a single encounter (depending on how tooled up with magic items they are and how many PCs).

Encounter 4: Beholder in lair. Have the lair have a high ceiling and be over a room littered with 20' deep pits filled with Acid [5d10 acid damage] (odds are the PCs are magically flying). Use your AM cone to shut down flight, over said pits, and your TK ray to throw PCs into said pits.

The room should have some stalagmites/tites for cover. A 120' Circular room, with the entrance a strange organic sphincter like door covering a hole in the middle of the room leading down (it seals when the PCs enter, trapping them in the room. It can be forced open with a DC 20 Strength [athletics] check, or via being damaged [AC 15, 50 HP, Immunity to acid damage]. The room is organic in structure (dont ask why, just sounds cool).

Maybe have acid intermittently drip from the roof at randomly determined areas of the room every round on Initiative count 20 [winning initiative ties], dealing 3d10 acid damage [DC 15 Dex save for half] to nearby PCs. Have this in addtion to the Beholders lair actions.

In addition to whatever treasure you decide to give it, there is also a perfectly preserved statue of [???] in the room. The statue is really a petrified [???] who if freed via greater restoration, offers the PCs [an adventure hook, money, a reward, tries to kill them, whatever].

Should be a fun and memorable adventure.

[Amdy_vill]

my tip be ruthless. Beholders are paranoid. if any creature in the book would kill a downed party member it would be the Beholder

[MaxWilson]

Beholder + minions = lethal = fun.

For example, a beholder plus two dozen hobgoblins. Antimagic zone prevents easy Fireball clearance, hobgoblins add lots of ranged firepower to counter ranged-firepower parties, beholder provides tactical acumen and logistical support (disintegration ray) to justify plenty of advanced tactics (pit traps, caltrops, flanking movements, etc.) as appropriate, beholder eye rays provide nova strike opportunities when PCs make a positioning mistake like letting one guy get isolated.

Consider having the beholder bide it's time and Dodge most of the time while minions and legendary action eye beams do most of the killing.

Beholders without minions are incredibly gimmicky and weak (easily slain by e.g. a single Rogue under Greater Invisibility because no eye rays can affect what the beholder cannot see), but with minions to diversify their offense they become complicated to deal with, therefore fun.

Good minions might include goblins, werewolves, githyanki, neogi, quicklings, or kobolds. Anything where Fireball/etc. would normally be a good solution.

[Malifice]

For example, a beholder plus two dozen hobgoblins.

Going by your own methods of calculations Max, isnt this a deadly encounter for 20th level PCs?

More than 6 or so hobgoblins and we have to multiply the Beholders XP (and the goblins) by x 3.

[MaxWilson]

Going by your own methods of calculations Max, isnt this a deadly encounter for 20th level PCs?

More than 6 or so hobgoblins and we have to multiply the Beholders XP (and the goblins) by x 3.

I assume by "your own methods of calculation" you mean the DMG methods, since my own are somewhat different and this type of scenario with heterogeneous forces is precisely why I created them.

DMG methods evaluate 1 beholder + 24 hobgoblins at 49,600 XP; my method evaluates it as ((100)^(2/3)+24)^1.5*100 = 30736 XP (high Medium for 4 20th level PCs), i.e. 24 hobgoblins is approximately equivalent to a second beholder, which is nice because DMG rules also give 24 hobgoblins ~= 1 beholder when computed in isolation. That is, 24 hobgoblins as an encounter = 9600 XP, and 1 beholder as an encounter = 10,000 XP.

Note further that Xanathar's rules consider 1 beholder + 7 Githyankis to be a medium-difficulty fight for 4 17th level PCs.

The goal of interpolating my own method from the DMG tables was to give the same nice, "smooth" results as Xanathar's (so DMs are encouraged to make heterogeneous encounters with both strong and weak creatures in them, instead of always just using a uniform strength) but still be quantifiable like the DMG method and (unlike Xanathar's) still be something you could use with the DMG XP budget per day. I wanted something that will give results very similar to the DMG method for homogeneous encounters, but results similar to Xanathar's for heterogenous forces. I think it works out pretty nicely in the beholder + minions case, exactly as I hoped.

Anyway, Deadly encounters never stopped me before. Once of the first adventures of my first campaign culminated in a battle with three 3rd level PCs plus some borrowed retainers vs. what would have been a Deadly fight for 20th level PCs, IIRC 64,000ish XP worth of Umber Hulks and Neogi. (I had to make up my own Neogi stats because obviously 5E didn't have any yet.) Due to some careful planning and tactical preparation, including the initiative they took to tell the king and borrow the remants of his guard force for this battle, the PCs defeated the enemy in detail and got lots of XP. The players had a good time.

If you're trying to "balance" your encounters to guarantee that the players will always win--don't. It makes player decisions not matter and sucks all the dramatic tension out of the game. Don't do it.

[Malifice]

If you're trying to "balance" your encounters to guarantee that the players will always win--don't. It makes player decisions not matter and sucks all the dramatic tension out of the game. Don't do it.

Thats not how you balance encounters.

But OTOH throwing super deadly XP x 10 encounters at them all the time is tantamount to Fantasy Underground Vietnam. Your players all end up with PTSD and stop giving a **** about your campaigns (or their characters) knowing they'll likley suffer a TPK before 5th level, and will cycle through dozens of characters per year.

My games work off the pretext that the PCs are the protagonists, and are supposed to win. Be challenged yes, and entertained definately, but they're supposed to win.

I think we had a grant total of less than a dozen deaths in my recent 1st to 20th+ level 3 year weekly campaign, and of those deaths 10 were undone with Raise dead (we only permanently lost the one PC; a Gnome Wizard at 6th level). The closest they came to a TPK was a random encounter with an Ancient Green Dragon at 17th level, leaving only the Swashbuckler alive.

He used a Wish from a Luckblade to restore the Cleric back to life, and the two of them then had to sneak into the Dragons lair to recover the Diamonds needed to raise the rest of the party.

If your way works for you, go nuts man. It just sounds like a radically different game to what Ive been playing for 30 years now.

[MaxWilson]

Thats not how you balance encounters... My games work off the pretext that the PCs are the protagonists, and are supposed to win. Be challenged yes, and entertained definately, but they're supposed to win.

Interesting (but not surprising because I already know how you operate).

My social contract with the players is that they'll have interesting things happen to them, and that if the DM drops a challenge in their lap it will never be a hopeless one--the challenges are always solveable, and it's okay if you solve it in a way the DM didn't anticipate. But as for what actually happens, well, that's up to you. That's what the game is about: making choices and living with the consequences.

I think you prefer much, much slower games than I do. I'm a busy guy, with a lot of things going on in real life, and so when I run a game I like it when "the game" is something which takes place over the course of a single session, or at most two sessions with a week-long break in the middle, not something which takes three years and thousands of real time hours to conclude. Bringing your characters from one game (i.e. adventure) to the next game is fine, but if you want to bring a different PC to this game than the one you brought last game, that is also fine. (In sandboxy campaigns the boundaries between one "game" and the next are more fluid, but I still try to design interaction nodes within a sandbox to climax relatively quickly once the players engage with them.) My campaigns have a lot in common with OD&D as described here: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/3891/roleplaying-games/reactions-to-odd-the-scope-of-the-game


The idea that successful characters were destined for more things than dungeon-crawling was part and parcel of the game. There are rules in OD&D for stronghold construction, political assassination, the hiring of specialist tradesmen, baronial investments (in things like roads, religious edifices, and the like), assembling a naval force, and so forth.

And when you realize that this type of “realm management” play was an integral part of the original gameplay of D&D, then tables in which “40 – 400” goblins were capable of appearing begin to make sense: Sometimes you were a bunch of 1st level nobodies trying to root out the local goblin gang that had taken root in hills north of the village. And sometimes you were a band of nobles riding forth at the head of your host to wipe out the goblin army marching on your barony.

Now take a moment, if you will, and consider the type of game that arises when all of these elements are true: Some of the PCs have become the local nobles. Others are still lower level dungeon-delvers. And the entire world is developing and evolving as a result of their cumulative actions.

E.g. randomly-appearing armies of 30-300 orcs would fit perfectly well at my table, and you might engage them in personal combat or lead an army of your own against them, and the outcome is definitely not premeditated, and the table is open, and the cast of PCs on-screen at any given time is fluid.

I realize that you have totally different preferences and I'm happy that you and your players enjoy playing the way you like playing, which is the polar opposite of how I like playing.

[JackPhoenix]

Snip

So you don't actually run campaigns, you run one-shots. Explains much.

[Kane0]

Beholder's also have a sense of superiority and self-importance that matches their paranoia. They will *not* tolerate any other creature getting even close to their grandeur, and while they will often have minions and lackeys there is no such thing as an equal to a Beholder. They design their lairs to suit themselves and no other, lay plans with complete disregard for others except as tools, and will use and abuse all their abilities as they see fit in pursuit of their own goals. Playing fair is not what beholders are about.

So with that mindset in mind, some tips:

- Read the Beholder's lair effects. They can be brutal, especially the random eyes firing rays at the party to whittle them down before they even encounter the beholder proper.
- Beholder lairs are carved out in 3D, and they will have considered a great many things when planning it out. A beholder will not be cornered or caught out of position despite their slow speed
- Beholders are well known for being very observant, there is pretty much no chance of the party sneaking up on one. Punish them if they are stupid enough to try it.
- The Charm ray lasts an hour and is not broken by creatures other than the beholder attacking the target
- The Telekinetic ray is a handy way of separating the party or introducing them to hazards around the lair. Combine it with the antimagic cone to strand PCs in difficult positions
- If party members are exposed or isolated (especially trying to navigate the lair), you can be sure the Beholder will take advantage of it.
- Beholders will often have charmed or otherwise subjugated meatshields available, though it will not care about them in the slightest.

[MaxWilson]

So you don't actually run campaigns, you run one-shots. Explains much.

I think you're confusing campaigns and adventure paths. If you're trying to say that adventure paths are the only kind of campaigns there are, you're wrong. Maybe you're trying to say "your campaigns are not adventure paths***, and I Jack Phoenix only want to play adventure paths," and if so... [shrugs] Knock yourself out, I don't care how you play your game.

My campaigns are campaigns in the original, old school sense: after one adventure wraps up, you can take the same PC on additional adventures (sometimes in the same setting). There is no master plan driving everything that happens toward some final confrontation between PCs and the ultimate bad guys that will happen three real-time years(!) later. That's called an "adventure" and I try to make sure they wrap up quickly, although the consequences of a given adventure's ending may reverberate indefinitely.

Not everything takes place within the context of an adventure. Sandbox campaigns, as mentioned previously, still have many interaction nodes with a structure like a small adventure, although some sandbox sessions do not take place in interaction nodes--when players are proactively driving the story themselves. But I've found that players also like having the option to check into something where the DM is supplying a plot and a scenario structure, with some kind of beginning, climax, and end, and those are the things I call "adventures" and try to keep relatively contained.

But I do like one shots as well, especially for testing out new scenario structures. I've got an upcoming one based on Betrayal At House On the Hill which I'm excited about. The main difference I guess is that in a one-shot I tell you to create fresh PCs at high levels instead of coming up from first or third level the usual way, via adventuring or character tree advancement.

*** Adventure path (noun): an adventure which thinks it's a campaign, and drags on interminably without closure for months or years.

[Malifice]

E.g. randomly-appearing armies of 30-300 orcs would fit perfectly well at my table


The post you quoted suggests the exact opposite! That the game infers that PCs are supposed to hit high level, and have armies of their own at some point, when they deal with said threats.

[MaxWilson]

The post you quoted suggests the exact opposite! That the game infers that PCs are supposed to hit high level, and have armies of their own at some point, when they deal with said threats.

...That's not the opposite. That's the same.

Remember the 3rd level PCs against the 20th level Deadly threat? They survived partly because they borrowed 20-30 0th level guards from the king and each led a squad of them against the neogi ship. That plus the element of surprise, which let them defeat the enemy in detail, starting with the neogi wizard/captain.

It's the same engagement model as what the Alexandrian describes: lead NPCs against a military threat too big to handle in person. That is what bounded accuracy is all about, and the fact that it works properly is one of the better things about 5e. PCs are highly mobile special ops, but sometimes you need an actual army.