Testing Tiamat

[Dork_Forge]

Well, COP is "One-word answer or short phrase if one-word answer would be misleading". The usual question battery could be e.g.:
- What is the strongest enemy we shall face on the coming day?
- What is their most troublesome immunity to weapon users? [E.g. nonmagical weapon damage immunity]
- [Optionally go through all elements] Are they immune to [Element]?
- Are they immune to magic spells of some level?
- [If yes] What is the lowest spell level that works on them? ["None" would imply a Golem-type total magic immunity while otherwise you could figure out the level of spells that works here]
- What other immunity of note do they have?
- What is their most dangerous attack?
- What is the strongest spell they can cast?

You could formulate many of those in a way that works with Commune:
- Is the strongest enemy we shall fight on [day X] immune to X?

Go through all important immunities and resistances. Then "Can they cast spells?", "Do they have area of effect damage?", etc. can be used to gain further information. As long as you can identify the most powerful enemy, this is applicable to most types of boss-level encounters. Of course, you can adjust questions on the fly depending on enemy AC. Between 6 Portents, there's a reasonable chance of getting enough for 3-4 castings of COP which is 15-20 questions.

3-4 castings in a single day..? So how long actually is the prep period for this as you have:

-At least one day dedicated to information gathering

-Multiple days dedicated to summoning, binding and simulacrum creation (to assume a fresh Simulacrum casting the spell in the immediate days before hand is preferable)

on COP and Commune: Both spells also say that their sources don't necessarily know the answers to the questions, so I think the following information is a reasonable gathering:

-Her Immunities

-That she has Legendary Resistance

-That she is a spellcaster, but not her spell

-That her tail is her most powerful attack

-She has some degree of magical immunity, but not the full extent of that immunity (advantage on saves and assuming that anything below 4th is useless is safe I think)

I don't see the short phrase line of COP to be carte blanche to just ask none one word questions, and the exact details of a god that has been locked up for so long that differs from her children significantly are probably not known to the majority of creatures you'd be talking to.

EDIT: I rolled the-day-before Portents in the roll thread. 1 and 7 guarantee Planar Bindings and 11-19 guarantee 4 successful Contact Other Planes so I could ask 20 questions. Further, I can ritualize Commune on the last day and this day so there's 6 accurate Commune questions available.

EDIT#2: Preliminary draft of the character sheets done minus equipment. PHB only is making some buffing issues more apparent since the spell lists of especially Druids and Clerics are much more limited in a PHB only settings but it seems workable, if a bit rough. I'm still pondering few options for the Bard (Counterspell vs. Wall of Force) and some Druid/Cleric choices as well as how to apply the rest of the long term buffs and how many slots to put into buffing in general, but that's largely whatever level. I've probably put some useless spells on the lists and forgotten some of the essential ones: this is the issue with doing stuff out of memory and not developing character over a campaign (FWIW I've used some pre-existing spell lists as a blueprint but aside from the Swords Bard and the Diviner, I haven't played these exact subclasses with this kind of party on this level so the needs are a bit different and thus the party dynamics change too).

As we are this far in I'll most likely just allow the Simulacrum to regain the portents, but the RAI behind Simulacrum not regaining resources would push me to say it's basically disposable in any game I actually ran. So I'm currently torn.

Thanks for doing this.

At level 14 I think the strongest party still has to have at least one Fighter in it--Tiamat is vulnerable to archmages, making her a bad strategic threat from a narrative perspective, but her magic immunity does make things hard for lesser mages with fewer spell slots.

I agree with a true martial being a necessity. From a narrative perspective I see her threat being a mixture of nullifying the might of tha mjority (armies are worthless, most mages are worthless) whilst unifying all evil dragons into an army.

My BOTE says a Battlemaster 11/Forge Cleric 1/Rogue 2 Sharpshooter Crossbow Expert Dex 20 human is an ideal Simulacrum template for fighting Tiamat. (Save Action Surge and maneuver dice until near the end, to finish her off.) Make yourself a Heavy Crossbow +1. Plan to finish each turn 150' to 250'ish from Tiamat. Take turns concentrating on Bless.

The other three PCs can be wizards (Diviner 13/Forge Cleric 1) or shepherd druid. Wizard has the simplest strategy: stay out of the fight using a Phantom Steed while your Simulacrum of the fighter (also on a Phantom Steed) does the fighting and the Wizard concentrates on Fly VI (fighter + three fighter Simulacra, although until a Fighters' Phantom Steed dies or Tiamat attempts to flee the Fighters will not reveal that they can in fact fly 120' per round), or Bless II, or if there's a third wizard Greater Invisibility for advantage. (Or cast Fog Cloud to grant advantage to all three Fighters, if the DM is running RAW on heavy obscurement--oddly, Tiamat has no blindsight, not even the standard draconic 120' blindsight.) If there's a Shepherd Druid instead of a third wizard he can send waves of conjured animals at Tiamat, depending on what the DM declares shows up.

That's my BOTE. Not sure if I want to roll it out in detail because it seems obvious that it will succeed, since Simulacrum is such a broken spell and RAW on unseen ranged attackers is so abusable, and Tiamat doesn't have any counterplay available. Even if the DM rules that "start at 60'" means the PCs start in Fireball Formation, Contingency (Dimension Door) or Scatter from the wizard with the highest initiative should solve the problem reasonably well--as long as at least three of the fighters survive round one and retain Fly, she's toast eventually--her regen rate can't keep up with the ~45 DPR that three Fighters will inflict, not even counting superiority dice and Action Surge and possible advantage from visual effects like Fog Cloud or Greater Invisibly.

Sorry I'm unfamiliar with the term BOTE, can you please explain?

I assume the minimum range you're looking to maintain at all times is going to be 125ft then?

I'm not sure how well this stratgey would work in practice, I think the Simulacrums will go down very quickly and as DPR drops things heavily shift into Tiamat's favour.

The problem is staying out of her range is a tall order, since she can dash for 240ft a round and some of her breath weapons can reach an additional 120ft. She can effectively fly up over 400 ft range when needed to take a break, her potential movement and range actually give her great pursuit/skirmishing in a kiting scenario, with her attacks being devastating enough that the additional help will drop off fairly quickly.

Add in a few Planar Bound air elementals or whatever if you've got them just to constrain her movement and give her targets for her breath weapons and the illusion of progress.

DM rulings will affect the details of how the fight plays out, but I think they won't change the outcome: not more than five minutes after the fight starts, Tiamat dies. That doesn't make her a weak opponent for a level 14 party (clearly we are taking extraordinary measures to defeat her, and the party will feel they were challenged even if they win) but it still leaves her far weaker than Cthulhu or Gobogeg or Hastur, not strong enough to fulfill her place in the narrative as a threat great enough to unify everyone against her including liches and archmages.

What is the purpose of the Air Elementals sorry? Is this meant to be their Whirlwind effect? They can't grapple her and it's impossible for her to fail a Whirlwind save.

I think what needs to be kept in perspective here is a couple things but I'll lead with what I think may be most pertinent to you:

-She is not the most powerful god, the fact that she can appear on the material plane reinforces this. Her threat to the world comes from her being a powerful creature that is difficult to kill, whilst also uniting evil dragons into an army that could easily conquer nations.

-The reality of a lot of these attempts is that 14th level party: The actual PCs + constructs + small horder-large army of summons. This is probably a table difference but I don't think most parties are rolling like that at those levels. Heck a lot of this boils down to 'party with at least one high level Wizard' where Wizard is probably the least played class that I see personally. Whilst to some degree a Wizard could be replaced by something else, a lot of the problems come from the sheer amount of spells they have the potential to stack up in a vacuum.

I'm interested in the turn out for the test, I'm not certain on the outcome but at the moment I lean on the Tiamat side unless the dice heavily fall to oppose that.