3.5 was edition I played the most. It was a reason why I quit RPGs for nearly a decade because I hated it so much.
Every time I see another meme about how amazing 3.5 Tarrasque is, I remmember how amogn actual 3.5 players Tarrasque was the biggest joke. It was always brought up as definite proof designers have no idea how to make good monster. It was laughably easy to beat. A wizard could casually solo it, the same abilities people now miss in 3.5 amounted to ribbons. It was a laughingstock, forums had 100+ pages discussions how to fix it and general consensus was it’;s beyond saving. It was first proof in 3.5 if you cannot use magic you’re only good to roll over and die.
I honestly don’t know if everyone claiming 3.5 Tarrasque is such a horrifying monster are trying to rewrite history or unintentionally proving what a broken, unplayable pile of garbage 3.5 was, if it’s biggest punching bag is actually dangerous in a different, better designed game.
i can also confirm that the tarrasque was pretty universally clowned on for being easy in 3.5e. That discussion is basically what drove the whole “town built around the tarrasque” idea on the wizard forums and enworld. That said, it’s probably not as bad as the 5e tarrasque by comparison
the whole “town built around the tarrasque” idea
The what?
in 3e, the tarrasque had regeneration, and couldnt die from negative HP. So the idea of building a town that “farmed” an unconscious tarrasque for its meat/bones/whatever was a popular thought experiment for a setting back in the day. IIRC there was also someone who took the idea and published it as an actual book at some point too (which honestly felt kinda scummy to me, since it was basically a big community project/collaboration)
Could you give examples? I never heard of it being easy to beat, and I would love a laugh at it being easily handled
The big one was its complete lack of mobility abilities or ranged attacks, so a party with overland flight could attack it pretty much with impunity. Iirc that was most commonly paired with shrinking a bunch of boulders, carrying them up with you, then dropping them right as the shrinking spell expired. This is all from memory 15 years ago though so details could be a bit sketchy.
the usual go to back in the day was to drown it, because it wasnt immune to that in any way. Simply gate it to the plane of water. There was a number of other work arounds like that too.
Killing it by banishing it to another dimension of reality sounds like the epic, high level stuff the Terrasque was made for
i mean, there were plenty of other ways, including things you could do at lower level, that was just the common go to because it required a single high level spell, and usually you fought big T at high level.
Yeah, I ran campaigns from first through 3.5, never really played 4th or 5th. I’m curious how 3.5 tarrasque is easy to beat with anything other than broken munchkin builds from conflicting source materials that no sane DM would allow, or would be reserved for epic level campaigns. Like sure, when you get to a point where you can casually cast things like hellball, then things like the tarrasque might be easy. But at that point you will be doing the tango with the outer realm creatures and Demi gods.
My personal favorite:
A 9th level druid (any druid) flies 40ft in the air and upcasts one of their summon animals spells to summon 8 giant owls, then makes them fall prone.
3.5 falling damage was both clear cut and bonkers. Your Owl MIRV would do an average of 679 damage.
Not munchkin, not a special build, just the base rules and a default druid. It’s even easy to write off thematically as the owls kamikaze dive bombing it instead of just falling!
The 3.5 Tarrasque didn’t have the 5.0 damage resistance to non-magic weapons, it has a flat 15 DR, which was the style at the time, but useless against the numbers falling damage mechanics would push out.
I think a good DM would say the summoned animals aren’t magic slaves and simply would not kill themselves doing this, but at the end of the day you could also just do this with large rocks so you might as well let them have kamikaze owls.
So it depends on the spell, but I think you are talking about summon nature’s ally. That allows you to give instructions to creatures who can understand, and they will fight to the best of their ability, but as a DM I wouldn’t interpret the spell as written to include suicide.
But even then, a good DM doesn’t put a tarrasque into play and have it sit there and die. Once it realizes it is getting damaged and can’t retaliate, it can burrow from we whence it came, etc.
So I think most of the strategies involve weak roleplay from the DM, munchkin builds, liberties with the rules, or both.
Even then, actually killing the tarrasque requires a wish spell, which is not something that a 9th level druid can do.
Summoning animals to kill themselves does not sound like a thing a druid would do
in 3e, summon spells specifically conjured the spirits of creatures that couldnt “die” per se. They would desummon if they lost all their HP and reform later.
How do they manage an average of 679 damage?
First Aerial bombardment rules would probably give the Tarrasque a DC 15 Reflex save for half damage for each. Assuming it was a surprise at first the Tarrasque probably doesn’t get this so I’ll ignore it.
Second, a Giant owl’s likely only weigh like 140lbs by loose calculation, being a little over 4x the height of a snowy owl (so assuming 4 times equivalent weight and then cubed is 64kg which approximately equals 141lbs. It could be a little higher but its not breaking 200lbs) and requiring falling at least 20ft before they even start ranking damage by the srd 3.5 rules for items falling on players (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm). Assuming you meant 40ft over the Tarrasque, and allowing for 1d6 damage every 10ft past the point instead of the 20ft that’s implied to be required, the owls would deal 2d6 damage each at that height, requiring 20ft of falling to start incurring damage. Even without it that’s not 679 damage.
That’s pretty much 0 damage too, because 2d6 per owl - subtract the DR 15 of the tarrasque from each instance of damage - is 0 damage. Iirc there was a min 1 damage even for negative strength modifiers but DR superseded that. Even if I’m wrong that’s 1 damage per owl max.
Even if you went the 220ft up above the Tarrasque you’d need to hit maximum fall speed under the more polite 1d6/10ft rules, after falling 20ft, you’d end up with 20d6 each, the cap for fall damage. Which after DR is 440 damage.560 damage without DR.
Which actually isn’t that high up. I thought the Tarrasque was taller than 50ft, but its still a hell of a timed shot tbh. It assumes the Tarrasque doesn’t move for like 6 or 7 rounds, or moves in a straight line into the falling birds.
That doesn’t’ fix the weakness of a Tarrasque to some form of high impact drop damage, necessarily, just means that I’m suspicious the birds can pull it off.
Maybe birds aren’t good at math?
That’s fair. Neither is the Tarrasque.
I remember the go to strategy being to summon an Alip, an incorporeal undead that can drain strength without needing a save.
And in 3.5 STR 0 meant your body no longer had the strength to have your heart beat so you’d die with no save.
I think that’s still the case in 5e, there are just way less monsters with ability-draining attacks (shadows are the one most players have encountered, they can still be pretty deadly!)
Yeah but the problem is that there isn’t a list of what happens for each score, so people aren’t quite sure if it’s a monster specific condition. It does seem to match up with the old rules though, so I’d just default to that. STR and CON are instant death, DEX is total paralysis, the mentals are comas/nonresponsive.
I thought they were all instant death, though I can’t remember if I read it somewhere or just assumed it. Makes sense though:
- STR: too weak for your heart to beat, die
- CON: too frail and sickly to live, die
- DEX: too clumsy to survive, fall over and bang your head, die
- INT: too stupid to keep breathing, die
- WIS: too oblivious to survive, walk off a cliff, die
- CHA: too awkward and unlikable, stabbed like Caesar, die
I have WIS and CHA as “Go Completely Unresponsive” and “Personality Death” respectively.
In 5e it’s quite hard to find the rules for “stat reduced to zero”, however the only stat that causes instant death at zero is CON.
Given that stat drain isn’t that common in 5e I’d hope the effects are described as part of the ability, for instance for the shadow:
The target dies if this reduces its Strength to 0
I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was… textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was… completely what it was. It wasn’t well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.
3.5e just had some much room to explore. Yeah, some parts sucked or didn’t make sense, but I think that really led to some interesting characters and fun moments in games. I haven’t played 5e much precisely because it’s so smooth in comparison.
I think what they want is something to be a little afraid of. Yes, the beast as written is easy to kill for the creative but for some dorks it was scary because it existed.
The Tarrasque is a flawed creature in all editions. In case of 1e/2e, it’s not immune to being stunned or being paralyzed (e.g. Hold Person), giving the party a good chance to exploit its vulnerable period. Later editions have other flaws, most of which can be fixed by giving the Tarrasque a ranged attack (similar to Godzilla, etc.)
The flaws in 3.5e actually involve power scale. There’s combinations of abilities that are incredibly powerful, resulting in characters that are pre-planned rather than organically grown - and also meant that some classes were inherently better than others. At the same time, there were feat taxes that were essential for almost any character, which would be cutting into abilities that would be normal.
However, I’d be comparing 3.5e to Basic D&D. In this case, I’d most likely prefer 3.5e, simply because it’s more flexible compared to the rigid use of Basic’s weapons, but I instead skipped past that and went to both 4e and/or Pathfinder.
Eh, it’s a playable fight in 4e. The biggest flaw there is it’s not particularly exciting as an encounter.
I’ve only played 2, 3 and 3.5. Read the rules for 4 when it came out and was not impressed in the slightest, and neither was anyone else in my group. Haven’t even bothered with 5 except in the case of BG3 which uses it so I don’t know if it’s as simplified as 4 or if the simplicity was simply the video game format.
We never used a terrasque and it’s not like I read every monster manual cover to cover. I’d skim through, see a cool picture and if the description of it was cool enough, I’d use it. The terrasque didn’t pique my interest by its appearance so I never read anything else about it. I’m a huge fan of Modons though. Fuck yeah! Shapes!