Beholder 'call for help' proposal to counter gas-'n-run cheese

[475513a]

As it is a couple of cloud spells makes clearing beholder lairs a bit too straightforward. Beholders may survive the stinky cloud by wandering out (thanks to SCS AI) but then they're usually 'near death' and dead in one arrow, a non-threat relative to how much XP they give.

 

If the player stays engaged to any beholder group for n rounds, all beholders in the lair start slowly drifting towards the player group's position.

 

Lore-wise reason (if needed): challenged in an open fight beholds are too arrogant to call for help and just assume (often rightly so) to roll over any intruders without losses. However when sh*t hits the fan (e.g. getting gassed or unable to beat charname's party within reasonable time) they start sending telepathic signals to their brood, which should be able to locate them even when out of LoS (telepathy, farsight, some weird alien lair contraptions that 'sense' living things).

 

Cloud/slow + disengage tactic stays viable but harder and more interesting as the player would have to think through their movements, running around trying to dodge the brood.

[subtledoctor]

Just make beholders immune to Cloudkill. They're already nasty floating gasbags! In fact I'd say when you kill one of them and they deflate, they should release a small-area Stinking Cloud.

[Ulb]

What I would generally like to see is for enemies to continue to run around for longer and "activate" other enemies they get in contact with. With that, "hit & run" tactics would become much more diffictult to pull off, would be like poking a bee hive.

[DavidW]

It’s hard to control escalation, at least not without tailoring it to specific encounter areas.

[Ulb]

You're probably right. It sounds reasonable (and pretty realistic) for a beholder lair, but would probably be a hot mess for larger areas with multiple thematically different enemy groups...