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.
Look, everyone knows that <previous thing> was much better than <current thing> because it was <comparator> and more <adjective>. Just look at how much <comparator> <element> became! They completely ruined it.
Fingers crossed this gets fixed in <next thing>.
< 1 year before release: This will be the best game ever, it will be better than real life. It will replace my life completely, allowing me to live in this world until the end of time.
Release: This is garbage. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The <original creators> are turning over in their graves. Gaming is shit now. Devs fucked up. How could they ever release this.
1-2 years after release: Silence
2-4 years after release: You know, I replayed that game, it wasn’t that bad, honestly I kind of liked how it worked
4-8 years after release: That game was honestly one of the best. Back from the old days of gaming before everything became shit. Now it’s all terrible. I hope they don’t fuck up the next one.
8+ years: It’s probably one of the best games of all time. It wasn’t for everyone, but us true gamers knew how great it was. There’s nothing that will ever beat it.
Had to view source to see the “insert thing here” things. Some issue with the formatting using < and >, not sure if it’s just on the Jerboa app.
I wrote it on a pc, then looked later using Jerboa and saw what you saw. Definitely a Jerboa issue.
what I liked about 3.5 was that it was insane, and the system was exploitable in ways the GM could not predict. it let you surprise even a railroady GM. there’s a kind of vibrancy that gives to a fantasy world. I think for a lot of people, that was the first time they saw anything like that. it was a tedious 90s/00’s kind of good.
it was tedious, and required knowing far too many rules. it was a tedious sprawling 90s/00’s kind of shitty. I don’t think it was a good system on balance, I just think it’s better than any other D&D, unless pathfinder counts.
and you can absolutely play a non-wizard, you just have to be as broken and weird as the wizards are.
Yeah rogues would literally just walk up to wizards and explode their whole body with a sneak attack and +40 Stealth checks.
Then they kill the wizard’s familiar with their other two attacks.
Fighters acted like they were poor little victims vulnerable to mean old spellcasters but that’s because players don’t like taking defensive feats. By the time 3.5 was done there was a build floating around that basically made you immune to magic.
I don’t recall 3.5 spells having nearly as many guaranteed success effects as 5.0 has. It was generally considered, you know, a bad idea to be able to reliably CC ancient wyrms with no hope of defense.
Fighters acted like they were poor little victims vulnerable to mean old spellcasters
About 14-15 years ago, I was playing in a 16th level game where the DM did NOT know how to challenge us. He put us against an astral behemoth with double hit points and our fighter soloed it in one round, dealing out a whopping 2,500ish points of damage in 7 attacks. One of the toughest monsters in the game, with double hit points, and the rest of the party didn’t even get to act.
Later in that game, we abused gate spells to crash rocks into the Abyss at 80% the speed of light.
3.5 is ridiculous.
a whopping 2,500ish points of damage in 7 attacks
I know this is a long shot, but can you remember how they managed this? I’ve played pathfinder and this still seems like ten times more than what a well-optimised could do!
we abused gate spells to crash rocks into the Abyss at 80% the speed of light
Ah, now this just sounds like the DM didn’t know how to say no to your crazy ideas that don’t fit into the rules!
having more variance in player capabilities and unique strengths (this build can fight orcs forever without getting tired!) that can kind of shape a campaign is much better than all the shit that tries to reduce variance and balance, keeping players at similar levels of general capacity just isn’t worth the effective homogeneity.
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
http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/2015/04/salt-in-wounds-overview-origin.html?m=1
A campaign setting about a LE township whose economy is predicated on harvesting the perpetually regenerating form of the Tarrasque. The town is divided into districts based on the massive magical spears that have pinned the creature to the soil. And there’s a ton of intrigue surrounding the various political families that are charged with maintaining - and periodically adjusting - those magical spears in order to keep the beast constrained, as well as the different religious, arcane, and druidic factions who have wildly different takes on if/how this process is to continue.
A very cool setpiece and one of the more exciting ways to describe how industrious adventurers might deal with this kind of creature.
I remember I Kickstarted this. The author realized he couldn’t finish and just released everything he had done so far.
Edit: here it is https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kD7kYL-lOhwEW7-BLWU92B4WB2h1K6gH
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)
I’ve been thinking it would be cool to have a campaign set after the town has gotten smaller. You go on your first mission to fight a cave full of kobolds or some such, there’s an earthquake that blocks the exist, and you have to fight through it and escape before later tremors cause it to cave in. It’s fairly standard, until you leave, and find out what was causing the tremors. At some point decades or even centuries ago, the rate they dealt damage to the tarrasque dropped below the rate it regenerates. Then it spent all that time slowly losing the nonlethal damage, until finally it was enough to regain consciousness. The city is left in ruins, and now the nations of the world have to deal with the tarrasque acting like a roving natural disaster. Maybe at the end, you have a choice to rebuild Salt in the Wound and get that source of alchemical supplies back, or kill it for good as the only way to be sure this never happens again.
You know how the tarrasque constantly regenerates? Well what if you harvested it for meat?
The 3.x tarrasque became a joke, but that was a result of the extensive options combined with people’s system understanding - sure a single wizard could kill it, but that still needed to be played by someone who understood the system. It was a system that gave unlimited options, so if you worked out how to combine enough of them you could break the system wide open, and the tarrasque was a great yardstick for that.
Then you come to 5e’s tarrasque and it’s so badly designed that it’s obvious from a glance that a level 1 character with flight can just hover above it and plink it down with a bow. I’ve seen 3.5’s brought up in comparison to that, but not as an example of difficult fights in a vacuum.
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.
so a party with overland flight could attack it pretty much with impunity
That’s true of anything without a fly speed, assuming you’re doing all your adventures on a flat plain during the daytime in perfect weather. But the game changes slightly when you’re spelunking through the Underdark, racing through a forest of redwoods, or caught by surprise in the middle of a hurricane.
The drama of D&D is in the circumstances. You’re not supposed to have every fight in ideal conditions with a week of downtime to prepare. If you’re summiting a mountain during a blizzard and one of the Tarrasque’s meaty fists pops out of a cave wall to try and snag someone, or you’ve accidentally woken this thing up from beneath an ancient tomb full of restless wraiths, that’s a very different encounter than squaring off against this lumbering titan as it casually stomps its way across empty desert.
That’s true of anything without a fly speed,
And without a burrow speed, and without a ranged attack, and without an ability that lets it ground all flying enemies. Maybe a skilled DM could make it work, but in other editions it wouldn’t have been an issue.
Though the other problem is that you can deal limitless damage just by dropping sufficiently many 100 pound boulders. In 5e, they got rid of damage from falling objects, but you just need to drop enough creatures. Or ignite enough horns of gunpowder with a single Bonfire.
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
The best way I’ve seen to defeat an enemy without killing it is Flesh to Stone, Stone to Mud, Purify Food and Drink, and then boil the water away. That was more for keeping an enemy from being resurrected, but it would be a cool overkill way to get rid of a tarrasque without using Wish.
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.
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.
Summoning animals to kill themselves does not sound like a thing a druid would do
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.
I mean, I think the generic DM response to that is going to boil down to “The owls won’t behave that way”. Its for the same reason DMs blanche at the “Summon a whale 40 ft off the ground” technique (and why rulebooks started adding conditions about where and how things could be summoned, period).
at the end of the day you could also just do this with large rocks
The magic bag full of boulders is a classic munchkin weapon, but it does require some degree of preparation and isn’t the same level of mechanically out-of-the-box function as kamikaze owls. Even then, a general DM adjudication to these kinds of techniques would be to limit the damage to an equivalent spell effect. So a 3rd level Shrink Item will let you do (level)d6 damage from a hurled boulder. And you can only practically fling one of these a round.
That allows people to be creative to a degree (dropping a boulder down a mountainside will have different consequences than lobbing a fireball, and everyone can lean into that) without exploiting the mathematical discrepancies of fall damage versus every other kind of damage.
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!)
