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.
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.
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.
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.
Giving the Tarrasque a burrow speed goes a long way towards improving it, I agree. The hurl boulder ability of giants wouldn't hurt either, although there's really nothing stopping a Tarrasque from hurling rocks with a standard BAB.
I wouldn't mind giving the Tarrasque a breath weapon, either. It works for Godzilla.
But these are incidental improvements. Just ambushing players in a cave will go a long way towards negating it's deficiencies, even at high levels.
Catapults are popular for a reason. But there's still some issue of ammo and opportunity. You're really banking on your target just hanging out at the optimal firing range.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/powergamermunchkin/comments/wjtvch/whats_the_easiest_way_to_kill_a_tarrasque/
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.
Maybe birds aren't good at math?
That's fair. Neither is the Tarrasque.
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.
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).
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!)
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:
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:
Yes.
5e very often puts caveats into the rules text for an item/spell/monster, and they very often don't match the "generic rule". The advantage here is that you shouldn't have to cross-reference stuff as often to know what's happening. The disadvantage is that, because you don't ever reference the generic rule, people often don't know it even exists.