Monster of the Week #22

This week we go back to D&D to look at the Pit Fiend. 

I recently ran a max level game of D&D for a friends birthday, and had this guy come out of the woodwork to cause as much pain as he could. It was the first time I had something like this on the battlefield and I was looking forward to seeing what it can do.

Turns out it has a lot it can do!

These creatures are CR 20, so definitely a massive challenge for a party that aren't pushing the upper levels. It boasts a whopping 26 STR, so it will be punching down your players hard with its melee-based multiattack (of which it gets four). One nice addition here is that the multiattacks are classed as magic weapons for the purposes of cutting through resistances and immunities.

This creature has resistance to magic saving throws, so can resist your casters at a reasonable rate. For your melee players, the Pit Fiend is has resistance to most damage that isn't magical or silvered - so keep that in mind!

One thing that could have really gave my players grief was the Frightening Aura this creature has. Everyone within a 20 ft radius of the Fiend needs to make a DC 21 Wisdom save or be frightened of the Pit Fiend until the start of its next turn. I think based on how it's written, a player could continually be affected by this again until the save is made. Once the save has succeeded, the affected player is immune to this aura for 24 hours.

Frightened can give melee characters a hard time (which I am all too familiar with as primarily a melee player in recent months when I have had the chance to play), but my players had a real hard counter to it... A paladin that makes his party immune to fear. It was a great move from the paladin, and made my fiend much less intimidating.

We already mentioned multiattack earlier, and while this is pretty common in D&D for enemies, this  creature gets 4. One for the claw, dealing 17 (2d8+8) slashing damage, one for the tail 24 (3d10+8) bludgeoning damage, one for the mace 15 (2d6+8) bludgeoning damage and 21 (6d6) fire damage, and finally a bite (my favourite!) which delivers 32 (4d6+8) piercing damage. The special aspect about the bite is that (once hit) the target myst make a SC 21 CON saving throw, and on  a fail the target is poised and cannot regain hit-points in this state. They also take an addition 21 (6d6) poison damage at the start of each of it's turns. The poison save can be attempted again at the end of each of the targets turns. Now that's a lot of turns!

So the multiattack on the Pit Fiend is big, and can potentially deal massive damage. What I found in practice though for level 20 players was that their saves and ACs (including all the other abilities they had on offer) made the fight no where near as hard as I expected. Also to my surprise was that the fight did not take as long to complete!

The last thing the Pit Fiend has to offer is innate spell-casting. This gives the creature a little more to play with, allowing it to cast detect magic and fireball at will and hold monster and wall of fire 3 time each per day.

That's the Pit Fiend in D&D! My players enjoyed it at the level they fought at because it had enough moves at it's disposal to take advantage of a few party weaknesses. While the party eventually pummelled this thing to the ground, it's hefty 300 hp pool gave it the lifespan it needed to do real damage before falling.

I can only imagine what a creature like this would be like with legendary actions and resistances... ;)

Thanks for checking out this weeks monster of the week, and hope to see you here again soon!

-KJ