Quote Originally Posted by Erk View Post
For the first, your players clearly have more critical thinking skills than mine, or your plots are more straightforward. I usually need a mary-sue just to keep my players from killing themselves. Wanting to thwart them is not the problem, wanting to keep them from thwarting themselves is. (cringes at a team of four level 2 characters peeing on a sleeping owlbear)

For the second, just don't use the default MM skills and powers. Twist them around slightly to mess with your players. If you get the hang of it and do it as a standard fare system, they will stop assuming they know the monsters you throw at them just because they look like ones from the manual.

Anyway, it seems totally out of character for Parson to describe Stanley's forces as "unspeakable". It seems far more likely that the Cute and Plush would be unspeakable forces. Besides, how interesting is a campaign of 24:1 odds in the players' favour for a team of experienced gamers?
If they decide to piss on an owlbear, let it eat them. Do that long enough, and they usually clean up. I have a simple rule "Dice eat fools. Try to keep your head in the moment, and there may be mercy at bad luck. Screw around, and you chew your botches and villain crits."