The most frustrating monsters to encounter as a PC...besides rust monsters

[daremetoidareyo]

I'm all ears. No rust monsters allowed.

[Rangô]

Hey there!
As a DM I've never had so many complaints as I faced the party against Golems, no matter which CR, practically untouchables. Also I remember that Ghosts and Shadows were rather hard without a ready-for-service spell list. And my favourite for final boss, Beholders... I love antimagic field and desintegration MUAHAHA

[Seppo87]

Anything stealthy with high touch AC, saves and generally a lot of ways of avoiding being attacked entirely is pretty frustrating.
NPCs tend to do this depending on how you build them.

[The Viscount]

Bebiliths are very nasty to fight because they destroy your armor.

Shadows and Allips are horrendous at the level (3 for both) you can first encounter them, because chances are you won't have any weapons to hurt them with, and you may not have the right spells. Shadow is worse because it can actually kill you, and create another shadow possibly before the combat ends.

That damn crab is of course a legend at the low CRs you fight it, same goes for adamantine clockwork horror.

[ExLibrisMortis]

I've never had to deal with one, but I imagine an enemy who uses forced dream and time hop is incredibly annoying. Rolled a 20? Not anymore you haven't!

[Eldariel]

The first time I ran into a Ragewalker, that was Rage-inducing indeed. Couldn't get into melee without Bloodlust & Chain trips, it had sufficient spell resistance that using magic was difficult (and the encounter took place in a Temple fully under Forbiddance so transportation and summoning magic was impossible), ranged attacks are turned against their users. We didn't have Assay Resistance in our sourcebooks, which would make the fight a cakewalk. Ultimately we won with our Cleric's last Destruction successfully and luckily getting through the spell resistance and it rolling poorly on Fortitude (then again, it's got pretty bad Fort-save at +13; it needs a 10 to save vs. a 26 Int Wizard's Flesh to Ice/Baleful Polymorph/whatever) but not before much of our party had beat each other senseless and it had shrugged off a number of Fort save-or-dies. Those quickened empowered CL20 Blade Barriers against a level 13 party didn't help either. And that's without it having any Living Spells available; we would've been so screwed if it had a couple of Living Blasphemies lying around. And this being only CR14 vs. a 7-man level 13 party.

That said, Ragewalker is just an annoying fight and one that casters particularly in the open can easily deal with (though its spells are hard to dispel and the Will-save to resist bloodlust is tough so one has to never let it get close/have like 28+ Wisdom, and hope it can't just nuke you with Blade Barriers and Walls of Fire). Indeed, if it were played optimally it would've probably just obliterated the Cleric as soon as it recognized him (Empowered Blade Barrier + Quickened Empowered Blade Barrier is 157 damage, tough for a level 13 Cleric to survive) and tried to make the Wizard go nuts; with its Hide, the environment and Initiative it had the first move. The lesser and non-casters would've had no chance.


But Ragewalker has nothing on something like Adamantine Horror, which can just wipe out all your items permanently and you gotta save vs. Disjunction for each and every one of them without magical protection to stop that from happening. Damn that thing.

[Marlowe]

Will o' the Wisps.

Flight. Make touch attacks. Non-magical permanent invisibility. AC and touch AC so high that most level-appropriate PCs need 20s to hit it. Immune to most magic either by dint of being nigh-impossible to hit or by simply being immune. Very obviously a creature put together for a puzzle-boss fight back in the bad old days and never redone as something sane. The solution to the puzzle is that it's not immune to Magic Missile.

Had a PbP campaign die because the DM thought it was a clever idea to make one of these the first encounter. Nobody wanted to go throw the real-time weeks of rolling dice to get the natural 20s required to get rid of the thing.

Special mention for the homebrew demons some other DM threw at us in another PbP. Every time you hit them, or cast a spell on them, or did anything to them you had to pass several Will saves or have your PC COMPLETELY REMOVED FROM EXISTENCE and all memory of your existence removed from everyone else's memory. How anyone with enough working brain cells to type two words in a row couldn't see how broken this was I cannot understand.

When one of the players queried the guy, he commented something about how he expected us to just use summons and animal companions on them.

[Zaq]

Of the ones I've seen in a live game? Will o' Wisps, Cranium Rat Swarms, and worst of all, the Teratomorph. That damned Teratomorph derailed the campaign for the better part of a real-world year! Stupid Plane Shift aura . . .

[WeaselGuy]

My group got beat to hell by some damn ghost lion. We (5 of us, pretty balanced party) were around level 7ish, and exploring some sort of catacombs, and here comes this damn ghost lion out of the wall, claw claw biting us, and forcing some sort of save or lose-a-turn on anything he hit. We were totally unprepared for incorporeal anything, so about all we could do was hope we passed our saves and let the cleric and the wizard whittle it down without nailing us with aoe.

On the note of a Bebilith though. Same group, same characters, about level 13 or so. Playing with some random crit fail table, our caster rolled a nat 1 on some spell, and "suddenly, a bebilith!" (one of our catchphrases now). Ate our BSF for lunch, gave my Champion of Corellon Gryphon Rider a run for his money, and resisted just about everything the Wizard through at it. Our Cleric managed to nat 20 a dismissal to save us all. I think we got 2 levels from that encounter, after everything else we were fighting finally died. Heh. Fun times for the "Otyugh Slayers, Inc" (We Split the Party™).

[Malimar]

Disenchanters. There's a reason they were never ported to 3.5 other than by the 3rd party Tome of Horrors. Imagine a rust monster, except instead of just rusting your stuff, it touches you with Mordenkainen's disjunction.

[Gildedragon]

Disenchanters. There's a reason they were never ported to 3.5 other than by the 3rd party Tome of Horrors. Imagine a rust monster, except instead of just rusting your stuff, it touches you with Mordenkainen's disjunction.

They actually were: Fiend Folio

I'll throw my hat into the ring with the ethereal filcher

[Inevitability]

Disenchanters. There's a reason they were never ported to 3.5 other than by the 3rd party Tome of Horrors. Imagine a rust monster, except instead of just rusting your stuff, it touches you with Mordenkainen's disjunction.

That's called the Adamantine Horror.

[Malimar]

They actually were: Fiend Folio

Were they?

...why so they were!

There you go then.

That's called the Adamantine Horror.

That too. But there's supposedly only one adamantine horror in the world, but lots of disenchanters.

[Eldariel]

Were they?

...why so they were!

There you go then.

They are however CR17 so it's nothing special. That's the same CR as a Gray Elf Focused Abjurer/Master Specialist/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil 17 with their Disjunctions/Maws of Chaos, and the option of Quickening a few + Celerity, Shapechange (into e.g. Choker or Chronotyryn for doublecasts) and so on. CR17 creatures can pretty much do whatever and they aren't terribly scary since the company they keep is so stiff. For funzies, Adamantine Clockwork Horror is supposedly CR9 though, because MM2.

[Amphetryon]

Meenlocks can be frustrating if you take their CR at face value.

[Pex]

Beholder, Medusa, Basilisk, Cockatrice, Gorgon

At will save or die as often as it wants. I can appreciate in 4E, Pathfinder to a degree, and in 5E they've mitigated the danger so that you don't necessarily die just because you rolled 5 or less, but in general combat just becomes a question of how long your luck lasts and relief you aren't the one being attacked that round. I acknowledge parties do win and have been in such parties, but chances are high someone bites it and needs to be fixed. Only once ever for me, knock on wood, against a basilisk.

Undead

When the party couldn't possibly have the means to face them. By that I mean level/energy/ability score drain when you are not at the level in which you could protect yourself or at least readily recover from the effects. I remember a Pathfinder game session where we were 4th level, had to fight a wraith, and needed to go to NPC Hospital afterwards. I hated that.

[Inevitability]

They are however CR17 so it's nothing special. That's the same CR as a Gray Elf Focused Abjurer/Master Specialist/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil 17 with their Disjunctions/Maws of Chaos, and the option of Quickening a few + Celerity, Shapechange (into e.g. Choker or Chronotyryn for doublecasts) and so on. CR17 creatures can pretty much do whatever and they aren't terribly scary since the company they keep is so stiff. For funzies, Adamantine Clockwork Horror is supposedly CR9 though, because MM2.

It's slightly more reasonable if you don't use it until ECL 17 and then dump a ton of lesser clockwork horrors in to make it a balanced encounter. Lots of weak monsters may usually not be a viable challenge for ECL 17 PC's, but if their buffs and magic items are stripped away all the time they may be.

[Malimar]

They are however CR17 so it's nothing special. That's the same CR as a Gray Elf Focused Abjurer/Master Specialist/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil 17 with their Disjunctions/Maws of Chaos, and the option of Quickening a few + Celerity, Shapechange (into e.g. Choker or Chronotyryn for doublecasts) and so on. CR17 creatures can pretty much do whatever and they aren't terribly scary since the company they keep is so stiff. For funzies, Adamantine Clockwork Horror is supposedly CR9 though, because MM2.

The Tome of Horrors version is CR3, which is a level where you still hardly have any magic items, so each loss is more keenly felt.

[Snowbluff]

Disenchanters. There's a reason they were never ported to 3.5 other than by the 3rd party Tome of Horrors. Imagine a rust monster, except instead of just rusting your stuff, it touches you with Mordenkainen's disjunction.

Adamantine Clockwork Horrors for similiar reasons and otherwise killing you outright.

EDIT: Swordsaged. :P

[The Insanity]

Humans. gbyfv

[paperarmor]

Drowned. Horribly under cr. Thought it'd be thematic for a pirate campaign. Nope.

[Soranar]

Any creature that have a constant ''save of suck'' ability because , no matter how high your saves are you can always roll badly

Best example:

party of 4 (paladin, paladin, cleric, bard)

everybody is level 2

we encounter what should be a walk in the park : 3 ghouls in a tunnel

Due to bad dice we're all paralyzed except for the bard who is seriously considering running away. Finally the cleric manages to snap out of it and gets lucky on a turn undead roll (nat 20) and saves the day.

3 levels later a near identical encounter (4 ghouls in a tunnel, we're all level 5 now mind)

TPK

Ghouls kept hitting us, none of us were immune to paralysis and every other DC 15 fort check failed. Their damage was pitiful but with 1 bite and 2 claws each killed us slowly but surely.

[Telok]

It really depends on if the party plays 'combat as sport' and just walks into fights or if the party plays 'combat as war' with scouting and information gathering before going into the dungeon.

I've seen bufffed and templated hydra go down in two rounds to 'combat as war' parties twice. On the other hand a vampire giant octopus that was confined to an underground lake killed at least 5 level twelve PCs across three attempts. They never did kill it or get all the magic gear back from the victims. Every time, even once they knew what was there, they walked in unprepared for aquatic or undead combat.

For frustrating, inaccessable spellcasters with an infinite attack resource. It can be a spider climbing warlock in a large cave or a wolf riding goblin sorcerer with a wand of magic missile, once it was a psychic archer on a giant bat. Ranged touch attacks, mobility, and being inaccessable to stupid fighter types who focus exclusively on melee (which always seems to be a third or half the party).

[Esprit15]

A well run vampire is terrifying. Save or suck at will, DR that the party needs to prepare for, fast healing to draw out the battle, negative levels, and if you do kill them improperly, the odds are decent that your party should sleep with one eye open. For the rest of their lives. Oh, and they're all at least fairly clever, so odds are they won't fight fairly like your average monster.

Not so bad when you're prepared for them, not too bad in a blank room with nothing of note, terrifying when you realize midway through dinner with your host that the wine is poisoned, the soup is poisoned, the bread was poisoned, the incense burning around the room were (surprise!) also poison, and at this point you've all failed enough saves, one against paralysis, that the party is incapacitated before initiative even had to be rolled.

[icefractal]

It really depends on if the party plays 'combat as sport' and just walks into fights or if the party plays 'combat as war' with scouting and information gathering before going into the dungeon.

I've heard this, but - it's not like the monsters can't use tactics too. "Powerful but dumb thing you can defeat with good planning" is one thing, but there are some monsters that could easily harass a party to defeat if the DM didn't take pity.

On topic - things that can stay out of LoE almost all the time - incorporeal creatures with Flyby Attack popping in and out of the walls, for example. It's an effective tactic, but a really annoying one.

[Spore]

Lich Illusionists. They have convinced the town populace that they are innocent traders. When you try to attack her openly, she only uses defensive magic and later on accusing you of attempted murder. If you succeed to slay her in secret, nothing happens because her phylactery is hidden pretty well. Stealing it would mean breaking into a trading corporation's warehouse.

[Inevitability]

Lich Illusionists. They have convinced the town populace that they are innocent traders. When you try to attack her openly, she only uses defensive magic and later on accusing you of attempted murder. If you succeed to slay her in secret, nothing happens because her phylactery is hidden pretty well. Stealing it would mean breaking into a trading corporation's warehouse.

Why would you want to attack them, though?

[Willie the Duck]

Chaos Beast (CR 7)-- it touching you, or you touching it means you become close to unable to act and start to lose 1 wis a round unless you spend your action and make a dc 15 CHA check. Only cures? Restoration, heal, and greater restoration. Only the first of which will you have access to at level 7 and you better have it memorized (because the afflicted won't last until next morning). Oh, and they don't die, they become chaos beasts, so unless you have a wish, you lose your character permanently. Did anyone think this through?

[Willie the Duck]

Lich Illusionists. They have convinced the town populace that they are innocent traders. When you try to attack her openly, she only uses defensive magic and later on accusing you of attempted murder. If you succeed to slay her in secret, nothing happens because her phylactery is hidden pretty well. Stealing it would mean breaking into a trading corporation's warehouse.

What's so horrible about that? A regular human criminal whom only you know is an evil-doer can also do the 'you can't attack me because that makes you the murderer' thing just as well.

[ShurikVch]

Crawling Claws
Diminutive Construct (swarm) with SR 10 at CR 1/3? Seriously?