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.
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.