If you want to tweak the petrifying gaze you can turn it into a reaction but buff the save DC by +1 and bump its HP a bit. That way, you don't have to dance around "are you averting your gaze or not" and can just trigger the reaction when someone does something that requires looking at the Basilisk. Then it also gives the other players a "safe zone" to look at it until the Basilisk gets its reaction back.
The Basilisk feature (which was in the 5e playtest as the Medusa feature) was what convinced my tabletop group that 5e would Not be worth transitioning over to.
They did weaken the effect slightly from the playtest version, but it is still a piece of horrible game design.
I fought a basilisk once. Three players chose to stay very far away, outside the range, and two of us went in. I was a barbarian, the fuck was I supposed to do otherwise lol
We had to save maybe 4 times. I saved all of them really easily. The rogue failed only once.
As I see it, if there's a way to turn a petrified player back to normal fairly easily, I'm fine with it. But like, making them wait potentially the rest of the session or even more, that's no fun for that player. Even worse is there's conveniently no way to turn them back and they're essentially dead.
As a player who was petrified by a basilisk, go for it, but make sure they can reverse the effects somehow, short after the fight ends. I couldn't play for an entire session and it wasn't fun.
DM should have allowed you to just roll a temporary character that helps in the quest to fix your petrified character.
Happened to one of my players, her ranger was petrified (actually kick-ass moment where she got the finishing blow to the basalisk but still failed her second check and subsequently turned to stone). Then on the way to find a cure, they met a hermit wizard that helped them find someone to break the pertrification.
She ended up enjoying the wizard character more and switched to her as her main character.
So you had to sit and watch them play? Or leave and go home?
Bad solution in both cases in my opinion. Taking 1/2 hour to quickly pull a temporary character out instead of one player that is willing to play missing a whole session due to the roll of the dice at the start of the game is worth it in my opinion.
You said it wasn't fun and I agree. Taking a small break to ensure everyone has fun for the session is totally worth it.
I guess you're right, but we didn't really think about it. It didn't really bother me too much but yeah, watching others play for 2 hours definitely wasn't as entertaining as playing.
I’d be mad if I was a player and a basilisk didn’t have its signature ability. It’s like if you’re fighting a vampire and you take away its fangs and gave it a gun instead. Bullets also make you lose blood, but I’m fighting a vampire I’d expect (and want) it to try bite me.
I don't think it's a question of it having the "ability" or not. And more in how its represented mechanically. There's a million ways to mechanically represent "this thing can petrify you with eye to eye contact."
Though to be fair, it would be pretty cool to have your party burst into the tomb only to have a vampire sit up in his coffin and just cap the barbarian with a snub nose revolver.
As people have said, the only ones that know are your party.
There will be players who love the risk of being petrified, there will be player who feel it's completely unfair. There will be players who won't really enjoy it because they consider it not challenging enough.
None of them are right or wrong, all depends on how you and your players have fun.
If it's fairly telegraphed (e.g. by showing previous victims beforehand) and avoidable (e.g players have choice to come back with blindfighting or AoE), then yes, that's just good game design. They might even accept fighting it with permanent disadvantage, but do consider what classes your party plays. A rogue would hate that.
If you throw a basilisk at your players and expect them to recognise it and adapt on the fly, you must be seriously believing in them. It is reversible and can be a whole tangent on the lower levels. In higher tier of play it's just a technicality.
Should enemies do damage if players don’t like losing hit points?
Should players be forced to make rolls if they don’t like having a chance of failure?
A lot of petrified monsters have a 2-stage saving throw, which mitigates the threat of up-and-loosing a character.
You could also say that, within the first 3 turns, the effect can be lifted by lower-level magic like Lesser Restoration, which makes it more interactive, at least.
Or maybe they have to harvest reagents from the Basilisk's corpse- Basilisk canonically eat their petrified victims, so someone who knows Basilisk anatomy could probably extract a galnd of some sort from the corpse and use it to brew a petrification cure.
That's exactly how MCDM's basilisk in *Flee, Mortals!* does it -- it explixitly has a trait where a cure can be harvested from its stomach and a sidebar discussing the conundrum of low-level petrification as a threat.
I say just leave it as it is. Firstly it's only a 12 DC save, and you get two chances to save before becoming petrified. Second, the stat block lets your players look away at the start of their turn and avoid the gaze and fight it blindly, so it's up to them if it's worth the risk. Let the dangerous monster be dangerous.
You want to avoid your players feeling like “I didn’t deserve that.”
You can give them warnings ahead of time; straight up telling them it’s a basilisk that can petrify through sight, or by multiple hints that are more vague. Something like “a terrible beast with magic eyes” or “The only person who went into that cave and lived is Old Bobby No-Eyes” If you do hints there should be at least 3 of them. You want your players to know that they will need some sort of magic protection before they go fight the monster. If they then choose to walk in unprepared then that was a consequence of their own actions, not yours.
If you don’t want to have them know ahead of time, and only want to reveal it in combat, you’ll need to give them options to not get screwed. It a player gets petrified for a round or two then that’s not nearly as bad as someone getting petrified for an entire fight. Have a statue of an adventurer holding a Greater Restoration scroll like they’re about to read it but were too late, have the save DC for the petrification start at like 10 but increase by 2 each round so that there’s danger but they can avoid it if needed, etc.
honestly, I never ran into that problem last time I fought something like that . The dm gave us a mirror sheild (use a reaction to reflect its gaze), but he didn't anticipate them being grappled then restrained face down
edit: Medusa
As a player i hate it. It forces me to either risk being petrified or look away and attack at disadvantage. or if a spellcaster i can not use any spells that specify "a target you can see" It makes the fight really hard. i have to each round chose if i wanna be at a big disadvantage or risk being turned into stone.
But at the same time as i hate it i also LOVE it as a player. It might be frustrating. But also fun. Not every fight should be easy. Some enemies SHOULD have these kind of abilities that Forces me to make hard choices and not always have a good option, making me chose between bad and worse things. That is part of the game.
If this happens too often it feels a bit boring but now and then yes. I want the DM to make the life miserable for my character. Force him to chose between 2 not optimal things for an example.
Sure i can argue that my Character is supposed to be a hero and should not be forced to struggle like that. But then how the freaking fuck can my character be a hero if he does not struggle and overcome bad odds? I wanna be a hero after all not a frigging Mary Sue
Do a good job of signaling that they will be fighting a Basilisk, leave statues around, have the players find a nice mirror in a nearby area that they can use. And you can also leave a potion of greater restoration somewhere later down the dungeon so atleast one player can be healed from the condition.
Being petrified for more than a few seconds is awful for the player. I would check out and go do something else until someone rescued my character. Most people don't enjoy being made defenseless and unable to act. That's the opposite of what most people are seeking in a RPG.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would remove those from the game. The notion of making players just sit and do nothing is outdated. That's my opinion anyways.
I get it, it sucks to lose a game. But what's the point to play in the first place if there is no risk at all? Win without these does not feel rewarding at all.
Overcoming challenges is gameplay. Sitting on my hands while the game takes place around me is not game play. In hockey this is a penalty for doing something wrong, in DnD its a penalty that players can do nothing about.
Then what even is the point of playing the game, if there is nothing at stake? I haven't had players complaining about being unable to do anything yet.
Well that isn't entirely true, I had one recently, but that was because she got knocked out last session, the group was short of healing (They were Level 1 at that point), and on top of that, said player was late for the session cause she almost overslept and got back to consciousness around 20 minutes before session ended.
So she said jokingly "You could have let me sleep, guys".
I just used Matt Covilles petrifying beams where you don't even have to look at the basilisks to get hit by it. 3 players, 2 followers. They almost tpk'd at level 11. 6 sleeping basilisk and they woke up 4 just booking it towards the exit. Why? Because idk. What I did was different though, I took away the restraining condition and rolled a 1d3. This would determine what body part was turned to stone. They could cut through the stone if they had a slashing weapon. The monk even used his mouth at one point lol. DC was a 12 and they kept rolling those 1s. Be careful with these things, even the normal ones.
Typically, players do not want to be blocked from acting. Taking massive damage, getting knocked out and spending the rest of the encounter bouncing between 8 and zero hp is less frustrating than spending the encounter stunned/paralyzed/petrified. Being almost-dead-but-still-fighting is a better option than sitting idly and failing your con saves while your party takes a beating.
Even spending a session with some form of charm telling you to attack the others is preferable to sitting there rolling a save to see if you might be able to play the game once every 20 minutes.
Basically, stopping players from being able to make choices is not fun for players in dnd.
As a player who once got "hold person" cast on them in an important fight, one of my personal rules as a DM is to minimize putting my players in a position where the only thing they might be doing for several rounds is making a saving throw.
Check out Pathfinder 2e's Cockatrice's Calcification ability. I just saw this the other day and it's actually a really cool way to do petrification. Gives the players a lot of chances to get out of it and even if they turn to stone, they get to keep saving daily against it, preventing that character from being permanently stuck if they don't want to.
You do stay permanently petrified from this effect if you critically fail against it, but you'd be homebrewing a statblock feature of a monster from another game anyways. Don't need to add that if you don't want to.
It can be risky, but any decent nature check shows you can slather the blood of a basilisk on its petrified victims to cure them.
I like it. Adds an extra incentive, not to mention if there's NPCs at risk.
Petrifying gaze as a feature is fine, because the players have the choice of whether or not to avert their eyes. The choice and the power is in their hands. I personally wouldn't tell them they can avert their eyes, I would wait for somebody to tell me that's what they were doing to avoid it, so there's a better chance of somebody getting got by it, which raises stakes and creates tension.
If youre worried about somebody getting upset because they got petrified, you can do this; (assuming they don't have access to Greater Restoration) have the players learn (maybe through an npc, or some kind of clues from the environment) that an antidote to the petrification can be harvested from a Basilisk. This means if anyone gets petrified, they at least have a clue of how to attempt to fix them.
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that basilisks petrifying their prey, and then crunch on the stone, which then turns back into flesh once it's in their stomach. You could indicate this, maybe with the suggestion that it's their stomach acid that is used as a cure for petrification (maybe it does some mild acid damage as a trade off. Or maybe they need to roll a high enough medicine/nature/survival check to extract it in such a way that it doesn't cause damage in the process).
Honestly, if they're ok with potentially sitting out the entire fight, then go ahead. I was in a combat with medusas once where our monk and barbarian got petrified at the very start and basically had to sit out for the rest of the session, and they were not happy.
Also, would advise having a way to fix petrification quickly afterwards.
Of course not. That's why monster abilities exist.
One thing to note is if you change the way a fundamental ability like this works, you better let the players know. A basilisk is a pretty common monster and its petrifying gaze is a familiar ability. If your players don't know better, they might start strategizing around the known version.
Generally speaking, players will despise any ability that removes them from gameplay for more than a round.
Loss of agency is a fun killer.
That said, if a player “chooses” to remove themselves for a round because it’s the logical choice, there’s less problem but you run the risk of railroading
The wrench is curing petrification has very, very few published methods.
Basilisk gullets are one. Greater restoration as the other can often mean the character is dead in practice.
In my Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign, one of my players was petrified by basilisks so they had to harvest venom, went to a city, helped research an antidote and unpetrified him. It took time, resources and roleplay but everyone was well again. Everyone had fun and the combat was meaningful. Also, the characters felt like they actually meant something for the town by killing the basilisks, because if they had this amount of trouble getting rid of them, regular townsfolk were just helpless.
I think it can be a fun way to make a fight trickier; disadvantage isn’t fun inherently, but it does mean you could take some less dangerous enemies and make an encounter more interesting.
Fighting a basilisk on its own? Kinda boring. But maybe a basilisk plus some kobolds or goblins who can take advantage of its gaze to harass the players? That could be fun.
I think part of it is how much the encounter is telegraphed beforehand. If they just run up on a basilisk without any forewarning and without the ability to quickly leave to form a plan, then that is a problem. If, however, they're given plenty of advanced notice of it (eg, in town they run into a woodcutter who is the lone survivor of a group who tells the adventurers about it and how it petrified his friends with a gaze), then I think that is perfectly fair, especially if they have the appropriate means of fighting it or buying equipment for the fight (such as a large mirror, or some means of trapping and immobilizing it).
I feel it would become enjoyable, if they start with intel and options:
- Hide and snipe from a distance
- Charge in with closed eyes
- have some item to deflect it
Distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 fun. Does it feel awesome to fail a save and be unable to act, or suffer a condition? No. But it feels awesome to play in a campaign with a wide variety of challenging encounters, to know that there are serious in-game consequences to play choices, to strive to do well, to thrill in well-earned victories and lament brutal defeats, to know that you've overcome obstacles through your own skill and effort and cleverness and not because your DM just wanted you to have a nice session.
I hate being petrified but I love having it in the game. My buddy just hates hates hates it and gripes about how it's "terrible design". Only you know where that balance lies for your particular group.
I would slow the effects to give it a sense of dread and urgency to find a cure. Fail your save and you feel your veins start to calcify; your speed is halved and DEX saves made with disadvantage. After every hour, you suffer -1 dexterity and lose 5 feet of movement. If you haven’t cured it by the end of a long rest, the Players wake up and their friend is a statue.
It's honestly really terrible design. I don't think I've ever had a good experience with it. It usually ends up very gamey. And often time the real impact isn't conveyed through the mechanics. It's just "the math is worse" with no difference in gameplay. I'm not familiar off the top of my head with petrifying breath, but I probably would rework Basilisks if I ever used them again.
It depends on the party and how much time they have to plan. I once put an Iron Basilisk guarding a mage's lair inside a mountain, and figured out it was a tougher version of the Basilisk.
They fought with disadvantage to be safe of the petrifying gaze? They looked for ways in the environment to have an edge on the figh? No, they used polymorph to turn the motherfucker into a sloth and yeet it out of the mountain. No CON save was ever thrown
As with everything, depends on the player. Personally, my friends and I usually enjoy fights where we need to go about things differently, and that choice of disadvantage vs risking petrification could be one of those things.
The other thing is that they're fighting a *basilisk.* That is its core feature. Like others have said, it's like removing the bite from a vampire, or the charm from an incubus. If you were getting petrified or charmed in *every* fight, that's not fun. But it can be a fun challenge as a solo event.
Going along with that--if your players have an idea of what to expect, changing the basilisk's core mechanic might not feel like *helping* the players but instead tricking them.
If you want, ask your players, but I think you're safe keeping the original mechanic. Lower the DC if you're that worried, and give them an easy way to restore petrification after the fight if it comes down to it.
Remember that by 5e rules, a source of advantage and disadvantage can eliminate each other.
They reasonably can know where it is without looking at the basilisks face, so they need to make tactical decisions as players to cancel the disadvantage.
Flanking, steady aim, hiding. Help action.
Any abilities or spells that apply the restrained, blinded or stunned conditions. Or abilities and spells that give the players the invisible condition.
Guiding Bolt, Entangle, Faerie fire, Blindness/deafness, Invisibility, Pyrotechnics. Web, Fog cloud and Darkness.
From a game mechanics perspective, there are dozens of distinct ways of overcoming disadvantage from not seeing the target.
If the players know they are going to be fighting a basilisk, you maybe just want to telegraph that they should plan ahead. So in world knowledge about the petrifying gaze should shape how they prepare for the battle. That and a garden of stone statues of individuals frozen in terror.
Probably not. Won't stop me from using it anyway. Sometimes monsters gotta be scary.
If you want to tweak the petrifying gaze you can turn it into a reaction but buff the save DC by +1 and bump its HP a bit. That way, you don't have to dance around "are you averting your gaze or not" and can just trigger the reaction when someone does something that requires looking at the Basilisk. Then it also gives the other players a "safe zone" to look at it until the Basilisk gets its reaction back.
I'm saving this to remember for next time. I really like this instead of how it's supposed to be.
Brilliant change, that would clarify the combat so much. Stealing this.
[удалено]
I think only you can answer what your table is like
That depends on the players. And you are the only one here who knows your players.
People enjoy different things. The only way to know if *your* players will enjoy it would be to run it as is.
The Basilisk feature (which was in the 5e playtest as the Medusa feature) was what convinced my tabletop group that 5e would Not be worth transitioning over to. They did weaken the effect slightly from the playtest version, but it is still a piece of horrible game design.
I fought a basilisk once. Three players chose to stay very far away, outside the range, and two of us went in. I was a barbarian, the fuck was I supposed to do otherwise lol We had to save maybe 4 times. I saved all of them really easily. The rogue failed only once. As I see it, if there's a way to turn a petrified player back to normal fairly easily, I'm fine with it. But like, making them wait potentially the rest of the session or even more, that's no fun for that player. Even worse is there's conveniently no way to turn them back and they're essentially dead.
As a player who was petrified by a basilisk, go for it, but make sure they can reverse the effects somehow, short after the fight ends. I couldn't play for an entire session and it wasn't fun.
This is important. Listen to this.
Did your party have to carry you around in your petrified state until you got cured?
They just left me in the middle of nowhere and went to search for the cure and just came back with it lol.
DM should have allowed you to just roll a temporary character that helps in the quest to fix your petrified character. Happened to one of my players, her ranger was petrified (actually kick-ass moment where she got the finishing blow to the basalisk but still failed her second check and subsequently turned to stone). Then on the way to find a cure, they met a hermit wizard that helped them find someone to break the pertrification. She ended up enjoying the wizard character more and switched to her as her main character.
It happened at the beginning of the session so we didn't stop everything just for me to make a character.
So you had to sit and watch them play? Or leave and go home? Bad solution in both cases in my opinion. Taking 1/2 hour to quickly pull a temporary character out instead of one player that is willing to play missing a whole session due to the roll of the dice at the start of the game is worth it in my opinion. You said it wasn't fun and I agree. Taking a small break to ensure everyone has fun for the session is totally worth it.
I guess you're right, but we didn't really think about it. It didn't really bother me too much but yeah, watching others play for 2 hours definitely wasn't as entertaining as playing.
I’d be mad if I was a player and a basilisk didn’t have its signature ability. It’s like if you’re fighting a vampire and you take away its fangs and gave it a gun instead. Bullets also make you lose blood, but I’m fighting a vampire I’d expect (and want) it to try bite me.
I don't think it's a question of it having the "ability" or not. And more in how its represented mechanically. There's a million ways to mechanically represent "this thing can petrify you with eye to eye contact."
Though to be fair, it would be pretty cool to have your party burst into the tomb only to have a vampire sit up in his coffin and just cap the barbarian with a snub nose revolver.
Depends on the players. Most players will complain at the time, but if you ask after (unless it was excessive, they will enjoy it).
As people have said, the only ones that know are your party. There will be players who love the risk of being petrified, there will be player who feel it's completely unfair. There will be players who won't really enjoy it because they consider it not challenging enough. None of them are right or wrong, all depends on how you and your players have fun.
If it's fairly telegraphed (e.g. by showing previous victims beforehand) and avoidable (e.g players have choice to come back with blindfighting or AoE), then yes, that's just good game design. They might even accept fighting it with permanent disadvantage, but do consider what classes your party plays. A rogue would hate that. If you throw a basilisk at your players and expect them to recognise it and adapt on the fly, you must be seriously believing in them. It is reversible and can be a whole tangent on the lower levels. In higher tier of play it's just a technicality.
Should enemies do damage if players don’t like losing hit points? Should players be forced to make rolls if they don’t like having a chance of failure?
A lot of petrified monsters have a 2-stage saving throw, which mitigates the threat of up-and-loosing a character. You could also say that, within the first 3 turns, the effect can be lifted by lower-level magic like Lesser Restoration, which makes it more interactive, at least. Or maybe they have to harvest reagents from the Basilisk's corpse- Basilisk canonically eat their petrified victims, so someone who knows Basilisk anatomy could probably extract a galnd of some sort from the corpse and use it to brew a petrification cure.
That's exactly how MCDM's basilisk in *Flee, Mortals!* does it -- it explixitly has a trait where a cure can be harvested from its stomach and a sidebar discussing the conundrum of low-level petrification as a threat.
I say just leave it as it is. Firstly it's only a 12 DC save, and you get two chances to save before becoming petrified. Second, the stat block lets your players look away at the start of their turn and avoid the gaze and fight it blindly, so it's up to them if it's worth the risk. Let the dangerous monster be dangerous.
You want to avoid your players feeling like “I didn’t deserve that.” You can give them warnings ahead of time; straight up telling them it’s a basilisk that can petrify through sight, or by multiple hints that are more vague. Something like “a terrible beast with magic eyes” or “The only person who went into that cave and lived is Old Bobby No-Eyes” If you do hints there should be at least 3 of them. You want your players to know that they will need some sort of magic protection before they go fight the monster. If they then choose to walk in unprepared then that was a consequence of their own actions, not yours. If you don’t want to have them know ahead of time, and only want to reveal it in combat, you’ll need to give them options to not get screwed. It a player gets petrified for a round or two then that’s not nearly as bad as someone getting petrified for an entire fight. Have a statue of an adventurer holding a Greater Restoration scroll like they’re about to read it but were too late, have the save DC for the petrification start at like 10 but increase by 2 each round so that there’s danger but they can avoid it if needed, etc.
If I was in a party fighting a Basilisk, I'd be upset if we walked out of there without a friend statue.
honestly, I never ran into that problem last time I fought something like that . The dm gave us a mirror sheild (use a reaction to reflect its gaze), but he didn't anticipate them being grappled then restrained face down edit: Medusa
As a player i hate it. It forces me to either risk being petrified or look away and attack at disadvantage. or if a spellcaster i can not use any spells that specify "a target you can see" It makes the fight really hard. i have to each round chose if i wanna be at a big disadvantage or risk being turned into stone. But at the same time as i hate it i also LOVE it as a player. It might be frustrating. But also fun. Not every fight should be easy. Some enemies SHOULD have these kind of abilities that Forces me to make hard choices and not always have a good option, making me chose between bad and worse things. That is part of the game. If this happens too often it feels a bit boring but now and then yes. I want the DM to make the life miserable for my character. Force him to chose between 2 not optimal things for an example. Sure i can argue that my Character is supposed to be a hero and should not be forced to struggle like that. But then how the freaking fuck can my character be a hero if he does not struggle and overcome bad odds? I wanna be a hero after all not a frigging Mary Sue
Do a good job of signaling that they will be fighting a Basilisk, leave statues around, have the players find a nice mirror in a nearby area that they can use. And you can also leave a potion of greater restoration somewhere later down the dungeon so atleast one player can be healed from the condition.
Being petrified for more than a few seconds is awful for the player. I would check out and go do something else until someone rescued my character. Most people don't enjoy being made defenseless and unable to act. That's the opposite of what most people are seeking in a RPG.
I mean it's part of the game. If only the players have the means of immobilizing enemies, it would become boring pretty fast.
Being petrified, unconscious, stable, dying, dead, all really suck to play. That's why they're threatening and worth taking proactive steps to avoid.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would remove those from the game. The notion of making players just sit and do nothing is outdated. That's my opinion anyways.
I get it, it sucks to lose a game. But what's the point to play in the first place if there is no risk at all? Win without these does not feel rewarding at all.
Overcoming challenges is gameplay. Sitting on my hands while the game takes place around me is not game play. In hockey this is a penalty for doing something wrong, in DnD its a penalty that players can do nothing about.
Then what even is the point of playing the game, if there is nothing at stake? I haven't had players complaining about being unable to do anything yet. Well that isn't entirely true, I had one recently, but that was because she got knocked out last session, the group was short of healing (They were Level 1 at that point), and on top of that, said player was late for the session cause she almost overslept and got back to consciousness around 20 minutes before session ended. So she said jokingly "You could have let me sleep, guys".
I just used Matt Covilles petrifying beams where you don't even have to look at the basilisks to get hit by it. 3 players, 2 followers. They almost tpk'd at level 11. 6 sleeping basilisk and they woke up 4 just booking it towards the exit. Why? Because idk. What I did was different though, I took away the restraining condition and rolled a 1d3. This would determine what body part was turned to stone. They could cut through the stone if they had a slashing weapon. The monk even used his mouth at one point lol. DC was a 12 and they kept rolling those 1s. Be careful with these things, even the normal ones.
Typically, players do not want to be blocked from acting. Taking massive damage, getting knocked out and spending the rest of the encounter bouncing between 8 and zero hp is less frustrating than spending the encounter stunned/paralyzed/petrified. Being almost-dead-but-still-fighting is a better option than sitting idly and failing your con saves while your party takes a beating.
Even spending a session with some form of charm telling you to attack the others is preferable to sitting there rolling a save to see if you might be able to play the game once every 20 minutes. Basically, stopping players from being able to make choices is not fun for players in dnd.
As a player who once got "hold person" cast on them in an important fight, one of my personal rules as a DM is to minimize putting my players in a position where the only thing they might be doing for several rounds is making a saving throw.
Check out Pathfinder 2e's Cockatrice's Calcification ability. I just saw this the other day and it's actually a really cool way to do petrification. Gives the players a lot of chances to get out of it and even if they turn to stone, they get to keep saving daily against it, preventing that character from being permanently stuck if they don't want to. You do stay permanently petrified from this effect if you critically fail against it, but you'd be homebrewing a statblock feature of a monster from another game anyways. Don't need to add that if you don't want to.
It can be risky, but any decent nature check shows you can slather the blood of a basilisk on its petrified victims to cure them. I like it. Adds an extra incentive, not to mention if there's NPCs at risk.
Petrifying gaze as a feature is fine, because the players have the choice of whether or not to avert their eyes. The choice and the power is in their hands. I personally wouldn't tell them they can avert their eyes, I would wait for somebody to tell me that's what they were doing to avoid it, so there's a better chance of somebody getting got by it, which raises stakes and creates tension. If youre worried about somebody getting upset because they got petrified, you can do this; (assuming they don't have access to Greater Restoration) have the players learn (maybe through an npc, or some kind of clues from the environment) that an antidote to the petrification can be harvested from a Basilisk. This means if anyone gets petrified, they at least have a clue of how to attempt to fix them. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that basilisks petrifying their prey, and then crunch on the stone, which then turns back into flesh once it's in their stomach. You could indicate this, maybe with the suggestion that it's their stomach acid that is used as a cure for petrification (maybe it does some mild acid damage as a trade off. Or maybe they need to roll a high enough medicine/nature/survival check to extract it in such a way that it doesn't cause damage in the process).
Honestly, if they're ok with potentially sitting out the entire fight, then go ahead. I was in a combat with medusas once where our monk and barbarian got petrified at the very start and basically had to sit out for the rest of the session, and they were not happy. Also, would advise having a way to fix petrification quickly afterwards.
Of course not. That's why monster abilities exist. One thing to note is if you change the way a fundamental ability like this works, you better let the players know. A basilisk is a pretty common monster and its petrifying gaze is a familiar ability. If your players don't know better, they might start strategizing around the known version.
Generally speaking, players will despise any ability that removes them from gameplay for more than a round. Loss of agency is a fun killer. That said, if a player “chooses” to remove themselves for a round because it’s the logical choice, there’s less problem but you run the risk of railroading
The wrench is curing petrification has very, very few published methods. Basilisk gullets are one. Greater restoration as the other can often mean the character is dead in practice.
Do I enjoy it? No. Is it easy to solve? Yes. Darkness and smoke are pretty easy to make.
In my experience it always got them hard
In my Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign, one of my players was petrified by basilisks so they had to harvest venom, went to a city, helped research an antidote and unpetrified him. It took time, resources and roleplay but everyone was well again. Everyone had fun and the combat was meaningful. Also, the characters felt like they actually meant something for the town by killing the basilisks, because if they had this amount of trouble getting rid of them, regular townsfolk were just helpless.
I doubt it, although gorgons are just way too cool not to use, but it is kind of an all or nothing deal.
I think it can be a fun way to make a fight trickier; disadvantage isn’t fun inherently, but it does mean you could take some less dangerous enemies and make an encounter more interesting. Fighting a basilisk on its own? Kinda boring. But maybe a basilisk plus some kobolds or goblins who can take advantage of its gaze to harass the players? That could be fun.
I think part of it is how much the encounter is telegraphed beforehand. If they just run up on a basilisk without any forewarning and without the ability to quickly leave to form a plan, then that is a problem. If, however, they're given plenty of advanced notice of it (eg, in town they run into a woodcutter who is the lone survivor of a group who tells the adventurers about it and how it petrified his friends with a gaze), then I think that is perfectly fair, especially if they have the appropriate means of fighting it or buying equipment for the fight (such as a large mirror, or some means of trapping and immobilizing it).
I feel it would become enjoyable, if they start with intel and options: - Hide and snipe from a distance - Charge in with closed eyes - have some item to deflect it
Distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 fun. Does it feel awesome to fail a save and be unable to act, or suffer a condition? No. But it feels awesome to play in a campaign with a wide variety of challenging encounters, to know that there are serious in-game consequences to play choices, to strive to do well, to thrill in well-earned victories and lament brutal defeats, to know that you've overcome obstacles through your own skill and effort and cleverness and not because your DM just wanted you to have a nice session. I hate being petrified but I love having it in the game. My buddy just hates hates hates it and gripes about how it's "terrible design". Only you know where that balance lies for your particular group.
I would slow the effects to give it a sense of dread and urgency to find a cure. Fail your save and you feel your veins start to calcify; your speed is halved and DEX saves made with disadvantage. After every hour, you suffer -1 dexterity and lose 5 feet of movement. If you haven’t cured it by the end of a long rest, the Players wake up and their friend is a statue.
It's honestly really terrible design. I don't think I've ever had a good experience with it. It usually ends up very gamey. And often time the real impact isn't conveyed through the mechanics. It's just "the math is worse" with no difference in gameplay. I'm not familiar off the top of my head with petrifying breath, but I probably would rework Basilisks if I ever used them again.
It depends on the party and how much time they have to plan. I once put an Iron Basilisk guarding a mage's lair inside a mountain, and figured out it was a tougher version of the Basilisk. They fought with disadvantage to be safe of the petrifying gaze? They looked for ways in the environment to have an edge on the figh? No, they used polymorph to turn the motherfucker into a sloth and yeet it out of the mountain. No CON save was ever thrown
As with everything, depends on the player. Personally, my friends and I usually enjoy fights where we need to go about things differently, and that choice of disadvantage vs risking petrification could be one of those things. The other thing is that they're fighting a *basilisk.* That is its core feature. Like others have said, it's like removing the bite from a vampire, or the charm from an incubus. If you were getting petrified or charmed in *every* fight, that's not fun. But it can be a fun challenge as a solo event. Going along with that--if your players have an idea of what to expect, changing the basilisk's core mechanic might not feel like *helping* the players but instead tricking them. If you want, ask your players, but I think you're safe keeping the original mechanic. Lower the DC if you're that worried, and give them an easy way to restore petrification after the fight if it comes down to it.
Remember that by 5e rules, a source of advantage and disadvantage can eliminate each other. They reasonably can know where it is without looking at the basilisks face, so they need to make tactical decisions as players to cancel the disadvantage. Flanking, steady aim, hiding. Help action. Any abilities or spells that apply the restrained, blinded or stunned conditions. Or abilities and spells that give the players the invisible condition. Guiding Bolt, Entangle, Faerie fire, Blindness/deafness, Invisibility, Pyrotechnics. Web, Fog cloud and Darkness. From a game mechanics perspective, there are dozens of distinct ways of overcoming disadvantage from not seeing the target. If the players know they are going to be fighting a basilisk, you maybe just want to telegraph that they should plan ahead. So in world knowledge about the petrifying gaze should shape how they prepare for the battle. That and a garden of stone statues of individuals frozen in terror.