I recently downloaded the PDF for Flee, Mortals! - the MCDM (Matt Colville's company) monster book.
I have never run a Lich combat encounter before (spoilers for anyone in my campaign, but they've met one who has been disguised as a living human and using Nystul's Magic Aura to avoid the Grave Cleric's Eyes of the Grave) but when I look at the Lich stat block, I find myself extremely skeptical that, as written, it'll put up much of a fight.
The Lich is a CR 21 monster, meaning it should be able to present a significant threat to a tier 3 party on its own, in theory. But if there's one thing that really makes me doubt that, it's the Lich's pitiful 135 hit points. At level 16 (the level my party is currently at) my Wizard (obviously in a different campaign) with his admittedly high Con (+4 once we hit level 8) will have 132 HP - within a rounding error of this ultimate boss monster.
Now, before we get into comparing stat blocks, the party makeup is also somewhat important here. I have a big party, and the players who can most consistently play are a Fighter/Paladin, Grave Cleric, Artillerist Artificer, Whispers Bard, Ancestral Guardian Barbarian (with a powerful homebrewed artifact sword similar to the Sword of Zariel from Descent into Avernus,) and two Storm Sorcerers.
The Lich has pretty decent saving throw proficiencies, but with only an AC of 17, a level 16 party is going to be hitting very frequently.
(It's been a long campaign, as well, so there have been things like Tome of Understanding and +2 and +3 magic items to boost attacks.)
Take the Artillerist, for instance. They have a +6 to Intelligence, a +5 proficiency bonus, a +2 All-Purpose Tool, and an Ioun Stone of Mastery. So, we're looking at a +14 to hit.
After one round to set up their two Eldritch Cannons (using the Force Ballista option,) the artificer's standard turn is Fire Bolt followed by the cannons.
Yes, we're going to do a damage array (this is more for me than proving the point here).
Fire Bolt hit: 3d10+1d8, or 21 damage.
Fire Bolt crit: 42 damage.
Force Ballista hit: 3d8, or 13.5
Force Ballista crit: 27
Miss 1-2 (10%) Hit 3-19 (85%) Crit 20 (5%)
Fire Bolt damage per round: 17.85 + 2.1, or 19.95
Force Ballista per attack: 11.475 + 1.35, or 12.825, then x2 for two cannons and we get 25.65.
Add it up and our Artificer is doing on average 45.6 damage per round with minimal spell slot investment. That's almost precisely a third of the Lich's HP.
And with a big party, that means that if they focus fire on the Lich (did I mention that two of the melee characters have means to get fast flight speeds?) It'll go down in one round - potentially before it has a turn to take an action.
So, the HP is an issue. The AC is also a bit of an issue. But what about damage output? Liches are, after all, just undead Wizards (they also have a means of doing a bit of damage-for-healing). So, are they just glass cannons?
The Lich does most of its damage via spells. For the ones prepared in the Monster Manual version, Disintegrate is probably the most potent, though of course it's a save-for-none spell, so you really need it to land for it to do anything. Still, that's 75 damage in a single round. But that's only half of what a CR 21 monster is expected to put out. You do have some AoE spells like Fireball, which can do lots of damage if you hit a lot of targets with it,
There are a lot of factors that bump the Lich's CR up, of course, but I think the amount of planning you need to do to make a Lich feel truly like a serious threat to your players is kind of absurd. You need to make it hard for the players to reach the Lich, because in melee, they'll be shredded pretty quickly.
Now, let's look at the Flee, Mortals! version of the Lich:
Things change very quickly:
The MCDM Lich has 270 HP - twice as much as the Monster Manual one. (It's still CR 21.) It also has an AC of 20 - not a ton higher, and high-level PCs will still hit it more often than not if they have any kind of magic enhancement. However, the Lich also has a flight speed with Hover, meaning that the party will need to figure something out if they want to have their melee characters be able to hit the thing. And that speed is 50 feet (not as useful given that my Barbarian and Fighter/Paladin have easy access to 90 and 60 foot flight respectively).
Ability scores are also bumped up a bit - this lich has +4 to Strength, though only +2 to Dex (down from +3). They also get higher Wisdom and now have proficiency in Strength saves.
Notably, they don't, however, have legendary resistance (the named Lich which is on the next page, and is a Solo monster, has the MCDM equivalent, which imposes a penalty on the monster when used, which I think is fun design). It's also fully immune to being Turned.
Now, let's look at damage.
This lich, like the newer WotC designs, uses a multiattack action, with bespoke magical effects rather than existing spells. However, these effects are still considered spells, meaning that, among other things, they can be counterspelled. The lich doesn't have spell slots to keep track of, but these unlimited-use things (and some limited use things) have levels.
The lich gets to use an ability called Glare of Undeath and then four spell attacks, using any combination of things called Biting Acid, Disruptive Thunder, or Pain of Ages.
Glare of Undeath is a crowd control ability, while the other three are damaging attacks. Each does roughly 22 damage on a hit, meaning we're still doing only about 88 damage on a turn if all our stuff hits. But each also comes with a secondary effect, giving you plenty of options when running them.
There are also some limited-use spells. Horrid Woe is similar to Finger of Death, and causes the target's spirit to rise as a Wraith under the Lich's control if it puts them to 0 HP (though interestingly doesn't kill the target). Life Absorption is the big 9th-level, 1/day ability that periodically sucks life out of the party to grant the Lich temp HP - another way to keep them alive.
As with a lot of big boss monsters in this book, the Lich also has a powerful bonus action and reaction. Necrotic Form allows them to move with a bonus action and gives them immunity to most weapon damage, making it far easier to get away if they get swarmed.
Then, they have a reaction to impose advantage or disadvantage on d20 tests - probably the least devastating of the Lich's features.
The Lich, like most new monster design, does have a number of utility spells as well (including the aforementioned Magic Aura - the SRD version of Nystul's Magic Aura).
Now, the Lich is also presented as a "Controller," meaning you can expect to have some minions around.
In the Xanathar's version of the encounter building advice (something I find much better than the DMG's,) a CR 21 legendary monster should present an appropriate challenge for 6 level 16 player characters. But I think this is balanced basically for if it's a low-stakes random encounter.
Flee, Mortals! has its own encounter calculator, and evidently online, it actually makes good on the promise of Hard encounters.
I'd love to have the eight players I've had playing regularly the last couple weeks always able to show up (along with one of my roommates, who hasn't been able to play in months, but has a Spores Druid,) but to be conservative, let's say we have six players for sure.
And we'll ignore that I've been spoiling them with insanely good magic items and say they truly count as normal level 16 characters.
The MCDM guidance says that each level 16 character is worth a certain amount of total CR, depending on the difficulty of the encounter. For easy, it's 6.5. Standard is 7, and Hard is 8.
So, with that group, I've got a total CR budget of 39 for an easy fight, 42 for a hard one, and 48 for a hard one. The Lich leaves me with 18, 21, or 27 total CR to fill out that fight.
Let's say we're going for a standard encounter (I could go hard given that I'm expecting the dungeon leading up to him to be more puzzles-and-traps focused, but I also want this to be a fun victory, especially because this is only the first time they're going to fight him). While I've been leaning toward undead as the main "force" that this lich is using, he's also part of a Phyrexian cult, which could mean using Aberrations and Construct (Oozes and even some Elementals, like a blood elemental in Flee, Mortals! could work). Fiends of various sorts could work.
Anyway, I'm rambling here:
The point is, I can see this Lich being a much bigger problem for the party, without needing to do an insane amount of prep work to make it a challenge.
We are, of course, a year away from the new Monster Manual, which will certainly have a new version of the Lich that adheres to the Monsters of the Multiverse style of spellcasting monsters. I'll be very curious to see how the old version, and this MCDM version, compare to it.
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