Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Revisiting Creatures That Can Take on the Tarrasque

 Earlier, I made a post about how a Clay Golem would actually win in a fight against a Tarrasque. The Clay Golem is immune to attacks from non-magical weapons (those that deal the standard bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage at least) and also acid damage, which means that even if they were swallowed, the Tarrasque's powerful digestive juices wouldn't do anything to it.

I'm not the first person to realize this - the Tarrasque's lack of magical damage is a big liability when sent up against other magical monsters. But that being said, as others have also pointed out, a golem is not immune to all non-magic bludgeoning damage - just that dealt by attacks. This means that a Tarrasque could pick up a Clay Golem and hurl it into a building or just up into the air so that it landed with a big thud. Despite the ground or the wall of that building not being magical, the Golem still takes the damage (my quasi-headcanon for this is that a golem's outer shell is impervious, but its internals will still be damaged by a sudden shift in velocity.)

I do think there's a really cool thing you could do with lore in which there's a big army of golems like the Terra Cotta soldiers in China that was built by an ancient Wizard anticipating the arrival of the Tarrasque - sure, the Tarrasque might destroy some of them by tossing them around, but they'd ultimately overwhelm it.

However, a simpler solution occurred to me: the acid damage from the Tarrasque's bite attack only works on Large or smaller creatures. So if you have a Huge or Gargantuan creature, they don't have to worry about the acid damage. You just need a big creature that has immunity to non-magic BPS damage and has magic weapons of their own.

This actually gives us a fair number of demon lords, the kraken Tromokratis (from Theros,) Empyreans, the Colossus of Akros (also from Theros) and a few other options.

A fair number of these are pretty enormous, and many have Strength scores that are near if not equal to the Tarrasques' so throwing them any serious distance would be difficult.

Still, none of them come close to the Tarrasque's insane damage output.

Naturally, we need to talk Tiamat, who is the only other creature in 5th Edition that's CR 30. Tiamat has a little less health than the Tarrasque, but unlike other dragons (and technically Tiamat counts as a fiend, which I guess makes sense as an evil deity, though I feel like it's an open question as to whether gods even have creature types) she has immunity to non-magic weapons (something even ancient dragons don't even have resistance to.) She's certainly big enough to prevent the Tarrasque from swallowing her, and to make it hard for it to throw her (she can also fly, which I feel should at least give her some kind of advantage on avoiding being tossed.)

In terms of damage output, assuming every strike hits, the Tarrasque does on average 148 damage per round (not counting crits or the swallow ability.) Including legendary actions, that goes up to 232 (using each action to make a tail attack.) Of course, none of this actually does anything to Tiamat, who's immune to the nonmagical damage coming from the Tarrasque.

Tiamat only does 76 damage on her turn, but with legendaries, she gets her breath weapons. We have to ignore her red and green heads, as the Tarrasque is immune to fire and poison damage. I think it's a matter of interpretation whether the Tarrasque's reflective carapace would deflect the blue head's breath, though I'll say it wouldn't because it's not technically a spell, RAW. So we'd have one breath per round, adding 88 damage (and the Tarrasque can't actually succeed on its save unless it burns a legendary resistance) plus a bite that deals 46 total damage (as long as Tiamat doesn't bite with the red or green heads.) So that's actually 134 damage on top of the 76 (Tiamat's all about those legendary actions) giving us 210 damage per round.

The Tarrasque is ahead of Tiamat in health and raw damage output (though I'd argue Tiamat is still clearly the more dangerous as those breaths can hit a ton of targets) but given Tiamat's immunities, she'll always win against it.

Given the immunities involved, there are actually plenty of monsters that could beat the Tarrasque. Tiamat, though, is the only one with the insane damage output to be able to do so relatively quickly. And well she should. She's a goddess.

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