Assume the twig blights take 10 on their Hide checks, so Spotting them requires beating a Hide result of 19. If the party is not slowing down to make extra Spot checks, then each party member makes only two Spot checks, opposed by the two twig blights’ Hide checks. Of course, if the party is carrying a torch, then the twig blights will see them coming long before they can possibly detect the twig blights - and thus, by the time they arrive, the twig blights will already be concealed and stationary, making Listen checks to detect them infeasible. Of course, if a character does have particularly good ears, we should take that into account.) (If all character’s Listen modifiers are particularly low, it’s still usually easier to roll a few hopeless Listen checks then to do the math to figure out exactly where they might succeed. So we can declare that 60 feet is when we’ll start rolling Spot and Listen checks - that’s within the plausible range for the limit of line-of-sight, if the twig blights are in foliage - assuming no character has a particularly high Listen bonus. At a distance of 70 feet, a character with no Listen ranks but a +2 Wis bonus (or who happens to be an elf and has a +2 bonus from that) has a total -5 modifier to Listen checks, so rolling a 20 they can tie 15…but the higher modifier wins ties, so they cannot actually succeed on the Listen check until 60 feet. Listen checks take a -1 penalty per 10 feet of distance. Getting back to the ambush, assume the twig blights take 10 on their Hide and Move Silently checks. I think the revised stats are cleaner, simpler, and better to use, so those are what we’ll be assuming when talking about stealth and detection. This would be perfectly clear to a person who was actually standing there, but might not be obvious to a player at a table just trying to figure out why their attacks don’t seem to do anything. Don’t be coy about this be explicit that the spear (for example) slips between gaps in the twig blgihts’ bodies and that the character will likely need to switch weapons. If a character is holding a piercing melee weapon when the twig blights attack, they’ll find it ineffective. The 3.5 update also gave twig blights Damage Reduction 5/bludgeoning or slashing as part of the 3.5 drive to unify all the various monster resistances into the Damage Reduction mechanic. There’s no need to worry about that too much, though - with Hide, natural camouflage is already factored into handwavy DM judgements of what exactly qualifies as “cover” or “concealment” that allows a character (or monster) to make a Hide check at all. Neither The Sunless Citadel nor the Monster Manual II specified any Hide bonus for a twig blight in a wooded area, but it would be reasonable to give them a circumstance bonus. The 3.5 update settled on “Hide +8, Listen +1, Move Silently +4, Spot +1” for the twig blight’s skills. Later the designers realized that the whole “plant creatures don’t have skills” idea was kind of stupid, and 3.5 made plant monsters work just like any other type of monster. The Monster Manual II clarified that “A twig blight gains skills and feats as a fey.” - because in 3.0 plants didn’t gain skills nor feats, but twig blights were supposed to be sneaky. That wasn’t the last time the twig blights were revised. (Probably not, but every little bit of enemies-feeling-different-to-fight helps.) With luck, the players might even get nervous when engaging twig blights, because twig blights can weaken them in a way goblin short swords can’t. That introduces some extra bookkeeping, tracking changes to characters’ attack bonuses, but it gives the twig blights a gimmick to help them stand out. The Monster Manual II brought the Fortitude DC way down, to 11 - but if a PC fails the save, the effects are more serious: a point of Strength damage. But mostly, it hardly seems worth the bother. There is a tiny bit of nuance introduced by that - because part of the twig blight’s damage is gated behind a Fortitude save, character with low hit points but high Fort saves, like clerics, can hold up surprisingly well. The original poison was a fairly difficult Fortitude save or take…1 extra hit point in damage, immediately, with no secondary effects. The only difference (apart from bumping up their Hide bonus and giving them Listen) was to change the effects of their poison. Twig blights were revised in the Monster Manual II, and I think it was an improvement.
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