Without boring you with the math, I’ll just share that, regardless of the cone’s range, this means it covers an arc of about 53 degrees, or slightly less than one-sixth of a circle. In fifth-edition D&D, a cone-shaped area of effect covers a distance of x feet, out to a width of x feet at that distance. Wherever it aims its Antimagic Cone, it’s also going to catch creatures it wants to shoot its eye rays at.īut with a little geometry, we can see how the Antimagic Cone can be made to work effectively. A beholder is going to position itself as you’d place a security camera: in a high-up corner where it can see everything and no one can maneuver behind it. The only function its Antimagic Cone will have is to interfere with its killing the intruders.Īs written, the Antimagic Cone seems at first to be a power of highly questionable usefulness. Every instinct it has tells it to kill the intruders. A group of intruders appears in the doorway. Here’s the problem: According to the Monster Manual, the cone “works against the beholder’s own eye rays.” OK, imagine that the beholder spends all its time with its gaze focused on the entrance to its lair, because that’s exactly the sort of thing an aberration would do.

The beholder is aggressive, malicious and antisocial, so when trespassers appear, it’s not going to indulge any attempt to negotiate passage-it’s going to attack immediately.Īt the start of its turn, it must decide whether to use its Antimagic Cone. And a beholder encounter almost always happens in its lair. It can also project an Antimagic Cone from its central eye, but this ability is problematic, as we’ll see in a moment.įinally, a beholder in its lair has access to three lair actions: slippery slime on the floor, grasping appendages flailing from the walls and random beholder eyes appearing on nearby surfaces. These rays have a range of 120 feet, enough to keep trespassers at a distance for two to five combat rounds. It has an innate ability to hover, so it can never be knocked prone.Īt melee range, it has a bite attack, but the beholder’s trump card is its Eye Rays, which emanate from the many smaller eyes at the end of stalks extending from its body. As you’d expect from a floating blob with a giant central eye, its Perception skill is through the roof it also has darkvision out to 120 feet. Though not strong, it has powerful mental abilities along with a high Dexterity and very high Constitution, protecting it against all of the “big three” types of saving throws. It has little purpose in life beyond guarding its chosen turf. The beholder is an aberration-a magically summoned creature of extraplanar origin-with a hateful, avaricious and territorial temperament.

Why do I mention this? Because the beholder is such an iconic D&D monster that our host-who knew hardly anything about the game before we began playing-told me near the beginning of our campaign, “All I want is to run into an ‘eye of the beholder,’ and I’ll be happy.” Our current Dungeons and Dragons group got together after one of my wife’s coworkers cattily referred to a client as “someone who looks like he’d play Dungeons and Dragons in his mom’s basement,” and another of them retorted, “I would totally play Dungeons and Dragons.” He ended up being the host of our weekly sessions.

Beholder dragon