The art on this card is more immersion breaking than the art of the Beholder at gay pride (or a public celebration or parade or whatever it was).
>>96801894How do you figure?
>>96801894Sure you could home-brew a beholder to work like that card, but it doesn’t really represent their special abilities as is.I don’t think it even matches up to any specific beholder kin sub species, but even if it did it would be weird to have something like a hivemother, spectator, gauth, or death kiss on there. That’s because It’s strange to have a beholder-kin variant rather than a true beholder as the creature on the titular card. The card isn’t called eyes of the beholder-Kin. The art In this promo works fine, beholders are like orc and drow alignment wise. They were never always evil.The only wonky bit is it’s hard to tell what would be in the central anti magic cone.
>>96801894Both are symptoms of the same disease.
>>96802122I should’ve put in the op but a typed up a post here:>>96802130More info:So speaking in terms of vanilla beholders.The thing is beholders eye rays don’t work like on the card. The central eye doesn’t fire a beam, they can’t aim all their eye rays in the same direction, the rays have different colors (at least in earlier editions).It’d be a decent representation if it was just the disintegration ray, but I think that’s supposed to be just green.The other damaging rays wouldn’t disintegrate someone like that.They don’t have any lightning rays.
>>96802179You're largely correct, but Beholders technically can aim all their eyes in a single direction in terms of fluff, they just choose not to since... I think it's because they all have some racial level of paranoia? Basically there's nothing in lore physically preventing from focusing all their eyes on a single point, they just choose not to since it's more practical to maintain all around vision. There's also a metamagic feat in 3.5 that lets you fire a spell as an eye ray (From the beholder section in lords of madness, duh) but I can't quite recall how it works, only that it could allow a beholder mage to fire a lightning bolt from an eye (Though then they'd be missing the central one)And I will argue that the gay pride beholder is still more immersion breaking, since beholders are not only a single sex species that reproduce through parthenogenesis, but they're all some level of completely fucking insane and literally so racist that they've been known to even be racist towards their own reflections. They're all Evil for a reason.
>>96802214> And I will argue that the gay pride beholder is still more immersion breaking, since beholders are not only a single sex species that reproduce through parthenogenesis,Asexual reproduction probably falls under the lgbt+ umbrella > but they're all some level of completely fucking insane and literally so racist that they've been known to even be racist towards their own reflections. They're all Evil for a reason.A lot of their lore gets retconned across editions. But for instance in 3rd edition, they were “Usually Lawful Evil” (compare to devils which were “always lawful evil” but even that had exceptions). That’s the same as stuff like hobgoblins.That meant it might be rare but you could find ones of other alignment. Not sure if other editions kept the often, usually, or always modifiers to alignment.
I think beholder Reproduction was asexual in all editions but the details changed a lot
>>96801894I'm not a D&Drone and my interactions with Magics are because I work at a game store. So, for me, it doesn't break any immersion and my perspective is more important to me than yours is.
>>96802130>>96802179To add to >>96802214 I'd point out that 5e had variant abilities for Beholders listed in Volo's Guide to Monsters. Mostly replacing various eye effects with different spells.One of them listed for the central eye is Power Word Stun, stunning the weakest creature each round, which could get closer to a beam. Chain Lightning is also listed as one of the replacement ray options, but there's also a listed option to simply replace the damage type of any rays where applicable. And yes, the restriction on a Beholder blasting all of its eye rays is largely due to flavor justifications, much like the randomized eye-rays themselves. A Beholder can technically use whatever eye ray whenever it wants (such as using Disintegration to carve out a lair or Telekinesis to manipulate objects), but during combat they mix it up in order to keep enemies guessing. The random rolls are to represent that inscrutable alien mindset. If a beholder had the right eye rays and just wanted to angrily blast someone as hard as possible, it's technically physically possible. More importantly, the art does ultimately depict a Beholder blasting someone with eye rays to kill them, which is what Beholders are known for.
>>96802401>And yes, the restriction on a Beholder blasting all of its eye rays is largely due to flavor justifications, much like the randomized eye-rays themselves.In 3.5 the reason was given as them being unable to turn all their eyestalks in a single direction due to physiological reasons. I guess like how most people can't wiggle individual toes.
>>96802484I don't remember where this was written down though.
>A beholder’s favorite foods include small live mammals, exotic mushrooms and other fungi, gnomes, beef, pork, colorful leafy vegetables, leaves, flower petals, insects, and birds.
>>96802484>>96802550If we go back further, the AD&D Beholder used a mix of random chance and firing arcs, where it could fire 1d4 rays at anyone in front of it. So it's not as if the 3 eye stalks in 3.5 was a hard limit. The AD&D version also allows it to fire all 10 eye rays at once at someone above itAlthough logistically, that also seems questionable. If a Beholder is keeping its central eye looking down a particular hallway, and is attacked from behind, then logically it should be restricted in what eye rays it can fire behind it. But that doesn't really work. You would need to actively track which eyestalks are positioned on which arcs of the beholder, so that if the beholder needs to keep its central eye steady you know which ray is where. That the rules don't instruct you to do this would indicate to me that the limitation isn't actually that strict. And really, just looking at the 3.5 art in pic related, the fact that you can see all of the smaller eyeballs and none of them are facing away makes it clear enough that the Beholder can aim more than 3 of them forward if it wanted to. And by that logic, this art >>96802130 also breaks that rule because all of the eyes are clearly flexible enough to point forward. Either this is more of a retcon for Beholder biology (or at least a distinction in variants between old and new editions with rigid and non-rigid eyestalks), or the earlier rules were merely a way to balance a Beholder's use of eye rays during combat by limiting them to how many they could fire at a smaller group of targets, much like the random chance of 5e Beholders.
I did a search and found this:https://www.realmshelps.net/monsters/detail/Beholder>Each of the ten small eyes can produce a magical ray once a round, even when the beholder is attacking physically or moving at full speed. The creature can easily aim all its eyes upward, but its own body tends to get in the way when it tries to aim the rays in other directions. During a round, the creature can aim only three eye rays at targets in any one arc other than up (forward, backward, left, right, or down). The remaining eyes must aim at targets in other arcs or not at all. A beholder can tilt and pan its body each round to change which rays it can bring, to bear in an arc.This is what it says on that page.But it doesn't appear in this page: https://srd.dndtools.org/srd/monsters/monsters/core/monstersBtoC.htmlThat instead says:>Eye Rays (Su): Each of a beholder’s small eyes can produce a magical ray once per round as a free action. During a single round, a creature can aim only two eye rays (gauth) or three eye rays (beholder) at targets in any one 90-degree arc (up, forward, backward, left, right, or down). The remaining eyes must aim at targets in other arcs, or not at all. A beholder can tilt and pan its body each round to change which rays it can bring to bear in any given arc.I'm not sure if one of them came from errata or something.
>>96802699To be fair it's canon (in some editions?) that even true beholders tend to have a wide variety of appearances in terms of how their eyestalks looks.Lords of madness:>On most beholders, each eyestalk is smooth and rubbery, almost like a tentacle.Again, there can be much variation. Some beholders have segmented eyestalks similar to a worm’s body, while others have articulated, almost insectlike stalks composed of numerous knuckles and digits that can rotate and bend in any direction.
>>96802784>To be fair it's canon (in some editions?) that even true beholders tend to have a wide variety of appearances in terms of how their eyestalks looks.Yeah. I mostly brought it up because it'd be the best in-universe explanation for why beholders vary in terms of how far they can bend their eye stalks. Going by >>96802750 it seems even within 3.5 there was a change where a Beholder could no longer just fire all of the rays straight upward.And even that change I'd assume would be for an attempt at balancing the use of it, since rather than the combat strategy listed on that page (plow right into groups of opponents to use as many of their eyes as they can), the preferable strategy is to simply hover upside-down as high up as possible, and then freely bombard whoever is below you. But if we're focusing on the eye ray arcs as the crux of the issue, then that's something that would have occurred when the 5e monster manual first released, rather than years later when they were making MtG cards. By the time this card was printed the rules about firing arcs for eyestalks were already long gone. And at that point it seems like less of an issue with the artwork and more of a matter of dumbing down the rules themselves, which is a fair enough complaint.
>>96802214They aren't all insane.From the lords of madness book page 48:>Not all beholders are insane, solitary creatures with little more on their minds than slaughter. Just as other races have members who simply can’t abide by the rules of their society, so too do beholders have outcasts. From a humanoid viewpoint, these outcasts are the few sane beholders. These creatures maintain a hatred of other beholders, but this is a hatred born of fear rather than intolerance. A sane beholder understands that others of its kind view it as the greatest threat of all, and it seeks out places that other beholders shun. In other words, these beholders live in the societies and cities of other races.>Although these beholders might be considered sane, most remain evil to the core.Important to note that shit gets retconned, at least in part because there's a ton of different writers. Also this was a 20 year old book.
>>96802848>And even that change I'd assume would be for an attempt at balancing the use of it, since rather than the combat strategy listed on that page (plow right into groups of opponents to use as many of their eyes as they can), the preferable strategy is to simply hover upside-down as high up as possible, and then freely bombard whoever is below you. That's a clever strategy.>But if we're focusing on the eye ray arcs as the crux of the issue, then that's something that would have occurred when the 5e monster manual first released, rather than years later when they were making MtG cards. By the time this card was printed the rules about firing arcs for eyestalks were already long gone. And at that point it seems like less of an issue with the artwork and more of a matter of dumbing down the rules themselves, which is a fair enough complaint.that might makes sense. though The aiming direction thing wasn't the biggest of my issues with the artwork.
>>96802871>that might makes sense. though The aiming direction thing wasn't the biggest of my issues with the artwork.Well, if we put that aside, then what I said earlier about 5e having variant beholders with different central eye rays and damage types also still applies.If we want to stick with 3.5, then Lords of Madness has a feat that can narrow down the central eye cone to target a single object and focus it into an eye ray.And I suppose as long as we're dredging up everything, I'll also bring up 4e's Beholders, where there were elemental variants in that edition whose central eye rays did just explicitly target a single creature, and whose eye rays would all be similar colors. Not hard to imagine a lightning variant in comparison to pic related.And granted, plenty of people don't like 4e, but Beholders have always been these sorts of mutant weirdos where no two were exactly alike. Being able to blast all their eye rays has been around for since AD&D; being able to turn the central eye into another ray has been around since 3.5; being able to have the central eye ray and the smaller eye rays all be energy blasts has been around since 4e; being able to aim any eye ray in any direction was reinforced in 5e.Just going back through the issues listed here >>96802179The eye rays have changed. The eye ray can fire a beam. They can fire in the same direction in some editions. And the 5e version can explicitly have lightning rays.So the only remaining factor listed is the color of the rays, but if the element can change, why not the ray color?I suppose my point is that the way beholders work has been getting steadily tweaked for decades now, so the fact that a card from 5 years ago (which is drawing inspiration from an edition that came out 10 years ago) doesn't perfectly align with the rules from 20 years ago shouldn't be that immersion breaking. No more immersion breaking than simply fighting a Beholder in 5e after having memorized the 3.5 statblock.
>>96803056my issue isnt really the idea of new beholder variants (like a hypothetical eye of lightning similar to the eye of flame variant), but more so using them on a card that supposed to represent the default beholder.
>>968023123e is also where the racial insanity and extreme racism originate.And Asexual reproduction wouldn't fall under LGBT since the entire cult is about sex and gender and something that reproduces asexually quite literally lacks both of those.
>>96803125To frame this in a different way, it'd be like if they made a Wings of the Dragon card, and they put a Purple Dragon on it. That's not exactly a default dragon, nor is it something more classic or iconic like a Red Dragon. But it would still get across the idea that dragons have two wings that they fly with. Just like how Eye of the Beholder gets across the idea that beholders have 11 magic eyes and kill people. Eyes of the Beholder itself mechanically just nods to the fact that a Beholder has 11 eyes. It doesn't depict the default, but it's made to represent something beholders have in common. Sure, it's kinda weird that they'd go for something more obscure, but it also isn't as if this is the sole Beholder card they printed. The series of 10 Secret Lair cards does the job instead of showing off every single eye ray in a more standard manner.
>>96802179maybe you're technically correct, but you're definitely a stupid bitch because the minor inaccuracies make a good composition that sells the beholder as a villainous figure lording over a dungeon, unlike the gay beholder which is part of a fucking lame-ass composition that completely lacks any features of the dungeon fantasy D&D literally defined, outside of "it has elves in it"
>>96803730im not criticizing the fantasy aesthetics of the card, but the fluff
>>96801894>dnd crossover shitMtg is dead. Theme parks were bad enough, now it's pozzed black Aragorns and crossovers...
>>96801894At medium and high levels running antimagic field is a giant pain in the ass because the charcters' abilities and bonuses are vastly different with their magic items off that I pretty much almost always homebrew the beholder's central cone to be something other than AMF unless the AMF is meant to be one of the main gimmicks of the fight. The last beholder I ran (quite recently funnily enough, like 3 weeks ago) has a spell reflect/redirect cone, any spell cast on the beholder would instead target all creatures in the cone, unless nobody was in it in which case the spell worked as usual.So in other words get fucked faggot, you probably don't even play/run games.
>>96801894-11/-11 seems like a weirdly specific number. Also admittedly I haven't played since the 2000's, but you used to be able to straight up merk a target creature for way less mana.
