During tonight's fight with the nightwalker, the party nearly had it's first irrecoverable death.
Nightwalkers kill the soul of anything they strike down, immediately skipping death saves and causing a death so permanent only Wish can revive them.
The Nightwalker sent out a Finger of Doom for the exact HP of the party's Wizard, but he managed to make the save.
The Nightwalker then swung out at the party Samurai, who was within melee range. The thing crit and dealt 54 HP, taking her HP down to 14. On her turn, she just barely managed to avoid taking 21 damage from the Annihilating Aura and dying.
Entire fight, optional. They party sought out this thing with the intent to dispose of it. Ultimately, they got really close until their two front liners were within inches from Soul Death. When they realized that it was too big of a risk to continue, the Cleric banished the creature back to the Negative Energy plane from which it originated.
So while they defeated it, it's still out there, with it's warped motivations set upon terminating the lives of dwarves. Very likely they might face it again, as they've yet to deal with the reason why it was on the Material Plane in the first place.
essentially throwing out all three answers like that implies the author has no idea which one is right, calling into question whether any of them are right and can be trusted at all; or thinks they're all right, but isn't actually putting in a walkthrough of "well it depends on what you want" and instead leaving it to popular vote to decide for them meaning guidance is missing; or has no idea what is right, so why should we listen?
it's definitely an issue, I've seen someone provide multiple answers to a question before but it was after, say, a reversal of opinion. Once upon a time kryan came up with a second very different answer to a question days later but didn't want to delete or co-opt votes on the first answer, so posted a second one and explained the relationship the second has with the first.
The Invisible Stalker is a monster that can be summoned with an upcast Conjure Elemental spell. According to that spell, "It obeys any verbal commands that you issue to it (no action required by you)." The stalker has a trait called Faultless Tracker:
The stalker is given a quarry by its summone...
My favorite part of that encounter was when the Samurai said "Come at me, B****!" and then the d20 came up 20 in the same second and I just silently rolled the crit damage as we all took a moment to figure out if this was an instant kill.
The players made the smart call to lure the creature into narrow alleys rather than fight it in the Belltower Square where they saw it. They were able to dip around corners to avoid the damaging aura.
But it was still a VERY close situation as she would still start her next turn in it.
