Boulder Beetled Redux
Boulder beetles were a humorous and beloved but poorly designed monster whose primary attack gimmick was trivial to avoid. As a counterpart to upcoming removal of some of the boring animal monsters seen in mid-dungeon and lair, I propose reworking and reintroducing boulder beetles. Their rolling attack will be made difficult to avoid, but will allow some means of escape, including sufficiently fast movement and use of EV or SH in additional to the usual translocation escape methods. I'd imagine new beetles as relatively rare lair spawns you'd mostly want to 1v1, and where they'd initiate a roll attack 1-3 times in a typical fight to the death. The roll attack would be on the order of 2-4 times as powerful as their normal melee, probably on the higher end of that range so the incentive to avoid the roll attack is high.
If the boulder beetle is at least one tile away, it can initiate a roll state where it will gain fast movement and will do a high damage attack that checks AC, EV, and SH and ends the roll state when it hits or is blocked. The beetle won't start the roll attack if adjacent so that the player can always counter the roll via their positioning, but see the section below on the issue this introduces.
The boulder beetle roll will be a normal "seeking" movement to avoid arcane rules about moving out of the way, but will be only somewhat faster than normal movement speed, say 12. This allows the player haste/blink/tele as a means of escape, and felids and spriggans can successfully outrun or at least maintain distance on the roll until the attack ceases. Breaking los also won't guarantee a failed attack, since the monster will use normal seeking, but the roll state will abort if the beetle loses its target memory, so high stealth can be relevant. After a shortish number of turns, say 7-12, the roll attack will end, allowing players who stay away from the beetle for a while by whatever means to avoid the high damage.
If the attack misses, the beetle keeps rolling along a ray path until the roll duration ends. For this reason, the roll duration might need to depend on the distance to the player at the time of start of roll, with shorter duration the closer the player is at starting time. This way way the bettle won't roll too far past the player. If the attack is blocked, I don't think anything special should happen aside from the beetle ending its roll state.
The roll attack will have a cool-down after its ended for whatever reason, which should be a shortish number of turns, perhaps a bit longer than typical monster breath attack. The beetle does need to reposition in order to execute another roll attack.
If beetles can't roll while adjacent, they need a way to reset their position eventually in order to allow them to initiate a new roll. Unlike centaurs, who can't fire a launcher while adjacent, beetles won't be able to initiate their "ranged" attack several times before the player closes the gap. I think it's more interesting if the player can partially mitigate the roll by being next to the beetle, who'd be no slouch in melee, but if this is the case, the beetle needs to create distance somehow.
The most straightforward way is to give beetles innate Blink that they use periodically, but this raises theme issues. Should beetles have a translocations theme somehow? Does this require some other translocationy aspect to their properties? Is this a bit weird since we have another notable and pretty good translocationy lair monster: blink frogs? Is there another way for them to reposition that doesn't involve blink? Tune in next week to find out!