A few weeks ago, one of my players uttered that question at the end of a particularly difficult encounter with a drow mage. "How were we supposed to beat that?"

My answer was, "Well... I expected you to be creative, and you were."

I knew that they didn't have a true answer to one of his most basic abilities: deeper darkness. One character had a stone with continual light cast on it, though, so they weren't entirely helpless. I ruled that the two effects would negate one another, but only in a five foot radius around the stone. Blue (the character with the light rock) was central to their victory even though he didn't do much damage. From moving around with the stone enough for the characters around him to get glimpses of the battlefield, to rolling it like a bowling ball toward their enemy, the group's creative uses of that stone allowed them to defeat the drow.

I just love good fights that require players to think outside of the "which weapon/spell/ability will do the most damage this round" box.
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