Curse You, Wyverns!

My first and second ironman playthroughs of the computer game Pool of Radiance ended in Total Party Kills from squads of typical humanoids due to my own poor preparation. The third playthrough, however, ended only after I had broken out of the city onto the world map and was happily poking around looking for that rumored lizardman city. I was in the wilderness when I get that cold chill up my spine from the random encounter text, and I realized before the combat screen had even loaded that I was already six feet in the grave. It was wyverns. Stinking wyverns.

Most older games have that one grossly unfair random encounter that seems wildly out of line with everything else around them. In this case it can't be blamed on an index overflow error or a cruel programmer. The presence of wyverns in wilderness encounters is a faithful adaptation of the PnP game tables, dating back (one supposes) to the archaic Gygax-era. Why are wyverns so uniquely horrible? Let us count the ways:

• Start with a spider, one of those "save or die" lethal poison kinds.
• Put it in plate armor.
• Give it wings and speed on par with a pegasus, so nothing can successfully run from it.
• Direct quote from the 1st edition Monster Manual: "They are rather stupid but very aggressive, and wyverns will always attack." So forget about making a reaction roll.
• Dragon-quality 2d8 bite attack, in a system where that can one-shot any mage it lands on.
• Swoop attack! Your marching order, it means nothing!
• 2nd edition buff: "The final approach of the dive is done in complete silence, imposing a -2 surprise modifier on the target."
• The 3.0 revisions nerfed their poison so they now need, maybe, two hits to insta-kill you with CON damage. And a Spot bonus so you can't hide, tasty little morsel.

The ACKS system, which usually tones down poison a bit by giving it an onset time, specifies that wyvern poison "instantly kills" a target, a trait shared only with the purple worm.  The 2d8 is now interpreted as two attacks, allowing for multiple special combat maneuvers at once. It also specifies double-damage with talons on a dive (4d8!), with a success allowing the wyvern to carry away its target to (presumably) sting and devour, or drop for amusement. I put a couple of wings of wyverns in the first Domains at War playtest we did, and they basically savaged the opposing army single-handedly. (Bonus: ACKS also features "Giant Killer Bees", which are kind of a disposable mini-me variation of wyverns, for when the GM basically just wants to throw 1d12 save-vs-deaths against a single player all at once.)

Hard to do something single-handedly with no hands, but YNWIM

The mere existence of something like this suggests that the game you're playing is meant to be approached from the combat-as-war paradigm. It's basically exempt from all the usual evasion and diplomacy mechanics, so you have to fight it. But you can't fight something fair when it's made of this many dirty tricks. In a computer game, you basically just reload (or in ironman mode, reroll) after hitting this kind of nonsense. In a free-form tabletop environment, you need to improvise.

Wyvern-slaying ideas:

Seriously? You want to ride me against that? I'm outta here.

1. Nets or a web spell might be able to keep them grounded. Or tie a rope to a tree and snag with a grappling hook. Once immobile, they can be picked apart with arrows.
2. Ride an elephant and hide in a tower on its back. At least you'll be too big to carry away.
3. Wand of Paralyzation, the ideal bane of any flying creatures. (I've placed one in a dungeon, but so far it remains unfound.) Note that the 3.0 version of the wyvern explicitly makes them immune, so apparently Skip Williams is hip to your tricks.
4. In ACKS, I would rule that fixing polearms against a charge will work against dive attacks too.
5. Lots of archer mercenaries. No, not that many. Way more than that.
6. Cast an illusion that resembles the wyvern's natural enemy, the... er... "*ahem* The wyvern has no natural enemies". You just shut up, 2nd edition MM!
7. Write an angry blog post about them after they TPK you. That'll show the bastards, eh?