Ok, so, long post incoming.<br/><br/>First off, about Tess: I really,<em>really</em>don't want to deal with a PC committing suicide in an RP, unless that RP is generally geared towards that sort of thing.  Heck, I don't even want to deal with a character getting killed off (well, killed off for real; resurrection and stuff doesn't really count).  If you want to step out, that's fine, and I can just NPC Tess for the rest of the battle and then have her do something else (probably going along with having her be a messenger of sorts).<br/><br/>Ok, back to the gameplay.  Yes, these monsters are overtuned.  Snake mentioned to me in a PM about a normal fight expending about 20% of the party's resources, and that this one cost about 40%.  I agree with a general game, but PbF usually takes a lot longer to get things to happen, so everything else runs at a faster pace to compensate - for instance, I fully plan to have you guys level up after this fight, and unless you decide to go off and charge into another (rather obvious) battle, you'll have a full rest to recover all of the party's resources.<br/><br/>There's also the issue about these monsters not acting like normal monsters.  In a normal fight, the monsters attack and deal some HP damage, the party attacks and deals a lot of HP damage, monsters die, party moves on.  Here, the only member of the party to take actual HP damage is Squeek, and that's because grabbing and raping a snake just sounds... odd.  Further, the only character in both fights to take any ahegao damage is Naia, and she wouldn't have taken any for a few more rounds if she didn't get a nat. 1 on her save.  If you guys had killed the monsters by now, there would have been practically no threat to the party.  (I will say that Naia's monster is at significantly lower HP than the one holding Tess however, and the one going after Lyra has about 2 HP left, and is quite dead after the crit, although that post seems to have suddenly vanished...)<br/><br/>I will say that I overtuned them, however.  I made them pretty optimized, and that was a horrible mistake.  (They do all have a racial ability to make grapple attempts without provoking an opportunity attack, which I pretty much have to do for balance seeing as they don't have any real attacks that<em>aren't</em>grapple checks.)  On the other hand, they also have to have some advantage over the PCs for grapple checks, again because it takes several rounds before they can actually accomplish anything.  It takes one round to grab a girl, another round after that to pin her and start stripping her, and then a third round to actually start raping her - if she succeeds on an escape at any point during that, she just completely invalidated several rounds of the monster's attacks.  Granted, it can go after multiple girls, and I think I have to balance that part better (I've got some ideas, which I'll get to later), but there's also generally less of them.<br/><br/>One thing I'll probably do is change how multiple tentacles stack.  The idea should be that if a girl is only held with one tentacle, it should be very easy to slip free, but if she's held by 3-4, it should be difficult.  Getting grabbed by 5 should be nearly impossible to escape from.  So I'm going to lower the monsters' base CMD and CMB, but they'll get a higher bonus for each tentacle beyond the first going after a girl.  I'm also going to lower how many tentacles they can respawn in a round (it hasn't come up yet, but my original plan was that the big ones can respawn two per round, the small ones can respawn one per round, and a tentacle that just spawned can't act).  All monsters will be able to spend a full-round action respawning all of them, however, so while killing them as they spawn will keep it weak, it won't guarantee killing it.<br/><br/>Now, back to talking about Frag's problem, that of feeling useless.  I may not have hammered this home enough before, and for that I apologize, but if you're grabbed, you can do more than just try to struggle away - you can attack.  You can't do anything that requires both hands, but taking a one-handed weapon (a sword, an axe, even a dagger) and trying to hack away at the tentacles holding you is probably a pretty good idea.  Naia can even spend her rounds making a Flurry of Blows action, as that doesn't require both hands (or any hands, really, since monks can use any part of their body for unarmed attacks, and nothing in Flurry's description says that the bonus attacks have to be with an off-hand weapon).  I even made this easy by saying that any attack that hits will kill the tentacle (and deal some damage to the main body even, so killing tentacles does help you kill the monster).<br/><br/>Anyway, those are my thoughts on why the encounter's going like it has been.  If you guys have any specific thoughts, I'd like to hear it - I'm fine with criticism, and I'm well aware that the mechanics for this are not at all close to being balanced.