Harsh Reflections: Part Thirty-Three
Chapter: Season Six
Damn. It’s a bummer but Sam let the dice fall.
Don’t worry though, the events of this sessions will set up several things to come.
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Damn. It’s a bummer but Sam let the dice fall.
Don’t worry though, the events of this sessions will set up several things to come.
Comments are closed.
HOVER-TEXT: There will be STERN letters from the Jeda Swiftbeard Fan Club.
i only saw 4 saving throws . . .isn’t there 5 of them at the table?
ooooohhhh Sentinel Hale did not roll!! oh please let him save the day!
Jeanie’s character was already dead. No need to save.
Dam it!
Damn right there will be Stern letters. I think Jeda is an amazing PC.
Also, this is just heart breaking, a TPK on the first encounter of a game. I mean Holy Shit.
hohohohohohohohoohohohohoho!!!! It actually happened! Props to Sam to stick to his word! Now to watch them all have that precious breakdown, mourning while eating pizza, and roll up new folks. unless he add a “However…” to that which is still possible. Regardless i’m glad this happened.
Awwwwe Shiiiit! but you gotta respect a DM who doesn’t pull punches, let the dice fall where they may.
TPKs happen, and as a DM, I hate them… but I would feel like I’d failed the players if it was all the result of one surprise round and a few bad die rolls rather than bad decisions or poor strategy on their part.
Bad decisions and poor strategy like not getting the available information about the tunnels where they are heading to before setting out or stopping and getting the information while a stealthy character scouts ahead? Yeah, the time to find out specifics about where you are headed from your guide is before going there.
I was commiserating with Sam, not condemning him. From the look on his face, he’s feeling pretty down about it.
Based on the comics presented, though, Sam didn’t give them the chance to get that kind of information. He dialogued them straight into the mines. Strategy and planning wasn’t an option.
Yeah, it’s a foil I’ve seen before. One time, I played with a group and at the start of our 2nd campaign… Oh man, the DM had a meltdown after the session. He said he spent weeks organizing a tale of intrigue and epicness and such. But he didn’t take into consideration some of the things that could happen. The innkeeper we met that was supposed to be someone we should win over and he’d become a valuable ally was so snotty and rude that we completely ruined our relationship with him in retaliation (my sorcerer used prestidigitation to cover the rented room in feces as a counter-insult) and then the DM introduced what was supposed to be the main villains for the first several levels to us at level 1… and they were openly rude and hostile. So we did what every good PC should: we killed them. The entire campaign ended before it started.
But, as for the TPK.. it happens. Unlucky rolls can happen.
Just recently, had a near TPK situation vs a naga in pathfinder. She dominated our most OP member of the team (he’s a min-maxer who always focuses on making his character be the most outrageous dps builds possible and who ALSO did NOT have a good will save) who then had him attack the 2nd strongest on the team and killed him from full health in one single attack action. Caused that player to rage quit the game. And the Sorcerer that was helping the naga severely weakened the healer of the team. My gunslinger would have been next target for the dominated OP if we hadn’t run out of time for the session. During out of game discussion, we came to the conclusion that with my character being a selfish, neutral and very perceptive realist who was already on the verge of leaving these strangers to their fate (she was thrust into the midst of their quest due to circumstances beyond her control and also had it done during the middle of a earlier battle, so she didn’t even have time to get to KNOW these people and was with them purely till she could evaluate the situation) she would know that as the next best dps on the team, she would be a target and that this fight was beyond her. She’d honestly GTFO on these people which would leave the last 2 people up shit creek. We ended the campaign there.
It’s a DM’s biggest fear. No two ways about it, it sucks but good on Sam for sticking to his guns.
Not just a TPK at the beginning of the adventure, but one that wasn’t caused by GM fiat in any way. That’s a truly remarkable run of bad luck.
CALLED IT! WOOOOOOOOO!
What is a TPK?
Total Party Kill
Okay, so I was off a little. I thought it was Total Player Kill…
So, meet up next week and reroll, restart…
The game has now become a mid-apocalypse scenario. Plan accordingly.
Awesome. Props to Sam. Seriously – very few GMs I know have the kojones to allow this to happen, and that he’s willing to let the dice fall, accept the consequences, and let everything play out – I love it. This is the kind of game master I enjoy playing under. 🙂 I’ve got mad respect for him.
I wonder: who had fun here? Not the players, not the GM, the story didn’t advance a bit… This is not “let everything play out”. This is “everything ends here”. Nothing played out.
The thing is, ‘fun’ depends on what you’re looking for in a game. If there’s a chance to completely sweep the enemy, there should be a chance for the enemy to completely sweep the PCs. Sure, this might not have been ‘fun’, but it’s one of the risks in roleplaying games. Grin and bear it, make a new character, and move on. It’s going to happen sooner or later.
TBH that response from Sam is understandable but disappointing. Who says the cultists take no prisoners besides the DM fiat? I always feel that results like this shouldn’t end in the end of the adventure, but present a significant setback in the player’s efforts. There should always be a “you failed, but” way of advancing the story forward.
I disagree with you. If the dm’s notes say that the cultists don’t take prisoners, then even if it hasn’t been revealed, that’s the way it is. And I’d think less of Sam as a dm if he decided that he was going to change this entire part of how his world works, just to avoid a bad luck TPK.
I dunno, I have a respect for people who run their games in a sorta simulation style (this is the way the world is, as an absolute, and the dice are the arbiters of chance) but don’t think most games are or need to be like that. Not least of which because “that’s the way it is” when dealing with fiction is a cheap excuse, same as when someone engages in unacceptable or anti-social behavior and says it’s “what my character would do” because the simple answer is “then you should have made a better/more interesting character.”
Unless something truly interesting is done with the consequences or its the result of an epic scenario that everyone is more interested in seeing play out than they are continuing to play all a TPK game is end the fun of gaming on a downer, in my experience.
Personally I’d rather find a way to keep playing, because I’m there to have fun in a more general way than “play out the realistic results of actions in a fantastic world” type stuff.
So you disagree with him that this was DM fiat… Because it was written in the DM’s notes. Who wrote those?
It doesn’t matter. The world has been established ahead of time. If you’re going off the setting, then it isn’t ‘DM fiat’. It isn’t arbitrary. If NPC notes say ‘if confronted with an accusation in the court of law, this NPC will challenge his opponent to a formal duel to the death to clear his name’, then that’s what the NPC does in those circumstances. Changing it is GM Fiat, because the GM is going ‘screw the setting, this is my law’.
I think, in general, that consistency is important for a GM to maintain only to the extent that it helps or hurts the enjoyment of the players. If the only thing the GM is being “true” to is the totally internal knowledge of what he or she decided earlier, and going in a different direction would not alter the world as the PCs understand it, then any argument they have with themselves over the matter is one of creative choice rather than an issue of realism or fiat.
However, if the information is written down – notes, setting information, module, or what-have-you, that’s an established aspect of the world. If I’m playing Shadowrun, and the game master decides to change how the Ancients are organized – that’s a significant shift. If he does it in the middle of a session, that’s even worse.
It’s like those GMs who suddenly alter the HP of the opponents to reflect how well the players are doing – if the players are having too hard a time of it, the bad guys suddenly have less HP, but if the players are trouncing the bad guys, the GM adds HP. I consider it a cheat – enough of one that I’ll leave the game.
Except when done properly that sort of cheat can make an encounter all the more epic. Speaking as a player from a group of players who know how to make our PC’s pretty powerful, our DM was pretty much lost on how to challenge us. He could try and out DPS us (and since he was throwing gestalt characters three levels higher then us, he sometimes did) but we’d always recognize threats and convene on them before they could do damage. A tactically aware group of powerful PC’s is dangerous.
My suggestion to him? Screw what the books said about the HP of enemies. Dial back on the DPS so they’re threatening and then make them harder to kill then a tank. Lots of HP, DR, AC or even Fast healing could make what would normally be an eh character into something deadly as he wears us down. And he took the advice. Battles started lasting for more then two rounds. Bosses were suddenly dangerous again because our best shots were only bloodying their nose.
My GM has asked a few times ‘how to challenge the PCs’, and my answer was ‘what makes you think I want to be challenged’? My goal is to deal with opponents as quickly and efficiently as possible. This means that if I see a threat, I will take it down, hard. This doesn’t mean I want the GM to make bigger threats – that just means I’m going to get Xp faster. And it means I’ll look for the means to take down THOSE harder and faster.
I’m of two minds about what I once said. On the one hand, I stand by the idea that the rules are guidelines for a better game and story. I’ve played more games since then, gotten better as a DM and Player, and I have yet to run into something in D&D or any other RPG that was perfect. Modification, even mid swing, can turn a boring encounter or series of encounters into something more, something fun.
That said, it’s not a tool to be used lightly in some groups. Some groups want the dice to fall as they may and, in all honesty, that’s the groups choice. I tend to play with people who are more story then dice, even if I myself am an even hand at both, and I can understand why they’d want a game where they either best what the DM has planned or don’t. A game that has no risk, no chance of loss, is boring. My players find their risk and loss in mostly pure story elements and RP with NPC’s but not everyone wants that. Some want the visceral chance of death on every random fight, even if it’s low.
Ultimately what I feel now on the matter is… If this is how the group has fun, then this is how the group has fun. If the group wants these odds, then let them have it. It’s their game and it’s their choice on how they get to enjoy it.
Now is it going to be a new spread of PCs or will they throw that out the window, chalk it up as a learned exercise, and realize in this world intelligent enemies are actually intelligent restarting with the same characters?
Well, that just gave me the worst case of narrative blue balls ever. Good job!
I have not played an RPG in ages, but when I did play, it was more often as the GM. I loved both sides of the GM screen, but world building and creation were always my favorite.
As a GM, I never had a TPK. I’m not at all against it; in fact, I do believe I’ve avoided it through the thinnest of margins. I once came close, and that was while running the original D&D module for Ravenloft. That was one bugger of a show!
Seeing this play out in your comic has reminded me of many good times, many close calls, and not a few angry players (after watching their fave PC get impaled, dropped, eaten, what-have-you). Keep telling the fun stories!
The Dice Gods decreed a TPK, it seems.
Alas, poor party, we hardly knew ye.
Well we did know Jeda.
No death – players get sloppy. I remember of local college gaming convention there was a discussion when someone asked what to do about players who insisted on being contrary, going off in the charming terms of my first year torts class ‘on a frolic of their own” My buddy and I looked at each other and , as he had been the person to teach me the ways of 3.5, I deferred to him as he said “kill ’em”. “Adventuring is dangerous, and fools and loner’s often die. ” I know that GM ing for a group of experienced players, if one of them doesn’t go down at least once a session, the sessions are too easy.
Oh, heavens, yes. Had a few of these happen to me myself, and engineered at least one deliberately as a DM (long and convoluted story, that, but all my players agreed that it was a stellar way to end that campaign). Despite all of that, I’m ordinarily of the the school of thought that believes that *nearly* killing the PCs is the best way to go. It’s not out of any misguided sense of mercy, however. In my mind, a dead PC is a PC who has escaped me….
Send in the rescue quik-gen team
I dunno, I’ve seen some bad runs of dice, both as a PC and DM, but the players rolls were so consistently bad, and the enemy’s so good. Even my worst night of roiling had some good results here and there. I can’t help but be more than a little suspicious. Something is up, I’m calling it.
I’m going to guess not, myself. I’ve been part of sessions where everything has gone absolutely south like this, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. We were guarding a caravan, got jumped by bandits two levels below us, and got owned. Seemed like none of us could roll over 10, and none of the bandits could roll under 17. Most of the party died, and the only guy who lived stabilized at -2 and was eventually found by a passing caravan. It led to a new nickname for our group: Team Fail Wagon.
I think he means that whole “GM power over reality” plot line. Dove is returning.
Ah, makes sense.
*shudder* Ugh… Dove….
TPKs can happen, but a TPK forst session, first encounter, first round?
I hate to be that guy but a first encounter TPK would make me care a whole lot less about any character I brought to that table in the future, especially in a game where it takes more than a few minutes to make a character.
I’m with you. And it was poor Carlos’ first session as part of this particular gaming group.
The joy and pain of tabletop gaming. Sometimes, nobody knows where the story’s going. If the players trust Sam to build a story around the party’s failure, then some awesome stuff can happen.
RIP Jeda.
… just remembered how death is in Karthuun. “Peace” is kinda out of the question. Daaaaaaaamn.
oh hell
i forgot about that
“hush lil baby… . don;t say a word . . .”
Calling that the Shepherdess brings them all back from the other side
yep .. i am calling it ( thats the Iron kings daighter who died in the the first Karthun adventure)
It’s a personal thing, but unless I think the story can handle a the death of a PC, I typically don’t allow it to happen. As a GM, the story is everything to me. It’s my investment, but also my reward for putting in the time and effort to build the game, often from ground up. Now, if I’m running a module, you’re on your own, but if it’s part of a larger narrative, your characters aren’t getting the easy way out. That said, I’ve TPK’d parties 9 times in the 35 years I’ve been GMing… not counting games of Paranoia where I’ve managed to kill the entire party 4 times in one night. I’ve killed dozens of PCs… hundreds if you count the ones with access to resurrection… one of those 14 times in a single night.
Hide behind the mound~~~ of dead bards!
I agree that if the dice fall badly, a GM should run with it. I just don’t think death, or a TPK, should be the go-to consequence. A failed battle can have all manner of horrible consequences without killing the characters. There’re certainly times and places where death CAN be the consequence, but the first encounter of a campaign isn’t it. I see tabletop RPGs as a storytelling game, and a story where the protaganists all die five seconds in isn’t at all satisfying.
Exceptions can, and should, of course, be made for egregious player stupidity.
It isn’t a matter of go-to. The PCs took enough damage to pass out, and the NPCs were the ‘take no prisoners’ kind. That pretty much means the PCs either bleed out, or the bad guys make sure everyone’s dead. If I have to choose between ‘these are the logical consequences’ and ‘this is a story’, I’ll go with the logical consequences any day.
No one WANTS a TPK but it has to be possible or the game wouldn’t be worth playing. Death of a favorite character is the motive behind playing the game a certain way. Why is it important for the party to stay together? Why do you need to pay attention? Why do you need to (fill in the blank with any of 1000 possible answers)?
As far as the story goes you could easily say the next group going in knew some of the previous group and so the next wave of characters know the situation and have a better understanding of how dangerous the mission is, and that is just one way to proceed.
The only time it can be a problem is if the group or most of the group sees the TPK as being the fault of one character, especially if that character was fooling around when others were trying to be serious. I don’t think Carlos can really be blamed and I don’t think this group would be likely to do that anyway but it has happened, at least in my experience both as a player and a DM.
Also in my experience the DM is only blamed if the players see it as the DM going out of his/her way to kill off the party or an individual. In my experience that usually leads to a new DM. This is something I don’t think Sam needs to worry about though. I think it is clear to everyone that Sam just refused to save the party when, “Hey, sh!t happens”.
The short answer is death what players are fighting to avoid, without the possibility of death or a TPK the game is boring, might as well watch a movie you know has a happy ending.
I’m afraid for carlos: the guy is new to the party…and what was the little paper he give at Sam? Will we ever know?
They die. But the Iron King owes them one and owes Jeda AT LEAST one. Out of respect for his daughter. Orrrrrr his daughter shows up in the dead and sends them back. Only Jeda would realize what happened but again it’s like “you get one for the bonds we shared in life”
KILLTACULAR
I tend to run with a “luck” or “fate” system in my D&D sessions (similar to how the 40K games play). Players have a set amount of points which they can choose to lose to prevent death. Once those are gone, your luck’s run out 😛
Seriously though I kinda feel for Sam. I’ve had a few occasions myself where I’ve set up an encounter that’s challenging, but good to get the team working with each other and most if not all of them have kicked the proverbial bucket.
Yeah, given that “the cultists don’t take prisoners” wasn’t true until he said it, that was DM failure pure and simple. That said, it fits with some of his prior behaviors as a DM…
see Michael, that all depends on how much “Improve DMing” Sam does. if he invented this “on the fly”, yes i would agree with you. Nothing i have seen of his character (also nothing i have seen him as a character do) leads me to think that. Indeed everything i have seen so far says he did a massive amount of prep, and since this cult was the Major Villain Group for at least the first act if now the whole arc, yes i can and do believe that he stated them up. Including a “Take No Prisoners” policy. after all The Grin has had it’s cult attacked by how many Adventurers by this point? it WILL learn.
Doesn’t matter how much prep he did. Until he said that, it wasn’t true. I can write a thousand pages of background material and session instructions, and if I’m not willing to vary from it, I should probably use it either for a novel or a video game.
I disagree. If you write a thousand pages of background material, that’s the setting. You don’t have to vary from it – the setting sets the paradigm, and the PCs interact with the paradigm. As far as I’m concerned, Sam did an awesome job – he stuck by the setting, he let the dice fall where they may, and while it was a TPK, it shows Sam’s willing to let the setting trump ‘story’. That’s the kind of GM I want to play under.
And I’ll also disagree – something in the game can be ‘true’ without the GM saying it.
That’s still fudging. Whether changing the result of the die or what was written on the page, it’s altering things to favour the party. Fudging.
no, it is called “creating a world that reacts to events in a non algorithmic manner.” without that, you might as well play Baldur’s Gate.
Again, I disagree. The setting and the rules create a paradigm, laying out how the world works and what the world is like. That doesn’t mean you’re nothing more than a program if you follow the rules. It’s what creates consistency. The major difference between a tabletop RPG and a computer game is choice. The players have more choice in what they can do, and where they want to go, and how they react to things.
According to your logic, there’s nothing wrong with the GM suddenly declaring every paladin in a setting Chaotic Evil suddenly, because the PCs have never met a paladin, even if the setting says all paladins are Lawful Good. It doesn’t make sense, but hey! The PCs haven’t met any paladins, so the GM’s allowed to do it, right?
Sure. The GM’s allowed. But the players then have every right to call bullcrap on the call.
It’s not always that simple.
Having spared PCs in the past through story, it can feel cheap. The players didn’t save themselves, fate/DM mercy did. Which is just as bad as a video game cut scene where the heroes are saved. They still have no imput in the death.
In a situation like this, Carlos triggered a trap through his actions, and that action should have consequences, even if it is death and the end of the story.
Of course, it’s also a fictional story. One way or another the party was going to TPK. Brian could just have easily had the rocks to killing damage. And there might some story fallout from the “no prisoners” decision.
It is called “having a world” Worlds are messy. People don’t act the way they are supposed to all the time, often because the unexpected happened, but often for no perceptible reason. X always does Y in range z of inputs is almost never true.
People do have a ‘fallback’ attitude and position. For it to change, there needs to be a reason.
“The bandits do not take prisoners.”
Fine then. They don’t take prisoners. It actually makes a lot of sense – having to bandage, heal, and feed prisoners is a royal pain in the rump. It costs more to keep prisoners than you would get from having them.
Just because the PCs are PCs shouldn’t change this – at all. The world should NOT make exceptions for PCs just for being PCs. If the PCs had something the bandits wanted? Maybe (though just robbing the corpses would do better). If the PCs had sent a message ahead for negotiations? Possibly. If one of the PCs was an ex-bandit and the bandits know about this? Maybe.
But without mitigating circumstances? I don’t see a shift in the bandit’s activities. Being a PC should not give you plot device armour.
Funny, I would have said that if the heroes winning is guaranteed, that is when you might as well write a novel.
In what world is THAT true. Did you READ the parts where he made this world? Its entirely possible, if not very likely, that Sam put a ton of thought into these cultists before this campaign arc was even conceived.
So? It is thought. It isn’t the “reality” of the game until you act on it. That is why we use GMs instead of playing Dungeons of the Necromancer’s Domain.
Consistency is fairly important in a good campaign. Changing it on a whim, or ‘for story’ does the setting a disservice.
I think you’re missing a big point in your ‘setting trumps story’. Without a story the setting is pointless.
The world spins forward without being beholden to story. For me, exploring the setting is fine. I don’t need a story to explore the world. I act, the world around me reacts, I act, the world reacts. It doesn’t need a narrative, it just needs to be consistent.
“Bandits are raiding the farm!”
Whether or not I go to the farm shouldn’t break the game. The PCs may have something more interesting for them.
Sam looks like he’s gonna cry… Poor guy.
What? whaat? no dark lighting ,no Villain grin, no Manical Laughter?
Sam you do it all Wrong and give us TPK loving DMs a bad Name.
(By the way if you can’T tell,i am totally joking,please don’t tear me apart)
After three decades of gaming, I’ve been on both sides of the screen for TPKs more than a few times, it’s never fun for anyone. Except for that grudge-monstery bastard who wiped out our party because we wouldn’t let him take more than 3 “smoke” breaks an hour…he seemed pleased enough with his kill count, at least until we fired him as DM…
Still, sometime there’s wiggle room for a “deus ex machina”, maybe even literally in some games. I’ve been in at least one game session where the enemy didn’t bother to do a “confirmed kill” on the defeated party, and one character manages to stabilize and recover enough to gather a few bits of the rest of the party for resurrection and limp out of the dungeon.
Jaw = Ground
Holy hell, now it’s what happens afterwards. Last time I played after a TPK, the DM had us start in a world fast-forwarded to show the consequences of such failure. Took him two weeks of nearly non-stop work to get it ready.
It was the most brutal campaign I ever played. Loved it ^^
Ah, first session TPKs. I pulled one of those once. Of course, it was mostly because the PCs were overconfident and reckless, but still.
You know a vendor was selling TPK merit badges at Gen Con?
I got one of those once….
Well, that happened.
I’m pretty sure I stated a few posts back that the PCs could have avoided this outcome via some better recon.
Now, there are some additional considerations:
(1) Bad dice, which is nobody’s fault. When the dice want you to die, you tend to die.
(2) Sam’s obviously at fault for deciding the cult takes no prisoners. It might make sense in the context of the worldbuilding he’s done, but ultimately all worldbuilding is DM fiat. (Also, a “rocks fall, everyone dies” trap seems a bit of an odd choice when you’re relying on having open tunnels to get in and out of your secret cult base.)
(3) Also Sam’s fault: the “break the ice” encounter’s design. I don’t think this was a bad encounter, per se – in fact, sentries and a trap are a perfectly sensible encounter in context. But it was mismatched to the purpose. He (a) ought to have considered “what happens if the dice hate the players” when building it, and (b) could have had the “break the ice” encounter play out differently (instead of a prepared sentry, the cult could have a patrol that didn’t see them coming), giving the PCs a chance to get to know their abilities (and one another) – and establish the value of solid recon – without quite as much risk of a TPK.
There are, however, interesting ways this development can take the campaign – what are the consequences of the Grin’s manifesting in Karthun? The new batch of PCs could make a great campaign of it.
yes and no, he rolled the damage for the trap, the problem is the damage was enough to kill everyone. They were already taking damage from the cultists. If you paid attention they were most unconscious, not dead, the cultists, like any good villains in this type of scenario don’t take prisoners, they might however take sacrifices…. Look at the Gabriel Knight video game as an example. In Sins of the Father you actually deal with a voodoo cult. if you mess up in the game in any way when your facing them you become a sacrifice. This is the same kind of deal when you get down to it. Bad things happen The players chose their route and it went extreme tpk in the end. If your a good DM you let the dice fall where they may. You can make backup plans to the situation if things go wrong but you need to take into account your players and show them respect like Sam is in this instance. He was open about it, everyone saw the dice fall and he has no out if he wants to maintain their respect. Your also right, the next batch of PCs could have all sorts of fun with it.
Can’t blame new guy. A quick rush isn’t a unusual counter against archers.
Can’t blame the party. There was no infighting or stupid stuff going on.
What could be fudged, is that the “trap” be turned into “alarm system”.
Party members get _a_ d6 damage each, rather than 5d6 each.
Other systems also put in luck or chance counters for important PC/NPCs to enable them to fudge or straight “get out of death free” just to alleviate this exact problem, especially for long loved characters.
Sometimes it comes with “a cost” eg the TPK is bought off by burning a luck point for each character, so the trap collapses part of the ceiling, slowing the cultists, who are chased off by a group of town militia that were right behind the party trying to detain the party (hence enough numbers). Militia might have been going to warn them about the “well prepared cultists” or “run off the troublemaking adventurers”. either way they regain consciousness in camp/town, less bunch of gold, some broken items, owing big favours, down a life saving luck point.
In cases of high tension, like boss or puzzle areas, it’s possible for DM to announce, “No luck points to be used so take care”. Then you _know_ you deep in it.
Also luck points help save against teleport fail, raise dead failure, all those “random dice throws”. It help a bit to soften the eventual blow too, because you’ve faced the chance before, so inevitably when your luck does run out, you know you’ve used all your chances.
Congratulations, Sam, you just blew everyone’s evening with Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
But you’re super sorry about it so that makes it oh-kay.
It’s a funny thing. I know my GM reads this strip too, so me saying that he would NEVER pull a stupid stunt like this regardless of what the dice said almost sounds like kissing ass, but it’s true. That guy believes that the story and a good time are more important than what some stupid chunks of plastic say.
But hey, at least Sam knows how to blindly obey plastic. Good job, Sam. The plastic respects you now.
It’s just too damn bad I don’t.
Oh, don’t mistake this is as a “why I’ll never read this strip any more” speech. This is a “why you suck” speech geared toward Sam. I’ll keep reading, though; this might end better. But right now I’ve got no respect for a guy who puts painted pips on plastic above a good night’s game.
I look at this as a why you specifically suck speech. Respect your DM or bad things can happen to you. Sam is a very responsible DM and the dice were thrown in the open he can’t fudge what went down even if he wants to. Not to mention his players would lose all respect for him if he did. These are good folk and they respect what went down. They also respect Sam a heck of a lot more because he didn’t make any bones about how a raw deal went down and he has a way to deal with this in place, you can just see it coming. Now as to his group, they wouldn’t respect him if he did what your suggesting these are good players and they know things like this happen they even accept it. I said before don’t diss your DM, and they don’t diss their DM they go by what went down. Respect them and you might start to respect yourself. What you wrote shows no respect for either.
Except several folks in Sam’s Group have shown that they to are ‘dice fall where they may’ players. Speaking as someone like that we don’t DM screen except to hide notes, and if bad stuff happens you shrug it off, are bummed out a little then pick yourself up and play again. If you can’t fail and die then your actions no longer have consequence and especially as several of them were trained by ‘old school’ DMs the dice having consequence upto and including death is something they expect and have signed on for I’d assume. It’s something that a lot of us love about the game.
Sorry, I disagree. The GM is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of the rules. The PCs aren’t given plot device armour, and shouldn’t be treated special. The dice fall where they may, and the GM and Players accept the consequences. If this means a first-encounter TPK, then so be it.
If I catch a GM fudging on my behalf? I’ll walk. I don’t care two s**ts about the story if it isn’t something I’m dealing with fairly. Any victory on my part needs to be earned, not given to me, and if the dice say my character dies, so be it – I don’t want my defeat taken away from me, just like I don’t want my victory handed to me.
Sam did the right thing.
That was my point exactly. When bad things happen you have to man up and deal with it. Bad happens, so be it, that’s all she wrote and its over, however I’ve also had DM who were just out to kill a character, a specific character out of a vengeful fit because they didn’t like the guy playing the character, or they were on a power trip and they purposely geared things to kill you no matter what you do. That’s not cool and its a violation of the DM player trust. This however is a totally different animal.
It’s known as going “Hard Core”. No more “Easy Setting”.
If it wasn’t for the inclusion of a long serving character then wouldn’t be a big deal.
For those that pan the decisions Sam made as a DM, you do understand that this is…fiction…right? Comments about ‘making a snap decision on the fly’ or ‘my GM doesn’t do that’ are kinda irrelevant. Brian has a reason for playing it out this way, so keep your shorts on.
This is so true. Sam’s decisions may or may not be “right”, but it’s about the story *Brian* wants to tell, and that called for the TPK.
I have no bones on this situation being a DM or even a GM is a hard thing. This stuff happens all the time, and I mean all the time when the bad goes down you have to deal with it however you can and sometimes death happens. TPK happens whether you want it to or not the thing is are you honest enough to let it all out to your players and then deal with the consequences. Now in my case I deal with it then give them a way to get out of it, but their are always consequences when they make such a deal. I have even given players the chance to purchase insurance if you will so if they die a church will resurrect their player. This however can only be done so many times depending on certain player stats and that specific stat takes a hit every time this option is used until they can’t be brought back again. Some DM and GM don’t use this though, but its a sort of back door that’s always been there.
I disagree, strongly.
Anyone offering an opinion (positive or negative) on the matter, who is not obviously trolling or “hate/rage-posting” (and I haven’t seen evidence of either thus far), is demonstrating their emotional engagement & investment in the story and characters by taking the time and effort to comment.
Further, just because a character’s behaviour is necessary to set up future story developments, doesn’t mean the audience is obliged to agree with such behaviour in and of itself. (Specific to d20monkey, consider Grey or Dove, or Sam’s “Evil Sam” episode.)
You are correct Composer, and I concede to your reply. Emotional engagement and investment are huge, I can attest to that. However, I was primarily referring to posts that contain snarky language and usage of words like “stupid stunt” and “no respect.” Whatever degree of engagement/investment is involved, creative criticism is 10/10 a better alternative than cutting remarks.
You still don’t seem to be getting it, though; people aren’t saying that Brian pulled a stupid stunt or deserves no respect, they’re talking about Sam. I’m squarely in the “Let the dice fall” camp, but that doesn’t mean I think these comments are inappropriate, just wrong.
Perhaps a more apt comparison is Mel, because Brian wanted Mel’s story to be about people who are cowardly and let their friends down. She didn’t get the kind of character growth and increasing maturity we’re seeing with Brett because it wasn’t in the plan for her.
But the fact that we care about them and get upset when we feel they’re making bad choices means that they’re been written very well.
This really does suck, but I respect Sam’s decision to simply be honest about it. He wasn’t out for blood, it was just the dice.
And I still very much want to see where this all leads.
Before I mentioned facing death for the right to your life, as I’ve seen in a certain prior encounter in this world when the daughter of a certain king went over and became a Shepard she was able to come back. Could their be a situation like that in this encounter?
No! Wrong! I reject this reality and demand a substitution! I refuse to believe that the heroes who beat an efreeti necromancer can be done in by a few no-name cultist mooks and some falling rocks! Do-over! Reboot! Ctrl+Z! Load previous save! Hell, at this point I’d even settle for the “it was all just a dream” card! Anything!
Seriously though, it will be a shame if they don’t at least try this campaign again with some new characters if they can’t salvage the ones they started with. I was really interested in seeing how things played out with the Grin and the ambassador’s brother. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Sam’s a pussy for not saying the line.
actually. this could be used constructively. there was a series of modules for Hollow World, in it are encounters that while they begin easy enough, as the encounter progresses, it becomes apparent that there is no way to win (such as being attacked by two, then four, then eight ghouls at the same time (eventually you WILL fail a save vs paralysis and then bam, you’re down due to a killing blow)
and then the characters wake up with half their HP gone, wounds from the battle on their skin. then it happens again the next night, untill the third or fourth night when most of the party only has 1 hp left due to the exhaustion. and it turns out that an immortal is giving them warnings that the path they are on isnt the right one and that if they want to get through the ghouls, they need something more than just a single cleric’s turn undead.
That said, perhaps Sam could use the ‘shared nightmare’ as a way of saying that the Grin is trying to frighten them off by showing them different possibilities that they will die.
See…as much as I love the danger of dying…I like this. And to me, it makes sense. And I /love/ the whole “monster playing on your fears” angle of a game.
That, and I also would LOOOVE to see more of “The Grin”. Awesome name. Cool looking. Great concept. Do want.
You’re going to. Aren’t the cultists about to give the Grin a host body?
Oh gosh I feel so bad for Carlos. I mean, I know no one can be blamed for a trap being set off on accident, but given his feelings of social anxiety I can only guess he’s going to feel terrible about this.
Ouch, you’re right….
^This
Will Carlos give up on the group? how will they step up to help him. THATS the payoff of this arc
Carlos is the one who d’ont look Sam but the other players…Bad sign
Sorry to say it, but this encounter is a “Killer GM” designed. If you designed the encounter to “familiarize the characters” and have a trap be able to instant kill the fighter? WTH?!? Seriously. Poor design. If you have a trap in the first room that can instant kill someone on a failed save, then you are a killer DM. Period. My group has had TPK’s before, but it’s always been a knock out drag out fight that meant something. While I respect the author’s storyline, the first room TPK in 1 round is a GM that didn’t care enough (or was too lazy) to balance the encounter in any recent edition of D&D…
Maybe they are playing Pathfinder?
Obviously, you missed a few things.
1) PCs didn’t have a scout ahead to look for possible dangers.
2) The PCs failed to spot the enemy. The enemy gets a free shot.
3) The NPCs got god rolls and killed a PC on the surprise round.
4) A PC triggered a trap (since the PCs didn’t have the scout look for a trap)
5) The PCs botched their saving throws.
6) The damage was enough to knock them out.
That’s not poor design. That’s poor planning on the part of the PCs, and bad dice rolls. That kind of thing can happen in any game.
For example, the average 3rd Level fighter in Pathfinder has about 30 HP, while the average 3rd Level cleric Mage has about 22-23 HP. The average longbow is 1d8 (x3 crit). Three hits with the longbow (plus a critical) will average 22-23 HP (which will usually render the average cleric KO’d). If the GM gets an above-average damage roll, the cleric’s most certainly out.
The ‘rocks fall’ part’s a little trickier. From the look of it, it’s a collapsing ceiling, and having it be 6d6 damage isn’t that far-fetched. That’s roughly 21 damage on average, but if you get a good roll, you’re easily able to do 24-30 damage (and I’ve done 36 damage on 6d6, so… Yahztee.) Your average fighter should be able to take the hit, but it isn’t a given, and the side effect of being hit by a collapsing ceiling (and failing a save) could have the PC pinned and helpless, meaning that doing a coup de grace is quite possible.
And the thing is? For a 3rd Level party? I’d consider this a fair encounter. 4 2nd Level bandits with longbows and a 4th Level leader, plus a boulder trap? That’s easily within the range of an acceptable CR 4 encounter – a bit ‘tough’, but easily within the capabilities of a Level 3 party.
Never underestimate the dangers of rolling crap. 😀
I feel I should point out that a cave-in isn’t exactly fair for such a low level group; a cave-in is CR 8.
Which is within acceptable parameters for a low level group. It would be a hard fight, but not an impossible one. The dice were just against the PCs, it happens.
It really isn’t, although I’d missed that you were talking about a scaled down cave-in. A full 8d6 one would be really harsh on a level 3 group, we’re talking less than a 10% chance your mage survives and a 38% chance that your fighter bites it. That puts it squarely in “save-or-die” territory (which may be your thing, but it’s not how modern D&D is balanced).
Of course, it looks like Sam is scaling his cave-in even further, only rolling 5 dice. If 22hp was low for a mage, that really shouldn’t have killed the rest of them from full hp. Something was funny there. Either way, they had horrible luck; they might have survived blundering into that ambush if the dice didn’t have it in for them.
the Slavers series of AD&D modules are designed that the players are captured/potentially killed in the very first encounter. those that live ended up in the slave pits and have to actively avoid being killed outright. personally, i think it was designed to be a tough challenge to seasoned rp’ers and like Christopher noted, they made EVERY rookie mistake that a group like this shouldn’t have.
Hello. I’m late to the party. I only started reading this comic a couple of weeks ago. I’m at Sept 29, 2014 right now. I’ve just completed the “Dove vs Dungeon Run vs Dallas” arc and I felt compelled to say something.
I know the arc is a year old and Gamergate was in full swing, but I’m new here: the panel showing Dallas’ sales dropping just because she came out female is bugging me. And: gamers who pass on material they know they used to like for just because a dev’s a lady aren’t real gamers. It works just as well on video games as P&P.
Oh, since I’ve gotten up at 2:30am and turned my computer back on to say that it’s 2:30am and I’ve turned my computer back on: you seem to have the Constitution of a drunk-ass kobold. Please find/make/steal a cloak of resistance.
Thank you, and have a nice wee hours of the morning.
What the hell does this have to do with this episode?
I’m curious how this will affect Karthun. Sam’s not the type of DM to have his players exist in a vacuum; the world moves around them. I know if it were me, and the characters all fell on a quest like this, I’d use it for world-building or make it more urgent for the next team to go into the mines and stop this before it’s too late.
WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS, SAM?!
PILLS BABY
Pish-tosh. Time for a resurrection campaign with death feats and a subplot to figure out who raised them while the world gets a big reboot. This is a glorious gift to them all.
I’d feel cheated as a player with that kind of deus ex machina.
Agreed. Forget resurrection. Time for an apocalypse campaign! This is now Call of Cthulhu, baby!
TPK in the first encounter is a bummer but it could be worse. I once played in a game where the DM ran his favourite character as an NPC in the party. At the climactic final fight of the adventure all of the PCs were killed and we sat there for a hour while the DM played with himself, won the fight, destroyed the evil artifact, collected the treasure and awarded himself the XP. Needless to say that character was banned from my game and the other rotating DMs games.
I wonder what was going through that guy’s head while he was pulling it off.
Probably that it was legit since the character was normally a PC. That’s a better answer than “he figured they’d like to watch him play with himself for an hour”, anyway.
Honestly, I’ve got to say that this was more poor encounter design than anything. Yes, bad rolls suck, but a good encounter is going to allow for that. I don’t really care what any of the characters are saying: The way it’s presented, this kind of thing simply shouldn’t be happening. Hell, the first set of random shmucks you run into shouldn’t be immediately ganking your mage. There shouldn’t be a trap that can incapacitate the entire party, or the party should have had a chance to notice it (Give the dude a roll to notice the goddamn tripwire, at least). Build in redundancies, or be flexible enough to make them up if things are obviously not happening as you expected.
Players can die because they made bad decisions, or because the DM killed them. Dice are no excuse. The players here made reasonable decisions given the information they had access to. Sure, technically the party could have played a horribly paranoid game of Wrestle the DM, but they should not have to, and play that is not perfectly optimal is not play that is wrong in a game where you tell stories about wizards. The DM decided that the first encounter would be one where hidden information that the party had no reasonable way to obtain could kill the party outright. It’s on Sam, not anyone else, and certainly not “the dice”.
Note: I say this as a GM. If I’d put a party in this situation, I’d invite them all to punch me in the mouth.
If I put my players through this situation, they’d be kicking themselves for not scouting the tunnel or sending a rogue in front to search the region and spot a potential ambush. They wouldn’t blame me in the slightest.
This is not a poor encounter. Four or Five 2HD fighters or thieves, one 4HD boss, and a 6d6 trap. There’s nothing wrong there at all. The NPCs got surprise – which is perfectly fine. They have cover, which is also fine. They get a surprise round and roll a critical hit – that’s fine. The PC trips a trap. That’s fine too.
Where’s the poor design? This is easily a CR 4 to CR 5 encounter, which is well within the allowance for a PC party of 3rd Level to face.
There’s not a single bad decision on the GM’s part here.
The fact that the introductory encounter – explictly designed to allow them to get “Familiar” with their abilities – could go this bad.
An encounter for people who are already used to their abilities? Sure, it’s perfectly fair, although Sam’s shock at how quickly it became a TPK indicates he hadn’t thought through the combination very well. But for a training encounter – again, what Sam said the purpose was – it’s badly done. The NPCs have suprise, cover, a potentially party wiping trap, since it does enough damage to take down unharmed characters , range in an obviously lethal system……This is not an introductory encounter to get familiar. This is an encounter for people who are already well used to their abilities, and even there, a difficult one.
I suspect this is because his meds are messing with him – balancing encounters is hard enough at the best of times.
The cultists wouldn’t post guards on the night of their big plan? The trap didn’t kill them, he specifically says that the cultists don’t take prisoners so even the ones who survive but are buried are helpless and dead. And how else would you show someone’s ability to spot and disarm traps except by putting in a trap? As for cover, players could have had that as well. They’re in the same tunnel. They don’t have a set up position but they’re are probably rock outcroppings. I don’t think his medication has had anything to do with this. Sometimes your characters just die.
If the cultists should have guards, then you don’t make the cultists the introductory encounter. As for the trap :- Sure, you put in a trap. You just do not make it a trap that can potentially take someone from full to zero hitpoints. He says they go to unconcious. It doesn’t matter at all that the cultists don’t take prisoners, he has a trap that takes an unharmed fighter to unconcious in one shot.
Sometimes your characters just die? Yes. But setting up your famliarisation encounter with a Save or Die trap and enemies that are that capable is simply bad GMing. Encounters once you’ve started playing? Sure.
But making the tutorial that lethal is a failure as a GM. This is the mechanics of this encounter:-
1:- The party failed to recon. This is true. However, they will still engaged in NPC exposition speech. If your intention is that they should be doing proper recon, engaging them in scene setting is not sensible. (part 25)
2:- Obviously, I don’t know how “passive perception scores” work. However, since they are passive, it is fair to assume that Sam knew what they were, since Passive effects tend not to be rolled. This means that he should know that the attackers are going to get Suprise. (part 26)
3:- He focus fired on the mage. Now, in a way, this is fine, to show that the enemy are smart. However, this is a problem. Either there’s a reasonable expectation that three shots against an unaware target won’t kill the forgehand or Sam should be aware that there’s a very real chance that firing all three at this target will kill her. If the first, fine, but that makes the trap worse. If the second, then this is bad encounter design, since remember it is reasonable to assume he knows he’s getting suprise.
4:- The mage attacks the enemy. We can assume that this was genuinely poor luck, given his reactions. (Part 27)
5:- Suprise round over, and..the enemies have intiative. They have six attacks of actions before anyone could act? Remember, Sam should have known this was likely before hand. Six attacks before anyone can act is incredibly dangerous. Fairish? Sure, but preventing the party from acting in an encounter to show them how their abilities work is never anything but bad planning.
6:- They then hit Trevor. All three attacks hit. Now, ok, they’ve got a grouping, but given that the previous rolls were above 20, we can assume that these are not God Rolls. They are likely mid rolls. They reduce the next character to 1 hit point. This shows that these three archers are reliably able to critically wound one or kill one character a round.
7:- No other characters have been damaged at this point.
8:- Carlos sets off a trap.
9:- This trap is capable of reducing the undamaged characters to unconciousness in one hit. It doesn’t matter that they failed their save. It doesn’t matter that the roll was “heavens to betsy”. This trap can one shot on a failed save. In an introductory encounter. That wasn’t intended to be lethal.
So. This is an encounter that was explictly intended as a teaching encounter, and it has a near guarenteed six enemy actions, that can kill one or possibly two party members before they ever get to act (Even without the crit, the cultists went first, so they’d kill her on the next shot). When the players FINALLY get to act, they set off a trap, without any roll to avoid it. This trap then on one single roll takes every single one of their hitpoints away.
This is not good GMing. You can certainly justify the cultist actions. Yes, they make sense. But it’s failing Sam’s intentions for the encounter. This means that Sam failed in designing the encounter.
Yes, sometimes the dice get away with you. But he killed nearly two party members with statisically probable rolls before they ever got to act, and then killed the remainder of the party before they got another action.
That’s not dice getting away from you, that’s screwing up your planning. A round and a half of mostly enemy actions killing the party is not God Dice, it’s a bit of luck and an overpowered enemy.
Hell, the fact that for the last few pages, everyone has been wondering what this obviously deliberate TPK was leading up to kind of shows the reactions of a lot of experienced players and DMs.
You seem to be interpreting “it wasn’t supposed to kill you” as “it should have been impossible for it to kill you”. Remove that assumption, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. When planning an encounter, you don’t expect the PCs to fail every roll and the NPCs to make them all. No encounter stands up to that standard. And you seriously think that NPCs scoring six for six is “statistically probable”? Normally mooks would need to roll at least a 13 to hit a PC. The odds of them hitting 6 times is less than half a percent.
Well, okay, let’s look at it scaled down to 1st Level.
A 3d6 trap is perfectly normal for a 1st Level group to face (and can kill pretty much everyone at 1st Level). Three goblins and a goblin leader is a fair group for a 1st Level group of PCs to face. In fact, that is almost the default ‘encounter’ for 1st Level. Let’s throw ‘surprise’ out the window for the moment.
The goblins could still win initiative, would have their short bows for range, and can still roll a crit. The PCs could still lose their healer at the start of the round, the mage could still fizzle a spell (the goblins pass their saving throw, for example), and the fighter can still trigger a trap that kills everyone.
The entire thing is, at the very most, maybe, CR 2. Way within the reach of a starting group of 1st Level adventurers. And in an encounter like that, it still isn’t the GM’s fault.
There are just times the dice don’t go your way. And there’s nobody to blame for that.
And this is why 1st level D+D is bad.
Also..no. a 3d6 trap that has a sufficient area of effect to hit each of them isn’t ‘perfectly normal’, nor is a suprise round that allows the enemies SIX ATTACKS before the party can meaningfully respond. In fact ,that’s pretty damn high damage for a 1st level encounter. And no, we cannot throw ‘suprise’ out of the window, because Sam set that encounter up knowing that the Cultists would have suprise. (Passive perception).
The goblins in your example COULD win initiative. In this, since there are no rolls, the cultists HAVE initiative.
The encounter absolutely is Sam’s fault. It’s overtuned at every point.
The party is facing enemies that can kill them with a single volley, who are behind an apparently undetectable trap (no rolls at all to detect it means undetectable), and expecting them to have scouted the area during Plot Exposition is naive.
Does this make Sam a bad GM? No. We’ve all done that. Sam doesn’t need to have perfect encounter balance to be a good GM. And hell, evne if Sam IS currently a bad GM, that doesn’t mean the story is bad.
This encounter doesn’t serve Sam’s purpose, and the dice are irrelevant for that. The enemies with marginally above average rolls were capable of killing nearly two party members.
This isn’t even going into Sam’s decision to have them continue to focus fire. It’s not about fudging. A GM who wants to kill the party WILL DO SO. It is impossible for a party to survive against a GM who is trying to kill them, even without the GM fudging rolls. And the interesting thing is? As a GM, if I decided I wanted to kill the party, having a near perfect suprise round followed by enemies who win Initiative and just so happen to know in the dark who they should be targetting, and are able to communicate this plan quickly and easily, who are behind an undetectably lethal trap…would be the way I’d go about it.
Sam’s built a killer encounter. You can justify it with the Dice Go Bad all you want, but the second round of attacks has to be an average or slightly above average roll, and it nearly killed Trevor. The above average roll inflicted nearly DOUBLE the total health of the player character in question. (29 damage took her to -15).
This isn’t the dice going bad. It’s a bad encounter.
Oh, also, if your introductory, learn to play encounter is above the CR of the party, you are doing it wrong. Introductory learn to play encounters -and it’s irrelevant whether you think they are necessary, that’s what Sam states he’s doing here – need to be as close as possible to at CR. It’s hard to learn your abilities if you are killed in the first round.
Err, show me the rulebook that says this? I’ve never seen, anywhere, that an ‘introductory encounter’ has to be as close to the party CR as possible.
For example, in my new campaign, the ‘introductory encounter’ for my player (Barbarian, 1st Level), was having her in a gladiator’s arena versus a centaur. Centaurs, by the way, are higher than CR 1.
She beat the centaur, single-handedly, then asked for another fight. She got a displacer beast. Again, 1st Level, higher CR. She won that fight, too, with almost no HP left. Single-handedly.
Smart tactics, lucky dice rolls, and using class abilities allowed her to defeat a CR 2 and a CR 3 encounter by herself. It could have gone horribly wrong and she could have died (it was a close thing), but everyone was satisfied with the encounter and the outcome. It was an amazing introduction for her character.
I didn’t, for a minute, go ‘oh, well, I should put her against a CR 1/2 or something because she’s fighting solo and this is an introduction’. The campaign setting is harsh, the PCs are typically going to face things more powerful than they are, and they’ll need to be at their A-Game to survive.
Which is why, at 10th Level, I took the Tarrasque, removed the tail, and gave it an AoE sweep attack before throwing it at them. The PCs survived, flipped out when they realized what I threw at them, and came back for more.
I also made demons manifest by possessing anyone with human blood. They make a Will Save or explode messily, the demon crawling out of their carcass. We lost three PCs through this.
The players are amazed at what I do to them, and they enjoy themselves, and they keep coming back.
So, balanced encounters? Not necessary. PC deaths? Happen. As long as the setting is *interesting*, they’ll come back.
Okay, doing the math: 6 goblins (CR 1/3, or CR 2 for six of them) + one 6d6 trap (Perception DC 15, Disarm DC 15, AoE effect) is a CR 3 encounter. That’s considered ‘difficult’ for 1st Level PCs, but perfectly fair for a fight. I’ve thrown worse than this at 1st level parties, nobody cries foul.
And no, 1st Level games aren’t ‘bad’. I consider them the best period for forming the character – the first few encounters at 1st Level can make or break a character, leaving impressions on the character which carry over to higher levels. An encounter where things go horribly wrong can leave a character scarred and hesitant, where another character in the same situation may rise up where nobody expected him to, to save the day. I feel that when the characters are that fragile, everything is emphasized.
The thing about traps is that you don’t normally get perception checks to look for them in 3.X/PF. If you aren’t looking for traps, you could very well trigger them out-of-hand. That’s kind of what they’re there for, and it’s why you usually have someone looking for them actively. (In 5e, with Passive Perception, the GM compares your PP vs the Trap, and goes from there). The character very well might not have had enough PP to spot the trap. So, no roll needed.
As for focused fire? It makes tactical sense. And if the players are allowed to use battle tactics, so are NPCs – especially NPCs where it would make sense to use battle tactics. In fact, it’s usually a go-to. Focus ranged attacks on a single target until they’re dead. Move to the next target. Prioritize ranged combatants and healers first (so, clerics and mages). If the leader of the bandits has any degree of Intelligence or Wisdom (12+ will do), that’s a strategy that immediately should come to mind. And if the bandits have had to deal with other interlopers before the PCs (which also makes sense), then they’d have experience with the tunnels.
And that doesn’t increase the CR of the group. Using smart tactics and using terrain does not adjust the CR of an encounter. If the dice rolls had all been misses, the PCs would have had the opportunity to use tactics, get cover, and prepare themselves. The dice didn’t give them the opportunity.
Mathematically, this was a solid encounter as far as I can tell. I don’t see anything wrong with this – it’s pretty much the exact same thing I’d have done. (My PCs would have been smart and retreated after the surprise round, however, if it played out like this – retreat is an acceptable option.)
No perception check was given.
And yeah- 1st Level D+D is bad. Not as bad as 20th, but still bad. If you can die because you happened to lose a single dice roll, there are problems. 5th may be better, I’m talking about 3.5/Pathfinder style D+D.
Don’t normally get perception checks :- No. You don’t. Which is why your Fireball Trap (6d6, area effect) is absolutely not CR 3. As for comparing the passive perception – So this value that the GM knows is too low to avoid triggering the party lethal trap. And yet you are continuing to say that this is blaming the dice? A flat, known value is somehow because of the dice? What?
Focus Fire making sense:- Yes. Of course it does. However, if the goal of the encounter is to allow the players to learn their abilities, when you notice that focus firing is killing a player (why did he roll all three attacks at once, for example?), YOU MOVE TO THE NEXT ONE. It’s impossible to learn your abilities if you’ve been randomly nuked by an enemy who you could not possibly (passive perception) have acted before.
Also, note that these ambushers have identified, in their first volley, who is a squishy supporting character. Go and look at the portraits in part 20. Sure, the mage is obvious, but there’s very little difference between the others. So these cultists know, without seeing ANY ability usage, who is the priority target? Really? Based on what, exactly? A holy symbol? Sure, but then we have “When exactly did they spot that, in the dark”.
And actually – yeah – intelligence usage DOES increase the CR. three goblins wandering around an open plan with a trip trap somewhere is not as challenging as three goblins set up in a perfect ambush position behind an unavoidable and undetectable within the encounter party wipe trap.
Mathmatically it’s solid? Then your maths is bad, because you seem to be persisting in the belief that this encounter is designed to be a difficult and potentially lethal one.
Maybe you should read the comic above again. It tells you what it’s designed for.
Also – retreat is an option? When, exactly, did the players get that chance? The action order is:-
Cultist
Cultist
Cultist
Mage
Cultist
Cultist
Cultist
Fighter moves forward, everyone dies.
The party had TWO actions in that fight. TWO. One of them was from the newbie, who has no reason to suspect that the GM is giving them an encounter they should retreat from (Your players are obviously aware that you run over the odds lethal encounters, so are used to it. Sam does not, up until now, and even if he did, Carlos would not be aware of that).
The only player who could have affected the party retreat is the newbie.
So. We have, without looking at dice:-
Sam’s certain knowledge that the enemies would get suprise over most of the party. No, recon doesn’t change this, because Sam was still doing exposition, and if you expect your players to try doing recon while you are doing scene setting, your players stop listening to the scene setting.
Sam also knew that the cultists would be going first, I have to presume ,since nowhere did he ask for Initiative rolls.
He also (should) have known that a high roll for the trap would obliterate the party, and that the party had no way of detecting it.
He also knows, because we have to presume that he’s not an idiot, that three enemies with a potential maximum damage of about three times the hitpoints of a given party member are a difficult encounter even without taking into account their essentially perfect position.
Finally, he knows that this encounter is intended to be a LEARNING EXPERIENCE, not the dangerous and challenging fight that you seem to think it’s supposed to be. Yes, with a group I was sure of, in a game where I’d told the players they needed to be cautious (so they weren’t expecting a high adventure fantasy game), and with players who knew their abiliteis well, I’d agree, it would be fine. The group above is none of those things.
What doesn’t Sam know for sure? He doesn’t know how the Mage will do in the first round. The Mage is the only participant that gets to fight before the cultists have had two full rounds. So how can this balance it?
The cultists could have had very low hitpoints. This is entirely possible. But then, for that the change things, the mage would have to have killed them all in the first round. That’s not accomplishing the purpose either.
For a learning encounter to work, players have to actually have a chance to use their abilities. In this encounter, the mage used one (or potentially two, depending on whether they sense the ambush as an ability or a flat statistic), and the warrior moved up.
The simple fact that the learning encounter had the potential to kill the entire party with their net actions being casting a spell and half a move action indicates it’s a badly balanced encounter.
Worse, it’s a killer encounter. Perfect surprise from ranged combatants behind a trap that party wipes. It doesn’t matter than your group expects it. If you sell people a high fantasy game of derring do and adventure, and then spring Tomb of Horrors on them, you are the one that screwed up, no matter how well a group of paranoid experts might do in the Tomb.
The only party action they got before they all died was one spell. Learning encounter. With allowing only one spell. Sam messed up. It’s not the dice, although they didn’t help. Assume the cultists didn’t god roll. Turn one, they hit twice and inflict probably 15 damage. Character is out of the fight. (29 damage takes to -15, so has 14 health). Mage casts. Either he oneshots them, or they don’t die. Turn two, they shoot again. They take Trevor to 1. Then Carlos moves up. He cannot detect the trap. They have had no opportunity to look for it, and even if they DID approach looking for a trap, the archers would have ambushed them anyway. The trap triggers. They roll their save. Half of them fail. It inflicts 6d6, which averages at 21 damage. We’ll assume it’s binary, so no half damage. Trevor dies, unless wizards have good evasion saves. Brett probably saves, Carlos fails. 14 health for the cleric, so he might survive on low health.
Even without the dice godmoding, we have two party members dead and another critically wounded.
And this is an encounter to learn abilities.
Oh, plus, do you not think that just maybe us being shown Sam taking prescription painkillers may have been there for a reason?
Sam messed up. I get that you are being all defensive because you do the same lethality with your group.
But that level of lethality is FINE…if that’s what people are expecting. The problem isn’t actually the lethality (I consider it a big dickish, but then I DM to tell a story, not wipe the party because they lost Initiative automatically). It’s that it was that lethal and the intention was ” just an encounter to get you familiar with each other and your abilities”.
Sam didn’t let them roll initiative, you say?
Funny thing? D&D isn’t the only game where characters can be killed right out of the gate. Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, Call of Cthulhu, Summerland, etc, etc. All these games allow for a character to be killed from a single die roll. That’s not bad – that just emphasizes how dangerous the setting can be. And 3.5/PF? And considering the kind of characters I’ve built in 3.5 (100+ damage in a single attack at around 10th Level), if I saw the same kind of character used by the GM against the PCs? I’d not flinch. I don’t consider it a bad thing at all – for me, it adds tension and a bit of a thrill to me to know my character can die in a moment’s notice. (For the record, I also think 3.5/PF is entirely too soft when it comes to poisons and diseases, I’d rather have those things closer to RL levels of threat, than the watered down crap in the game).
A 6d6 Fireball trap with Disable DC 15 / Perception DC 15 is CR 1, can be CR 1. The CR is 1 for every 10 points of damage (average), -1 for Disable DC 15 or Less, -1 for Perception DC 15 or Less, and +1 for AoE. If you don’t have a thief in your party, or you don’t take the time to look for it, or whatever, that isn’t the trap’s fault. It doesn’t suddenly spike the DC. So yes, It *is* a CR 1 trap.
He rolled all the attacks at once, because none of the NPCs are going to say ‘oh, wait, we were told to shoot this guy, but you guys – who were shooting at the same time as I was, dropped him, let me change targets’. It doesn’t work that way. The head bad guy declared the target, the bad guys shoot the target. That actually falls under roleplaying.
And no, playing to the intelligence of the enemy doesn’t raise the CR. If the NPCs have an intelligence stat, you use it. You plot according to the stat of the NPCs. And using the terrain to your advantage does not increase the CR either – it’s presumed both PCs and NPCs will use the terrain. If the PCs are the kind to march in order into unknown territory without taking precautions, then that’s on them.
By the way, we have no idea what the players discussed before the narration. How did we know their marching order? I’d presume there was table talk ahead of time. Initiative? We didn’t see the roll for it, but I’m pretty sure there was one. The mage could have decided to cast a defensive spell instead of an offensive spell, the fighter could have fell back, rather than attacked, these are all options on the table.
I still think this was a fair encounter. I’ve faced similar as a player (Shadowrun). It’s nothing to sweat about.
The 6d6 trap is what gets me. The around 10s didn’t save so they have less then 50% chance to save and it has enough power and aoe to one shot the entire party. I could dealt with one character killed by surprise and then the trap killing another, but ending the entire party with a single trap? The ambush didn’t even need to be there.
I was mis-remembering, evidently none of them got to 10 😛 Still, point stands that the trap alone caused a party wipe, and I feel it’s bad dming when you put a trap that could even potentially do that with no opportunity to counter or prevent it.
There could have been opportunities. If the mage hadn’t hosed his spellcast roll, and the fighter didn’t rush, the rogue could have made an attempt to see if the hall was trapped. They could have also retreated with their dead, and regroup. That was also an option. If the PCs hadn’t screwed their Ref Saves to avoid the trap, they could have had enough HP to continue.
A lot of ifs. But there were opportunities. A 6d6 trap? For a 3rd level group, I’m fine with it.
You think the intelligent thing for Carlos to do under focused fire from people who have demonstrated that they are quite capable of killing a PC a round is to stand around?
Retreat? Sure. But PCs rarely retreat unless they have reason to believe that they are in a game that needs them to. PCs don’t retreat unless you’ve told them that it’s a lethal game. Sam hasn’t done so. Stop comparing to your games.
That’s… actually incredibly foolish. Retreat should always be an available option, especially if a PC’s been downed. Unknown territory and outnumbered? Back off, regroup, and reconsider. And apparently, Sam HAS told people TPK is an option in his setting (people have mentioned this a few times in this thread, it seems).
And yes. I am going to compare it to my games – Sam and I apparently run the same type of games. ‘Here’s the rules, there’s the setting, let’s see how it goes’. It also seems Sam doesn’t hold back on the mechanics ‘for story’, and for that, I solute him. 🙂 Story is something that happens from playing in the setting. The setting doesn’t bow to the story.
Ahhh i can’t take it! The suspense is killing me!
Better that than rocks….
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OK . . .not sure if this has been mentioned
But there are 5 of them . .. i only saw 4 dice rolls .. . .did we forget someone?
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Jeanie’s character was already dead.
Well, colour me satisfied. I was expecting some sort of handwavey karthun shenanigans. But nope.
Well done. Sometimes, Players make the wrong decisions, sometimes the dice just want everyone to die.
As a GM, I never gave this much power to dices. Many players are afraid to lose their freedom to the GM, and that, without the dices, he could railroad them. That’s a foul fear to me, the point of the game is according to me to “play”, in other words, to have fun together with a story told by a teller (the GM), but changes and revolves around the PCs – in that perspective, the death has to be part of the narrative. It means that i I (as a GM) could’nt make the story better by a kill, then there won’t be any kill. The difficulty is to make it sound entertaining (not realistic, for me RPG is not to be realistic, but epic or dramatic). And yes, I never hesitated to favour a player that did RP but had bad rolls – and nobody ever felt cheated, because it wasn’t for an egoistic purpose or to play favorites, but to make the story better and the experience better for all.
But I think there may be a gap between what some or other players want. I would have sweared that some of the characters were the same type as me. What follows will tell.
It sucks but this gives a chance for completely unknown characters to become large and in charge. A TPK sucks but I disagree on the “didn’t advance the plot” idea. These heroes aren’t the only ones capable of doing amazing things in this world, and the players are going to want to take revenge. 😛
This is the strip that got me into this comic! I’ve been re-reading the entire series. I recently got into D&D (played a little bit of pathfinder) and have been playing online with a group of people on roll20. We were playing a relatively simple part of an encounter when… Giant spider TPK’d us! Our GM posted this strip in the thread.
This comiccis awesome by the way!
Can we get a word about what actually happened here? It looked like Sam rolled 5d6 for that cave-in – if 22hp was low for a mage (Ref. Part 28), 5d6 shouldn’t have one-shotted a fighter type even if he rolled Yahtzee.
damnit sam Rocks fall everyone dies is suposed to be a JOKE