Archive for June, 2010
Life and death situations
June 4th, 2010 Posted 1:41 am
Last weekend, I just killed my first PC in about 25 years.
The previous permanent fatality of a long-term character in any of my games was Tom D.’s were-tiger. Tom mixed up the abilities of a cockatrice (turning to stone by touch) and a basilisk (turning to stone by gaze). “ I close my eyes and leap on it!” were Furtig’s last words. I didn’t feel so bad about that one.
However, I am feeling somewhat guilty about Sunday’s game fatality. The group “deserved” a fatality, but that wasn’t the character that “deserved” to die. Plus, I made a large number of GM/interpersonal blunders that lead to the fatality.
We were playing my homebrew D&D variant game. The players were Jai, an experienced D&D player, a good tactician, but frequently over-confident; Ted, also experienced at D&D, not as confident, but enjoys it when the group gets in over their heads and needs to improvise an escape; Rosemary, a casual player who has really only played in my games, and usually follows the others’ leads; Beth, my wife, who is assertive about her own character but does not get involved with group plans; and Greg, who was playing for the first time in 20 years.
In game, Jai was a wizard with healing and force magic, but no real area effect spells; Ted was a sorcerer whose strongest magic was flight and invisibility; Rosemary was a elven druid with mounted archery abilities; Beth was a spy with magical disguises; and Greg was an archer ranger. So there wasn’t anyone with front-line fighting ability.
They had to break a siege where their employer was trapped in a magical location, and had set the wards against a small army of aquatic kuotoa attackers. The attackers were working on breaking the magical wards, but until then their employer and his friends were safe. The party was heavily outnumbered, but they had several advantages:
The kuotoa’s enemies, the sahaugin that owned the waters surrounding the besieged area, allied with the party. They would attack below water in co-ordination with the party’s assault above.
The sahaugin warned the party that the kuotoa had a shock attack.
The wizard had an endure elements spell that could have protected against electricity.
Beth’s spy had infiltrated the kuotoa. They used their familiars to establish contact.
Their goal was to rescue their employer, not kill all the kuotoa. They
could have done this by sneaking past the enemy, and magically analyzing the wards, then sneaking back with the hostages.
Because the party was geared more for stealth and subterfuge than head-on combat, I was expecting them to come up with a plan using these skills: avoiding combat entirely, or identifying and assassinating the enemy magicians and other leaders before making a quick escape.
Instead, mainly under Jai’s leadership, the group went in wands blazing. They were buffed and flew in (several on Rosemary’s horse), and surprised the enemy, but they were visible, not protected from electricity, and hadn’t identified the enemy leaders or their abilities.
Initially, the plan worked well. The archers mounted on Rosemary’s flying horse killed two of the three wizard types. Beth’s spy managed to sneak attack two of the kuotoa leaders without blowing her cover. But then the enemy finally got a chance to counter-attack, where the enemy leaders channeled their troops electricity into small lightning bolts. The flying horse with multiple archers seemed a really tempting target, so I had two bolts target it, and one the wizard.
A few seconds later, three of five party members are at negative hit points, including both healers, and a TPK looks increasingly likely.
Rosemary is the next to act. She has a choice: stay still and hope to hang on until someone can assist her; or cast a healing spell on herself and hope to get to positive hit points. She casts the spell, gets to -2 hit points, but then fails her Fortitude check at the penalty for exerting herself and dies. However, she saves the day posthumously. She had just taken the Boy Scout feat that allows you to retroactively declare that you had brought something with you, and so announces that her saddlebags contain healing potions. Preserving their strength until the survivors and familiars can deliver the healing potions, everyone else survives to retreat. Since the party is flying, they get away.
Rosemary takes her death in stride. A “passing barbarian” joins the party, they regroup, form a cautious plan, and secure a victory on the second attack. But at the end of the session, she asks me if I can tutor her on “how to be a better player”. On the one hand, I’m really happy she still wants to play, on the other hand, I feel bad that she’s taking the rap for everyone else’s mistakes.
I think most of the mistakes were my own. First, I make it a habit to not pay much attention when the players are plotting, in order that their opponent’s responses are not biased. But for this type of group, I should have been monitoring more closely and hinted that the less experienced players needn’t passively agree with the more experienced players plans, and also hinted that the experienced players had a reputation for rashness.
More seriously, I didn’t let Rosemary go through all the options before making a decision. She latched on to the healing spell early, and I went with it. I should have helped her calculate odds of survival in her two options. Especially, I should have pointed out that, with her healing skill, she could easily have kept herself patched together indefinitely (assuming eventually someone else helps her.)
I had ulterior motives for not doing this, some better than others. First, I didn’t want to seem to be hinting that she had made the “wrong decision”. Giving an alternative sometimes is misinterpreted as advice. I think this is a benevolent motive, but misplaced here.
Second, I didn’t want to slow down the game. That was stupid; it was a critical moment, tension was high, and a PC death slows down the game more than rules advice.
Third, the spell had the best chance of saving the day for the whole party. If she had succeeded, then she could have gone on to heal others. But here I was letting Rosemary take the risk for the whole group. If she wanted to go out heroically, great, but I should have informed her that that was a real possibility.
Fourth, I’d never had this rule situation come up, and I wanted to see how my homebrew system actually worked. This was really stupid. To see how it worked, I should have calculated each option’s probabilities and given her the choice.
Anyway, I’m not going to need survivor’s guilt therapy. I made a mistake, but GMing requires many fast decisions and some of them will be mistakes. But I would like comments on how others would have handled the situation.
Posted in Campaigns