I killed off the entire party at the weekend. Perhaps not my best ever move, since it kind of puts a dampener on the whole campaign, but not too disasterous.
The circumstances leading to the TPK were, in fact, as follows:
1) The party has been regularly besting encounters two or three ELs higher than might be expected. Consequently, to challenge the party, I had taken to beefing up the threat level a tad. (This seemed to be down to dice rolling. Basically, my dice hate me, and several players seemed to have dice which always rolled well for them. Naturally, when things got bad on Saturday, it coincided with a switch in the dice.)
2) I expected the party to rest before running into that encounter. Now, that wouldn't have made a huge difference, except that the cleric went into the fight having used all his spells. Therefore, when he was called on to heal the fighters during the combat, he could only use his wand of cure light wounds. With rest, I suspect the fight would have gone better, although it still would have been close.
3) The Spell Weaver was well above what the group should have been facing. Now, he only hung around for two rounds, but that was enough to totally incapacitate the group's wizard, and seriously injure one of the fighters. If not for him, the fight would have gone very differently. However, as the Spell Weavers were intended to be the 'big bad' of that section of the campaign, and since the party was in a Spell Weaver temple, it makes sense that a Spell Weaver should be there, both from a realism and drama point of view.
4) When the party saw their opponents, they immediately dived into combat. Naturally, the opposition did likewise, scoring three sneak attacks in the first round. Again, I had expected that there would be some level of banter before the fight, which would have meant no-one started flat-footed, and those sneak attacks wouldn't have happened.
5) When things got really bad, I would have expected the party to consider surrendering. Silly me.
Anyway, the party died, leaving three options:
1) Weasel out of it. "You all wake up in a dank cell..." I really, really hate this approach. If the foe has a reason to keep the party alive, fair enough, but you can't just hand-wave a rescue into existence without it sucking beyond reckoning. In the situation as it was on Saturday, the party had to die.
2) Play something else. This is pretty obvious.
3) Restart. This, too, is obvious. It is also the option that was taken. (In hindsight, I'm starting to regret not restarting at 1st level, but that seems to add two and a half months of playtime to the campaign without much benefit.)
There is one distinctly positive thing to come out of a total party kill: everyone now knows that it can happen. Henceforth, it should be possible to let the dice lie where they land, accept the results that are there, and move forward. And that's a good thing.
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteWell in hindsight we really should have rested before we took on the big bad[tm]. However we had already rested once in the dungeon, and nothing ruins the suspension of disbelief more than just bedding down inside the keep of your enemies. Really, there was thrashed stuff all over the place and it had to be noticed by whomever lived there. You don't just bed down in a room somewhere; it goes against common sense.
Unfortunately this is the way D&D works, you fight, you use your spells and then you rest to regain them, and for challenge ratings to work you need to be at full strength, otherwise you are doomed, as we noticed. I don't like this, as it takes away from the experience of play, and makes resting an artificial requirement and something you have to do after each fight. I don't mind challenges, as that's one of the reasons to play, but having to constantly rest all the time just ruins the mood and to be honest, it's rather silly.
Now why should we have surrendered? The battle was quite close in to the end, and I would have thought that when the two leaders were gone, one fled and the other killed, that the final grunt would surrender to safe his life. Now instead he got a critical hit and it was game over. This is another thing that keeps popping up in D&D, people fighting until the last man, even standard grunts. I have yet to see one combat in D&D where either side has decided to surrender. Why is this? Well mostly it's because of the fact that a person remains 100% operational until he hits -1 hitpoints, and until that time there is always the chance of getting a lucky hit and taking down your opponent. It's also to do with the good/evil nature of alignment; an evil person would never surrender as he probably would end up dead anyway, so why not try to take someone down with you?
In the end though, I blame Johannes, if he had cast that damned flaming sphere earlier we could have made it, it's all his fault. ;)
What lessons have we learned by this? Well, due to the nature of D&D and the requirements for rest, we need to invest in a wand of cure serious wounds, minimum. It would probably also be useful to have scrolls or wands with attack spells for the cleric, in case the mage gets disabled. And finally, talk to the bad guys before trying to kick their asses.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteFighting to the Death
You're quite right that the enemy should not necessarily fight to the death. Indeed, my plan for the NPCs in that last fight was for the Spell Weaver to flee in round 3 (as it did), for Aritz to flee if the three dark ones fell, or for the remaining dark ones the flee if Aritz and one of their number were gone.
Unfortunately, none of those triggers came to pass until the last round, when it became a case of each side having one warrior left, each of whom would likely die with the next hit.
The reason I said you should probably have considered surrenderring is that the party very quickly lost their two front-line fighters and their wizard in the combat, while the enemy had their entire force remaining for most of the fight. It is, however, fair to say that you rallied distinctly near the end of the fight, and very nearly pulled off a truly heroic victory.
However, it is definately true that the mechanics of D&D make surrender or retreat an unlikely option. You can't surrender unless the entire party agrees, which is never going to happen in a 'realistic' combat, as they can't discuss the matter as they go. Unless there is a party leader, surrender becomes impossible. Likewise, the NPCs can't easily surrender, as there isn't a single figure to surrender to. There's no party leader who can accept or reject an offer of surrender, meaning that it becomes dependent on the mercy of the least moral member of the group. So, offer to surrender, and you're likely to get slaughtered.
Likewise, retreat is very difficult, as the enemy most likely either has someone who is faster than you (who will catch up and proceed to cut you down), or has some missile weapons (and so will kill you as you run away). Either way, if you run you're most likely dead.
I think perhaps there needs to be a "retreat for parlay" option, whereby characters withdraw 10 feet (or so), and ready an action to retreat further if the enemy tries to close, to the limit of their double move. The rules, as they currently stand, don't allow this (you can only Ready a standard action, so would have to move your full distance, and then ready the same. Moreover, withdrawing in that manner would provoke an attack of opportunity. Better to simply slug it out). Additionally, even if you withdraw your full distance, unless you have a faster movement rate than your opponent, they can simply charge you to attack anew.
I suppose the ideal would be an agreement between the players and the DM that retreats and surrenders would be honoured (so, no shooting people in the back as they run away). However, this makes no sense in-game (as some creatures either just would not honour a surrender, or need not be given that luxury (such as demons or the undead, either of which even paladins can kill with impunity)), and also opens whole new realms for DMs to screw their players with: the evil overlord hires 200 bandits, all of whom are given strict instructions to immediately surrender to attackers, thus making any sort of stealth approach possible, or the party meets the DMs pet monster, the one that "just doesn't follow the rules of civilised society".
The short version of all that is that I'll try to be a bit more aware of whether monsters would surrender/honour surrenders, and otherwise we can go on as before.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteResting
You're right that the need for constant rest is something of an oddity. It's definately a feature of the system.
Anyway, if you had rested anywhere in the dungeon, that wouldn't have been safe, as you said. What I would have done was to have the Spell Weaver scry until he found the party (this is, of course, after the evidence of destruction was found). The dark ones and Aritz would then have barricaded the door to whatever room you were in, and then set a fire. Which would have given you a few minutes of extreme "fun" as you had to battle another door monster before getting to safety. Not to mention the need to fight Aritz and the dark ones once you got clear.
So maybe resting wouldn't have helped.
The suggestion about a wand of cure serious wounds is a very good one, by the way. From a cost point of view, cure light would seem to be the way to go (750 for 1d8+1 versus 11,250 for 3d8+5) but in combat, the first is mostly useless, while the second has a chance of actually being useful. The other suggestion I would make is that the the party should be less reluctant to use up the charges in their wands, favouring the cleric as the source of healing(as, indeed, Andreas said). Granted, the cleric's services are free, but the wand can be easily replaced. At the very least, if you are going to go with wands of cure light, then healing done outwith combat should rely heavily on the wand, rather than on the cleric, reserving the cleric's spells for when cast in combat, where they can make a real difference.
Similarly, potions of cure light wounds just aren't going to help any more. They're very cheap, but they take a round to use, and the damage you're likely to take in a round is most likely to eclipse that gained by using the potion anyway. That said, cure serious wounds is the best healing you can get in potion form, costing 750 gp for 3d8+5 (instead of 50 gp for 1d8+1).
Archived comment by Andrew:
ReplyDeleteFighting to the death
The main problem with the TPK session was the sneak attack damage Vibius took during the initial combat round. This meant he was almost useless and of course with the die rolls he was useless. This is why thieves are so dangerous at higher levels and something we'll have to watch for. If Vibius didn't take that 50 damage then I think we would've won the combat, though only just.
Resting
I felt we had to move on since we were attacked while resting in one room. I then assumed we would be attacked if we rested in the room with the kids (oops they'll be waiting for our return for a long time). The only logical course would be for us to move on and clear out the dungeon so we could get the spell removed, which is something I never thought about until just now.