Dragon Heist TPK

[Zerdal]

Did your players knew who the villain was? If he was someone famous you should let your players make the History check or just tell them outright who they're dealing with. After that, if they didn't reconsider and still believed that challenging a foe that's way beyond any of them is a good idea, they deserved TPK.

 

[Derren]

Thats the problem with going against the genre. D&D is about charging in, killing monsters and get rewarded for it. The rules are geared towards this gameplay with most of it being combat, damage being very easy to recover from and all classes being geared towards combat and it basically being impossible to make a character that is not a powerful combatant. So this is the expectations it creates for the players.
So it is understandable that there is a lot of confusion when the adventure suddenly assumes that the players should act against the spirit of D&D. So even when the players realize that the encounter is technically too hard they will still be conflicted about doing the smart thing like fleeing/not pursuing and going full Leeroy Jenkins because thats how you play D&D, especially after the big push for "combat as sport".

The exact same encounter in a different system like Shadowrun would likely work out very differently most of the time simply because the mindset is different.

 

[Zerdal]

I think it's less about D&D rules, but players with a particular mentality. Once they realize the world is not scaling down to their level and combat is not the only option, they'll be fine. Of course, some settings can help to reinforce that idea better than others, in Planescape, for example, players often encounter much powerful creatures from other planes of existence.

 

[S'mon]

I think it might be good for the GM to say "You know this guy is way out of your league".

 

[Reynard]

It sounds like a failure of communication to me. Did the GM explain how this adventure is different than others and point out that the world will not scale for them? Session 0 should have mapped all that out. If so and the PCs pushed it -- well, you get what you ordered.

 

[Zerdal]

Or even better: describe the villain that way, so players will decide themselves that frontal attack is not the right idea. With a good description you can influence your players to avoid combat (or display any other behavior you want them to do). In my games, if I describe something as really scary or formidable, players will choose the combat only as a last resort.

 

[Ancalagon]

Picking fights with NPCs (vs "monsters") is always a dangerous thing. While there are exceptions, in general you know a goblin is less dangerous than a troll. But a human? It could be a peasant, it could be an archmage in disguise.

 

[Pauper]

I haven't read Dragon Heist, so don't know if the other details in the module would support this idea, but I kind of like the idea of using a session one TPK as a prelude to a short, 'The Sting' style campaign.

Session one, the party ends up somewhere they really shouldn't be, encounters the big-bad, and decides 'if we don't kill him, we don't get XP!', so attacks. They get wiped. DM announces, "If you're still interested, bring a character for next time who knew and admired one of the characters who were just killed."

The next session introduces the new characters at memorials for the dead characters. Some NPCs express anger at the big-bad that he/she/it won't be brought to justice for the killings; most just express their disappointment, 'such a shame', that sort of thing.

The party gets together with a sympathetic NPC to figure out what to do to get justice/revenge. It seems pretty clear that they can't just attack the big-bad and go for a killing of their own -- the big-bad is clearly powerful, plus the NPC points out that the big-bad has connections and will just be brought back from the dead even if they miraculously succeed. No, what they need is to hurt the big-bad in a way that can't just be bounced back from, preferably while making the big-bad look foolish in the process.

They need to swindle the big-bad out of his/her/its greatest treasure.

Begin campaign. I know I'd be excited as hell for something like this.

--
Pauper

 

[Demetrios1453]

We had several close calls even though 90% of the encounters were easy until the first real major boss. Don't know how to hide spoilers so lets just say it was a major bad guy who was WAY over the pc's level 1 ability and even though he tried to (get away) the party forced him into a fight and he destroyed the entire party in six seconds. One round and done,TPK.

Like ok I realize not everyone follows that same script and reacts to seeing that the same way but I hardly think that is THAT far off normal.


Am I missing something or are others having to deal with the same thing or heavily alter the adventure?

I know which encounter you are taking about - so how did they force that NPC to fight? The entrance is fairly distant from where the NPC is trying to escape, and there are two other NPCs available to run interference. Did they manage to get around those two (provoking opportunity attacks) and get into the NPC's face before he could move? If so, the NPC should have just passed on by, allow them to get opportunity attacks on it, and then escape.

 

[MNblockhead]

While I do see some value in the "not everyone is beatable" type lesson. I just do not see a lot of value on forcing a wildly unbalanced encounter on the party with survival criteria that the party doesn't know.

For instance is it BAD that a party would try to stop a villain trying to get away? That seems counter-intuitive. Bad guys seek to escape and heroes bring them to justice.

For instance, the Players knew the monster was dead, but argued to themselves that their characters wouldn't have a clue what it was and so attacked it and tried to bring it down.

If the party would have been less effective and hadn't one rounded the help and still had enough change left over to threaten the big bad and force it into a confrontation they would have probably lived.

I dunno, I'm just shocked im the only one having issues with it.

If you were the DM and were having issues with it, you could have just had them knocked out and have them come to in any alley later, missing their coin and other valuables. That could teach a powerful lesson while not killing the entire party if that is how you and the players want to play.

I guess that in my games, the players know to be careful. To me, Curse of Strahd is even "worse" (or better, depending on your POV) in this regard. A misjudged encounter early on almost resulted in a TPK and set the tone for the rest of the adventure, too the point that even foes they can not mop the floor with--they will be very careful about engaging. They don't take things for granted.

Now, I won't FORCE players into a deadly encounter. But if they go walking into a situation without taking precautions, and with no efforts at gathering intel, that's on them.