A momentary lapse of good DM judgement killed all my players.

[William Ronald]

SpuneDagr,

I think this is a good save, as you did not want to kill the party. I think that the 10 should have been a success, indicating that attacking the creature would be foolish.

As for the suggestion of the characters got what they deserved, each DM runs games differently. One size solutions seldom fit all. If everyone is happy about the solution, who is hurt by it. A good group does not last long if there is no such thing as give and take. My way or the highway was a good philosophy for Frank Sinatra, but it might not always work for a gaming group. (I have no problem eliminating characters for their mistakes. SpuneDagr says that he believes he has made a mistake, and has tried to find a way to correct it. Last I checked, even the best DMs screw up sometimes. There is a fine line between being too harsh and too lenient on players. Sometimes, players have to be allowed to fail. Just not all the time.)

As this seems to be a campaign with ties to Planescape (the Athar reference seems to confirm this), perhaps the characters should have had a better idea of the ultraloths true nature. I would have tried to give more of an impression of menace and danger.

 

[SpuneDagr]

The campaign is Hellbound, set in Planescape. The players are only as familiar with the setting as I allow them to be. I tried to get across to them how friggin' uber this guy was, but sometimes I forget that I know way more about all this than they do.

"Ultro-what?"

 

[William Ronald]

SpuneDagr,

We all make mistakes. Sometimes an encounter is too tough or too easy. The last person I met who claimed to know everything did not impress me with his knowledge. So, you learn as you go along.

I hope you can make it to the next EN World Chicago Gameday, which should be sometime in October.

 

[Jhyrryl]

At some point, I got tired of the number crunching around the table. "Ok, you are at -3, we don't need to heal you quite yet, you might stablize and we might take this thing down before then." So, I stopped telling them what the HP were at when they went negative. I just tell everyone that the character(s) fell. Now, they have to ignore that, or somebody has to determine the status of the downed character(s). It has made my combats a bit more dramatic and they usually get somebody with healing over there much quicker. Every so often, the downed character is dead and no amount of healing will help at the moment. Sometimes the character death is obvious (yardshaft through the head) and they know that they will pick up the corpse afterward.

I'm not keen on having to keep track of PC hps myself (I have a head for how numbers and algorithms and such relate to each other, but not for the numbers themselves ... I suck at dates, for instance), but I like this and may make a house rule that states that when a player goes down, s/he's not allowed to express what that means in any more detail. That may mean that *I* don't know either, but that should just scare the PCs into action that much more.

This kind of ruling will also more fully justify the Clerics' use of status now that it's only a 2nd-level spell. "She's still alive! We've got to save her!" (After all, true rez is now 25k gp, bare minimum. )

 

[Dirigible]

I agree with the sentiment "I'm the host; we're here to have fun."

What I don't get is everyone saying 'good save' regarding the 'it was a hypnotic vision' bit.

Isn't it a bit like Dallas, where -whoops- the whole season was a dream ? Everyone though that was cruddy (it's practically the Iconic Dumb Writer's Trick).

No offence, and I understand that it was probably the best you could rig up in the circumstances (and believe me, I've resorted to much, much worse deus ex machina to pull PC bacon ouut of the fire), but it is a pretty lame save.

 

[Treacherous]

I recommend adopting the 3.5 knowledge skill rules if you havn't already. If the player rolls high enough for you to give him or her a useful bit of information his or her PC remembers, say "These creatures can cast Firestorm at caster level x once per day" or whatever sounds really scary. If the roll fails, the character doesn't remember anything useful.

 

[mythusmage]

S.D., instead of gaming the fiend, try playing it instead. Put yourself into its head. What would a millennia old, utterly selfish, unrepentently evil creature of vast intelligence be like? How would it think? How would it perceive a bunch of short lived, incompetent, rash fools? How would it deal with such?

Think long term. Think subtle. Think absolutely convinced of its own superiority compared to those pitiable fools that presume to deal with it on an 'equal' basis. There are many ways to destroy a foe, and few involve his physical destruction.

It's not what you do, it's why you do it.

Think self image. Think self worth. Think of all the ways you can mangle, maim and pervert a person's idea of himself under the guise of friendship. Remember that you are dealing with a beast that has lived for centuries upon centuries; one who has no need to kill when it can do so much worse to any opponent. Especially ones as weak as mortals.

Sometimes the most vicious thing you can do is to let the other guy live.

 

[Hackenslash]

Foobarr !!!

1st PC : Hey this mission is foobar...

2nd PC : Yeah, this is foobar...

3rd PC : Definitely FOOBARR !!!

DM: Yep...there's a lot of that going around...

4th PC : What's Foobarr ???

Well just trying to make light of the subject, but in all seriousness it is not an easy job being a DM and sometimes we can make mistakes. It is how we deal with those mistakes that makes us the type of person we are. Don't beat yourself up too badly over it, what's done is done. Peace All !!

 

[Barak]

You know.. Often I see people saying "well, they should have ran away". As a player, that sounds nice in theory, but doesn't always work out in practice. I'm not sure about this particular situation, but often it doesn't sound like it would work. Let's say I play a dwarf, for example. For some odd reason, despite being level 5, we decide to attack a demon/dragon/whatever that we were parlaying with. Combat starts to look bad. We aren't doing much damage to him, and the creature is tearing into us. Would I start thinking about retreat? In many situations, no. Let's face it. If I was a demon, pure evil, and some jerks I was talking with attack me, barely scratch me while I tear into them, and then they start retreating at 20' or 30' movement, and I myself am faster, or can Dimension Door, would I just.. Let them go? Heck no. I'd kill them until they be dead, and then kill them some more. So although retreat is sometimes the best part of valor, it's not always a clear-cut choice.

 

[bret]

Funny, I've got almost the exact opposite problem coming up in the near future... my players caught onto what I had planned as a minor background thread involving cranium rats and pursued it completely out of proportion, keeping me on my toes inventing as I go along... which is all well and good, other than the fact that they seem hell-bent on fighting the bare-brained rodents long before I'm ready for them to do so! They're level 3, and they probably won't be more than level 4 or MAYBE 5 before they get there, and they want to go up against a pack of over 40 rats!

I can't think of a way out of this without killing every single one of them... they're charging in that much over their heads, no matter how many hints I drop... they KNOW how dangerous cranium rats are in numbers that great, and they still seem to be planning on going through with this... If they fight, they'll lose, so the only option I can see is for me to find a way to keep them from fighting.. Any ideas, anyone?

Go on with the rats as planned. Either it will work out as you expect (the players all die), or the players will surprise you.

What you have to make sure of is that there are no sudden changes in the threat. Don't go from throwing 3-4 rats at them to suddenly throwing 7-10 rats at them. Don't back down on the threat, just make sure that they have a good idea of exactly what they are getting into.

Are they doing Gather Info rolls? You might have them find someone who actually knows quite a bit about the rats, have them mention how nasty a nest tends to be as you get surrounded by the nasty buggers, them cutting off the retreat and such. Be even more interesting if he had been part of a party that had tried it before, so he could give examples of how the mage's fireball wasn't nearly as effective as expected. If you do this, make sure that you've made up the dead party and gone through the motions of a battle so you have a good idea of what strategy the dead party used and how they failed. That will prevent you from being surprised, you can at that point say 'Nope, don't think we tried that.'

I would give the expert a big cat, make him fearful of rats which is why he got the mouser -- help protect himself.

After that sort of warning, if the party still charges ahead, just call it a mass suicide and allow them to go in. The players have to learn that some challenges really are too much for them.