Players who think out of the box

[DragonKnight88]

My questions:
How the Pc manage to find and throw the boulders.
5 tons, you need leverage, machinery, they work unnoticed?
And The boss, he was sitting in his bath, wandering, What the hell is that red cross paint on the ceiling?

Like I said long story short, they got to this point by scouting out the keep, and determining the Lords chambers, and then proceeded to create an avalanche.

 

[cooperjer]

As a mechanical engineer and a DM I can say with confidence that the 5E rules do not model reality. I feel like you had a couple choices to make regarding how to address the big bomb. Two options were to use more narrative or use a group of dice to determine the impact of the bomb. The 5T mass (2.5 Ford Taurus cars) dropped from a height can be a significantly forceful impact. 15d10 feels a little light, but good enough. 20d10 might have been a little closer to feeling right. The median value is 110, which in my mind means 27 dead commoners with the impact on average.

If you question is about what to do next with your story I'm going to refer to something I learned from How to be a Great GM. The plot should be something about the NPC wanting something and having a hard time getting it. Well, that NPC might be dead now, or that thing is destroyed in the bomb. Who wanted that thing? What happens if that thing is broken? Does someone else now want that thing? Did the PCs now earn a reputation of being capable of mass destructive power and are being sought by another individual who wants a big thing that can only be obtained with mass destructive power? If you build a plot on the NPC wanting a thing / or event and having trouble getting it then you might be able to expand from this current event and further develop the story.

Good luck.

 

[jgsugden]

D&D is an RPG. A role playing game. Characters play a role in a story. That story is one that the DM plans and the players improvise through. The first role of being a good improvisation partner is NEVER SAY NO.

You had a plan. They came up with something unexpected. Your job: DON'T SAY NO. Find the fun in their plan and let it go. It doesn't mean you need to let it succeed, but build upon their ideas and tell a fun story.

If you let them perform their plan, their job is: DON'T SAY NO when they hear how you decide to resolve it. If you decide it is an autokill - ok. If you decide it deals a bunch of damage - they need to say, "OK". If you decide they saw the 5 ton rock coming and escaped - they need to say ok.

The most important thing is to make sure it creates an awesome story that everyone enjoys. If the BBEG escapes, make sure the twist is fun for the PCs - and earned. If you can't, don't let him escape. If you let him get nailed, decide whether to go insta-kill or take damage. If taking damage, make sure it is meaningful based on the circumstances and sell it to the PCs with a great description. If you don't think the PCs will buy any level of damage - give them the insta-kill... and figure out how to continue the story from there.

When I was very young I designed a giant ice maze dungeon. It was meant to be a major delve with the PCs spending weeks of gaming in it. I was so proud of all the different things inside of it - the ecology and interaction between different areas. The fun traps. The stimulating puzzles... and a bunch of monsters I'd built from scratch. The climax was a massive battle scenario before they exited the dungeon on the other sizide of the maze and would be able to see the sun for the first time in so long... The PCs arrived at the dungeon, took one look, asked themselves what was stopping them from just walking over the top of it... and I was crushed. It was such an obvious answer and it slipped right past me.

So they walked past it. I kept a straight face and didn't reveal until a year later that I had expected them to adventure through it - and how much time I'd wasted. The most important thing to me, as I'd learned from reading the DMG, was to make sure we were telling a good story. And the best thing for the story, when they saw the path, was to ley them use it. While I've learned a lot and am less likely to make a similar mistake today\, if I did, I would do the exact same thing.

 

[DragonKnight88]

Sure, I get it. Sometimes we make these calls in the moment using the standard guidelines for a nonstandard event and it doesn't quite work out. That's okay. A good rule of thumb for future use in these kind of does-the-villain-die-in-one-go-or-not situations is to start with the hit points as the average damage, then work backward to arrive at the damage roll.

The only thing I would say, and have, is to lay out those stakes before you jump to resolution so that the players can agree with your call or renegotiate based on their expectations. That might have avoided some problems. Also, I would add don't let the amount of time you spent on your prep influence your decision-making. Either accept that your prep is part of the lonely fun of DMing and it might not see the light of day (this time...) or work on your improvisation skills and do less prep in general.

I’m all for letting them freelance ideas, but I feel it’s going to take away from the experience if I eliminate the Unknown. Is it really best to give the players every outcome based on their plan. It destroys the mystery and kinda defeats the purpose of even role playing is they know they will succeed or fail before they actually try.

 

[iserith]

I’m all for letting them freelance ideas, but I feel it’s going to take away from the experience if I eliminate the Unknown. Is it really best to give the players every outcome based on their plan. It destroys the mystery and kinda defeats the purpose of even role playing is they know they will succeed or fail before they actually try.

The mystery you speak of is somewhat overrated in my view, but actually I'm referring to letting them describe what they want to do then telling them how you're going to resolve it before you do and possibly, in some cases, before they fully commit to the action. That leaves an opening for them to object to how you plan to resolve it based on their perception of how feasible the plan is given their understanding of the situation. Maybe you didn't make something clear or they misunderstood something critical that you stated. It's simply a technique for clarifying communication, setting expectations, and getting player buy-in. Based on the details you provided, the players did not appear to have the same expectation as you did and that's why they objected. Clarifying what success and failure look like before throwing the dice goes a long way to sidestepping that common issue, especially in these let's say nonstandard approaches to dealing with villains.

 

[jasper]

Rule 0.5 The monsters want to live too.
I would be going up the wall if they took 2 hours of real time to do the circles and arrows of the plan, I have no problem with your damage. If they twitch when you ask can you do to them and have them die. then they need to readjust their thinking. Always ask "can I use your cunning plan against you at a later date.?" If they scream not fair then it not fair against the monster.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You may need to shift how you think about the game.
Is combat a sport (two "balanced " group of foes face off and the best wins)? Or is combat war? (Anything goes, the PCs do whatever they can to make the fight as most on their side as possible).
Combat as war don't care about a fair fight. The fun is coming up with the best way to crush your foe.

D&D combat is part of a game (because D&D actually is a game, it's easy to forget that, at times, because it's such an open-ended 'infinite game' in concept, and such a technically poor one in mechanics).

Treating a game as a war is...
...inappropriate. Yeah, ironically, even in a wargame. ;P Going all Kobayashi Maru on every scenario defeats the purpose of the exercise, in the first place.


CaW/CaS is thus mis-stating things. I think iserith (and indie game designs that use similar ideas) have a better grasp on the underlying range of play possibilities in "stakes." (Personally, I also think genre conventions come into it, and climactic battles with main villains might be set up with a creative/improbable/desperate assault like that, but not instantly won with one, becaue that'd be anit-climactic.) RPGs run aground on issues like this because they're so open-ended, and the player's ideas of what a given action should result in can be so different from the DM's (and the DM's is ultimately what goes).

If the DM goes through a process with his players:

I'm referring to letting them describe what they want to do then telling them how you're going to resolve it before you do and possibly, in some cases, before they fully commit to the action. That leaves an opening for them to object to how you plan to resolve it based on their perception of how feasible the plan is given their understanding of the situation. Maybe you didn't make something clear or they misunderstood something critical that you stated. It's simply a technique for clarifying communication, setting expectations, and getting player buy-in.

... he can avoid problems like the OP's, and avoid frustrating his players...

 

[cmad1977]

Get new players.

 

[Gwarok]

How do they know that they hit him dead on? How powerful could those explosives have been? Even modern artillery strikes can be fluky enough that you get unlikely survivors near the point of impact, and I can only imagine a jury rigged boulder, while devastating to the structure and anyone in it's direct path, has far more opportunity for someone surviving the strike. If the situation was that a human type person was hit dead on by a 5 ton object, then yea, dead on impact because saying otherwise makes it seem less like DND and more like an episode of Road Runner vs Bugs Bunny. What's the old saying, "I agreed to suspend my disbelief, not hang it from the neck until dead.." That being said, sometimes you just gotta say someone dies when something like that happens.

If you can't make the PC's have a very solid reason to approach such a planned out encounter in the manner you need them to this is going to happen. And that's a very hard thing to do without railroading your players. Any chance you can describe the scenario in a bit more detail, like how you saw it going down and how they rigged their Acme Exploding 5 Ton Boulder contraption to hit a man sized target, inside a structure no less, with such precision?

 

[DragonKnight88]

I guess the real takeaway is to work on my improvisation and just keep on moving forward. If they wish to start including realistic expectations, I will point out that at later levels characters can literally fall hundreds of feet and not die instantly from it. If they are that unhappy with my gaming style then we can all sit down and figure out what it is they want or if we should move onto just running modules.