Wow! This response is stunning! I had no idea a post I wrote could produce this volume of responses; I appreciate everyone's input. I'm certainly not just looking for people to close ranks around my position. Thus, I really am appreciative of everyone's candour, even hong's.
A few points meriting response:
1. Like it or not, hong, the player is not going to post his point of view here. An online public debate is NOT the way I want to deal with this player.
2. "Why did I set up a climactic encounter in which half the group could be potentially nerfed?"
Well, my thinking was that everyone faces different disadvantages: the rogue was none too happy that the vampires are immune to his sneak attacks, for instance. But I wouldn't have thought this disadvantage would be tantamount to excluding him.
3. "Did you forget that with D&D, it's all about the gear?"
No. The reverse happened. I had grown increasingly tired of people coming up with absurdly flimsy excuses offered by my players as to why they would be wearing heavy armour at midnight or wearing it during meetings with city officials. I realized that I wasn't enforcing the rules in a balanced way
by consistently looking the other way on a very clear game mechanic for armour.
4. "I for one agree with his first statement. Just like I wouldn't be happy as a spellcaster to find out that the climatic encounter the DM has planned for 10 hours takes place in an antimagic field, I wouldn't be happy to find out as a meleer that my characters armor is useless."
Mistakenly, I thought that the natural abilities of the two clerics and one paladin who stayed home would make them not irrelevant but rather, indispensable: the two clerics had multiple copies of Negative Energy Protection and Restoration memorized to deal with vampires. Furthermore, they could all turn vampires; thus, I figured that their special advantages at fighting vampires would outweigh their disadvantages.
5. "So the choice you gave your players was simple. Go save hundreds of lives and become a vampire in the process or worse yet - lose a crapload of levels."
This was, indeed, how the choice was perceived by some players. However, from a metagaming standpoint, this was not really the case because (a) it was clear to anyone arriving at the combat that the vampires had their hands full controlling and herding into their tower the 140 guards outside (b) it was clear to anyone arriving at this combat that the vampires had cast all their high level spells to mind-control so many troops and to surround them with walls of stone, fire, etc. (c) because the primary objective of the vampires was to turn the guards, not kill the players, no one disengaging from combat with the vampires was ever pursued
6. "Another thing, while the characters went to investigate the explosion, what were the others doing? Sitting around sipping tea? No, they were probably donning their armor to go investigate too. So if it took the other characters 5-10 minutes to go investigate the explosion the others would have been fully dressed and prepared when they came back with news." I was
extremely careful in my measurement of time. All of the characters have speed-granting magic/magic items -- the three who stayed behind all have boots of striding & springing; the sorceror cast Fly; the other three who showed up at the combat all used Expeditious Retreat spells or potions. I carefully measured the distance from the characters' house to the combat and plotted it against movement rates to determine that most characters
would take 4 rounds to travel between these points and the slowest would take 6. Furthermore, the Paladin had a Huge Griffon as a special mount and a ride skill of 14 to further enable transportation between the locations.
7. More generally, I specifically wanted people to have to weigh their lives against others' lives. But I also, throughout this season of my game have worked hard to ensure that the characters' adversaries are intelligent. After all, a group of 21 vampire mages versus a city of 12000 people should be basing their strategy on their superior intelligence not their superior firepower. Thus, the last time the vampires figured out the characters were underground, they attacked the Paladin's griffon. Similarly, the first time the vampires attacked the characters, it was a surprise attack by former PCs and NPCs who had all been turned into vampires while the characters were out of town. The challenge with these vampires is that they consistently exploit their knowledge of the party and their latent cunning and intelligence in order to maintain the upper hand. This time, they exploited their knowledge of the party's dependence on its heavily-armoured paladin to execute a strategy that could only work if they could pull it off in 20 rounds before the city notables had time to react and retaliate.
8. "Anyone who wears heavy armor should have a backup breastplate, or at least a chain shirt, that they sleep in. IMC they call it paladin pyjamas."
The paladin did have a spare magical chain shirt but neither he nor the clerics were willing to wear it just to arrive earlier.
9. "so the DM should have had plenty of time to get to know the players, what their styles are, what they like in a game, etc. Thus, it shouldn't have come as a total surprise if a particular player is paranoid about being caught without their gear."
Well, this was part of why I did what I did. Just as the attempt to
assassinate the Paladin's griffin was designed to break the party of its annoying habit of going into the catacombs beneath the city, adventuring for an hour and then deciding to have a 10 hour nap down there so as to ensure they were always at peak firepower when confronting the catacombs' denizens. Thus, I created a situation where it was disadvantageous to abandon their base on the surface overnight without good reason. Similarly, I decided it was really time to break the party of its tendency to manufacture excuses for always confronting any problem fully armoured.
10. "The player would have a legitimate complaint, IMHO, if this tactic is overused. By the same token, if a player expects that this will never occur, or only occur in minor encounters, that is also not reasonable."
I had never, in my 18 years of GMing, ever used this tactic before. That was part of why the vampires did it; the former party members who are now vampires knew the party would be unprepared for this.
11. "The most unreasonable part was assuming that hundreds of vampires could be formed in 4 minutes. Maybe a few dozen, but not necessarily hundreds, because logistically, it takes time to find the victims, kill them, raise as vampire spawn, get acclimated to their new existances, etc."
Sorry. I should clarify. I took it that turning was an overnight thing. The limited number of rounds was actually the amount of time it would take the vampires to mind-control as many people as possible and then lead them into the tower where they would spend the next considerable amount of time draining them and preparing their bodies for transformation. I realize my phrasing was awkward; what I meant to suggest was that it would take about 10 rounds to herd everyone into the tower for turning. Over the next while, the vampires would turn the mind-controlled soldiers into vampires at a rate of 0-2 people per vampire per round, depending on (a) the vampire's number of attacks (b) the victim's level and (c) the victim's hit points. Actually, once the vampires were able to get 70 people into the tower, most of them spent their time completing that process, rather than dealing with the characters who breached their defences and rushed into the building to destroy their coffins.
12. "However, did the players in question come up with alternative solutions to the problem? Sleeping in lesser armor? Having the sorcerer cast a protective spell, such as mage armor, stoneskin, blur, etc.? Having the party cleric juice up the ones in their altogethers?"
No. It was most peculiar; they spent a lot of time planning their
inevitable confrontation with the vampires but they had always assumed the confrontation would be "about them" and initiated by them. The idea of the vampires setting the stage seemed to surprise everyone but the Paladin. He actually observed, talking to the captain of the city guard just hours before the attack, "if the vampires attack these guys, they're sitting ducks. We really need to deploy some more clerics tomorrow."
13. "However, I don't know how large your group of players is but 3 players decided not to participate in the combat. This should be a pretty clear indication that the perception of these players was that the odds of winning this combat without armor were not too good."
Right. However, once people arrived at the tower, their ideas about their chances immediately changed. Those players who showed up at the combat realized immediately that the vampires had expended virtually all their spells and that, by taking the offensive, the vampires had provided them with their best-ever opportunity for a counter-strike.
14. "Until the first wave of heroes tells the second wave of heroes, the second wave really doesn't know what is going on, because the second wave is busy getting suited up for battle. So, the first wave of heroes was wrong not to call for help. As soon as they realized there was a combat, they should have asked for immediate assistance. The first wave didn't ask for help, so they failed."
This is one of the thorniest issues for me; and it is further complicated by my lax attitude to metagaming. I never make an issue of characters knowing things only their players could reasonably know; thus, again and again, characters have done things based on what their players "know" is happening elsewhere.
It is perhaps because of my lax attitude to metagaming that the sorceror chose to seek help from the duke of the city instead of returning to the characters' house and telling his comrades to come to the battle without their armour. Nonetheless, he could have, in four rounds, reached the house with Fly and summoned his comrades to the battle. Similarly, the other characters at the battle didn't think to tell the characters they couldn't afford to take the time to don armour because the players already clearly
knew this.
Nonetheless, the sorceror took 4 rounds to go to the ducal palace and grab the duke instead of taking 4 rounds to go and get his friends. According to him, he did this because the players had made it clear that they would not send their characters into battle without armour regardless of what information he told them about the vampires' depleted state.
15. "What I don't understand is why some of the other party members didn't stay and help put the armor on. If the character has help, it takes only half the time."
The characters had servants who helped them put the armour on. However, it took a couple of rounds to wake the servants up which slowed the initial progress on armouring.
16. "Did the armor-donning players understand the situation completely?"
No. No one understood the situation completely. The flying sorceror was the 1st to figure it out and there was a general discussion about this, in metagame terms, once people realized what was happening. As I mentioned above, players have consistently been allowed to use such discussions to inform their characters' choices.
17. "Did the armor-donning players have reason to believe they'd be successful without their armour?"
Certainly the paladin did because he realized (a) his ride skill could be used to augment his armour class and avoid melee attacks if he rode his griffin into battle (b) even as vampires, wizards suck at melee attacks and deliver an average of 7 points of damage per round with slam attacks, assuming they hit (c) the two clerics had multiple Negative Energy Protection spells memorized for themselves and thus, would only be subject
to normal damage.
18. "Did you have some sort of backup plan for characters who for whatever reason couldn't get involved?"
"Simple, have a second group of vampires burst into the bedroom and attack the group suiting up."
(sorry to the two posters that I've paired your unrelated comments)
I didn't really consider the possibility until it was too late -- hence my resort to this forum. It seemed unreasonable to come up with anything else for the characters to do, though. The vampires were throwing everything they had at this single massive assault so it seemed contrary to my construction of them as brilliant tacticians for them to waste their energy on attacking the characters' Hallowed mansion.
19. "Point being here that as it was your responsibility to make sure everybody had a chance to have fun, it probably wasn't perfect DMing to leave characters donning armour through the entire encounter. I know that sometimes players do things that boggle our minds and force us to twist and warp our plans in order to stave off disaster, but hey that's why we're the DMs. We kick butt. We're smart and creative and our non-DMing friends are in awe of our abilities....Not get what they want, not receive sudden special abilities (like instant armor) just because they think they should, but a chance to play and not spend an entire encounter chugging through the result of one decision."
Given that the characters adamantly refused to do anything other than don aromour, I'm not sure what I could have come up with. If they had been attacked by vampires on their home turf, e.g., wouldn't they have been just as angry about not being allowed to wear their armour for the confrontation? (Furthermore, the nature of hallowing would have ensured they would have turned them immediately). Given that they insisted on spending 25 rounds donning armour (10 without assistance, 15 with), I'm not sure what I could have done to involve them without suspending the armour donning rule, which is what the one player kept demanding. For the first 10 of these rounds, I kept saying, "you can stop donning your armour any time."
You have really cut to the heart of the problem here with this question -- if they refused to participate in the adventure unless they did something that took 25 rounds first, how could I include them if they adventure was only 25 rounds long? I'm not asking this question rhetorically; I'm asking it because I really want to know.
20. "In this case, those PCs missed out on a combat and a lot of experience. They will learn to take precautions in the future to prevent such a situation arising again."
I awarded everyone equal experience for the episode regardless of their actions. There have been a lot of episodes where the Paladin has been the only one willing to stay visible and in melee while the rest of his party abandons him (that was his main motivation for hanging back, weirdly) where everyone has received equal experience. I find that if there's too big a difference between people's experience awards, resentments build up.
21. "Because he is little better than a Fighter, with the eldritch power of a wet doilie, and now no armor class, up against an unspecified number of level-draining vampires (of unknown levels, classes, and power) who can (apparently) kill one hundred people in under four minutes!"
Actually, the small number of high-level magi who pulled this off -- 1 14th level wizard, 1 11th level, 2 9th level used all their high level spells slots for spells like: Mind Fog, Mass Suggestion, Wall of Stone, Wall of Fire so as to either mind-control the people attacked directly or to hem them in so that they might be vulnerable to the dominate attacks of the lower-level vampires and vampire spawn. Additionally, once those spells were used up, the vampires (and their lower-level cronies -- 4 7th level, 1 6th) used Haste spells, along with individual Suggestion spells to bring as many soldiers under their control as possible. Just to round out the statistics, there were 13 vampire spawn, yielding a total of 21 assailants. Even so, the vampires, themselves, suffered casualties not inflicted by the players during the battle -- both from the duke and from the more senior officers in the city guard who were in possession of magical weapons.
This post is now too long. I'll deal with the social questions raised in a subsequent post.
) and he assures me the undead invasion should be coming to a conclusion soon. I do everything in my power to beef up my will save, ride out the undead invasion and then look forward to doing some damage. Well, guess what he throws at us next? More creatures with a Fear ability. Luckily he realized how annoying this was getting and he's tossed us some foes we could go toe-to-toe with. 
