D&D 5E (2024) Assassination on a PC yay or nay?

[nevin]

So at lvl 4 the PCs foiled the plans of a Shade. They watched her via a communication device dispatch an assassin and dark justicier to deal with them.

Level 5 and a tenday later they were traveling with Cornyr fairly safe right?

Near Arabel tge assassin struck. +10 on initiative, nightfall stealth role beat passive perception. Advantage on initiative, 28 assassin won.

CR8 vs 5th lvl PCs. RAW around a medium encounter. Last campaign involved lots of bhaalists. They usually used hold spells/command.

First strike. Critical hit. Base damage 1d8+4+6d6 poison. 3 attack. Next strike 20+ dropped the PC to 0. 3rd attack I targeted the downed PC putting them close to death.

Assassin then used shadow step (refluffed shadair kai as Shadovar ) and ran. End of encounter.

So that was it. Fiendish to a crit, raising tension and an assassin being intelligent and well an assassin I did a reasonable attempt of killing the PC's.

Some of the 5.5 reworks the monsters hit like trucks relative to 5.0. Goblin hexers, various cultists, assasssins, mages, archemages, performers all hurt. Hell Lost Library adventure has a mage apprentice that hurt lvl 1/2.

So several things going on.

1. DM special. Added a race to an NPC.
2. It did its thing scoring a crit.
3. Focus fire on one PC dropping them start of round 1.
4. Struck the PC once downed.
5. Shoot and scoot. Assassins mobility it got outta dodge.

PC chosen was random. Each player rolled a dice lowest got targeted (I do this when I suspect something will suck. Wife's at table she rolls the lowest she gets hit. No DM favorites).

Player was kinda shocked. Also the youngest player who has a very nasty striker type. They live action economy command or hold person has a 75% chance of success if combat continued.

1. DM special. Added a race to an NPC.
2. It did its thing scoring a crit.
3. Focus fire on one PC dropping them start of round 1.
4. Struck the PC once downed.
5. Shoot and scoot. Assassins mobility it got outta dodge.

PC chosen was random. Each player rolled a dice lowest got targeted (I do this when I suspect something will suck. Wife's at table she rolls the lowest she gets hit. No DM favorites).

Player was kinda shocked. Also the youngest player who has a very nasty striker type. They live action economy command or hold person has a 75% chance of success if combat continued.

Ok to make a point. I'd be really careful about this shoot and scoot stuff as an ongoing tactic. The players should be able to come up with some way to deal with this kind of attacks going forward. Not necessarily easily or cheaply. Otherwise your just putting them in a horror movie.

It's easy to turn lower level games into unfun games if you use stuff that the party can't deal with too often. Players have to feel like they have some ability to defend or mitigate attacks. Honestly you may find going forward that every decision will be much slower and much more tedious as they attempt to minimize the chance of this happening or even to decide if they should confront baddies. too much of this could slow your game to an indecisive crawl. I once derailed a campaign I'd been building for a year doing stuff like this. When the drow hit the party the last time because they were finally powerful enough to deal with them they just left the country and never looked back. In retrospect I was too good at showing them how awesomely bad the drow were. Cost me a lot of time. I had to put months of work in the folder and start over. I was a very sad DM.

 

[Zardnaar]

*Attempted.

They were warned, and the target was random. I think you did that right.

The characters are going to be jumping at shadows now.
Was that the intended goal?
Is this going to be a recurring NPC?

I suspect this may be a pivot point in the game/campaign.

Yeah it was mostly the goal and lead up to big reveal around lvl 6.
The assassin wont be recurring William as they'll probably get lucky initiative wise and kill it.

Its a tool of the Shade leaders.

 

[Zardnaar]

Esp since the whole party survived, the next attempt will be hitting harder…

Next ine will be dark justified plus friends.

They'll be establishing bastions soon s the assassin might strike at NPCs as its chop sued in direct combat.

I want the shades to be a phantom menace type threat vs brute power.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ok to make a point. I'd be really careful about this shoot and scoot stuff as an ongoing tactic. The players should be able to come up with some way to deal with this kind of attacks going forward. Not necessarily easily or cheaply. Otherwise your just putting them in a horror movie.

It's easy to turn lower level games into unfun games if you use stuff that the party can't deal with too often. Players have to feel like they have some ability to defend or mitigate attacks. Honestly you may find going forward that every decision will be much slower and much more tedious as they attempt to minimize the chance of this happening or even to decide if they should confront baddies. too much of this could slow your game to an indecisive crawl. I once derailed a campaign I'd been building for a year doing stuff like this. When the drow hit the party the last time because they were finally powerful enough to deal with them they just left the country and never looked back. In retrospect I was too good at showing them how awesomely bad the drow were. Cost me a lot of time. I had to put months of work in the folder and start over. I was a very sad DM.

I've used drow as shoot and scoot with 120' darkvision.

Basically early combat is initiative, mid combat surprise round, late combat round 1 withdraw.

Or bombard the PCs are range vs 120' darkvision. Lightning bolt, fireballs etc.

Very driw like. Send in the minions.

Also hitting them at night if NPCs have dispel magic.

Idea isnt to kill PCs more annoy them and raise tension.

 

[Umbran]

As I say, if the plan is just "do a lot of damage to one PC then run", it barely even needs to be a combat encounter.

So, it then becomes an element on the "wandering damage chart".

My broader point is that, yes, the assassin acted logically in the situation, but it led to a wasted opportunity to do something interesting because it had the DM's omniscience.

I don't know if it acted logically in this situation. If the assassin's goal is to actually kill, jumping into the middle all of them, when the damage from that critical was not guaranteed... was dumb. It sounds like except for the crit, they had little chance of killing anyone before they either has to run or get whalloped by all the PCs in concert.

A logical assassin takes them each alone, when they're asleep, or poison their wine, or the like.

And, in terms of game design, as others have noted, it didn't give the players anything to interact with, no decisions to make. Over and done before they can react. During that bit, the players were not playing, which could use some consideration.