...And you get to my Thursday night game. Our Eberron campaign, which has run for about a year and a half, reached an ignominious conclusion. The PCs were working their way through a fortress in the Demon Wastes--a fortress infested with conspirators of Mu Tahn Laa, The Inescapable Madness. Mu Tahn Laa, who's been imprisoned by Gatekeeper seals for millenia, has grown restive and is trying to break the seals that bind him. Naturally, the PCs have been trying to stop him, because they don't see the upside in a world that gibbers and capers before the death-dealing tread of an ancient demon-king.
But in the heart of the fortress, the heroes were overcome. Overcome as in a total party kill. And nobody's getting those bodies back. So Hammer, Karhun, Isidro, and Dessin are dead, done, finito.
So what happened? As with many TPKs, it was a confluence of events. They made a couple of tactical errors. They let the bad guys spread them out. They didn't focus fire enough. They took some needless damage (some of the conspirators of Mu Tahn Laa have heads that explode when they first take damage, so you want to soften the bad guys up with a ranged attack first, rather than drop an ice storm that'll make a whole bunch of heads explode right next to the paladin and rogue. And they were slow to realize that they were in over their heads, and the monsters happened to have good countermeasures for fleeing PCs in any case.
It was a great, epic fight. It probably ran for more than an hour and had 20 rounds, easy. But for a lot of it, everyone at the table could see things slowly slipping away.
But that's all on their side of the screen. They were also done in by something I learned about 4th edition. Fighting two encounters simultaneously is far more lethal than it used to be. That's probably good for the game on balance, but it does impose some new caution in my adventure design (or it should have, at any rate).
In 3rd edition, it wasn't necessarily a big deal if two rooms' worth of monsters attacked you at once. The CR 12 monster in room A4 and the CR 12 monster in room A5--well, that's still just an EL 14 encounter and only incrementally more difficult than those two rooms tackled separately. But in 4th edition, it really feels like something that's twice as hard. Which isn't to say it's impossible--my Thursday guys might have pulled out a victory with a little more luck and a little more foresight. But you can't blithely kick open door after door, that's for sure.
You don't want to eliminate the possibility of kicking in two doors at the same time, of course. And it's rarely worth the effort to bend over backwards during adventure design to protect the players from themselves. But you can bet that I'm going to include more doors rather than doorways, more ambient sound, and more "baffle space" between encounters in my site-based adventures in 4th edition.
So what do I do now? What's the post-TPK plan? Well, the Thursday night gang has been instructed to make up a 21st-level character for a week from tonight. Anything is fair game, but their back story must include something that's put them metaphorically "on ice" for the last hundred years. They're going to get thawed and told: "A thousand mad years of demons running amok have rendered Eberron almost unrecognizeable. Your job: Fix it."
That ought to be sufficiently epic. And it'll keep them (and me) busy for a while.
Out of Context: "The thing about the name 'Cubiclewild' is that there's so much tension built into the name itself."
