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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Urbannen" data-source="post: 4143166" data-attributes="member: 7643">One of my players has lost a third character since we began our campaign back in September.  No other PCs have died except for his. He wonders what he's doing wrong.  I know what's he doing wrong, but I don't think he can change.We are playing City of the Spider Queen in 3.5E.  The players all started with 10th level characters and a cohort for free.  We used 32-point buy, and all the characters have maximum hit points because CotSQ has the reputation of being a killer.  The player's first character was a 10th level wood elf ranger.  The party had just fought a ginormous fiendous spider and the character had been poisoned.  Well, a drow fighter, 2 drow wizards, and a quth-maren show up and the party decides to flee because they're hurt.(A quth-maren is a kind of intelligent undead that can make you cowered with its Will DC 17 gaze attack.)  Instead of directly fleeing, the ranger decides to hold them off while the party climbs up a rope and into a tunnel to escape.  The ranger finally barely makes it up the rope with some bad tactics on my (the DM) part and some very lucky Climb checks  (he has Strength damage from the spider's poison).  I knew he had a secondary save vs. drow poison from the drow fighter's crossbow coming up, but  I thought the party members would be around to help him if he failed.  He'd yelled at the party members to retreat and then decided to take a swipe at a spider climbing drow rather than fleeing.  Then he rolls a 1 on his save vs. poison.  (He would have failed on a 1 or 2.)  Since all the party  members had retreated, I ruled that he died.  Drow poison renders you unconscious for hours.  The drow pulled him out of the tunnel and gave him to their vampire mistress who turned him into a vampire.His next character was a front line human fighter 10 who died in his first encounter.  The party came upon 2 quth-marens and a high-level  blackguard, wizard, and cleric.  It was a fairly even fight.  THe first thing the character does is to run to close the distance betweenhimself and the enemies.  No other characters join him in the the fray for several rounds - they're much more cautious & some get cowered.   The fighter gets cowered (of course) and the blackguard starts sneak attacking him like crazy with his multi attacks.  The quth marens just lay into him, too.  Not surprisingly, the character quickly drops from c. 130 HP to -10.  (BTW, the more attacks your enemy gets, the more crits YOU tend toget.) The party wins the fight, however.  His newest character was a scout 5/fighter 5 who was very powerful.  THe party climbs a cliff face to the entrance to a cave where the drow's headquarters are.  They are accompanied by stone giant and bugbear allies they've picked up.  The scout/fighter is first to arrive.  He sees three quth-maren, a wizard, and a powerful guard.  So he jumps into the cave in the middle of the three quth-maren and instantly becomes cowered.  His cohort, a human rogue, follows, and is also cowered.  (At least he yelled out "Quth-maren!" as a warning.)  Well, those quth-marens lay into him with their acidy slam attacks and have brought him down to -8 hit points by the end of the session.  Lots of natural 20s on my part.  The giants have started to arrive (slowly - some unlucky Climb checks), but the flying party members are fighting two  vampires in dire bat form.  The cohort is at -2.  Short of stabilizing, there's no way the PC will survive.    What is sad is that right before being brought down to -8 HP, the character had a round of not being cowered.  Instead of fleeing to heal up (he could have Tumbled to avoid AoOs), he used his Whirlwind Attack, which did not bring down his enemies.  He said it was a calculated risk because he thought the quth-marens had been damaged by an ally's fireball (they've got fire resistance 15).  They're not that weak, people!    The players have a lot of trouble dealing with the quth-maren and do not takethem seriously. The players don't seem to be good at dealing with unusual threats, even after their knowledge checks give them lots of informatin about them. I finally just told the player with a cleric to read the Remove Fear spell (1st level spell that grants +4 vs. fear for 10 minutes to multiple targets, and the quth-maren's gaze is a fear effect).  Kind of too late, now, though. The situation with the player with the dying characters is getting serious.  Do you think this guy can change from someone who always runs forward without thought of defense? He doesn't seem like a dim person, and he is frustrated.  I may strongly suggest that he flee if he goes below 1/3 his HP.  He is not advancing his character because he keeps dying.  The other PCs are at level 12 and 11 and advancing nicely.  This guy would normally have been at level 12 if his characters hadn't kept dying.</blockquote>

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