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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 5706882" data-attributes="member: 2">I'm running a 4e campaign where the PCs are 12th level. I figured out a bad guy's plan that I thought was ingenious and clever... and I had six justifiably pissed off players on my hands. Setup: A current bad guy is a young noblewoman named Tanis Riverlimb. She and her noble father were poisoners, and she has a particular penchant for creating golems and flesh abominations. Other than that she's a lovely young thing, socially astute and politically important. The PCs discovered this and executed her father. Tanis managed to escape. The PCs knew that she very badly wanted a sword that one of them possesses, as it's a unique item she could use to power a particular golem. The PCs managed to put a whammy on her that allowed them to track her, and they followed her to the family's isolated vacation home deep in their estates. There they used clever diplomacy to remove her allies, hit and run tactics to get rid of some of her golem bodyguards, and finally assaulted the manor.Where I screwed up:Here's where things got tricky. It took about three sessions for the entire assault, ending with them isolating and definitively slaying her. When they did they saw that she had no heart, and the place where her heart should be was filled with a magical golem-linked device. The PCs rested, searched, and cleverly uncovered Tanis's treasure vault. In it was a near-perfect unconscious golem body made up from pieces of beautiful women. Tanis's heart beat merrily in its chest. So, with the game ending at 10:30pm and treasure all around them, they decided to do the dramatic and appropriate thing by stabbing her through the heart with the sword that she had wanted so badly.You see where this is going, right? She had planned for exactly this. The runic circle beneath her body activated, sucking the power from the sword into the golem and blasting the PCs backward. Just like that, the much-hated dead villain was back and stronger than ever.Now, I thought this was super-clever.  Ha ha! They beat her, and she still out-thought them! And.. and....and my players were justifiably pissed. It was 10:30pm, the end of the session. They were standing in a strongroom full of treasure. They had beaten the bad guy and searched the complex. From their perspective there was no way they could have known not to use that one sword. And - most importantly - they had done the dramatically appropriate thing and I had punished them for it.How I fixed it:Sending them an email, and talking about it the next day, helped.[sblock=My email][/sblock]The three week break between games gave them enough time to plan. I spent some time considering what Tanis knew upon waking up, instead of just coming out of it ready to kill. Did she have memories? If she had amnesia, what would her initial reaction be to nearby strangers? And the players handled it beautifully; one politely, diplomatically charmed her for a round, bantering until the rest of the group had healed a bit. She went down gloriously.TL;DR version: Communication makes it much easier to recover from a ban gaming mistake.Have you guys run into something similar in the past? How'd you handle it?</blockquote>

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