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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 1372085" data-attributes="member: 1656">That nearly happened to us today.First session of a new 3.5 campaign.  Brand new first level characters.  Seven of us.We sent the ranger and the bowman to take out the remote watchpost silently.  Easy fight, no problem.We found a blind spot where the climbers could scale the cliff up to the fort and lower a rope for the others, without the sentries being able to see.  No problem.Once up the top of the cliff, there was no cover until a hundred feet away, but all the hobgoblins were watching the expected approaches... all we needed to do was sneak across that hundred feet without being noticed, and we'd be fine.One blown Move Silently roll later, all hell broke loose.Half a dozen hobgoblins boiled out of the sentry tower... but the main fort still didn't know we were there.  The rogue and the ranger went for cover - the bowman took a critical crossbow bolt and dropped to 5 hit points.  He had a choice - stand his ground and shoot the hobgoblin with the horn, and be the only available target for six crossbows next round... or go for cover.I probably should have taken the shot...What resulted was sheer chaos.  The horn being blown alerted the main fort.  Due to the vagaries of the ensuing combat, the party ended up entering the fort from three directions at once - the main gate (covered by eight manned arrowslits - yikes!), the back door (lightly guarded), and a hole in the roof.  Which meant that we were generally outnumbered at all three places at once.As the DM explained later, "You pretty much activated every single encounter on the top level simultaneously."He spent the next four hours (thirty combat rounds) fudging attack and damage rolls like mad to avoid a TPK on the very first session of a new campaign.I know he's not afraid to kill characters - I've seen him kill several in the past - but this was just such a complete foul-up that he really only had two choices - fudge, or kill us all.  And he managed it without upsetting anyone - I've been known to fudge a couple of rolls to avoid a TPK myself, so I don't have a problem with him doing it.I nearly died anyway - dropped to -2, and failed every stabilisation check while the ranger and the hobgoblin that dropped me traded attack rolls of 3 and 4 for six rounds... the ranger finally dropped him and managed an untrained Heal check to stabilise me at -9.By the time we wrapped the session up, the party was actually nearly reassembled... though we're still mid-combat, and I'm still at -9.I had a lot of sympathy for the DM, though.  It wasn't really that any one person did anything monumentally stupid... it was the combination of a few crucially ill-timed bad rolls, and a lot of incremental slightly-foolish moves that meant that the whole thing cascaded into really-really-bad-position before anyone could stop it... and I could see the DM thinking "How do I not kill everyone!?"I spent about a third of the session unconscious, and even though I knew not all the rolls were kosher, I still found the combat tense and exciting... so I definitely approve of how he managed things <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />-Hyp.</blockquote>

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