I killed a character, twice!

[bbjore]

Just my two cents, but I think for the most part your encounters were fine. You shouldn't worry about the first death in the least. The player felt comfortable dancing around with 10 hit points, and then got stomped down for it. As long as you don't punish players too much after they die (allow raise dead, new characters of a similar level...), they'll eventually learn to appreciate that you as a DM won't pull punches. They'll begin to work together more on a tactical level, and soon a player with fewer than 1/4 hit points will be treated as someone to protect and rally around. I regularly have monsters Coup De Grace PCs or usual brutal focus fire if it would be in their best interests, and it's forced my players to really pull together and think realistically about the threats they're facing.

As for the second encounter, while a lot of people say avoid domination and stuns, it was still a reasonably fair encounter with one exception, the fall. As a DM, you have to be really, really careful about any terrain piece that can kill a player outright, which that fall could. I think that was your only real mistake in design and it wasn't that terrible. It's a cool idea, but at your player's level, a forty or fifty foot tower is a little fairer, not nearly as deadly, and still invokes the same level of tactical thinking.

From what you've posted it appears that you and your players might still be kind of getting the hang of a few aspects of 4E. That's fine, that's one of my favorite parts of the new system. But sometime miscalculations might happen. In that case, consider either fudging a little (e.g. adjust the falling damage to that PC didn't outright die the second time), or perhaps even better, give your players a bit of a reset button to help them out. When my group was just learning the game, I gave them 5 miracle man chocolates which could raise the dead instantly. It gave the group a safety net for all the mistakes we made while new to the system, and kept the story moving along when those mistakes did happen.

Talk with your player, tell her it wasn't personal, and just let her know that sometimes that stuff happens in D&D. Next time it will be someone else. Hopefully your players are willing to suck up the occasional bad night or forgive you & the dice for unexpectedly difficult encounters. The fact that your group takes the time to sit down and talk about how to make the next gaming session go better, tells me this is probably true and that in the long run you guys will do just fine.

 

[supersaiyandoyle]

I would've allowed the girl to make an athletics check to grab the wall as she was falling, or you could of allowed a member below to cushion the fall with an athletics check.

 

[Infiniti2000]

We have absolutely different definitions of "doing well".

Mine is pretty easy, but maybe I wasn't clear. It's from the OP: "The fourth player succeeded against every saving throw to be thrown off the edge of the tower for three turns." That's doing well, but apparently you think she could do better by failing a save. It's counterintuitive and only necessary because of the poor encounter design. I'm not saying that your point wouldn't save her character's life, but it's not the root cause and therefore IMO not helpful at all.

Can you imagine planning this encounter such that you'll actually recommend players have their characters throw themselves from a 100ft cliff as a way to survive? Doesn't this sound stupid to you?

 

[Riastlin]

Can you imagine planning this encounter such that you'll actually recommend players have their characters throw themselves from a 100ft cliff as a way to survive? Doesn't this sound stupid to you?

I don't think the point was to plan an encounter such that the advisable course of action was to subject the PCs to a 100 foot fall. The point here was that at the time, the PC was looking at a 3v1 to 4v1 fight due to an encounter that ended up unintentionally being harder than the PCs could handle. At that point, the better course of action was to let herself get pushed over the edge rather than standing to fight in what was obviously an unwinnable fight. The OP never intended that the PC's jump from the ledge in order to "defeat" the encounter. However the OP made an error (which is forgiveable) and the end result was that once 3 of the 4 PCs were already knocked down, the 4th PC was better off getting knocked down.

As an aside, I would tend to agree with Aegeri. The PC was doing very well in making her saving throws. Of course, those saving throws were necessitated by the fact that the PC was getting hit Every Single Round, thus making her incapable of even fighting back. If I were the player in question I certainly would not think "Wow, I'm doing really well in this fight!" I would however, think "Yikes! I'm getting my arse kicked."

 

[Artoomis]

It was an unfortunate turn of events, that's true, but fudging die rolls when the Players know you are doing so is a very bad idea.

Players need to know that PCs may die. Without that, plays will not play as well as they would otherwise.

In this case, she has no legitimate complaint of being "targeted" unless this happens week after week - in which case some discussion about tactics may be in order.

At 10th level, the penalty for having died is fairly minor as raise dead is pretty cheap at this point.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Are you serious? If this was a movie, we would have seen her try to get mentally controlled several times and been able to shake it off. We also would have seen her get pushed, thrown, or forced to go over a tall edifice, but somehow by the grace of the gods, the character is able to hang on for dear life... grabbing the lip of the tower and pulling herself back up to safety. She was the last one left! She survived everything they threw at her until the very end! From a descriptive stand-point, of course she was doing well!

To then have her of all people be the one who finally drops from the 100 foot tower and then die upon the rocks below is what really sucks. Because she probably had much fewer hit points then the others did when she eventually fell, she's the one who managed to drop to negative bloodied and get insta-ganked.

I think you're looking at things purely from the game mechanics point of view, where we can metagame and say "well at 100 feet, that's only 10d10 damage, averaging out to about 55 damage or so from the fall, thus since my PC has more than that, the best option is to throw myself from the edge and suck up the damage when I land..." But forgetting the fact that this entails a human being throwing themselves off of a 10-story building voluntarily, rather than put up a fight against some monsters. I dunno about you... but with all the complaints people have about verisimilitude in 4E... this is one time when it should definitely apply.

I think it was a heroic act and a heroic death. A D&D character couldn't ask for more, really. As a fellow player, I would want blood and heads from those demons in penance.

 

[Incendax]

I forgot to ask the OP: How long have you been DMing 4E for, as it seems this boils down a lot to general inexperience with 4E as a system and how it works.

I have been DMing 4E since the pre-release, but I have never run for a group like this. The party is composed of an Avenger, Monk, Ranger, and a Sorcerer.

The problems here are:

• Poor encounter design
  1. 5 of one monster type rather than varied
  2. All monsters have a very devastating power - be careful of stun/daze/dominate
  3. Top of a very high tower and making it very easy to knock PCs off - two methods to do it. When every PC ended up off the ledge, you know it was a terribly designed encounter - actually worse than terrible.

• 
  I will definitely give the nod to lack of monster variety. Part of the skill challenge involved an arcana check to discover that these monsters were indeed Incubus, but in retrospect I take responsibility for not making the monsters more varied and less dominate heavy.
  
  I had little doubt in my mind that the PCs would have beaten the Incubus easily if it was not for the inclusion of the drop from the tower. The players made several attempts to knock the Incubus off the tower but the dice did not favor them in this endeavor. Perhaps I should have made the drop shorter.
  

  Incorrect "rules" usage - these could be double checked
  

  • 10d6 is not correct falling damage. If it was 100ft, it should be 10d10
  • 5 monsters vs. 4 PCs, are you sure you have the right XP level?
  • Regenerate, but you mentioned that. How'd you make it up to her since you already knew this one? Surely you didn't just say, "My bad, too bad."
  • Intentional killing (twice) - although not a true violation of the rules, the guidelines recommend against this, and now you know why. Is it more important to play monsters "correctly" or have fun? Of course, this assumes that in this case playing "correctly" != having fun (though it might for some people and that's fine for them, but it obviously doesn't for this player)

  Each Incubus is 400 XP for a total of 2000 XP which is considered an average level encounter for four tenth level PCs. The fall was supposed to increase the difficulty but presented the opportunity for the players to gain an advantage as well. This was my first time using Incubus, however, and apparently they are pretty brutal for their indicated level.
  
  I made up the first death to the player by not charging any money or death sickness, although they had to make a few minor concessions to an unsavory NPC to gain this benefit. The issue of regeneration was not discovered until after the game ended and the player had gone home. I had a niggling feeling that the rules we were using for Regeneration were not correct, and looked up the correct ruling after the game.

 

[Ardulac]

Mine is pretty easy, but maybe I wasn't clear. It's from the OP: "The fourth player succeeded against every saving throw to be thrown off the edge of the tower for three turns." That's doing well, but apparently you think she could do better by failing a save. It's counterintuitive and only necessary because of the poor encounter design. I'm not saying that your point wouldn't save her character's life, but it's not the root cause and therefore IMO not helpful at all.

He's saying that failing the save would be the more prudent course of action. Who cares if one PC is "doing well"? High dice rolls (especially on saving throws) shouldn't guarantee a good outcome. Good decisions (like forcing down your survival instinct and allowing yourself to fall to a safer place when the only other option is suicide) should generally lead to good outcomes. I do think that the DM should have been gracious enough to allow one of her allies to roll to catch her. I also think that the DM in this situation didn't understand the numbers if he thought that throwing her for 10d6 was likely to end in anything other than her death. A 10th level striker has about 70hp, so an average roll of 35 damage on 10d6 would kill the PC even if she started at -1.

 

[MrMyth]

I had little doubt in my mind that the PCs would have beaten the Incubus easily if it was not for the inclusion of the drop from the tower. The players made several attempts to knock the Incubus off the tower but the dice did not favor them in this endeavor. Perhaps I should have made the drop shorter.

Checking the DMG's advice on falling distance (page 44). It has a table listing what heights would be appropriate for groups at a certain level, depending on how dangerous you want the fall to be. For 10th level characters, a 70' fall would be considered "deadly", which is to say, be appropriate in an encounter in which you are expecting to see someone die. This is comparable to the 100' drop you have, as your 10d6 is pretty close to the 7d10 the system assumes.

Thus, a 100' drop with monsters who are specifically designed to be easily capable of driving PCs off the roof... means you stacked the deck to try and kill the PCs, without accounting for the height in the challenge of the encounter. It sounds like this was accidental, but yeah, the encounter design here could use a lot of work.

 

[Squire James]

Now that I know the party composition, I think all this must be at least partially the party's fault. Playing 4 strikers is just ASKING for someone to get killed!

That being said, DMG page 44 has suggested falling distances at various levels. The Level 10 suggestions are: 30 ft for a "regular" fall, 50 ft for a "serious" fall, and 70 ft for a "deadly" fall. These seem about right for making "negative bloody" deaths rarely happen except for "deadly" falls. Needless to say, the 100 ft fall is a bit much. That's a Paragon fall, not a Heroic fall - who knew falls had tiers?