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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5305463" data-attributes="member: 78116">Remind me what is "voluntary" about the dominate condition again? <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" />The point is there is an equally good explanation as to why choosing not to take the saving throw would be valid in the same situation described. Mental fatigue plus the sheer fear of being out numbered by daemons that get into your head and do horrible things to your mind. There are equally good explanations for not taking the saving throws as there are for doing so.Just to comment on some other things:Bearing in mind that the other ally was thrown off in round 2 there, with her following immediately after it's not the most glorious of final stands. By herself she lasted a single round vs. the four (technically five, one was dominating her and was therefore removed from play). Also technically, if you read the fluff on the incubus that's just going to excite them into a murderous frenzy, not intimidate them in any manner (see bloodied invigoration).The round immediately after the other remaining ally went down. We aren't talking about her surviving 5+ rounds against 4 creatures, it was instant and very definitive once it came down to that situation you realize. You also have to bear in mind from a "fluff" point of view, once an incubus gets into your head it makes them more ferocious, vicious and lusting for your blood even more. This is represented mechanically by a pretty solid damage bonus to attacks against creatures they have dominated in a combat. So being torn apart and unceremoniously dumped was just going to happen.If I had to make a prediction, the two that bothered with claw attacks BOTH had dominated her on previous rounds and so had the damage bonus to their attacks as well.This is not an invalid way of looking at things and just so you know, I can just as easily justify it from a narrative point of view as well. It also wasn't 10d10 damage, he'd ruled it at 10d6, which is a bit different.Edit: I'd like to point out, in this situation that saving the dominate is the worst possible thing to do, because each Incubus gains +5 attack AND damage against you (if he's bloodied). So in short, whenever you save you are killing yourself. Each one that dominated will have +19 vs. AC and 3d8+9 damage with their claw attack (and will grab you to boot). At level 9, that's not an insignificant amount of damage or an attack bonus that you should sneeze at. So bear in mind when describing the "desperate" struggle to stay on being heroic, all it's doing is whipping the creatures up into a frenzy of killing that makes them much better at attempting to do utterly terrible things to you (assuming they are bloodied).Edit2: But this is rather missing the point overall, as I think the consensus by now is that the encounter was not a very good one and had more than a few flaws. The "what do we do about it" is the more important one, particularly in learning from what went wrong with the encounter design. Five creatures that dominate and have been strong regular attacks, combined with a large drop would be a good starting point. Bearing in mind the OPs original question was if he was picking on the player in question. I feel that's clearly not the case because his description indicates it was dumb luck that resulted in the player being the last one on the roof and then being torn up by the creatures and tossed off. How that was handled was not very good, but the whole "Was he deliberately picking on the player" doesn't seem to be the case. To me anyway.</blockquote>

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