My First PC Kill As A DM (Sort Of)

[William drake]

In the session last night I almost effectively killed my first PC. I am running the Dungeon adventure "Racing the Snake" from issue #105.

The party were heading through a 100ft wide canyon at night when they were attacked by 5 Cockatrices. In the 1st round of combat, 2 Cockatrices bit the 7th level Rogue/Ranger and he failed the DC 12 Fort save and was petrified. He had to roll a 6+ to succeed but managed to roll only a 2. He then spent an action point to add to the roll and got a 1! :\ The player's rolls have really sucked in the last few sessions so no-one was really surprised.

The session ended there and I decided to just fast forward through the rest of the adventure to get the party to town in the interests of group fun. The group was still a couple of days out from their destination and still had some dangerous ground to travel through. However I didn't want the "statue's" player to have to miss a session or two while the party travelled to town. Stone to Flesh is a 6th level Sorc/Wiz spell so no-one in the party is high enough level to know the spell. The only other way the party could get the statue back into real life flesh would be a high level Wizard who just happened to be nearby or a conveniently placed scroll. Both options seemed a bit contrived to me.

This encounter did make me decide that I will be very unlikely to use Cockatrices in my game again any time soon. The only real thing that a Cockatrice can do is bite. Its bite only does 1d4-2 damage so it is very unlikely to kill anything. However every time it hits with a bite (at +9 to hit, quite high for a CR 3 monster), the bitee has to make a DC 12 Fort Save. If you are low level (say level 3) this is effectively a save or die since Stone to Flesh is a 6th level spell. Does this seem slightly wrong to anyone else? How do these things eat? Chances are they will turn their prey to stone before they kill it, even if it only has a couple of HP's!

Olaf the Stout

My advice would be this, use them, but keep an eye on their abillities: lower them by one or two if you have too, make the DC11, or maybe even 10. Now, to explain how they eat things, well I'd say that within their stomaches, they have the natural abillity to reconfigure whatever it is that would've changed their foe. You see, like this: snakes can eat their prey, which has been effected by their bite, but that doesn't mean that they will die from the same poision...which is still in the prey's body since some snakes put out enough to kill their prey a few times over. The creature, is always immune, or naturally able to getover on their attacks. SO, these things, naturally would've been able to digest what they eat even after having bit it.

You might want to think about using that as an antidote...kill the creatures, gut it...somewhere within the lying of the the beast's belly, is this fluid which, injested....makes the effects of its bite...gone. See, so if you had a ranger..or a cleric in the group, they could know this since healing in the wild is things they'd have to go through, or perhaps even the groups wizard through a knowledge Arcana roll could've know this.

Game ON.

 

[blargney the second]

I had some fun attacking the party with a two-headed cockahydra.

 

[JRR_Talking]

if the region is known for cockatrices, as really such a mythical beast it should be utterly surprising if they werent, the nearest town may well have invested in some stone to flesh spells, just in case some high born dignatary falls 'fowl' of them!

so having them available for the party to buy isnt so contrived. Maybe they can do the town a favour in return.

John

 

[Jeff Wilder]

+8 to attack ought to miss a 3rd level meat shield?! But Fighter-3s or Paladin-3s with standard wealth only have top ACs around 21-22, lower if they're Barbarians.

Sorry about that. I got ahead of myself and left out " ... more than 50 percent of the time."

 

[bento]

You could always have the party employ one or two low level NPCs.

When one of the PCs gets whacked like that, the sidelined player can play one of the NPCs until the party gets back to civilization.

That way you wouldn't have to short change all the other players of adventuring fun!

 

[SteveC]

In the last game I played in, the GM ruled that the stoning effect was only temporary. I would slowly wear off, allowing the cockatrice to slowly feed on the remains. It let us get out of a nasty situation without a near TPK.

Just a suggestion...

--Steve

 

[FunkBGR]

I understand where everyone's coming from - nobody wants anybody to sit there and do nothing. But if you take a creature, but don't use all of their abilities, you're telling your PC's that they don't need to spend resources on preventive measures. I don't know how 'long' your game plans on going, but down the road, by not investing in those measures because they never had to before, your party might be hindering themselves more than helping.

If the PC was petrified, you might actually have the group drop money for a Stone-to-Flesh scroll.

What I do in that case, because I also don't want someone to just sit there, is give them an NPC, or fork over some monsters and ask them to run the monsters, until the party can get them back.

- Obviously -
Everybody's game is different.

In my case, I tend to run games that last from low to high levels (The Adventure Paths, etc.), the lower level encounters tend to "train" my PC's to invest in things that make sense.

 

[Chairman7w]

The dude rolled a 2 and a 1. That's the way it goes.

The moment you start changing encounters cause PCs "might" die, is the day you should just start storytelling instead of playing D&D. They're adventurers! If they didn't want potential danger they'd be bakers.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

The dude rolled a 2 and a 1. That's the way it goes.

The moment you start changing encounters cause PCs "might" die, is the day you should just start storytelling instead of playing D&D. They're adventurers! If they didn't want potential danger they'd be bakers.

That is true, the player did roll poorly. However a Cockatrice is a CR 3. It has a +9 to hit. Against 4 3rd level PC's it is meant to be a balanced encounter. With a +9 to hit it will hit about 50% of the time and the PC will fail his Fort Save DC 12 about 50% of the time (obviously these 2 percentages vary depending on the stats and class of the PC but it worls out to be roughly 50%).

This means that in an encounter where a Cockatrice hits with its bite 2 or more times you can generally expect a 3rd level PC to end up petrified. Considering the cost of a Stone to Flesh scroll and the amount of wealth that a 3rd level party has access to, the PC in many cases can be as good as dead. This seems a little harsh to me.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Now, to explain how they eat things, well I'd say that within their stomaches, they have the natural abillity to reconfigure whatever it is that would've changed their foe. You see, like this: snakes can eat their prey, which has been effected by their bite, but that doesn't mean that they will die from the same poision...which is still in the prey's body since some snakes put out enough to kill their prey a few times over. The creature, is always immune, or naturally able to getover on their attacks. SO, these things, naturally would've been able to digest what they eat even after having bit it.

You might want to think about using that as an antidote...kill the creatures, gut it...somewhere within the lying of the the beast's belly, is this fluid which, injested....makes the effects of its bite...gone. See, so if you had a ranger..or a cleric in the group, they could know this since healing in the wild is things they'd have to go through, or perhaps even the groups wizard through a knowledge Arcana roll could've know this.

Game ON.

I like that idea. It makes sense from an ecological perspective and it would make Cockatrices less deadly should at least some of the PC's survive the encounter. You could have the PC's make Knowledge:Nature or Knowledge:Arcana checks to figure out that you can use the Cockatrice's stomach to turn the petrified PC back to flesh.

Olaf the Stout