Players who think out of the box

[DragonKnight88]

Hi everyone it’s been a little while since I’ve posted but I’ve encountered a new issue with my group that I’m dming. Just to keep everyone up to date, all of the information and recommendations were awesome. I was able to keep my group together and we are still gaming together.

We we are currently playing in a new homebrew world. It has a little of everything but most of it comes from old world steampunk technology.

I created rules using the DMG to make most of the firearms and other gear scattered throughout the world. Most of them are variants on ranged weapons with diffferent die codes and drawbacks to keep them check.

However last night I ran into a big issue and it stopped our game for about 2 hours while my players, 1 who is an engineer in real life, started calculating out a trap they were setting. Long story short they dropped a 5 ton boulder with bombs attached which crashes through the roof of my Bad guys keep and crushed him.

Here is my frustration, they completely slipped past 2 weeks of planning for a big showdown with this NPC. When I told them I would have him autofail the save to avoid the boulder and I gave them 15d10 dmg for coming up with such a good trap. They lost their minds saying he should be dead. I tried to reason and asked how they would feel if I sprung a similar trap on them, only to be told I would be pety and doing so would ruin the fun of the game. For what it matters the party is made up of of 5 8th level characters. . A cleric, fighter, Druid, rogue, and a bard.

Im not sure how to proceed, I don’t want my game to stop and implode because they feel I’m being unfair. Should I have just had the bad guy die on the spot?

 

[Herobizkit]

Players feel cheated when their brilliant plans go unrewarded, but an auto-death isn't automatically the reward for a good plan - your solution is acceptable as far as I'm concerned. There was still a chance of auto-death with that damage unless you really beefed up the villain.

I think the only misstep is the mismatch of expectation between the players' actions and your ruling. Had you told them the result of this plan BEFORE running it through, they may have been more accepting of the ruling.

That said, what if the big bad had died then and there? The party would have been super happy, and you can always have a subordinate or some other thing happen to continue the plot. And Level 8 is one level below Raise Dead, so maybe that would have been an option too.

 

[iserith]

Had you told them the result of this plan BEFORE running it through, they may have been more accepting of the ruling.

This.

I just had this discussion in another thread. Setting the stakes so everyone's aware of what Success and Failure look like goes a long way toward avoiding a mismatch in expectations that leads to dissatisfaction (among other benefits). It's just getting everyone on the same page before moving forward, which is both useful in D&D and in life.

 

[Blue]

Okay, this seems to have two parts.

Rejoice that your players come up with plans like this. You can't hold onto your sunk planning time. Don't be afraid to kill your darlings - don't fall so in love with what you planned or with your NPCs and plots that you won't allow players to do something that invalidates them. That way lies railroading and players with no sense of agency.

The second part is their disappointment on the lack of auto-kill. I wouldn't mention anything about damage. If they want to see if he's dead they need to investigate. If the roof (and possibly intervening floors) slowed down the boulder or changed the course of it, if one of the bombs went off when it hit the roof and that pushed it sideways - there are a lot of "ifs" in the plan.

And even if not, ask the engineer how many great axe chops a person can withstand and keep fighting unimpeded - this is a heroic fantasy game where people have fire breathed on them by dragons and stay up. Or drop 50 feet. Or whatever - real world damage expectation are not part of it.

So, I would reward their agency with the massive damage as you did, not worry about the lost planning - that's part of being a good DM that the game doesn't run on rails - and remind them that it's a fantasy game and things we expect to be fatal in the real world often aren't in the game world.

 

[DragonKnight88]

So the villain was a Custom build. He had about 120 HP. They rolled low on their damage roll 70 something points. So he was messed up but not dead. I did mention to them that what they were doing may not work the way they thought. I have never been a fan of save or die rolls. They have a track record of turning moments that have such great lead ups into intense disappointment. I figured they would be happy, jump down and finish him off, not complain about the fact that he survived.

 

[Ancalagon]

You may need to shift how you think about the game.

Is combat a sport (two "balanced " group of foes face off and the best wins)? Or is combat war? (Anything goes, the PCs do whatever they can to make the fight as most on their side as possible).

Combat as war don't care about a fair fight. The fun is coming up with the best way to crush your foe.

 

[DragonKnight88]

See that’s the beauty of gaming it can be both, they won’t always have these opportunities, so I applauded the coming up with such a great idea, and it had the chance to kill the enemy. But the dice didn’t fall that way. I’m all for creativity and I will reward it. My keep encounter will still happen, just not the way I planned and I’m fine with that, I’m just trying to get them to understand that perfect planning does not determine an automatic win. We use moral quandaries in our games that sometimes cause them to side with bad guys because they feel, the game world hero’s are the real villains. So they will side with lesser evils to make fights or encounters easier for them. I guess I need to sit them all down and make sure we all understand each other and move past this and continue to have great games.

 

[Ymdar]

NEVER let your engineer players calculate anything in any game.

 

[Imaculata]

This reminds me of two sessions ago, when my players used the lenses on top of a tower to create a powerful laser, and then used it to banish the ghost pirate captain at the start of the big battle. It was awesome.

Sometimes the players will surprise you, and it is perfectly fine to give them their victory. Just be ready to have your villain die on the spot when this happens. Don't build your campaign to revolve around this one villain, if you're not prepared to have him die as soon as he is introduced.

Heck, during the last session the players used Feeblemind in the middle of an epic boss battle, to turn my big bad spell caster into a blubbering idiot. He had not been able to cast a single spell, and he was the end boss! But fortunately he had plenty of strong minions around him to still make it quite a tough battle.

 

[Bitbrain]

My old DM had a house rule that real world physics did not apply in his game, except for the idea that you would fall through the air at about 500 feet per turn.