Players who think out of the box

[Eis]

Meanwhile your BBEG can slink away to lick his wounds & return for vengeance, step out of the smoking ruins & shank one of them, or anything else.

ever read the Black Company series of books? how many times did the Limper come back and go for revenge against people who had screwed him over and "killed" him?

great plot device too...."Why won't that guy.....DIE ALREADY?!?"

 

[Wulffolk]

If your group is all about the "game" then you handled the situation just fine using abstract dice rolls to determine the outcome. The two things you could have done to improve the situation were to make the players aware of how it would be resolved ahead of time and then not allow them to argue after the fact.

If your group is based on role-playing characters through a story then utilizing player knowledge for the character's benefit is a failure of role-playing and they should not be rewarded for engineering a complicated scientific or mathematical plan with characters that lack that kind of knowledge.

Explosives? Somehow securely attached to a boulder well enough that they aren't detonated or destroyed before the avalanche reaches a precise destination? And this is all calculated precisely and timed perfectly? And the target is predictable and stationary?

Suppose all of those questions can be over-looked, the players should not know the results of their plan just by watching it happen. They should see no more than the destruction of the roof, the explosion, and a cloud of dust. They should have to work to figure out the results.

Also . . . CONSEQUENCES! There should ALWAYS be consequences for every action. The bigger the action the bigger the consequences. What is the logical fall-out of their actions?

 

[ccs]

ever read the Black Company series of books? how many times did the Limper come back and go for revenge against people who had screwed him over and "killed" him?

great plot device too...."Why won't that guy.....DIE ALREADY?!?"

No, but this plot device isn't by any means exclusive to that series. Movies, novels, comics.... I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I've seen it used. So of course it should be used in our games.

 

[CTurbo]

Yeah I would never let the players know how many hit points it had



As stated above, this is a high fantasy game where some classes can even overcome nearly infinite damage and not die.


An 11th level Long Death Monk with 1 ki point can survive a nuclear blast at ground zero.

Your players just need to accept that while their plan was really good, it wasn't good enough to auto-kill your BBEG. I'd definitely reward them though either with a boon of XP and/or maybe they find some powerful magic items if they search through the rubble.