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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 5080521" data-attributes="member: 726">Yesterday's run saw our first PC death.  Although this is more Story Hour fodder for down the road, I'll give a brief summary of how things went, with some more observations.  Other players and Piratecat should chime in, as I'm sure I'll forget some things, and get the order wrong in places.We picked up with almost the whole party ahead of the beholder in initiative order (except for Cobalt, who had been last to go in the previous session).  Doc Caldwell (out of surges) and Nuntle (minion NPC) went further back into the cavern to find the survivor among the hanging bodies.  They didn't find a survivor – they found TWO.  Which now meant we were going to have to haul two bodies out instead of one.  At least they were both halflings, and so easily carried.Toiva, engaged in melee with the monster, had 4 HP at this point.  Bramble moved closer in order to use First Aid to trigger Toiva's Second Wind (and positioned her Spirit Companion “Thicket” close by to increase the healing done.)   Logan used his Inspiring Word to further heal Toiva.   And Toiva – she just started the taunting the beholder.So, while some of the party had moved some distance away (and out of its reach 2), it turns out we were still in for a world of hurt.  After getting free attacks on Toiva and Cobalt to start the round, it let loose with a large area burst attack that did massive damage to everyone except Caldwell and Nuntle, and also gave us all “dazed, save ends.”  Crap!  So much for an easy getaway.Cobalt had gone from healthy to single-digits by the time it got back around to him; he healed himself twice (using an Action Point) but couldn't move away.   Meanwhile Doc and Nuntle were getting the bodies down from the hooks.  Toiva just kept mocking it, daring it to attack her.  (She even used Diplomacy to keep it focused on her.)  She was back up to reasonable health by then, but still:  gutsy.That's about when we started to turn the tide against the thing.  For one thing, we started lobbing Alchemists Frost and Tethercords, restricting its movement and making it only able to attack Toiva and Cobalt.  For the second, as Piratecat mentioned above, the creature just started missing.  A lot.  It also helped that Toiva's mockery made it HATE her, and it concentrated its attacks on her.  It could have just as easily targeted Cobalt, and probably would have killed him, as some of the misses against Toiva's superior AC would have hit him.  But against Toiva, it missed.  12 straight times, as it happens, over two rounds.   It must have been too angry to think straight – Toiva just did not let up with the verbal abuse for the entire combat.And while Toiva was knocking aside its tentacles with her shield, the rest of us were escaping.  Doc and Nuntle executed double-run actions, with Doc burning an Action Point to move 24 squares in a single round.  We had to weave among the bodies and stay to the edges of the cavern in order to not incur the deadly OA's of the beholder, but soon enough everyone was into the exit tunnel besides Toiva.  The exit tunnel, by the way, was just big enough for the beholder to fit in – 10' wide and about 12 feet high, I think.  So Cobalt borrowed sovereign glue from Logan, gooped up the ends of his stout and trusty iron-wrapped 10-foot pole, and wedged it across the tunnel about half way up.   Our escape was covered.Toiva, rather than flee with us (a dicey proposition since she was still engaged with the beholder) instead dove into the watery pit out of which the beholder had risen.  The beholder couldn't follow, since someone in the exit tunnel lobbed out a flask of tethercord from which the monster could not manage to escape.  (It missed 3 straight saves, and it gets +5 to its rolls!)  Toiva shape-changed into an Eel, but didn't know if the rest of us had escaped or not, so surfaced one last time, both to listen for friends in peril, and to take a last big breath of air.Alas, that selfless deed was her undoing.  The beholder recharged its ability to pull enemies, and finally started rolling well.  It lifted her up out of the pit before she could make a swimming getaway and made a quick, blood-sucking end to her while the rest of us fled.  We could hear her final scream to her Goddess Aika before it cut off.General notes:- The alchemical items made a huge difference.  Without the tethercords, alchemist's frost and sovereign glue, more of us would have likely died.- Strontium's die-rolling was just as atrocious as Piratecat's.  She was trying to harry it at a distance with spells, and I believe rolled 2, 2, 1 and 4 with her attacks.- But still – I'd never seen a run of bad luck like that beholder was having.  With even normal luck it would have easily killed Cobalt as well.- Speaking of bad luck, the four of us who were hit with the dazing attack missed 5 of our first 6 collective saves to un-daze.- Toiva at one point tried an excellent swing-on-a-chain maneuver to push the beholder away from some of the others, but missed with the attack.- Nuntle, with his 1 HP, survived.  Piratecat told us afterward that he had graduated up from Minion status.- It's amazing in practice how far you can get with a double-run (or a triple-run with an AP).  I know it comes with all sorts of penalties, but if you don't plan on rejoining the combat, it's pretty easy to get the heck out of dodge.- We're all pretty upset about Toiva's death, even though it could (should?) have been much worse. - Toiva's player (Aravis) is probably going to bring in a Sorcerer character to replace her, meaning we'll now have 1 Leader (shaman), 1 Controller (wizard) and FOUR Strikers (rogue, rogue, ranger, sorcerer).  We'll be dishing out the damage like never before, and now we'll have a ranged striker to go with our three melee types.  Of course, we'll have less healing and temp HP, and no defender, but that will just make things more exciting!- We also learned Logan's tragic back story, which ties into some local Grey Guard politics.  But I'll let Alomir or Piratecat talk about that.- Oh, I almost forgot.  Knowing that were were going to rescue-and-flee as fast as possible, Piratecat took great delight in telling us details about the huge pile of loot at the back of the cavern, which we had no time to investigate, let alone plunder.   I may have said some unkind things about our esteemed DM, but I assure you that I MEANT EVERY WORD!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />- On a related note, we plan to return tomorrow and try taking out the creature again, this time with our daily powers, a full complement of Surges, and a better knowledge of its tactics.  We're Grey Guard – we can't just leave a big pile of treas... I mean, a dangerous monster free beneath the city.</blockquote>

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