D&D 5E Should I nerf a curse to save a PC?

[randrak]

So my current campaign is set in the underdark and the characters are making their way to an underground city. To get there they encountered a dungeon with a mummy. An NPC promised to reward them if they rid the dungeon of the undead because they were a threat to her home. The players went down there and killed everything, but when they faced the mummy, two of them got cursed with Mummy Rot.

One of the rewards had already been set as a Remove Curse scroll (the NPC had it in case he had to fight the mummy herself) so one of them got cured from the curse, but they are level 5 and don't have access to their own Remove Curse or Greater Restoration. The druid (the one that's still cursed) is already down to half her Max-HP and the next town where they could possibly find someone that can cast a spell of that level isn't exactly easy to get to. They had already been informed that their options were going through an abandoned great forge where kobolds reside or spend about a week going around to reach the city.

Now, considering how Mummy Rot works...she'll be dead in a day or two if she's lucky (she's even at 8 HP after the fight) and I dunno how well she'll be able to go through the kobold dungeon while not being able to heal herself at all. Mummy Rot is pretty nasty, each day it takes 3d6 from her max HP and she can't regain HP. Luckily we ended the session right after so I got time to think.
I can't decide if I should just let it playout and see where the dice fall, or if I should nerf the curse a bit. Maybe instead of 3d6, the curse takes away 1d6 per day. Or make it so she can heal, only with magic, not with resting...or has to pass a skillcheck to heal?
What do yall think would be best?

 

[Hawk Diesel]

You don't have to nerf the curse, necessarily. But it is somewhat unfair to put the players in situations that they can't in some way get out of. That said, as the DM it is your choice if you want to be strict in interpreting the rules, or flexible. It's just a matter of allowing your players some creativity. For example, they may not have access to the remove curse spell. But perhaps the party healer could channel some raw healing magic to hold the curse at bay, if not temporarily alleviate some of the effects. Mechanically, it could be that the player loses/dedicates a spell slot to hold the curse at bay. The player loses that spell slot until the curse is removed, in a sense binding the curse with the spell slot. The higher the spell slot, the greater the number of max hit points return (though don't completely negate the curse. You still want it's effect to be felt).

Or a player may attempt to use their own life force, perhaps through a medicine check, to share the curse, allowing one or more players to spread the effects between them.

Or maybe through a religion/arcana check, a player can remember some ritual that won't cure it, but temporarily abate it at the cost that it could potentially become a "living curse" that has sentience and wants to spread across the world.

There are countless ways to creatively solve the problem if you are willing to let the solution be something other than "cast remove curse" or "find a scroll of remove curse." The best way to do it is pose the question to the players, and reward them for their creativity.

 

[iserith]

My personal preference is to just let it play out even if that means the death of the character. My players and I are fine with that level of risk in a standard D&D game. If your players and you are also okay with it, then I suggest the same.

If you or your player are not okay with it, then offering some way to cure it, perhaps at a heavy cost or after facing great peril, is probably the way to go here. You can't go wrong in my experience by turning these sorts of challenges into full-on adventures. That said, you're still left with the issue of what happens if they fail to pay that cost or face that peril - does the character still die?

This is an issue of stakes and I think is something to discuss with your players, ideally before the campaign starts. If you don't know if the player will be okay with the character turning to dust, then ask, working out some sort of compromise if he or she is not up for it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Normally speaking, you can end an effect that prevents you from regaining HP, by making a Constitution check at DC 15 after three days of resting. That's the intended method for getting rid of Mummy Rot, since nothing is actually supposed to kill you in this game.

Given that the 3d6 doesn't subtract from your current HP, the obvious solution is to roll that out. There's a significant chance that the character might not die, even if she's already down to half, although odds would have been better if she'd started resting before it had progressed to this point. Another potential solution would be to kill the character before the curse does, and then carry the remains off to get raised somewhere.

If you just give them an easy out, by nerfing the curse or letting a skill check fix everything, then you're denying your players the chance to come up with their own solution. I wouldn't recommend that, but you know your players better than I do.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

[MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION], that’s a good point. Knowing if your players are ok with their characters dying is pretty important. It's a conversation I had with my players before starting my last game. They said they were ok with it, but it seemed to be with an asterisk. I think if a player's character dies because of bad dice or their own actions, or if it fuels a cool story in some way, that tends to be more acceptable. But if they were fighting mummies and didn't have a way to deal with the after effects, and the player is watching their character die slowly and become less useful without any hope that it could be cured... I think that's not generally something players are ok with. If a character is gonna die, let them die quick so they can get on with rolling up a new character and feel they can contribute to the team and the story rather than being a burden.

That said, you could also allow the character to die, but the curse may be slightly changed in some way by the unsuccessful attempts to cure it, leading the player to rise as a revenant. You don't even necessarily need to mechanically change anything (unless everyone is in agreement to change things) and just role play the character as a zombie with all their mental capacities. Then it could become and adventure of not just removing the curse, but restoring the character to life.

 

[iserith]

[MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION], that’s a good point. Knowing if your players are ok with their characters dying is pretty important. It's a conversation I had with my players before starting my last game. They said they were ok with it, but it seemed to be with an asterisk. I think if a player's character dies because of bad dice or their own actions, or if it fuels a cool story in some way, that tends to be more acceptable. But if they were fighting mummies and didn't have a way to deal with the after effects, and the player is watching their character die slowly and become less useful without any hope that it could be cured... I think that's not generally something players are ok with. If a character is gonna die, let them die quick so they can get on with rolling up a new character and feel they can contribute to the team and the story rather than being a burden.

That said, you could also allow the character to die, but the curse may be slightly changed in some way by the unsuccessful attempts to cure it, leading the player to rise as a revenant. You don't even necessarily need to mechanically change anything (unless everyone is in agreement to change things) and just role play the character as a zombie with all their mental capacities. Then it could become and adventure of not just removing the curse, but restoring the character to life.

I'm reminded of an Eberron campaign I ran in D&D 3.5e where, among other things, the PCs fought a mummy. Only one character made it out of that adventure alive and that was the half-orc Morn Swampass. Morn had got the mummy rot though and time was not on his side - they were deep in the jungles of Xen'drik south of Stormreach and it would be days by elemental-powered riverboat to get back to town.

Morn died on the fore of the boat, put there as nobody wanted to be near him, before they could reach Stormreach. At that time, I was a little less accepting of TPKs than I am now and offered a number of solutions that I could present to help the character avoid this fate.

The player said that it was honestly such a memorable death that he didn't want my help. And so Morn died. They were successful in their adventure though and I think that's what made the difference.

 

[Bawylie]

I'd like to echo the importance of discussing stakes and the type of game the characters want to play. So, consider that echoed.

But I'd also like to advise you to never aim your DM-gun at anything you are unwilling to utterly destroy. If you didn't want the PC to die from a curse, you should've made that impossible. If you ARE ultimately willing (albeit with reservations), you must honor the decisions that have been made that led to these circumstances and allow them to play out naturally (or at least consequentially).

Of course it's your game and you must do what you feel is best for your own situation. Still, soft balling the consequences comes with side-effects (like a reduction in player agency and maybe feeling safe when they shouldn't or willing to take nutsy risks bc they count on you to softball). And maybe that's okay for everyone! Or maybe they want to deal with the consequences in full. That all goes back to the 1st point. Feel them out on it, then design your game accordingly


-Brad

 

[randrak]

They are all alright with dying, in fact it is somewhat of a theme that their characters die often. Unfortunately their characters last for about 1 or 2 levels with only one exception so far. I find this to be sad and it isn't because I constantly throw impossible challenges at them, but I tend to be unforgiving with choices. An example was that they managed to escape from an orc tribe but decided to go back on their own to kill them because they seemed weakened after fighting a dragon invading their territory. Even when they saw that several orcs were still up and in good health, they still decided that attacking them was a good choice. Even then, instead of killing them I sold them into slavery but their escape attempt was marred with bad choices and unlucky rolls.
So they aren't unfamiliar with death, but I kinda wished they could keep characters alive for a bit longer. Then again, they also tend to constantly want to try out new characters.

From what I've gathered, they have a very video game style of play where they focus more on the mechanics of the game. To them, a spell does X and rarely can it be used for Y or Z. That makes them coming up with such rituals (which I would totally allow) unlikely.

I honestly thought that at worst, one of them would get the Mummy Rot, thus why I had a scroll with Remove Curse ready. Didn't count on the tank going down as he had always been pretty strong, especially with the druid healer being so focused on healing already.

She is at 17 Max HP, meaning that in two or three days she'll be dead depending on the rolls. If she dies, then fine...we carry on, but I wanted her to have an even better fighting chance. Maybe I could try to nudge them into making such a ritual or something using an NPC?
I also have a dungeon that teleports around the world randomly, belonging to an insane demi-god that likes to put people in gauntlets and reward them with cursed items at the end. They have encountered this dungeon several times over the years and have commented on how it hasn't shown up at all recently. I could do it, see if they reach the end of the gauntlet and have the demi-god get interested in the curse and wishes to remove it so he can collect it but with a price (like her arm crumbling to dust or something as he focuses the curse on the arm in order to collect it).

 

[iserith]

They are all alright with dying, in fact it is somewhat of a theme that their characters die often. Unfortunately their characters last for about 1 or 2 levels with only one exception so far. I find this to be sad and it isn't because I constantly throw impossible challenges at them, but I tend to be unforgiving with choices. An example was that they managed to escape from an orc tribe but decided to go back on their own to kill them because they seemed weakened after fighting a dragon invading their territory. Even when they saw that several orcs were still up and in good health, they still decided that attacking them was a good choice. Even then, instead of killing them I sold them into slavery but their escape attempt was marred with bad choices and unlucky rolls.
So they aren't unfamiliar with death, but I kinda wished they could keep characters alive for a bit longer. Then again, they also tend to constantly want to try out new characters.

It might be worth examining whether you're adequately telegraphing threats to the players so that they are making informed choices with regard to the difficulty level of challenges. Another consideration might be how many die rolls you're asking the players to make when they make action declarations (or if your players are inflating this number by asking to make checks). The more you ask for checks, the more random the outcomes which can lead to more character death and dismemberment. These are the first places I would look were I in your shoes.

From what I've gathered, they have a very video game style of play where they focus more on the mechanics of the game. To them, a spell does X and rarely can it be used for Y or Z. That makes them coming up with such rituals (which I would totally allow) unlikely.

I honestly thought that at worst, one of them would get the Mummy Rot, thus why I had a scroll with Remove Curse ready. Didn't count on the tank going down as he had always been pretty strong, especially with the druid healer being so focused on healing already.

She is at 17 Max HP, meaning that in two or three days she'll be dead depending on the rolls. If she dies, then fine...we carry on, but I wanted her to have an even better fighting chance. Maybe I could try to nudge them into making such a ritual or something using an NPC?
I also have a dungeon that teleports around the world randomly, belonging to an insane demi-god that likes to put people in gauntlets and reward them with cursed items at the end. They have encountered this dungeon several times over the years and have commented on how it hasn't shown up at all recently. I could do it, see if they reach the end of the gauntlet and have the demi-god get interested in the curse and wishes to remove it so he can collect it but with a price (like her arm crumbling to dust or something as he focuses the curse on the arm in order to collect it).

If they're alright with dying as you say above, then I have to wonder why you're bothering with any of this. Is it really just YOU who wants to keep the PC around or perhaps please this particular player in some way?

 

[mellored]

I wouldn't nerf it. I would turn it into an opportunity to have them make a tough decision.

i.e. you find a magic alter that can heal you, it requires a blood sacrifice of...
you find a demon, he will save you in exchange for a favor....
you find a trader, he will give you an amulet of health in return for...