Two encounters at once: what would you do?

[Derren]

Kill them and let the kobolds take their stuff.

And don't listen to the people who want to blame you by demanding that you change a pre planned layout just to cuddle players or who criticize your sensible decision of not interpreting throwing fire at a door as welding.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I'll let others reply to your question outlined in the initial post. I'd like to focus on this bit here. Is there a specific reason you didn't either say yes here or allow the PC to roll the dice and make p42 improv effort to weld the door shut with the fire spell? That seems to be precisely the type of thing you want to be encouraging. It fits the genre and it's quick thinking by your player. And it's fun!

If you felt it needed to be hard, all you needed do was (a) make the of-level DC for the Arcana check high. If he passes, (b) let him roll attack vs Fort vs standard, of-level NAD and boom, the metal hinges of the door are slag and it's impassable (save ends)

I recommend that approach in future circumstances.

Sounds like good advice to me.

When you are looking at a TPK and your players are trying to be creative to get out of it, try to say yes to smart ideas. To me, that's one of the big differences between a computer rpg and a pen-and-paper rpg.

Sure it's a bit far-fetched, but you could just as well have said that the doors won't weld shut, but might get hot enough to make the whatever-nots stand back for 10-20 seconds to think about how they want to open the door. Or 2-4 rounds in normal-speak.

I regularily throw encounters like you just described at my players and they usually start to get all creative, looking outside the square box of the rules to solve the problem. Just the thing I want to encourage.

For instance, in one encounter a Knight is challenging a PC and calling him an imposter and going all high-and-mighty. The PC throws off his cloak, displaying a magnificent armor, telling him that it's the Knight who is the imposter. Just for role-playing kicks, nothing more.

Later in the fight, the same PC has killed the knight, but alone, down at 1hp and up against two remaining bad-guys. One loyal retainer of the now dead knight, and one mercenary. The PC offers the mercenary a deal, and the I thought the PC had done a good job earlier to sow doubt, so I allowed him an moderate Diplomacy check, which he aced. The loyal retainer didn't stand a chance.

Anyway back to your situation. Depending on how attached the players are to the characters, you should either just do a full TPK, or have them captured and then rescued by the new PC. I think the last part would be the most fun. Just get the Warlord down fast before anyone bleeds out.

 

[the Jester]

It sounds like, short of playing your monsters extremely (and uncharacteristically) stupidly, the pcs will lose this fight, but I'm with all the "take 'em prisoner!" commenters.

Is having a prepared plot really considered railroading?

It depends. How easily can the pcs jump off your plot?

 

[was]

The kobolds are secretly working for evil bad guy X. The wyrmpriest stabilizes them at 1hp
and takes them captive. The new PC is already captured and in the dungeon. The weakened PC's escape their shoddy restraints and must recover their gear while escaping from the kobolds lair. While doing so, they come across information Y which gives them adventure hook Z.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

"What would you do if you had a million dollars?"
"I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two encounters at the same time, man."

Two encounters, one adventuring party!

 

[TarionzCousin]

Take 'em captive, they can meet the new player in the pens, make a daring escape from there.

This seems like a natural consequence to me.

* Also would have let the PC have a Moment of Cool.

Like letting Burning Hands weld the hinges together for a few rounds. In my opinion, that was a good idea by the player. Why did he/she do it if you said it wouldn't work? It seems like a great opportunity to reward a player for clever thinking. I encourage that, regardless of whatever else may be happening. I think it is much better to be a "Yes, you can do that" GM than a "No, that doesn't work and here's why" GM.

Figuring out your group is half the battle.

Amen to that. It takes experience--aka dozens or hundreds of game sessions--to be able to mostly predict what your players are going to do. And then, they will do something you never expected. That happens all the time. You just need to learn to roll with it.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=71281]cmbarona[/MENTION]
I've found that with DM advice, there's very rarely a "this works" answer, rather all answers tend to be "this works...for my group."

It sounds like this is a group of people (some may be new, others might already know each other) who have plenty of experience with 3.5e, maybe took a bit of a break from roleplaying, and have started off a brand new 1st level game in 4e, which they havent played before. They're adjusting to the group's dynamic and learning what their characters can do, as well as learning the rules and the DM's world.

Sure, you could have responded better than "No" to the cool idea from the wizard player to fuse the vault door hinges shut with burning hands (what if he expended a daily or a healing surge or two, in addition to the burning hands spell? what if it only heated the door and bought sometime? what if you required the wizard to concentrate for two rounds and make an Endurance check to avoid passing out from the strain of unleashing a continuous gout of flame?).

Sure, the players could have played smarter and communicated better, avoiding opening two doors at once doing some recon first, ensuring the rogue got sneak attack every rounds, and fleeing when they were in over their heads.

But in the heat of play mistakes were made. No big deal.

Next session, assuming the warlord doesn't pull a miracle out of his ass or surrender, I would be completely forthcoming with the group:

Your party has been defeated by the kobolds. So we're new to this edition and maybe our current group dynamic is different too. I noticed you guys opened two doors at once, didn't set up sneak attack for the rogue, and didn't flee once it was clear you were outmatched. For my part, I said "no" to wizard player's cool idea to fuse the vault door with burning hands, when there were much cooler "yes, but..." responses I could have given. Since this potential TPK occurred so early in our game and since I'm partly at fault for it, I am making an exception to my usual policy of "let the players get themselves killed". So I want to ask you all what you think should happen to your party? I'll go with whatever you agree on...TPK, getting captured by kobolds, whatever. It's up to you.

EDIT: I put together a 4e cheat sheet meant to help with improvising and lots of folk have given me good feedback on it. So maybe it will help you. http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?307923-4e-DM-Cheat-Sheet

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sounds like you've gotten some good advice, and this is probably all been among it, but here goes:

4e's often criticized as not really deadly enough, not representing any 'risk.' Having an early career disaster like this will certainly dispel that myth for your group. Assuming they don't freak, there's no reason not to just advance the clock a bit and bring in all new characters, either dealing with the consequences of the first groups failure (which'd be cool in the 'establishing a living world sense,' or just picking up the same hooks and noticing the Kobolds have scavenged some pretty good gear from somewhere...

If they're already at all attached to their characters, go ahead and 'fail forward' into a capture scenario with a skill challenge to gain some information & escape. It's heroic fantasy, and heroes do get their asses handed to them now and then.

 

[evileeyore]

I fourth the "let them get captured". It's a heavy-handed tactic when it's railroaded on them, but this "worked perfectly" during organic play.


Also, I'd take a few seconds and talk to the players before the next game. Lat them know what happened (ie they tripped two encounters instead of one, thus doubling (or even tripling) the danger) and that "maybe you made a mistake in not letting the Wizard jam the door"*. This way they'll understand that 4e isn;t often that brutally dangerous (it still can be if the DM wants it to) and that "Moments of Cool" will be allowed**.



* Only if your okay with that. Some DMs prefer the "Iron Hand" approach to DMing, "Never admit mistakes, never let them see you sweat, etc". Some of us are soft-touches. This too is a style thing that you'll eventually figure out for yourself.

** Again, style thing if you like it.

 

[cmbarona]

Thanks for the great advice, everyone. I'm giving them the option of a TPK or to be captured and taken as sacrifices. And for those that want to stay in the same plot line but don't like their character, I'm offering to either swap them out with one of the other prisoners there (essentially making a new character) or retraining any number of skills, feats, powers, or even stats for their current character.