Vindictive, fair DMing, or is 3.5 too Lethal ??

[sumi]

I disagree with the folks who thought that this was too powerful. Unless this is the very first fight you've ever run into in this campaign, then I think that what happened here was a miscalculation. If I, as the GM, have a monster demonstrate a bunch of power and then try to parley rather than attacking, and the players choose to ignore my guy's diplomatic attempts and attack anyway, then, well, they get what's coming to them. If, as the GM, I say to myself, "Oh, dude, they didn't get my hints and decided to attack the powerful guy I didn't want them to attack -- maybe I should nerf him. And maybe next time I won't make anything in the adventure that they aren't powerful enough to kill," then I'm taking away the chance for the heroes to fail -- and thus, taking away any actual victory from their success.

I don't have the DMG on me, but doesn't it say something like "A small percentage of encounters should be way above the PCs' level, so that they have to flee or parley or seek another means of achieving their goals"? I mean, not in those exact words, but something like? Actually, I just found my DMG from 3.0, and yes, 15% of the encounters should be Very Hard -- someone could die, and 5% should be "Party should run -- seriously."

So... when you saw him cast the bigass magic and then you kept coming, that sorta sealed it.

Also, I'm concerned about the implication that anything you're powerful enough to kill, you should just kill. As a GM, I'd be looking for chances to trip you up if that's the way you approach the game.

So one creature in the middle of the room is enough for you to stop what your fighting and surrender. Not in the group of friends that I was with. I was with 4 other people who are very gaming smart - none of us saw it - maybe we should have had a commune before hand.

As to killing everything, we were with a group of Frost giants that were helping us out. Why because we had talked to them, after we had found out that the creature we were after had attacked their settlement. We even rescued one of their clan so that they would join us and not believe in empty threats.
We talked to the very entrenched troll to get throught he mountain pass to get to the caverns - that negotiation cost me a Masterwork Composite bow +4 Str.
Previous to this encounter we had captured and talked to the Wizards apprentice who led us to this room. Previous to this we had killed the 17th level barbarian who was the jailor of the Frost gaint we rescued and an Barbarian Ettin who was stood immediately in front of the only route in. Anything else in this adventure attacked us. I do not think that this represents a party that kills everything in site. Quite the opposite.

I do not think that running to the door to stop large numbers of creatures getting in, is foolish nor out of context. The wizard did not say a word in the first round - just two fireballs. The second was the Prismatic wall and I was dead before it ended - time for negotiation - None; words spoken by wizard - none. Chance of surrender from his show of strength - none.

Hints came from a creature that used a wand and asked us to surrender at the same time. That ended up dying in 3 rounds. Would you be frightened?. Would you surrender to it?. I do not think so.

As to bigass fireballs then run. Then yes. It makes sense, but I had only suffered about 18 points of damage from it, due to Fire sesistance. You do not expect an even higher wizard spell to come out. A 14th level wizard maybe is a tough enough challenge -with 4 ice golems CR 16. Not a CR 18. That is just on the scale. If we had known then we would not have bothered. The task was dangerous as it was. If he stopped in the door and said cease then we would have. It had taken us over 6 rounds to defeat one ice golem. I was going to be hacking about for well over 20 rounds before I could get to him. Yes - stupid, but it was a delaying tactic. The DM could have started negotiations then or allowed us to start negotiations - not just kill one party member, then start negotiations. That is what I take exception to - it could have been one of my friends, I still think it was brutal and not in the spirit of the game.

 

[diaglo]

talking is a free action.

the 2 rounds of fireballs...and you said????

nothing....

negoiations are a two way street.

or is it b/c you min/maxed your PC and had a low diplomacy/cha... so you were afraid to talk????

 

[iwatt]

Rarely is charging the door without an idea of what's behind a good idea.

But it is fun.

 

[mythusmage]

Sumi, it was unfair. It was damned unfair. That and a buck'll get you a cup of coffee. You tried a stunt and it failed. Death happens and there aint a dang thing you can do about it.

Your big mistake was you underestimated your opponent. He pulls out a simulacrum you don't assume that's the best he can do, you assume that's the least he can do. Rule #2. The other guy wants to talk, you talk. He wants your surrender, you ask for terms. You can work out a deal that benefits you, all the better. If not a surrender gives you opportunities to get the drop on him.

Besides, he might have work for you.

Were it my game in the same situation I would do the same thing. A 12' tall half dragon comes charging me I'm going to terminate with extreme prejudice. Or do my damndest.

BTW, the next time the villain asks for your surrender it may behoove you to find out why.

 

[el-remmen]

Uh, Sumi?

'Parley' does not equal 'surrender'

You say "why would you surrender to a creature that died in 3 rounds?"

Who said anything about surrender? How could you know how quickly it would die? Or even that it was an "it"?

I really think you are looking at this from the wrong angle?

And what do you hope to accomplish? Do you think the DM with undo what has been done? Or is this a habit with him and you hope to break it?

How long have you played with this particular GM?

 

[kenobi65]

2. I do not see how you see that saving throws of +7 against DC 24's is a fair chance at this level. 20% pass rate. If you think they are good odds then you are exceptionally lucky.

Yikes. You're 12th level, and two of your saves are only +7? There's part of the problem...the DC24 save coming off a 16th level wizard isn't entirely unreasonable, but your save modifiers stink. At 12th level, I'd expect a PC to have some magical bonuses to his saves (via a cloak / vest of resistance, or some such), as well as at least one ability score that pumps a save to be above 18. (Edit: I re-read your original post; the +4 cloak of resistance helps, but do you really have +0 ability score modifiers on both Dex and Wis?)

My general takes on the situation:

- You're 12' tall and farting fire, and trying to block the doorway and keep the BBEG's minions away from the rest of your party. If the DM is playing the BBEG with the Intelligence he's supposed to have (being a high-level wizard), *of course* you're going to be a big old target. To expect otherwise is, IMO, unreasonable. As a dozen others have already said, I certainly don't see it as vindictive.

- IME, 3E / 3.5 aren't tremendously more lethal than prior editions. Characters tend to have more hit points, but also tend to be able to dish out a lot more damage. And, there seems, to me, to be a greater variety of "instakill" things that can happen at higher levels, especially when you're dealing with a high-level spellcaster. But, similiarly, at high levels, death is often not much of a deterrent -- with magic, high-level D&D PCs can come back from the dead more often than Doctor Doom.

- Finally, there's a DMing philosophy that several others have alluded to -- as a DM, are you supposed to never present the PCs with a foe that's too powerful for them? Some feel you should, some feel you shouldn't (and, the DMG would indicate that there should be the occasional "run away" encounter). You complain that the EL was too high for your group -- again, this may simply have been one of those times (and, this kind of encounter doesn't always come with a DANGER sticker on it).

 

[Desdichado]

Also, I'm concerned about the implication that anything you're powerful enough to kill, you should just kill. As a GM, I'd be looking for chances to trip you up if that's the way you approach the game.

Bingo! Along with the correllary implication that there shouldn't be anything in the game that you can't kill.

Sorry, pal. No sympathy from me.

Then again, I'm immediately turned off when someone has a character die and then they come online and moan about it trying to get sympathy anyway, so I wasn't likely to have any for you anyway.

My suggestion? Play a Cthulhu campaign and toughen your skin to the loss of characters.

 

[takyris]

So one creature in the middle of the room is enough for you to stop what your fighting and surrender. Not in the group of friends that I was with. I was with 4 other people who are very gaming smart - none of us saw it - maybe we should have had a commune before hand.

As others have noted, "Talking" is not "Surrender". Two very different concepts. A failure to distinguish between the two might hurt your character at some point.

As to killing everything, we were with a group of Frost giants that were helping us out. Why because we had talked to them, after we had found out that the creature we were after had attacked their settlement. We even rescued one of their clan so that they would join us and not believe in empty threats.

Wait... I'm confused. You just said that you have Frost Giants helping you out. Before this, you were complaining about how overpowered the encounter was, and how the EL was way too high and such... but you've got a GROUP of FROST GIANTS helping you out? That sorta evens things out a tad.

I do not think that running to the door to stop large numbers of creatures getting in, is foolish nor out of context. The wizard did not say a word in the first round - just two fireballs. The second was the Prismatic wall and I was dead before it ended - time for negotiation - None; words spoken by wizard - none. Chance of surrender from his show of strength - none.

Well, hadn't he earlier tried to talk with you, and you killed him? So yeah, if I'm playing the BBEG, here's my thinking there:

"Well, I tried talking with them, and they killed my simulacrum. Guess I'd better show them I mean business, so that when I try to talk to them again, they realize that they'd be better off talking with me."

In that context, throwing out a bunch of damage makes sense.

In terms of your strategy not making sense... you were Con-drained, right? And you spend some of the paragraphs below talking about how horribly dangerous and hard to kill the Ice Golems were... so why would your Con-drained guy charge four of them? I mean... you seem to be trying to defending your tactics while also saying that the DM was sending you to your death. The two arguments are tough to justify side by side. If your tactics were so intelligent, based on what you'd seen, you wouldn't have died. And if the encounter was so much more powerful than you could handle, then those were somewhat silly tactics.

The way your argument would make sense is if the wizard were zinging you with magic missiles or something, or a non-maximized fireball, that makes you think, "Ha, he's got nothing!", and then you charge in and get fried. But he was using big mojo right from the get-go.

Hints came from a creature that used a wand and asked us to surrender at the same time. That ended up dying in 3 rounds. Would you be frightened?. Would you surrender to it?. I do not think so.

Again, surrender != talk with. Heck, pausing to talk to a wizard is a great idea a lot of the time, even if you plan on fighting him later. It eats into the duration of any spells he might have going, and makes it more likely that if the fight does start, you're on equal footing.

As to bigass fireballs then run. Then yes. It makes sense, but I had only suffered about 18 points of damage from it, due to Fire sesistance. You do not expect an even higher wizard spell to come out. A 14th level wizard maybe is a tough enough challenge -with 4 ice golems CR 16. Not a CR 18. That is just on the scale. If we had known then we would not have bothered. The task was dangerous as it was.

The flaw I see in this reasoning is that you're basing your "The wizard isn't that powerful" assumption not on the fact that your character has researched him or heard rumors or seen other evidence, but that you the player don't think your DM would send you up against someone that bad. That's metagaming, and it bit you in the butt big-time here. Obviously, your DM would send someone like that against you -- either because you had a bunch of Frost giant buddies hanging with you, or because he thought that after seeing the maximized fireball warning shot he fired across your bow, you'd go "Hey, I should maybe talk to this guy, like he wants."

And that fireball series was just a warning shot, because the DM obviously knew about your damage reduction for fire. That was an ideal way for the DM to say "Hey, check it, this guy can throw big hurt," without actually doing that much damage to you.

If he stopped in the door and said cease then we would have. It had taken us over 6 rounds to defeat one ice golem. I was going to be hacking about for well over 20 rounds before I could get to him. Yes - stupid, but it was a delaying tactic. The DM could have started negotiations then or allowed us to start negotiations - not just kill one party member, then start negotiations. That is what I take exception to - it could have been one of my friends, I still think it was brutal and not in the spirit of the game.

So, just to be clear, you wanted the BBEG to politely continue asking you to parley without firing back, even after you killed his simulacrum after his initial "Let's talk instead of fighting" speech? And when you saw multiple ice golems, when just one ice golem had taken you several rounds to kill, you thought, "I should run forward and attack"?

I'm just not seeing this as the DM's fault. The DM obviously didn't want you guys to fight that guy, but you didn't take the hint. He tried to warn you with dialogue, with big-damage spells that you were uniquely qualified to absorb without really suffering (the big fireballs on your fire-resistant character), and with a show of strength, monster-wise, that ought to have gotten your attention.

Instead of reacting as your characters would have reacted, you decided, "The DM wouldn't send something against us that we couldn't beat," and charged. That, compounded with confusing Parley for Surrender, resulted in your character's death. Not vindictiveness.

 

[carpedavid]

The scheme was not to defeat this Wizard but to steal an Orb of Dragonkind from a White Great Wyrm...We wanted to anger the Wyrm to come away from his horde and then get the rogue to get the orb.

Would you still be upset if it had been the dragon that came bursting through the door?

A lot of what your complaints seem to revolve around are expectations on your part. You expected that the creatures you were currently fighting weren't a true threat, and that you wouldn't be running into more powerful creatures at that point in the adventure.

The question at the heart of this discussion seems to be: were your expectations appropriate?

Regarding the current threat level: it always pays to be cautious. There is a difference between older editions of the game, where every creature had a defined XP value, and this version of the game, where creatures can have templates and levels. That doesn't make the game more lethal, per se, but it does make it more important that you use caution and information gathering. It's a different style of gaming that is no more or less valid than the old style - it just requires a different response.

If you're an old-school gamer, you may simply not have had enough experience with this style of play to respond appropriately. I know it took my players a while to get used to it. Consider this a learning experience.

Regarding the potential threat level, I think the general consensus is that you had plenty of opportunity to figure out that bigger and badder things were coming down the pike. At the very least, you should have expected to see a giant white reptillian figure headed your way at some point.

I don't know if this is the result of you being used to the old "static" dungeon style, where the big meanies stay on their level, but, regardless, the common wisdom of dungeon design now is "reactive," where, when the alarm sounds, the NPCs actively respond to potential threats. Again, it requires a shift in thinking from the old style.

With regard to the NPCs actions, the consensus is, again, that your DM played him intelligently. Divide and conquor is the name of the game. If the NPCs actions still seem funny - it might be because he has ulterior motives. You never can tell with good DMs.

At any rate, my initial question still remains: if, thinking back on this incident, it had been the white dragon behind that door, would you still be upset? Try substituting the BBEG that you know is there and are trying to draw out for the wizard in this scenario - would it have made a difference?

 

[fusangite]

Okay... I' sure Sumi's got the point. No point in further demoralizing him after the untimely loss of his character.

Sumi, my condolences. Looks like it wasn't the fault of the GM or the rules. But that doesn't make the loss any easier to bear.