When the Session goes Pear Shaped

[S'mon]

Well, my session today went pear-shaped when the Orcs' dice turned hot at the crucial moment. The big battle against the entire White Fist Orcs tribe ended with the following tallies:

Orc Drudge minion-4 - dead: 33 alive: 1
Orc Raider skirmisher-3 - dead: 4 alive: 0
Orc Chief brute-4 - alive
Orc Priest of Yurtrus controller-6* - alive
Dead: 37 alive: 3

*Half hit points

PCs:
dead - 4 (3 2nd level Bard, Rogue-Sorcerer, Avenger; 1 3rd level Fighter)
alive, unconscious: 1 (3rd level Invoker)
alive, conscious: 1 (2nd level Ranger-Rogue)
Dead: 4 alive: 2

The battle ended with the last PC standing dragging off her last living comrade.

Victory: orcs.

AFAICR this was actually the most PCs I have killed in one session in over 25 years of GMing!

I have read elsewhere that there's something about 4e combat where the party don't realise they're losing until it's too late, with a big risk of TPK. That was certainly what I saw today - it's so easy to get PCs up and fighting again, the party don't retreat when their comrades start dropping. Instead they were spending actions trying to heal each other, and failing (bad dice), with the orcs still wailing on them. They went into a death spiral. That there were only 3 orcs left (including the chief and his priest) I think encouraged this - they had just massacred dozens of orcs, 90% of the tribe, including 19 minions with 1 Invoker attack. It was hard to believe they were going to lose.

 

[Undermountain]

Well, my session today went pear-shaped when the Orcs' dice turned hot at the crucial moment. The big battle against the entire White Fist Orcs tribe ended with the following tallies...

Oh man that sounds like an awesome fight! You could easily say that the "dead" PCs are all just on the brink of death with the last few surviving orcs just retreating away. The 2 "surviving" PCs could save everyone else's lives. That would really keep the fear of Got in them for the rest of the campaign.

 

[Undermountain]

Well, my session today went pear-shaped when the Orcs' dice turned hot at the crucial moment. The big battle against the entire White Fist Orcs tribe ended with the following tallies...

gah... double post

 

[aurance]

If it makes you feel any better, I don't think the mistake was yours. They were the ones who decided to battle against a numerically superior force, despite being warned ahead of time how it was likely to turn out.

I agree with jdrakeh. To me, Armadillo, it seems that you warned your players clearly enough.

However, in general, I don't think "players should learn when to run away" is as much a problem as, "DM should learn to set a consistent tenor of lethality for his campaigns." D&D is not a life simulator; otherwise you'd be spending a great deal (most!) of the time fighting tediously easy foes or ridiculously difficult ones. For the most part, you have a DM that artificially sets the bar at some difficulty which makes most fights challenging but beatable. You can't blame the players for not running away when they've been able to beat the last 10 encounters - the DM is the one setting the precedent. If he wants his players to run, he should give obvious clues as to the odds.

Also, it's fairly easy for situations to turn from "pretty okay" to "everybody dead" in one round or less in most versions of D&D.

 

[S'mon]

Oh man that sounds like an awesome fight! You could easily say that the "dead" PCs are all just on the brink of death with the last few surviving orcs just retreating away. The 2 "surviving" PCs could save everyone else's lives. That would really keep the fear of Got in them for the rest of the campaign.

I'm not that kind of DM. >

We played through the death saves and death of the 4 PCs - took a while as I didn't recall the -5 to defenses for being unconscious. The surviving Orcs mutilated & ate the dead PCs. Then the Orcs split up - the Priest and the last mook led the 100 women and children down into the Underdark, seeking to join up with another, stronger, orc tribe, the Crushed Skulls. The ex-chief, knowing he'd be killed by the Crushed Skulls, bid farewell to his people and headed south into the hills, now a lone renegade.

"Fleeing from the Human Tyranny, a ragtag band of orcs seek a shining cavern in the under-Earth..."

Edit: The players took a couple of photos of the battle, the first the early stages with around 38 orcs on the battle-mat; then another after the Invoker's fury had incinerated 19 of them in one attack. If they get posted online I'll link.

Edit 2: One of the surviving PCs, an Invoker of the Raven Queen, is the group's journal-keeper, and only surviving original member. If she gets her journal up describing the fight I'll post a link. It was pretty awesome with the PCs tearing through the orcs until their Plague Priest* turned up and turned the tables with swarms of flies and Putrescent Bolts that kept on recharging!

*I used the half orc Controller-6 from MM2, with half hp. My impression is that MM2 critters seem to have a lot more offensive punch than their MM1 counterparts. The priest was an eggshell-with-hammer and might have gone down easily if the PCs could have concentrated fire on him, but as it turned out he obliterated most of them and didn't lose a single hp.

 

[S'mon]

I agree with jdrakeh. To me, Armadillo, it seems that you warned your players clearly enough.

However, in general, I don't think "players should learn when to run away" is as much a problem as, "DM should learn to set a consistent tenor of lethality for his campaigns." D&D is not a life simulator; otherwise you'd be spending a great deal (most!) of the time fighting tediously easy foes or ridiculously difficult ones.

My game - Vault of Larin Karr sandbox campaign - is mostly status-quo encounters, so it does have a large number of easy and ridiculously difficult encounters (and some of these can be tedious, but that's the price for this playstyle). The players know to retreat when they encounter a Roper or the Crushed Skull Underdark tribe of 9th level Orc Warriors*. It's the close-to-Balanced, potentially winnable fight that's potentially the real killer, as happened yesterday.

*9th level minions. If I had restatted them as 1st level standard Brutes (same XPV) as some would advocate, then I suspect the players would likely have regarded it as a winnable fight, kept fighting and been overwhelmed. Instead in that case they quickly retreated and got away with 10 orcs dead and no PC losses.

 

[S'mon]

I think terrain was a significant factor in the high number of PC deaths: beyond the initial entry cave was a 10' high cliff, with the main orc caves beyond. Firstly, the PCs killed 3 of the 4 orc guards at the entry way, the survivor raised the alarm before going down, alerting the main body of orcs. Then it took the PCs a couple rounds to climb up over the cliff, and they arrived in fairly ragged order, while the orcs were rapidly mustering. The PCs initially hit hard and killed dozens of orcs, but they were taking a lot of damage. Then when the orc chief & plague-priest arrived and the tide turned, the PCs had the cliff with a 10' drop at their backs, making an orderly retreat much harder. At first it looked like they could still win; then it looked like most could get away, but the dice just weren't with them and at the end the Orc chief was standing over a pile of PC corpses, rather than vice versa.

 

[Jhaelen]

I think that as a general rule, after a TPK it's best to start a new campaign.

Oh, dear. So far each of my campaigns have _started_ with a TPK.

I attribute it mostly to the players' cockiness after the previous campaign and getting used to the power of high-level pcs. It's soo easy to forget how lethal the game can be at low levels!

 

[vagabundo]

@S'mon: How do the players feel about it? Are they bitter or did they think it was awesome?

It sounds great, the stuff of legends anyway. Hmm a whole orc tribe. So close...

I wonder if the players have learned anything from it? I wonder if a PC drops is it time to sound the retreat or maybe - glup - surrender?? Or parley, play for time.

I've TKPed my 4e players once on purpose, when we were testing it out.

 

[S'mon]

Pics from yesterday's near-TPK:

Orcs Coming!

The Defender is surrounded:

Traumatised players: