In my last DnD session my character died. It wasn't one of those grand deaths where I made a great sacrifice for the common good, or where I heroically attempted something truly difficult and paid the price.
It was one of those questionable, sorry deaths. I was in a fight. Monsters spawned randomly, then they attacked me and I died. I had no place to run to, no tactic to use. There was no reasonable defence. The only way to save myself would have been to run away from the fight earlier and leave my friends, which would have resulted in them being dead instead.
When I am GMing I hate this sort of thing. I try to let the dice do the talking in fights, but I work hard to set up encounters so that if you die, there was a reason. I want you to have made a choice. Maybe that choice was just to be foolish and aggressive, but at least I want the player to be able to think that they did something to make that happen. "I should learn to fall back and heal when I am hurt" is a fine lesson to carry away from a death. "I sure did die heroically!" is also good. "I got killed and there was nothing I could do about it at all." doesn't cut it.
The main reason I died without any recourse is that we were fighting Shadows. Shadows drain your Strength score and my group had no way whatsoever to avoid, prevent, or heal that sort of attack. One moment I was fine, the next shadows all appeared next to me and my Strength score was drained to zero, killing me. Shadows are a scary opponent when there is only one or two, but when there are a dozen they are death machines, especially when they randomly appear and then attack, denying us any way to defend ourselves.
The module offered us a way out though. We were defending a paladin doing a cleansing ritual to get rid of the taint in a holy temple. The god associated with the temple decided to reward us for winning, and one of the rewards was a resurrection. The resurrection in question didn't help at all with having my Strength drained, but that was handwaved away and the boon was deemed able to resurrect me anyway.
Problem is, we each got a boon. And one of those boons had to be used to resurrect me. Everyone else was going to get an extremely powerful, permanent bonus, but I was going to get 'not dead'. That makes being killed totally randomly feel even worse. I did nothing wrong, the GM/dice declared me dead, and I get punished hard. Even worse, one of the options available was to make my weapon magical. Nobody puts magical crossbows in modules, so if I missed this I would be using a nonmagical weapon and doing half damage forever.
I was perfectly content with being dead. I don't like 'oh no, you are dead. Let's warp reality so you aren't dead' as a mechanic. Why bother to roll dice at all, if you can't lose? Just declare all the enemies defeated and move on, or describe battles narratively. If losing is impossible, then winning is irrelevant, so if I am dead I want to stay dead. However, the boon being able to bring me back was definitely intended, so saying that the resurrection also included a spell to remove my Strength penalty is quite reasonable. Still, I wasn't exactly thrilled about everyone else getting amazing, fun new powers while I got to look on.
Things didn't quite turn out that way though. One of the other characters decided to use his boon to bring me back to life, which meant I could use my boon to ask for a magical weapon so I can stop being terrible against the endless hordes of monsters that are resistant to nonmagical weapons. More than that though, now we have a story, and a debt. I owe that character something huge, something that will be terribly difficult to repay.
He didn't even make out that badly from all of it. After we decided on our boons and he didn't get a cool thing, we found another really powerful magic item and he grabbed it. We all ended the session with something new and exciting we can do, which is a good way to finish off a big section of a module.
So in the end a silly, pointless death turned into something cool and exciting. It set up potential conflict or drama in the future, and I sure do love that. All the credit goes to the player though, not the module. This combat and the fallout from it were a disaster waiting to happen, and we successfully snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
Just when I thought I was going to get a compliment at the end, you stole it away!
ReplyDeleteThere were a number of ways to improve the tactical situation that would have given you a much better chance at living. But they were non-standard and your group doesn't think that way so I'm not surprised they weren't considered. I need to up my game to make those options more apparent.
Your group could also have used Fireball earlier, but the threat level wasn't clear yet. I mean, the sky turned dark and the ground shook and an unholy wind blew up, so there was certainly some foreshadowing that something bad was happening. So maybe the Fireballs should have been unleashed, even if they only hit one or two shadows.
Definitely a deadly encounter. With a treasure to match. Five of them, in fact.