D&D

[cellio]

Last night's D&D game was a little awkward. Ralph had dropped a hint that he was a little worried about the encounter he had planned (that it might kill the party), but he kept it because we've surprised him in the past. So most of us knew going in that something was up.

The encounter in question turned out to involve animated hungry plant-life (something that had spread itself out over most of the length of a 50-foot bridge, and that had at least a 10' reach with tendrils). If we had not noticed that this was not just overgrown vines, the first person to step within reach would have died. But we did notice.

I eventually convinced the rest of the party that the answer was fire from a safe distance. After one fireball, it was obviously damaged -- but regenerated quickly. Ok, so we have to deal enough damage quickly to prevent the regeneration from undoing our work. I had three more fireballs left, and I could also cast Flame Sphere a couple times. Our rough plan: three fireballs, and if that seems to make a real dent in it then run for it. (Our goal was to cross that bridge.)

After either one or two fireballs, Turok (the fighter in the party) stepped up close to it. I am not sure why; I believe this to be player error. (He thought he was at a safe distance, but even so I didn't know why he wanted to be there.) The thing grabbed and swallowed him. He has more fighting ability (and hit points) than anyone else in the party, so if he was that easy to overcome then there was no way the rest of us were getting close. I continued with the fire strategy. (Kyle, the extremely-dextrous halfling, was lobbing acid at the thing, and the other two were hitting it with missile weapons.)

I used my last fireball and it was still alive, so I fired up two Flame Spheres. All tolled, I personally dealt 46 d6 points of damage to it. [Update: corrected number of dice. Math failure.] (Of the 12 saving throws it got against flame spheres, it made one.) I did not track the actual damage, but I think in general it was pretty close to the expected value. So obviously this thing was regenerating quite a bit each round, but we did manage to kill it.

Problem: Turok was dead inside the thing. Ralph was obviously quite conflicted against this. (Turok's player seemed ready to just punt and start a new character.)

The death of a player character has three effects in a game: an effect for that player, an effect for the party, and an effect for the game world. I think that sometimes people focus on the first effect, because it's the obvious one, and miss the other two.

Ralph has plot hooks that involve Turok. (As I believe he does for my character and at least one other.) Those plot hooks no longer work if the character is dead. So the GM has to decide how much of a problem that is. (Also, some development was starting to happen between Turok and my character -- not much yet, but I was looking forward to seeing how it played out.)

The effect on the party is that, if a new character is to be introduced (to keep the player in the game), a story mechanism has to exist to make it plausible, make us trust that character, and so on. This can be done, but it does tend to sideline the main plot for a little while. And it just plain takes a while to really develop a character -- personality, background, new plot hooks, and so on.

So Turok getting eaten by hungry vegetation was, if you'll pardon the expression, a bloody nuisance.

The party sought out a source of a Reincarnate spell. (For various reasons, Raise Dead was either inaccessible or highly doubtful.) There are very few outcomes on the reincarnation table that are unplayable. "Owl", however, is one of them. I was trying to speculate about ways we could rig a weapon-wielding owl (magical bladed gauntlets, that sort of thing), but the player was not into this. Ultimately, Ralph had him reroll and he ended up as a halfling.

I actually think this is playable, but the player still seems to be dubious. And that affected the mood of the rest of the evening (which ended soon thereafter, and possibly those facts are related).

I think the monster actually was callibrated reasonably well; we could have killed it from a safe distance without threatening any character. (This is probably not what Ralph intended, either. But if the thing had been mobile, we definitely would have died unless it was very, very slow.) The character dying was an accident, and one that Ralph didn't intercept early enough. On the other hand, the player made a mistake, so it's not Ralph's fault that it happened. But I can tell that both of them are bummed about it, and I don't know what I can do as a player to make that any better.

Comments

D&D Death

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

I can sympathise with this, literally. The last LARP game I played in, I lost my fifth level alchemist. He was also a plot hook for the GMs. They'd give me some coins and I'd 'hire' an adventure party to find some obscure alchemical component for me. What made matters worse was that I died because ANOTHER PLAYER made a bone-headed mistake, not me. (Details upon request) Fifth level means that I had invested about a year's worth of effort into the character, not only in-game, but scrounging yard sales and flea markets for oddly shaped bottles for his alchemist's shop. Next game I'm starting out with a first level character.

There's not much you can do to relieve the situation. Character death *has* to be a part of the game, otherwise there's no risk to advancement and no challenge. I wasn't wild about losing a character I had invested a year into, but I got over it and started designing a new character.

I like the suggestion made above. A side-quest. It's a lot easier when you're doing table top as opposed to live action to have a character be an owl for a few sessions