A DM's Woes: What Just Happened? (2 BBEG Dead in 1 Round)

I sat there, staring, as my players laughed hysterically.

In Krynn, our campaign setting of choice, there lay a smoldering, melted mesh of wizard and draconian, all that remained of my intricate, detailed, meticulously planned plot.

This was our 2nd session of the campaign, and at this point the party was level 4 and consisted of a focused conjuror specialist wizard, a human swordsage, a tarmak mystic (DMPC, so he didn't do much), and a cleric. The wizard was fairly optimized and the cleric geared towards combat (but not optimized). I guess my problems started there. Two tier 1 characters, a tier 2, and a tier 3.

In any case, the first part of the adventure went flawlessly, and left me feeling very content as a DM. The PCs recovered two magical artifacts from angry draconians, battled and were appropriately challenged by an animated twelve headed statue of Takhisis the Dark Queen after which point the entered into a duel with an elven noble (who was actually a level 8 black robed wizard...) named Alfelias.

Ah, Alfelias. Perhaps one of my favorite villains I've ever designed, outside of my satisfyingly evil Scar (a mul warblade, but that's besides the point :smallwink:). What plans I had for Alfelias. The PCs handed over the magical music box they'd found to him after he pretended to be defeated, and I reveled in my brilliance.

My brilliance began to plummet as the PCs followed Alfelias to his evil lair about ten levels early. I tried at first to deter them with evil draconian assassins, but then decided that as soon as they arrived and encountered Alfelias' shapeshifting sivak CR 6 guards they would abandon him and try for a different course of action. My brilliance, at this point, had tapered out.

When the PCs confronted and soundly butchered all of the CR 6 guards to Alfelias' underground hideout, I felt the first hints that maybe something had gone wrong. They proceeded to completely smash through my dizzying array of traps and guards before catching my CR 9 aurak draconian villain Drachma and Alfelias (CR 8) and killing them both in the surprise round. My plot was crushed. My brilliance...nonexistent.

So have any other DMs had similar experiences? :smallsmile: And sorry for the wall of text in which little was actually said...

What were the ACs, saves, and DCs of the relevant parties? CR is descriptive, not proscriptive, and if your level 4 players have a very good chance of either making their attack rolls or roflstomping the CR 8 / 9 enemy's saves then CR is unreliable.

Next time, more communication on the villains' part. Sending isn't a pocket change spell at those levels, but signal whistles are cheap.

Hooray! Story!

I had this happen to me once. I had designed a Temple of the Beholder to be this elaborately planned and scaled... Thing that was essentially the pre-gen from Hell. It was a nine-door switch puzzle (each leading down a tunnel that was not unlike the Beholder's eye stalk), leading to a room or rooms were the party had to endure one of eight challenges themed around the eight Wizard schools (the temple was crafted by a high-level generalist Wizard). The ninth and final stalk was a fight with a Beholder (with class levels, but not Beholder Mage levels) who was built up to be the last boss of the temple (being that it's a Temple of the Beholder). In the middle of the main room was a giant statue of the man who built the temple himself.

The party was able to successfully make it through the first of the challenges, which was abjuration-themed (and contained an iron golem with a permanent, triple-extended antimagic field centered on itself, followed immediately by a prismatic wall which was guarding the smaller, second room with the switch), before heading back to the main lobby (where three more doors had opened). The sorcerer, who was built as a pre-gen for just this purpose, had disintegrate on the spell list (for the purposes of defeating the prismatic wall), and upon entering the main lobby (and realizing that this was a switch puzzle), the person playing the sorcerer (who was a younger brother of one of my younger brother's friends) said, "I disintegrate the rest of the closed doors." I was kinda stunned by the sudden shift, although in retrospect I shouldn't have been since I gave him a bunch of disintegrates to play with, and then asked him to pick out which doors he wanted to disintegrate. A single Indian tear ran down my cheek as I told them that this was pretty much all I had prepared for them to play, and that they had pretty much smashed the entire dungeon to pieces very wantonly (they had thrown one of the other players into the prismatic wall in order to test it out, causing him to die by the fourth damage color, then fail the Fort save vs. petrification, the Will save vs. insanity, and the save vs. plane shift, which sent him to the Elemental Plane of Fire after twice-killing him). I managed to talk the player out of disintegrating everything just to humor me and actually play out the dungeon, after which he said, "fine, I'll just disintegrate the statue in the middle of the room."

The statue in the middle room was, of course, the high-level wizard who created the dungeon. He had entombed himself in a permanent statue form in order to prolong his life, and was jealously guarding the riches he had amassed over the course of his life, etc., etc. The wizard had a number of protections on himself, none of which stopped disintegrate outright (why had I not thought of ray deflection?!), so I played it straight and rolled his Fort save, which was a natural 1. He took 26d6 points of damage directly, and one extraordinarily high damage roll later, was disintegrated outright. Dungeon end.

Future incarnations of this dungeon would have a pre-gen wizard instead of sorcerer, who only has one prepared casting of disintegrate, and I cover my ears and scream at the top of my lungs whenever the party suggests sleeping ten minutes in to change up their spell list.

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Originally Posted by Sutremaine

What were the ACs, saves, and DCs of the relevant parties? CR is descriptive, not proscriptive, and if your level 4 players have a very good chance of either making their attack rolls or roflstomping the CR 8 / 9 enemy's saves then CR is unreliable.

Next time, more communication on the villains' part. Sending isn't a pocket change spell at those levels, but signal whistles are cheap.

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Communication? What do you mean? If you're saying that the villains shouldn't have been caught unawares, well...the way the PCs played I couldn't have justified them being prepared, really.

There's actually some more stuff that happens underground that more or less contributed to that, but I edited somewhat since the post was huge. If you guys are interested, I can tell you about the entire section of the adventure.

Could you post the character sheets of all involved? And could you explain, in precise detail, exactly how the combats and such happened, what tactics were used, what houserules are in play, etc. etc.?

Also, isn't the first thing you do, when thinking of a character, come up with a basic idea of what to do should the party end up killing them?

That's a major point of D&D. Parties kill things. Its what they do! That is what the system is geared towards enabling.

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Originally Posted by Vilpich

Communication? What do you mean? If you're saying that the villains shouldn't have been caught unawares, well...the way the PCs played I couldn't have justified them being prepared, really.

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Some of the guards, after seeing how powerful the PCs were, could have transmitted a 'buff or run' message to the villains. See the Dancing Lights OOTS strip for a magical example of coded communication. A network of active Message spells might work better in a more confined environment (and has the advantage of being a free action and harder to detect and counter than an in-battle spellcasting), though you'd need some pretty strict stationing and scheduling to pull it off.

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If you guys are interested, I can tell you about the entire section of the adventure.

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Sure, I'm interested.

Did they get to rest, like in the Big Bad's place?\

Edit:
+1 for the whole adventure. I assume the main part of it was in session 2.

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Originally Posted by Suddo

Did they get to rest, like in the Big Bad's place?

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Well...yes, once. But that was when they discovered the gulley dwarves and were hiding out...

It was a very complex plot.

However, in between sneaking through the underground fortress and attacking the big bad guys they didn't rest at all

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Originally Posted by Vilpich

However, in between sneaking through the underground fortress and attacking the big bad guys they didn't rest at all

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Damn they took on a CR+2 Adventure and had spells to spare to kill the Big Bad. I assume it was something similar to Save or Die stuff but at that level there aren't too many of those I'd love to hear a more detailed account.

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Originally Posted by Suddo

Damn they took on a CR+2 Adventure and had spells to spare to kill the Big Bad. I assume it was something similar to Save or Die stuff but at that level there aren't too many of those I'd love to hear a more detailed account.

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Well the final combat went something like this (I don't remember it perfectly). Also, I misspoke earlier. There wasn't a cleric in the party, it was a warblade. This happened maybe 2 months ago :smallredface:

THE TENSION RISES as our heroes approach the nefarious Drachma and his conniving companion Alfelias of the Ebon Robes.
Cutting that out now

The PCs had surprise, and unfortunately Drachma and Alfelias were right next to each other. See, the issue was I was positive the PCs wouldn't actually be foolish enough to attack them, and they were having a meeting, so I didn't think and put them next to each other.

The warblade had used the cosmopolitan feat to get UMD as a class skill and skill knowledge to get iaijutsu focus, so before combat he cast haste on himself with a scroll. Next, he charged Alfelias and used iaijutsu focus. He hit, and rolled a 19 on the iaijutsu focus roll and it modified to a 21 exactly...which is +3d6 damage, so 5d6 total with a greatsword.

Alfelias was a wizard, but he actually survived the attack. Unfortunately, the warblade had haste so...he used the mountain hammer maneuver and hit for 4d6 more damage. Alfelias died.

The mystic cast bull's strength on the swordsage. Then the swordsage moved in and attacked the aurak who had 76 bleeping HP.

He used the drain vitality strike which hit and the aurak failed his save. He dealt something along the lines of 15 points of damage plus the 2 points con damage, which were a further 8 points of damage. Then the wizard cast summon monster II and summoned a celestial riding dog. It actually hit with a smite but the damage was negligible.

The PCs won initiative.

The warblade recovered his maneuvers and hit with mountain hammer again with a critical as well, for something like 30 points of damage.

The swordsage initiated burning blade and hit, then tried to run away. And this was where my player had done something kind of brilliant. He provoked an attack of opportunity from the aurak on purpose, which successfully hit for negligible damage. But he used that to trigger fire riposte for 4d6 fire damage. And my gorgeous aurak died.

Actually, is that legal? Using fire riposte off an AoO? I think it probably is, but that just occurred to me...

Still waiting on those character sheets!

I could have sworn I posted a reply. Oh well.

Apart from the really good rolls, I'm not sure about the Iaijutsu Focus / Mountain Hammer combo. Can you break that turn into its component actions?

Fire Riposte off an AoO should be legal. The manoeuvre is an immediate action initiation and triggered by a successful strike by a melee or natural weapon, and there is no further text regarding the form of that attack. Therefore AoOs are not specifically excluded, and if an AoO takes the form of a melee or natural weapon attack then it satisfies the conditions for initiation of the Fire Riposte manoeuvre.

Erm, if you have a warblade its 3.5. Haste gives an extra attack at your highest attack, it doesn't give you an extra standard action to use a manuever I don't think. Otherwise Time standstill would be 4 attacks long, followed by white raven tactics shenanigans.

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Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx

Could you post the character sheets of all involved? And could you explain, in precise detail, exactly how the combats and such happened, what tactics were used, what houserules are in play, etc. etc.?

Also, isn't the first thing you do, when thinking of a character, come up with a basic idea of what to do should the party end up killing them?

That's a major point of D&D. Parties kill things. Its what they do! That is what the system is geared towards enabling.

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I'll take a look but I'm not sure I could find them. As to with the BBEGs and my lack of foresight...the issue was really that right until the end I didn't think the PCs would attack especially since I told them their CR OoC. Both villains were meant to die in other places, in much more epicways.

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Originally Posted by Sutremaine

Some of the guards, after seeing how powerful the PCs were, could have transmitted a 'buff or run' message to the villains. See the Dancing Lights OOTS strip for a magical example of coded communication. A network of active Message spells might work better in a more confined environment (and has the advantage of being a free action and harder to detect and counter than an in-battle spellcasting), though you'd need some pretty strict stationing and scheduling to pull it off..

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The thing is...the only guards that lasted more then a round were at the very beginning on the surface, and there wouldn't have been much of a justification for them to have dancing lights since they were draconian gulley dwarves.

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Originally Posted by Righteous Doggy

Erm, if you have a warblade its 3.5. Haste gives an extra attack at your highest attack, it doesn't give you an extra standard action to use a manuever I don't think. Otherwise Time standstill would be 4 attacks long, followed by white raven tactics shenanigans.

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Oops.

Actually, that might not have made a difference since the wizard had yet to act on the surprise

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Originally Posted by Sutremaine

I could have sworn I posted a reply. Oh well.

Apart from the really good rolls, I'm not sure about the Iaijutsu Focus / Mountain Hammer combo. Can you break that turn into its component actions?

Fire Riposte off an AoO should be legal. The manoeuvre is an immediate action initiation and triggered by a successful strike by a melee or natural weapon, and there is no further text regarding the form of that attack. Therefore AoOs are not specifically excluded, and if an AoO takes the form of a melee or natural weapon attack then it satisfies the conditions for initiation of the Fire Riposte manoeuvre.

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Sorry I missed your 1st post :smallfrown: I feel like a bad person!

I'll take a look at the iaijutsu focus mountain hammer, but as was previously stated that shouldn't have been legal since we used the 3.0 version of haste when it happened.

I thought fire riposte was legal too (and a rather awesome move by the player).

Here's the thing though. WHY would you ever think that player characters might not attack? Or that they might not do something stupid?

These are D&D player characters. They are, by definition, completely insane. These are the strongest, most capable, most intelligent, most wealthy, often the most beautiful people in a setting, and what do they do? They go into holes and KILL THINGS. Rather than living a life of luxury that they could obviously manage!

If there is a character, always, always, always have an idea of how they will react to violence from the PCs, and if you expect them to live, give them SEVERAL escape plans, and several things they can have others do to slow the PCs down while they escape.

What you did is this high level character played fair. NEVER play fair. You dont get to be level 10 by playing fair.

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Originally Posted by Vilpich

The warblade had used the cosmopolitan feat to get UMD as a class skill and skill knowledge to get iaijutsu focus, so before combat he cast haste on himself with a scroll. Next, he charged Alfelias and used iaijutsu focus. He hit, and rolled a 19 on the iaijutsu focus roll and it modified to a 21 exactly...which is +3d6 damage, so 5d6 total with a greatsword.

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Well, part of your problem is that you're using the wrong Cosmopolitan; it was updated in the Player's Guide to Faerun to grant a +2 bonus to Sense Motive, Gather Information and Bluff checks instead.

Unless you're PLAYING a 3.0 campaign... in which case you're going by the rules, and I'm afraid I have nothing further to offer you.

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Originally Posted by Kuulvheysoon

Well, part of your problem is that you're using the wrong Cosmopolitan; it was updated in the Player's Guide to Faerun to grant a +2 bonus to Sense Motive, Gather Information and Bluff checks instead.

Unless you're PLAYING a 3.0 campaign... in which case you're going by the rules, and I'm afraid I have nothing further to offer you.

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I was under the impression that the cosmopolitan feat from FF Campaign Setting and from Player's Guide to Faerun were actually two different feats.

Also, I don't own the Player's Guide to Faerun :smallfrown:

We were playing 3.5...hence the ToB material. However, a lot of my games do blend the two a bit :smallannoyed: That's one of my personal shortcomings with the system though.

if you're interested i have 3 (!!) such stories to tell. all in the same campaign. i have just returned to DMing after a long time, and have decided to start at 3.5. playing in Eberron the villainous group was supposed to be themed upon The Dark Six. the party started at 2nd level.

at their first adventure the party met The Fury- a shifter were lion babrbarian of high level. it was together with part of it's tribe, and the party had some city guards. the party was supposed to be awed, to fear it, and focus on secondary targets. :smallamused:

i forgot i was dealing with players. :smallannoyed:

they focused on the Fury, who i played badly- focusing on trying to find and stop a merchant with a secret. they whittled down it's impressive hitpoints slowly, until suddenly the half giant psiwar rolled a triple crit, taking her to below 10! death touch by the necromancer, and she couldn't even be revived.

she was supposed to be a recurring villain, and had some rolesin the campaign. oh well, time to readjust...

on their second adventure they met at the end some homebrewed creation of mine- The Devourer: a sort of a barghest only made out of an elf and panther instead of a goblin and wolf, with some druidic powers. now this will put the fear into them! :smallbiggrin:

it was the most depressing defeat i've seen, they butchered it, haunted it, mutilated it slowly. :smallsigh: obviously, i had a lot to learn of villain design

so for the 3rd adventure i turned to the forums to help in designing the Keeper: a cleric of The Keeper (obviously) turned bone knight. the party were a about 6th level meeting him. at first encounter they ran. the second encounter i hoped they would run as well, and focus on secondary targets.

i don't always learn from past mistakes. they decided to duke it out.

now this turnedo ut to be one bloody amazing epic battle, going back and forth, using every possible resource, tactic, and at the end endangering their entire mission on the chance to take this guy down.:smallbiggrin:

and just as before, the half giant rolled a triple crit, taking my second in command BBEG out of the game.

oh well, time to readjust, but it was as hell worth it! one of the best moments in the campaign!

the other villains were (mostly) much better! :smallwink:

TL;DR- i lost 3 major villains on my campaign prematurely. i learned from that and it gave me a great opprtunity to challenge myself and improve the campaign. and it sure did!

Chalk it up to a faux pas in DMing. Even if you hadn't taken the time previously to map out any defenses for the BBEGs' lair (under the mistaken assumption that the PCs wouldn't head that way), you should have taken a break to draw up something really quick. Or possibly called the game for the night to give you some time to hammer something out.

You have to keep in mind that you're not just challenging a group of players, you're roleplaying villains. Intelligent villains. Intelligent villains who have mooks and a lair they feel is worth keeping secret. Allowing the players to traipse through their lair without any sort of alarm or pre-warning system, no traps, no mooks making a tactical retreat to set up an ambush... that doesn't sound like an 8th level wizard to me.

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Originally Posted by Vilpich

I thought fire riposte was legal too (and a rather awesome move by the player).

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I'd also like to point out that enemies don't always have to take the AoO. I don't know what the Aurak's intelligence score is (don't own the book he's in), but when I'm running combat encounters, it's not uncommon for my monsters to completely forego AoOs. Either because they're intelligent enough to know not to be conned into doing what the enemy wants them to do, or because their focus is somewhere else and don't have the presence of mind to respond with the follow-up attack.

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Originally Posted by Greyfeld85

Chalk it up to a faux pas in DMing. Even if you hadn't taken the time previously to map out any defenses for the BBEGs' lair (under the mistaken assumption that the PCs wouldn't head that way), you should have taken a break to draw up something really quick. Or possibly called the game for the night to give you some time to hammer something out.

You have to keep in mind that you're not just challenging a group of players, you're roleplaying villains. Intelligent villains. Intelligent villains who have mooks and a lair they feel is worth keeping secret. Allowing the players to traipse through their lair without any sort of alarm or pre-warning system, no traps, no mooks making a tactical retreat to set up an ambush... that doesn't sound like an 8th level wizard to me.

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The layer was completely mapped out. Allow me a few minutes to write up everything that happened...

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Originally Posted by Greyfeld85

I'd also like to point out that enemies don't always have to take the AoO. I don't know what the Aurak's intelligence score is (don't own the book he's in), but when I'm running combat encounters, it's not uncommon for my monsters to completely forego AoOs. Either because they're intelligent enough to know not to be conned into doing what the enemy wants them to do, or because their focus is somewhere else and don't have the presence of mind to respond with the follow-up attack.

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Aurak's are like draconic mind flayers. They wouldn't forgo an AoO.

The player completely played me here. Basically, I got frustrated about the villain and made a comment about "he never even dealt damage to you" when Alfelias died. So he gave me an opportunity to take an AoO, knowing I would jump at the chance, then laughed as my BBEG burned to little pieces.

And this is why you never use crit or fumble houserules!

Also, if your BBEGs can, you know, die to damage from melee, you are doing something wrong!

One time I had an evil party that was seeking to revive a dead god they worshiped. In order to do so they needed to steal an artifact from a temple...that was guarded by a solar and a bunch of other angels.

Now I expected them to go all Shadowrun and spy, and sneak, and steal it like good master thieves.

No....they just kick down the door, and somehow I do not fricken know how, Kill 2 solar angels, 2 astral devas, steal the artifact, and kill about 6 more angels on the way out.

And no this wasn't at a level where you should be able to do that. This party was level 15, EIGHT levels below the Solar's CR.

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Originally Posted by Morithias

One time I had an evil party that was seeking to revive a dead god they worshiped. In order to do so they needed to steal an artifact from a temple...that was guarded by a solar and a bunch of other angels.

Now I expected them to go all Shadowrun and spy, and sneak, and steal it like good master thieves.

No....they just kick down the door, and somehow I do not fricken know how, Kill 2 solar angels, 2 astral devas, steal the artifact, and kill about 6 more angels on the way out.

And no this wasn't at a level where you should be able to do that. This party was level 15, EIGHT levels below the Solar's CR.

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That's harsh...

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Originally Posted by Vilpich

The layer was completely mapped out. Allow me a few minutes to write up everything that happened...



Aurak's are like draconic mind flayers. They wouldn't forgo an AoO.

The player completely played me here. Basically, I got frustrated about the villain and made a comment about "he never even dealt damage to you" when Alfelias died. So he gave me an opportunity to take an AoO, knowing I would jump at the chance, then laughed as my BBEG burned to little pieces.

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A 19 Int pseudo-sorcerer takes an AoO? Yeah, I don't see that.

You have to remember that lots of high cr things are only high CR if they use their supernatural abilities intelligently.

Which is a really nontrivial thing to do. Seeing as how most of the actual game part of the game is figuring out how to play characters well in combat situations.

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Originally Posted by Greyfeld85

A 19 Int pseudo-sorcerer takes an AoO? Yeah, I don't see that.

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Why wouldn't he? He had no way of knowing about fire riposte. Also, your comment makes it sound like the aurak provoked the AoO which was not the case. He made an attack of opportunity.

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Originally Posted by Gavinfoxx

You have to remember that lots of high cr things are only high CR if they use their supernatural abilities intelligently.

Which is a really nontrivial thing to do. Seeing as how most of the actual game part of the game is figuring out how to play characters well in combat situations.

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He would've used his abilities intelligently. If he'd had a turn in which to use them. :smallannoyed:

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Originally Posted by Vilpich

Why wouldn't he? He had no way of knowing about fire riposte. Also, your comment makes it sound like the aurak provoked the AoO which was not the case. He made an attack of opportunity.

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First, I can only assume that this Aurak is around the same intelligence as a mind flayer, due to your succinct description. So, under that assumption (18+ intelligence score), I also have to assume that the beast is bordering on super genius levels of intellect. Under this assumption, and also the assumption that this character is a psuedo-sorcerer (based on the premise described above), I can only come to the conclusion that in a combat situation, this creature watching a melee combat specialist suddenly take a tactical retreat after charging in and beating face would be at least slightly wary and highly unlikely to just suddenly lash out physically.

Secondly, the swordsage provoked an AoO. The monster was under no obligation to take it.

My Story(s):

Due to the powers of luck I've had stuff like this happen more often than I'd like...

The first time my party pulled something like this is when they all abandoned their gods to sell their souls for power (ON A BLOODY WHIM I MIGHT ADD) I gave them 2d6 hell fire at will as the bonus for the trade and told them that they had to do whatever they were told now. They agreed to this (I guess they were bored of how the good campaign was going) and went to the next town as planned. I spent all week reworking the city to accommodate the new party alignment...which was followed by an immediate razing of the city with their hell fire. Hard work and about 2 months of playable encounters and plot burned to the ground, literally.

The next time this happened was when I had them infiltrating a Thoon encampment at level 6. There job was to avoid everything and find 1 person taken to the breeding pits (which was going to have already become a slave). Earlier on in the campaign the cleric was given a wand of baleful polymorph (caster level 16) with one charge left. Now I knew the weapon was going to be a boss killer, and I was fine with that. What I was not ready for was them to storm into the elder brain room, actually make the saves, and definitely did NOT see the cleric using a grappling hook to swing onto the brain and use the wand nor escape alive after with the person they came for. I paid them back that time though by having the person end up killing the high priest and blaming the party.

as for your plot problem there is a little thing called the clone spell. Since he was a caster he very well could have used that and is still running around the country side doing whatever your plot has him doing. On top of that to make things easier do the old DM trick of fudging the numbers on his sheet. Make it so that the strongest melee guy need at least 15 on the die roll (regardless of his BAB) to hit him without flanking modifiers and a touch spells need I'd say 13 on the roll at least. Also if the party encounters him again build an encounter 2 CR above them plus the boss you don't want dead yet. It should work out that if they take the time to get close and kill him the other guys will have ripped them a fairly large new one. Don't go for a TPK, but throw your weight as DM around a little :smallamused: