Hype
We touched on the outcomes back in Boss Monster, but we’ve never talked about the mentality. What drives us to take on impossible challenges? Why is the paladin’s fondest wish to “buy the rest of you some time” by leaping in front of the orc army? Why does the rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold have to sap the barbarian just so she can be the one to collapse the portal from the inside? Why is Gandalf standing there on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm?
I think I found my answer a few sessions ago. It was in the depths of my megadungeon, and the party was badly undermanned. Only three PCs showed up at game time, but they decided to explore the deepest portion of the dungeon anyway. It was exactly the kind of situation where a little bit of bad luck could turn into a TPK, and that’s exactly what happened.
So there they were, all lined up and ready to throw down against a trio of medusa blackguards. The bard failed her save vs. petrification before her first turn. The paladin got off a flight of arrows before he too turned to stone. That left only the bloodrager to face down a trio of hasted, smite good, save three-times-per-round-or-you’re-a-statue medusae.
“OK,” I said. “Why don’t we call it there this week?” It was late. It was a good cliffhanger. My intention was to take the player aside and figure out some kind of captured! scenario. He looked at me like I was crazy.
“Why don’t we play it out?” he said. “I cast mirror image and make my full attack.”
My friends and loyal readers? It was fucking glorious. His mirror images poofed one by one. His hit points fell steadily. The medusae hit hard, but he hit harder. That magnificent bastard made every one of his saves vs. petrification. And by the time there was only one blackguard left standing, the odds had turned. He had done the impossible, and beaten a TPK scenario on single player mode.
I will forever regret that I tried to talk him out of that victory. You see, players don’t throw themselves into hopeless situations because they’re dumb. They do it because they’ve got hope. They’re chasing that moment where they can look into the face of death, choke up a little on a greatsword, and say, “Bring it on.” I think that’s worth a little risk.
Question of the day then. Have you ever managed to snatch victory from the jaws of certain TPK? What happened? Let’s hear your war stories in the comments!
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It actually happened twice back to back in one 5e campaign. I believe I’ve mentioned this game before, where it ended with us assaulting the illithid temple to destroy the elder brain before the mindflayers enslaved the world. First encounter we fought was a standard illithid and a Caller in the Darkness (an incorporeal conglomeration of dozens of victims who tied together in terror), wasn’t a challenge but drained us of some resources.
Second encounter was very nearly a tpk: we were walking down a hallway, and everyone was told to make 4 intelligence saves as 4 invisible levitating illithids ambushed us. I, the gnome wizard with the lucky feat, was the only to beat all of them, leaving me the only one not stunned against these guys. Some were trying to distract me while others went for the brain feast, so I put up a wall of force around the party to keep them out while the party kept making saves to snap out. Only thing that saved us was the DM had recently given me a Staff of Conjuration converted from 3.5, and one of the absolutely glorious spells it had was Summon Monster VI. I used that to summon 3 coatls, and their psychic immunity, SLAs including bless and cure wounds, and nasty con poison single handedly swung the fight in our favor and turned a tpk into a narrow victory. In real time after that, this was the end of the session, and I wasn’t able to make the next one so asked a friend to guest run my character.
Immediately after that fight, out BSF decided to start hacking at the organic walls before we could take a rest, and he managed to hack his way into the Elder Brain’s chamber. Combat ensued, and the Elder Brain went down a lot easier than we thought it would (it was just the Elder Brain, and there were 6 PCs plus the summons. Action economy is nice). After going down in about 3 rounds, the door to a side chamber opens and we are faced with a six armed illithid wielding sextuple lightsabers and with energy crystals that let him heal up completely when he used them. This guy was nasty, and we still hadn’t had a rest and were running on fumes, especially after nova-ing on the Elder Brain. The big bad starts for my character first and downs him in a single round, then picks up the powerful artifact he was carrying and starts using it and his own nasty powers against the party. The fight was very nearly a tpk when my friend noticed one of my index cards: “Contingency: if reduced to half or lower hitpoints, Dimension Door to the farthest safe location possible.” That basically meant everything that happened after my wizard’s death didn’t actually happen, so an hour of combat got rewound and the night was called again.
Final session I was able to make it, teleported away, and promptly called up some more summons while I desperately channeled the artifact’s ult that would instantly slay the Mindflayer. Unfortunately, this ult takes a minute to charge up, and the party has to delay him for that long. We were using pre-errata polymorphs to bring party members at 0 health back up as t-rexes, shamelessly abusing Conjure Woodland Beings and the summoned Coatls, but we’d already burnt most of our resources in previous battles and this still wasn’t enough.
With only our druid and (barely) rogue still standing and my wizard still channeling, we decided to gamble with a trump card. Our druid had gotten a lucky draw from a Deck of Many things to get a Wish spell. The problem is our DM interprets Wishes as the ultimate chaos magic and gleefully subverts them however possible, through creative misinterpretations and such. Our last wishes had gone…not so well, but we were desperate. So our druid makes a carefully worded wish that this particular illithid ceases to exist, with no negative repercussions on us or positive repercussions on anyone else. After saying the wish, the DM announced he was taking 10, leaving us on the edge of our seats as to how this would blow up in our faces. To our shock, when the DM came back he announced that, while the illithid was still there, everything that this illithid had ever done (including directing the invasion) was erased from everyone’s minds, including his own, leaving the confused illithid to simply wander away. Our wish had actually gone more or less how we wanted to, and for the second time in that dungeon a tpk was very narrowly avoided.
I appreciate the irony of the illithid getting confused for once.
Interesting about the contingency dimension door though. There was a pretty neat Reddit thread yesterday about dealing with wrong assumptions. Some of the discussion pertains to retcon:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/74dsq1/best_way_to_deal_with_wrong_assumptions/
So there we are, three level one barely-legal adventurers… no not that kind.
I forget the campaign, but it involved a rite of passage for the group of kiddos in a crypt. After a bit of travel we get to the place (omitting spoilers) and go in. While inside, we come to a room that looks like it would be a trap. I hold open the door and the other two go inside. Nothing happens. We move all the way in and the trap springs and we each get a dose of nonlethal damage. Next round, we take another dose… we are level 1. That’s not good even for non lethal damage, so we move to the far door and open it. One of us drops unconscious and they get drug through by our cleric “tank” with higher constitution. I go through but the door stays open. I drop next so he grabs me and tries to shield us as he pulls us away because we are now unable to save for half damage. He manages to get us out of harms way just shy of max non lethal himself.
The trap stops and we heal up, but man oh man if he had dropped too we would have just been slowly pummeled to death.
It was a pretty intense moment.
Level 1 is an exciting place. A lot of dudes like to skip it, but I love it because…well…I think the first quest in Borderlands 2 just about sums it up:
Nice.
Never played Borderlands, but that’s a cool way to be putting things into perspective.
I think one day I would like to do a level 1, all stats are 10s campaign just to see how far they can go.
Call it “D&D Hard Mode” or something? I’ve always liked that kind of idea (character funnels, asymmetrical parties, etc.) but I’ve never had the opportunity myself. Could be a fun con experience anyway.
I’ve commented this comment before, but my personal dogma of D&D is that you’re not really living unless your hit points are single digit.
I had a 12th level paladin/grey guard on a 3.5 chat that was ushering some lower levels (8, 9ish I think, just sort of playing babysitter except the kids are teens and know not to drown themselves by now) though some particularly hazardous enemy territory when the Illusionary Terrain lifted and we were beset on all sides by demons of all sorts, headed by a glabrezu. After the requisite taunting, I fully intended to shield wall for everyone else (who were on the -real- adventure), but the head honcho explained in a mocking tone that “My master likes nothing better than to play with his food, so everyone gets to have a 1 on 1 bout with an (appropriately CR) demon. Oh yeah, and if anyone loses, you all lose. Also I’m gonna be fighting the paladin myself. Enjoy!”
Cue half a dozen rounds of full attacks from the glabrezu and the accompanying grapples, followed by desperate Devastating Touches in return (which are basically Reverse Lay on Hands). Something happened where I got the chance to pull out one of my scrolls, got seven hit points back from the CLW it had, ended the fight with 4 hit points left and no healing remaining in the tank whatsoever. It leveled me up to 13, and I rolled my d10 for a new maximum of 174 HP, which I thought was super neat because that’s how many hit points a glabrezu has too. The other PCs did quite well with their fights, and we busted through a crowd of imps after all the 1v1s were done to grab the MacGuffin and scram.
Easily the most memorable combat I’ve had in years of D&D. 4 hit points. My heart was in my throat the whole time.
CR 13 demon vs. 12th level paladin? That sounds like a pretty even matchup. Must have been a touchdown dance at the end of that fight. 😀
The halberd was spiked triumphantly.
The battle that I am about to describe could best be described as “the plot train’s last stand”. We had recently failed trying to steal a very powerful artifact from an evil ninja empire, and when we next walked into town the streets quickly emptied and we soon found ourselves in the crossbow sights of 6 ninjas and a powerful evoker. The ninjas were arrayed along the rooftops, and the wizard was on the ground in front of us. As the effective party leader, I agreed to their condition that we lay down our arms after the ninjas demonstrated the effectiveness of their poisoned bolts on the sorcerer. The weapons and spellcasting foci were confiscated and one ninja took them and headed off to the palace. We were rounded into a small group, the wizard leading us towards the city jail, the assassins guarding us on both flanks. By a chain-linkage of obscure languages (primordial to auran to giant eagle to abbysal) we managed to come up with a plan. When I (a barbarian) saw that the wizard wasn’t facing me, I walked up behind him, activated a rage, ripped his staff out of his hands, and tossed it to the party sorcerer. I then sprinted off down a back alley, eating a devastating opportunity attack from a shortsword poisoned with wyvern venom. Using the wizard’s staff, our party sorcerer cast an invisibility spell with a high level slot to include the entire rest of the party other than myself. While the wizard and the sorcerer snuck off in one direction and I frantically scrambled off down the streets and alleys of the city using cover in doorways to attempt to avoid the poisoned crossbows of my foe, the kenku paladin went in an entirely different direction, imitating the noise of all our footsteps on the cobblestones and distracting the remaining 3 assassins and the wizard (now without a spell focus). After a long pursuit, I managed to escape into the alleys of the city, the invisible wizard and sorcerer managed to steal back our stolen gear and weapons, and the kenku managed to get a knife to the throat of the gimped evoker, bargaining for a ceasefire to allow himself to escape. We met up just outside town, took a long rest sleeping in the woods, cast water breathing, and snuck back into the city under the surface of the ocean. We then hitched a ride on the bottom of a ship, climbing out of the water and commandeering the vessel two days’ sail from port.
From this point on, the DM realized that we were working as a well-oiled machine, and allowed us to take up our self-proclaimed goal of conquering the world. The resulting game was probably the most fun one I have ever played. We became leaders of an orc warband, fought an army of fire elementals out of the world’s biggest city thereby conquering it for ourselves, smashed the armies of the ninja empire when they later sent their own forces after us in a naval invasion, and eventually divided most of the known world between us, to form the nations that would become the basis for the next campaign.
Were you goodly rulers? Because WWCD is an important question.
No, we were definitely not goodly rulers. Our nations were as follows:
A near-anarchy with corporal punishment in the arena as the penalty for any and all crimes (if they caught you and you weren’t able to bribe your way out)
A heavily nationalist dictatorship with strong propaganda (this one’s mine)
An underground slavery and kidnapping hub.
A nation built on necromancy and centered around a school of the same.
Yeah… You guys might want to lay down some barbarian repellant, because that mess is how you get Conans.
I love the idea of these kinds of moments. When I DM I want to have my players feel like they’re heroes; I will give you challenges of both battle and social, I will dump crises of city-wide, national, or plane threatening right on top of you with subtle and not-so-subtle foreshadowing, you or someone in the party just said the wrong thing to a homebrew above Ancient age Red dragon in his lair which is in a city which is in a nation that he leads. It is entirely possible that you can and will die.
But I will always do my best to help anyone my group when they Dare to be Badass. Someone wants to grab a chain and whip it around a monster that’s running away? Athletics vs. athletics. Was only off by 2? The chain hooks around it but now you’re being dragged. Give me a athletics to grab something or put your feet down to stop it. I try to give them some way to have their crazy plan succeed. it’ll likely screw with the plans I had but letting them made some of the most memorable and funny as shit moments I’ve had playing D&D.
For me in the end it’s all about having fun and making a world where you can win, even if it’s improbable. Unlike my DM on the other hand…
“Be a fan of the PCs” remains awesome advice. Let ’em be heroes, you know?
Now that said, you’ve got me well and truly curious about this DM of yours. Is he the adversarial type?
Hardly, if anything he’s a easy going guy. It comes down to how we tell our stories; I prefer uplifting stories while for him…the best description I’ve heard is from one of his friends and a player: “He told me that he makes the story and our characters are in it. Whether we fail or not is up to us, the world goes on.”
In short I prefer noblebright/dark while he’s more of a grimdark guy. Tragedy and sadness tickles his black heart while I don’t mind it being there so long as the people rise above it.
Now that’s interesting to me. If we accept the paradigm of “player as author,” then the story existing before the players touch it can be a bit of a problem. I think it can work though if the players’ success or failure can affect the larger world and rewrite the GM’s ending. It all depends on how much the players can change the story, damming its flow and redirecting its course as they go.
I like the idea of that style. So often I’m the center of some divine prophecy or one of a small group responsible for saving the world. For once I’d like to be just a guy that people hire to clear out the caves when the bandits are acting up, without stumbling upon some artifact of godly power or other such nonsense. It is kind of refreshing to be able to interact with the world without the fate of the universe depending on it.
Dunno if I’ve told this one before, but my GM created an encounter where two of our characters changed abilities (temporarily) upon triggering a trap that coughed out some homebrew power-swapping dust. Seeing how ridiculously OP that was, I convinced my GM that as an alchemist, I should be able to collect some in a vial for later use.
Fast forward almost a year in real time. The party is trapped in a collapsing Fey dimension being chased by the incarnation of a dead god. I say to my party, “Go on without me, I’ll take care of this while you escape!” They look at me incredulously, and leave fully expecting me to do the whole paladin sacrifice thing.
So I walk up to the monstrosity and shout, “Fight me, one on one!” It cackles and moves in to squish me like a bug. Then I say to the GM, “Okay I use the brown dust.”
Stunned silence for a few seconds. Then she rules that my mortal body can’t handle the power and I nearly die. But hey, the big bad is also incapacitated, and the party manages to recover my body and get away in the ensuing chaos.
So yeah, risky move but gotta love trying to take on an impossible fight.
I always think of Neuromancer in moments like that:
Not quite a TPK situation, but I spent my first-ever dungeon getting absolutely trashed at every opportunity. The very first action of the very first combat I was ever in was my half-elf getting shot with an elfsbane arrow fired by a Ranger with Favored Enemy (Elf) who then rolled high for damage. (My character: “Ow.”) My second combat got me Panicked by a failed Will save, AOO’d, tripped and barely being able to crawl away while the rest of the party dealt with it. My third combat had me chipping away at an immobile enemy with ranged cantrips while it fought our tank. My fourth combat saw me get Panicked again, recover and return and spend four turns rolling too low to hit an AC 13 enemy with my +6 total attack bonus. Then, having done the aforementioned third and fourth combats without rest, we ended up in my fifth combat, when we were looting a room and found a giant hermit crab with a metal shell. It’s first action was to successfully grapple me and our other main melee fighter. I foolishly attacked instead of trying to break the grapple immediately, took a bunch of damage when it maintained the grapple and the party’s plan changed from “defeat enemy” to “retreat.” Through Enlarge Person and Aid Another, we were able to break the grapples and flee, but by the time I got out of range, I had but 2 HP left, HP that I only had because I had 16 CON and had rolled high on hit dice. If I’d gone into negatives, there wasn’t anything the rest of the party could have done to save me, and I would have lost my first character in my third session (and the first session had no combat). So that at least felt like a “victory” against potential TPK.
…On the plus side, when the next real combat came around and I killed 4 ghouls and a ghast (three in one turn), it felt pretty good.
Yeesh. That’s a lot of rotten luck all at once. Sounds like the real BBEG is the bell curve. :/
level1 group: fighter as last one up, with 0 HP killed the last monster before passing out at -1, woke up faster than the rest of us to feed the healer the potion and get everyone home.
I bet you could hear that table erupt from space.
I have to say straight up that the situation in your anecdote of the bloodrager versus the medusae is simply majestic, and not one I think I could top.
But to share a similar -though less dramtically perfect- event in my gaming history, I’d look back to the first character I played as a grown-up (which is to say, after I’d worked through the usual dreary assortment of wish-fulfillment characters). This was also the only character I’ve played from start to finish in a campaign where I was not dm.
He was Arinen Blayke, a disgraced Neverwintrian courtier who had reinvented himself as mercenary as part of a long and gruelling plan to rehabilitate himself. His class was an unusual combination of sorcerer/fighter (which is, he always had sorcerous talent but took up martial training in aceptance of the fact that the hoi-polloi trust the shining man on horseback more than the berobed wizard).
Anyhow, the situation was that our party had wandered into a town and thoughtlessly thrown their weight around and in doing so stepped on the toes of the local criminal/law enforcement syndicate. The outraged gangsters, all built with character levels, accosted the party publically to throw us out of town and demonstrate their supremacy.
The DM wasn’t messing around – he’d dropped plenty of hints that we shouldn’t be making waves and we had blithely ignored them all. This was supposed to be an easily losable fight, and my fellow party members acknowledged that and surrendered to the toughs – except for Arinen, who would not play along. They all handed over their weapons as I was standing giving the enemy lip, and the other players were getting increasingly frantic at me to just shut up and stop endangering us all. The stakes, they pointed out, weren’t very high – we were just being run out of town and there were plenty of other places to go.
But Arinen, you see, was above all a politician, and he was a slave to public perception. He felt he could not afford even a small humiliation. So he stood his ground, threw down the gauntlet, dropped the sweetroll and stamped on it.
And we won. Arinen was also something of a gambler, combining in his ability heavy armour proficiencies and a penchant for abjuration magic. In 3E magic was a bad bet when heavily armoured (something like a 1/3 fail chance) but when it worked, as it did in the opening of this fight, it was mighty. With his AC boosted into the mid 20s, Arinen became practically unhittable, and after a couple of rounds was joined by his somewhat shame-faced (and unarmed) party members as they realised he was actually as good as his bold words. We carved those thugs into itty bitty chunks with flair.
It wasn’t a world-changing event. It wasn’t a great victory over evil. But damn did we demonstrate to all the unwashed masses that there was a new gang in town, and we weren’t to be taken lightly.
And for a long time after, Arinen was insufferable. And the party was never again so quick to throw in the towel.
I’ve often thought about giving the braggart archetype a try, but I’ve never got around. Must be a good day at the office when you can back up the tough talk.
Still, it makes me wonder if you guys ever wound up paying the price for that new attitude. Confidence is all well and good, but overconfidence….
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
Oh yeah, we came up hard against hubris eventually. One memorable event, much later in campaign, involved a battle with a trio of Gelugons which resulted in a permanent player death!
But somehow we never took the lessons from failure as much to heart as we did those of victory.
Given how the advice caption is worded, and how the bloodrager survived (arguably) ignoring it, I’m disappointed that nobody said “I AM THE HYPE!” yet.
I’ve always known that when people start getting into more complicated concepts, like the motion system in Pathfinders (I’ve been playing the hover game for a year and still have no real understanding of how flying works in that game), I simply need to adjust my understanding of movement rules. It sounds like a good incentive for an intelligent species to do, or one habituated to hunting in groups, from what I can see from your example. If the players object, I will respond that they are free to do the same if they like.