One Hit Point Left
WARNING: Reading this dramatic scene carries some risk. Consult your GM if you experience morale bonuses to Constitution, advantage on Strength checks or Strength Saving Throws, difficulty concentrating on spells, or other symptoms associated with Rage. If these symptoms persist for two or more sessions, or if you have a family history of writing belligerent rants on message boards, seek an FAQ immediately. Ahem:
Player: “Natural frigging 20! I crit for…carry the nine…4,362 damage. Hell yeah!”
GM: “OK. Let me just mark that off. And… cool. It’s the fiend’s turn.”
Player: “You mean it’s not dead?”
GM: “Nope. It has exactly one hit point remaining. Also it flees into the portal and escapes your righteous fury.”
Player: “It flees? Then it provokes an attack of opportunity!”
GM: “Ooh… sorry about that. I meant to say that it uses the withdraw action.”
Player: “But I have a reach weapon. Only the first square is safe from the reach of my mighty Gadget arms!”
GM: “Fine, whatever. Go ahead and role.”
Player: “Holy crap, another nat 20! I decapitate the the evil-doer for great justice!”
GM: “You attempt to do so. But your enemy has one last trick up its sleeve. The creature casts emergency force sphere!”
Player: “Didn’t you ban that from this campaign?”
GM: “I mean… It uses one of its legendary actions to force a reroll.”
Player: “Nat 20 again.”
GM: “You fool! The fiend was just an illusion!”
Player: “I have truesight up.”
GM: “Look, I’m tired of you arguing about every little rules call. If you can’t accept my authority as a GM, you can leave my table.”
And scene. Like we learned way back in “Boss Monster,” this mess isn’t just hypothetical. Desperate to save their pet storylines, there is literally no bottom to the bullshittery of a cornered GM. So for today’s discussion, what do you say we commiserate about these gross abuses? When have you caught your GM in bald-faced lie? And by the same token, have you ever been tempted to stoop to these depraved depths in your own moments of weakness? Climb aboard that railroad and tell your own “I was robbed” stories down in the comments!
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I wouldn’t trust Bad Cat if she said she sun rises in the east.
She shouldn’t be so smug; she created her own nemesis – one who knows her very, very well… all the rituals… all the talismans… the way she operates.
But once she reclaims her throne, she’ll be unstoppable!
She may find there’s someone already sitting on it.
And hasn’t that someone been an uncharacteristically good boss…?
One Woolantula the Servile, for instance, has been the recipient of his own galaxy’s worth of gold stars…
> someone already sitting on it
What do you think Bad Cat’s ritual is intended to do anyway? It’s not a simple plane shift going on here.
*hint*foreshadow*dire warning*
I can dream, can’t I? ^^; *dreading*
This is why I have “Cutscene Mode”. Sometimes I just want an enemy to smoothly exit when weakened, or the Shadowy Figure of Foreshadowing to just walk away while the players fight disposable minions instead of having to have an inconvenienced BBEG Disintegrate a PC who won’t keep his Grapple checks to himself. Either I can pull the kind of nonsense in the description, wearing on everyone’s nerves, or I can just pause combat time and declare the villain’s escape. It’s not as satisfying as running it properly and not for every game, but in my current game which embraces its more-silly-than-usual JRPG setting it’s just the ticket. I *will* admit to slightly padding a boss monster’s HP after a Paladin crit (D&D5e) so it could at least show off its fancy phase-transition-attack.
I have been a victim of this as well though, very frustrating. We’d just found a Necromancer meeting with his Pirate “suppliers” in a seaside cave, scouting them out undetected and setting up an attack from two sides to surround and destroy the villains. The majority of the party began skirmishing with the Pirates from the north, prompting the Necromancer to unleash some manner of undead abomination and flee south towards the boats and my waiting Hexblade, built for pure single-target damage.
At this point I broke cover and attempted to cut off the villain’s escape with a Shatter spell on the cave roof, attempting to block the exit. The GM ruled that this spell, normally sufficient to send a mighty Dwarven stone bridge crumbling into rubble, produced only some minor quaking and dislodged a couple of stalactites. The Necromancer just walked right over the sad veneer of dust I had apparently created, summoning a minor imp to deal with me. Next, I utilised my full mobility, including a Sprint action and a teleport from a magic item, to close to melee with the frail caster and set up my hexes. The next round I was hit with a Hold Person spell, which due to some good rolls later was revealed to be impossible for my WIS 8 character to actually save against, and the Necromancer completed his escape. The trash imp that I bypassed would have killed my character (thanks to our theoretically-clever two-front attack leaving the other characters unable to reach me without fighting through the majority of the Pirates) if the GM hadn’t had the bastard not even bother to Concentrate for the full duration of the spell.
“Cutscene Mode?” I know that technique!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/to-catch-a-killer-part-3-stay-of-execution
I think it works best when you plan it out ahead of time. I also like your technique of genuinely saying, “OK guys. Timeout.” But when the unexpected happens and you try to cling too hard to your pet NPC… That’s when the PCs get annoyed.
The worst I’ve seen was subdued, a bit of an error most likely. I was playing a Transmuter and had “Echolocation” up. An enemy was invisible and had Nondetection, blocking even True Sight. The catch is, Echolocation is not a divination that Nondetection should block, but rather… a Transmutation that gave me a sound-based detection power.
The BBEG’s lieutenant showing up by surprise still wasn’t enough to save him, though. (He was ALSO a Transmuter, btw. The BBEG that is.)
I have experienced that in Hackmaster, but in a totally legitimate way. Hackmaster has a coupon system that allows you to pull off things in an emergency (one a session per player, one per player per session for the DM). Most are simple stuff like rerolls, one-shot spell casts, but there are some sillier ones (like the hilarious “make the DM buy you a soft drink”).
We had cornered a particular bad guy who had been making our lives a misery, thought we had got him, and the DM played the coupon “Exit stage left” which just allows him to get away. We were fuming, and he was very smug. On the plus side, there is only one of those cards in the set, and you have to hand over used cards to the other person, so unless he has gone out and bought a second DMG just to screw with us, we know that card is gone for next time we catch him! (we usually ransom back DM cards for more player cards – but this one has stayed locked in my coupon box)
I like recurring villains, but as a player I know that is very frustrating that when the villains gets aways because “the GM said so” so now I just asume that every villain that I use against the players is going to die. They might still try to flee, but I no longer asume that it will work. Now if I need them later for the story I just resurrect them with npc magic.
The human bandit leader that was killed at level 2? Now is a bugbear bandit leader after rolling very well on the reincarnation table.
The human politician that is secretly the mob boss? His “daughter” has taken over the operation after her parent spirit possesed her and asumed her identity.
The evil wizard who was desintegrated? When the players find them again they are a talking jar of ashes on top of a construct body.
The fiend that as an outsider if it dies cannot be resurrected? Turns out that it keeps a portion of it’s essence into a bottle and after devouring a lot of souls is back to full strenght ready for round two.
The black dragon that wanted to run the region? No, that one is still dead. This one is her (mechanical identical) spouse that defitinely always existed and is going to still carry over the plan.
It’s still bullshit? Yes. But is slighty less obvious bullshit.
I’ve sort of done this in my one and only 5e campaign. No obvious rulebreaks, but I made sure to have my villain have counterspell and not use many slots to ensure no one can block his dimension door to blip himself and the party traitor out of there.
Years ago I was part of a huge combat in a big multi-party campaign. It was the multidimensional arena campaign I’ve mentioned a time or two before. There was a huge group of enemies attacking our rest area, but between a well placed entangle, fog cloud, an actual summoned alligator, and an illusion alligator, we bottlenecked the enemies and turned it into a series of smaller fights. However, the GM had actually wanted us to retreat inside, so somehow the enemy’s caster, who was somewhere around level 4, cleared all the spells from roughly 200 feet of battlefield with a single action.
In the end, it did not work out for the GM though, because that and other stuff ended up splitting the game in half, and the rest of the GM team left to make our own game.
It was in a 5e campaign, and we had just gotten our Buffy on with a vampire. We forced him to retreat, found his coffin, smashed it all up, then smoked him by dropping the building on him.
Well, the DM revealed that it turned out he hid other coffins all over the city, and we just smashed his favorite one, like breaking his comfy chair, and that he restored himself just fine. Needless to say, we were not impressed with that. Vampirism doesnt really allow for that, and its cheap to boot. It was one of the incidents that led to that particular campaign crashing and burning. We’re all still friends and play together, but we had to have a long talk DM about not putting NPCs in combat if we werent OK with them dying.
The bruises on Bad Cats cleavage resembles a fat-lipped fish. I have seen this, so now you must as well.
Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I made a campaign which ran great for the first few sessions, until the intrepid party met the BBEG for what was supposed to be the initial encounter.
Every-damned-one-of-them used their once-a-day/week feats and rolled a crit, the spellcasters rolled almost perfect damages, the BBEG failed every single oversized save and it should have ended with them looting the corpse and missing out on the dungeon to come and all the fun therein since I played it ‘as the dice roll’.
I decided that a contingency teleport was going to kick in and the mewling, gnashing of teeth and completely unveiled threats commenced.
I gave them each the appropriate xp, let them rifle through the BBEG’s robes and pockets for some spare change and a few mostly depleted wands, and then told them to roll some new characters as I reached for a module we’d played before but I was going to tack the rest of this campaign into instead.
The wailing and moaning got worse and I just said “pick one”.
The BBEG vanished into a plothole with a puff of approbation and the game went on for several more very enjoyable months.
Nobody even complained when the BBEG, on their second encounter, turned out to now be an unturnable undead, immune to critical hits and made saves with impunity.
Sometimes, a train ride is the only way to get to the destination 😉
So, my GM is really good at some areas, but struggles in others, so I’m gonna rant a bit but I really do enjoy their games. They are good at telling a story, but really bad at making it flow in gameplay without breaking the rules. For example, they wanted to have a moment where the caster, who was dominating the last few encounters, to not do so well and have to rely on the other players. So, they had an enemy wizard cast Antimagic Field, a personal spell, on the invisible caster from 100 feet away through a wall. Then they had a Monk trip them. Well, no big deal, they get up from prone and eat an Attack of Opportunity, which the Monk tries to use to trip them again. Now, usually AOO’s resolve before someone gets up, so you can’t trip someone getting up from prone. Then the caster had their familiar take the AOO with In Harms Way, which let them spend an AOO to take an attack for their master, and then do it again as they provoke for running up to the enemy wizard. But, the GM said that you can only take one AOO per turn even with Combat Reflexes so the Monk could trip them with their second AOO and the familiar couldn’t help.
The thing is, I called them out on all the rules breaking, but their defense was always just “Well, this is how I’ve always ran things, so I’m not gonna change it.” This was not how they always ran things, they just wanted to screw the caster for this encounter. Now, again, they are usually a good GM, but it’s really annoying to do something and have them say that they actually ban that, or that they houserule it differently, or that they don’t like it so they are gonna change it, or just make the enemies randomly immune to whatever you do. I suppose it’s just them wanting to tell a story and me wanting to play a game, and sometimes those two wants don’t coincide.
Therefore, as a GM, I am absolutely fine with whatever cheese or BS my players pull because I can relate. If you use invisibility, the enemies won’t suddenly have True Sight. They have what they have, and if your tactic happens to beat theirs, all that means is the encounter is going to be easier. I don’t try and tell a story, I just run the game and have the NPCs take the actions I think they would take, and I feel like that works best for me.
I haven’t encountered this often, but I have been able to “Biff the Understudy” it. Last time the party killed off an orc shaman before he could point them to the next plot point, I had his spirit animal alternate between cursing them out and telling them where they could go get themselves killed before vanishing into the æther.
Roleplaying an irate spectral cockroach is definitely one of the more interesting experiences I’ve had as a DM.
This is part of why I believe that Perception is overrated. You’re going to find the next plot point because the GM needs you to find the next plot point.
I supposed that the “correct” thing is to let villainy do its thing in the background, slowly building towards its goals until the party notices in the Evil Agenda style we talked about back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-nick-of-time
But dammit, I put work into this dungeon, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to spend my leisure time dicking around with random encounters because Oscar the Orc died a turn too early.
Personally, I err on the side of the players when DMing, although there were a couple times I had someone who had established teleportation bug out at low health.
But let me rant at y’all about a DM’s pet NPC, with a DM who was, intentionally or not, a total dick.
Based on a Demon Slayer character, which I had and have exactly zero context of, he told my character, a barbarian named Felhand whose entire life revolved around combat, had been talked out of the last two major combat encounters, including something of a personal challenge from literally Jormungandr, that he wasn’t gonna personally train the women in the party because he swore to Tiamat never hit a woman. Cue Felhand getting pissed off, for obvious reasons. Then he pulls a Dark Sun Gwyndolin and does space manipulation and whatnot.
Okay, I charge forward.
Evard’s Black Tentacles.
This was over three sessions, too.
Then a thing that I had been essentially trying to get his attention about for several months came up. Would’ve been fine with it as he was busy during that time, but he gave piss-all information about why he hadn’t done anything.
I come up with a different solution to fling myself out of tentacle-reach and into his stupid, taunting face, to get the one hit I was vocal about being the point of picking a fight, oops, he has some stupid barrier.
He misgenders me for about the eightieth time, despite me asking publicly and asking privately and explaining why it’s important to me (albeit in not super-clear terms), I correct him (a bit more forcefully than usual), he goes “I have trouble with it because I’m referring to the players and not the characters” I go “Yeah. *She.*” And my sister still has to spell it out for him. He apologises, in something of a backhanded way, I chalk it up to him probably being a fellow ND person and forgive him, we move on.
Completely coincidentally, I’m now able to get through the barrier and get my damn hit in.
Unfortunately, due to massive other issues (that unfortunately overlapped with family stuff) and repetition of the same big issues, that I talked with him about but he did piss-all to actually either really apologise for or fix, I no longer felt comfortable with him DMing and left.
Sorry about the rant and frustration, but I don’t really have another place to put this where it’s unlikely for someone to be pissy about my existence (US healthcare continuing to screw my attempts at therapy over).
I once healed a struggling PC by 12 hit points when the dice said 4. The nature of the dungeon they were in meant I didn’t have a backup plan if they died. Said player heard the insincerity in my voice and called me out. I doubled down. Still feel bad about it. Not for helping them out, but for lying about it.
Never tell them your bad guy has X hit points left. Be more descriptive. Also, as a brief aside, don’t allow a half dozen challenges to a single moment. Take a page from football and limit challenges to call. Session Zero stuff that.
Back to the matter at hand, I do like pulling THIS move on your hypothetical over-achieving power gamer.
GM: Wait, HOW much damage?
Player, smugly, confidently: 4,362! *Probably does a dance in their chair.*
GM: Ooooohkay… *roll some dice. Make some hmm noises. Check a book you don’t check too often.*
GM: Mmhmm… ok… so that and that… then… right, right, alright. *nods*
Player: *Victory dancing stops* It’s dead, right? There’s no way!
GM: Right, could you roll me an Arcana? No? You’re Fighter Meathead, Esq? Right then. There is a brilliant flash of blinding light and the BBEG is GONE.
Player: You mean dead.
GM: Far as you know. Also there’s no loot.
And leave it at that. Maybe it will make sense to have a mwahaha I survived moment later… maybe not. Put all of their machinations on pause for a while, you know the drill here.
That is still cheating.
I’ve been tempted before.
I remember one boss encounter I’d put a lot of effort into, carefully designing how it would change its behavior and tactics at it got fewer and fewer HP (thinking of it like a video game boss with phases and escalation and stuff), and then…the party blew through the entire first phase before the villain took its first turn.
I quietly boosted its HP a bit, but not much. I resigned myself to the fact that cheating wasn’t going to make this better enough to justify the cheating.
(I fondly remember the boss breaking out some stone-shaping magic to protect itself, fully aware that the party could pass/break through that barrier with minimal effort.)
Hot, tangential take: D&D/PF have lame bosses. Few editions have boss monsters, per se; almost all climactic encounters use monsters whose rules are designed to work equally well as mooks several levels down the line. Things like 5e’s legendary actions help the action economy, but they don’t change the fact that health, damage, etc scale so symmetrically, and that most bosses are just higher up on that scale.
There’s a lot of supporting arguments I could add, and some nuance I could add, like how some video games literally bring back early bosses as common enemies in the late game, and why I think that doesn’t change the overall argument.
(Look at the Capra Demon from Dark Souls; its difficulty comes not from its health bar, but from its boss arena and dogs. Capra demons in the Demon Ruins don’t have those advantages. It works as a boss because of context, not innate stats.)
But this is an overlong tangent, I don’t want to go overlonger than I have to.
One bit of nuance I feel I should add: I’m not saying it’s impossible to construct non-lame boss encounters. You can put a small army of mooks between the players and the boss, or some other obstacle. You can design a boss arena that suits the boss’s powers or poses some unique tactical challenge. You can act the villain in a memorable way. There are options! What I’m saying is very specifically that the stat blocks of D&Ds’ boss monsters don’t help you make climactic encounters. They help you make functional encounters.
I ran a Black Crusade campaign that was going to encompass all the modules from each of the books based on the four Chaos Gods. The whole thing kicked off with the group visiting a massive library complex in regards to some prophecy or legend. Well turns out the guy at the top who had the book of said prophecy decided he was going to fill the role himself and claim UNLIMITED COSMIC POWER.
So he trapped them in the room, set it on fire, and then convinced every guard on the planet that the fool heretics were burning the library, so when they finally got out of the room, it was a fight all the way down. He was cackling all the way to his ride, and did not expect them to skip fighting through several floors by using good old ‘barbarian featherfall’ to get to the 1st floor hot on his tail.
So, it was a fight, and as a psyker, he threw everything he had into running away, and was damned near going to get off to plague them by being one step ahead of every prophetic checkpoint, when one of the characters declared, “Oh HELL no!” and burned a fate point to nail him with a brutal shot that, er… left him at just oooone hitpoint, but made him drop his warp-infused magic stick as a consolation reward!
…Of course, the next player ALSO decided that ‘oh hell no’ was in order, and burned one immediately after, and of course they hit the fleeing chariot, sending that plan crashing to the ground in a ball of flame. Not gonna lie, after the ‘One hp left’ maneuver, I could not bring myself to further BS his escape. I let them get to him on his dying breath, so he could gasp out one last, “Exactly… as… planned,” before dying.
The highfives around the table were plenty worth having to reshuffle plans.
Wait… are you telling me our DM lied to us about the enemies having one hp remaining? T-T
Having never met your DM or seen you guys play, I can’t say for sure.
But on the other hand yes, your DM 100% lied to you.
The GM bullshit never actually happened, but mine did worry I was fourth wall breaking when I had my character comment on “if a mysterious entity can make doors open without giving away jack shit, it could probably force us to go through if we tried to refuse.” I just meant that as a “my character has experience with telling malevolent entities to fuck off because he’s a cleradin”
I actually had the opposite problem. I needed to fudge to keep a player character from dying at the hands of a villain who needed to escape with an NPC captive. The players were actually okay with it… I decided it stunk, and I instituted a new rule. “If the outcome must be preordained, it has to take place off-camera. After all, if I’m gong to tell the character’s stories myself, what do I need players for?
I had a DM who didn´t understand the rules of 5e, to the degree that we once played through an entire 13th Age adventure. Ignoring me whenever I mentioned discrepancies. Such as the fact that four “CR” 6 creatures that each have a +11 to hit and deal more than 20 damage per hit isn´t a balanced encounter for a level 6 party. Not to mention the 50 damage special attack one of them had. The only reason I got this confirmed was because I did a basic search on some names from it, and found it online (After we had played through it). Even after I tried to explain it to him again, he simply insisted 13th Age was a 5e setting.
It became pretty clear that he had a clear story in mind that he wanted us to follow, but had very little knowledge of how the system actually worked. So battles where very clearly fudged on the regular, bad rulings where made (“Escaping this creatures grapple is a flat check, vs a DC of 17!) and he got annoyed when we didn´t follow the plot, while at the same time making every NPC overly vague, sarcastic and slightly antagonistic towards us.
But generally I don´t personally plan around my bosses escaping. Sure some do try to escape, but if my players enter combat with a boss then it is generally because I am personally prepared for their death. Or I am not, and then simply accept that my entire planned plotline have gone drastically of rails and is now spiraling into the canyon below. I want to say you get used to that with time, but I don´t think you ever really do.
Don’t say she’s going to get out of this. I just want Magus back.
I’ve never deliberately warped an outcome to save a BBEG, but I have watched with mixture of amusement and disappointment as a player attempted some sick wrestling moves on a dragon mounted BBEG that would have been really cool if the BBEG was there as more than just the Mislead Illusion.
The Barbarian shouting “Coward!” as he plummeted to the ground empty handed was pure gold, though.
No one of the techniques is necessarily bad-wrong-fun. I’ll even do the ol’ “one hit point left” business in specific circumstances. (See “one last round” back here.) It’s when the party spots you pulling the levers behind the scene that you run into trouble.
Your own illusion-based BBEG sounds like a blast. You’ve got to love an enraged barbarian plummeting to the ground. 😀
What with the availability of resurrection spells and the prevalence of undead, it makes me wonder why do the ‘one hit point left’ thing at all?
Use a raise dead spell, have the bad guy come back as a ghost, have them reincarnate as a fiend, heck, have their shadow or mirror image come to life or have a treacherous lieutenant steal their soul to power themselves up.
Though funnily enough, 3.5 does have an Indomitability spell that can save the affected creature from fatal damage once, leaving them at 1 HP.
…Heck, combine all of those! The bad guy survives at 1 HP, which gives him the opportunity to get a contingency spell off. The party finishes him off after his gloating and attempted escape and obliterates his body for good measure, but his soul splits into half a dozen pieces, entering a magic mirror to create a doppelganger, an evil-aligned magic item to make a new fiend, a medallion worn by his lieutenant…and for good measure, pull a Zelda II, have the bad guy’s surviving minions seeking the heroes’ blood to sprinkle over their master’s ashes to resurrect them!
There is very little that is more frustrating as a player than the GM saying “because I say so”. While this is the first rule of tabletop rgps, it’s also the rule that should be relied on least, as it is the one based entirely on GM fiat and thus the one that will most likely alienate players. Any GM should know and accept that no plan nor storyline will survive intact after running into the players, so they need to be willing to adjust a bit (or a lot) on the fly.
I have literally shut a campaign down because of this. I had just PCSed to a new base and was overjoyed to find a group that played at the base rec center that welcomed me in.
Rolled a new character and spent the next two months fighting with the DM over exactly the sort of thing in todays comic. He had no consistency at all and was obvious when fudging for favorite players or his monsters. He also had the bad habit of making up rules and then forgetting what he had said. All things that drive me up a wall.
I didn’t want to try and find another group. I liked all the players and the DMs game was actually fun when he wasn’t being an issue. He finally snapped at me and said if I thought I could do better, then maybe I should run.
So guess who ended up DMing for the next three years until my next PCS move. All the other players told me, at one time or another, that they also had issues with him, but didn’t want to get into a confrontation.
Oh goddess, this is my biggest issue i I have had running book adventures. I personally love to run or play them, but so many encounters need other characters getting away so they can come back later or can’t have confronations before chapter ends. It has come up way too many times.
Do you have a preferred solution for a home game? “Just bring in the other evil lieutenant” or some such?
So my solution is actually i just don’t dm anymore. I was always a DM out of need never me wanting and it caused me no ends of stress and feeling like i was doing a horrible job. This specific issue usually needed me just telling the PC’s out of character they needed to drop it for plot.
Simple solution: All BBEGs are half-orcs now. Just all of them.
https://5e.d20srd.org/srd/races.htm#HalfOrc
Relentless Endurance. When you are reduced to 0 hit points but not killed outright, you can drop to 1 hit point instead. You can’t use this feature again until you finish a long rest.
The PCs in my current campaign “rescued” the current antagonist from some pirates at the end of last session. I’m kind of worried that they’ll just kill her at the beginning of next session, which would be unfortunate. I have plans for her which rather involve being alive.
I am hopeful they’ll show some restraint. The antagonist hasn’t done all that much to them — stole an artifact, which they now have back. And the pitch for the game was “globe-trotting archaeology a la Indiana Jones”, which is hard to do if you execute your opposition at the first opportunity. On the other hand, at least one of my PCs considers Getting Away a capital offense.
I have one card up my sleeve — they’re traveling on a chartered merchantman, and the captain wants no part of murder. So if they try it he’s going to threaten to dump them at the next port, leaving them stranded 1,200 miles from their destination. And if they go ahead and kill her anyway, he’s going to do exactly that. And then I’ll make the players figure out how they’re going to get where they’re going. That should buy me some time to figure out some new sort of opposition.