Smashing Success
This comic is the fault of a certain Magic: the Gathering card. However, it’s important to note that the principle of “too much force” applies to more situations than treasure chests. Is it time for another tale from the table? You bet your last treasure token it is!
So no shit there they were, rushing into danger like good musketeers ought. Invaders from elf-Spain were storming the castle of France-but-with-flying-islands, and our brave band of heroes had to stem the tide.
There in the dungeons, a captured political prisoner had enacted his master plan. With nothing but some rat blood, a prison shank, and couple of paper clips, he’d managed to open a portal. A literal army of long-eared, tapas-swilling soldiers were pouring through. My players were all set for Thermopylae style, hold-the-gates action. And knowing that the odds were against the party, I (in my infinite wisdom) decided to give them a little help.
Figuring it was high time they made peace with the anti-party in the Cardinal’s Guard, I placed their frenemy NPCs in the dungeon too. I assumed that, faced with a major crisis, my honorable PCs would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their countrymen. I underestimated how much they hated those guys.
“As you dash through the first prison ward, you hear the clash of steel down a nearby passage. Familiar voices raise a cry, ‘For the Cardinal!’ What do you do?”
The players huddled. There was much giggling and side-eying. “You remember that necklace of fireballs we picked up a couple of sessions ago?”
The blood left my face. “How many do you throw? Just one bead, right?”
“Naw,” said one supremely self-satisfied musketeer. “The whole thing.”
I looked down at my notes. I looked at the battlefield. I calculated the average damage. And then I asked, “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure! Two birds with one fireball!”
What the necklace-hurling player did not know was that the anti-party had been busy. I had it in my notes that they’d bested the first wave of invaders. They’d even managed to capture the spy that had come through with them. The same spy who had started the campaign as ol’ Chucky McFireball’s Milady de Winter one-true-love.
Boom went the dynamite. Boom went my plans for dramatic interrogation, courtroom, and execution scenes between lovers. And boom went the next five minutes of session time as I furiously debated a rewrite. Because it turned out Milady did not possess ~39d6 fire damage worth of hit points, and neither did her important-for-the-plot satchel filled with, “I’m a double-agent and never stopped loving you,” documents.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever hulked out and smashed too soon? What did you destroy in your zeal, and what approach should you have taken instead? Tell us all about those broken items, murdered NPCs, and collapsed castles down in the comments!
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not 1000% relevant, but when my party was high level and had to do some chores for a lazy genie demigod, their paladin rolled a natural 1 on chopping some magical firewood. Now, the paladin had 20 strength, so I decided to flavour their failure as less of “they weren’t strong enough” and more “they were TOO strong”. They chopped through the wood with such force that they also split the chopping block, and damaged the genie’s axe. this lead to having to fix their mess and, more importantly, didn’t make the high level paladin look pathetic just because of poor luck.
I sometimes flavour natural 1s that the character is proficient or expertised with in a similar fashion, “too much” instead of “not enough”, because I feel it makes the group appear to have grown from the lowly days of level 3
Coming up with dramatically suitable explanations for failure is one of the first and hardest tasks of a GM. Well done making the paladin feel like a BAMF even after the nat 1.
Yes, THAT is how crit-fails should be done.
In fact, one GM I learned from always called natural 1’s “catastrophes”, rather than something like “fumbles”, and the idea was not that the character necessarily screwed up, but simply that the worst possible thing happened. It was never “your character forgot how to climb a rope”, but “the rock face cracks, and your piton comes loose.”
Catastrophes could happen on any d20 roll, and you rolled to confirm them just like you do critical hits. If the confirmation roll beat the original success target, then your character manages to avert catastrophe (but still suffers a normal missed roll), and you still feel like a canny professional despite the setback. If you fail the confirmation check, then whatever happens will be a lot worse than a normal missed check…but the GM would still manage to spin it either as a darkly comic Murphy’s Law moment, or an interesting new challenge to overcome in later rounds.
The one time he WOULD put the blame squarely on the PC was when the catastrophe could be spun as a direct consequence of character traits that the player themselves had invented. So I could never object when my driven, sleepless mad scientist suffered a vivid flashback to the traumatic events that had spawned his campaign-long obsession, when my kindhearted ratfolk entrepreneur hesitated a fraction too long over a killing strike, or when my engineer’s latest jury-rigged invention explo…er, underwent an unplanned rapid-oxidation cascade. (“Ha! Is veritable treasure-trove of unexpected data! Also, ouch.”)
Players want to see their ideas incorporated into fiction. Finding a way to pair that with mechanical failure is the sugar that make the medicine go down.
“Catastrophes” is such a great idea—I’m firmly in the camp of “modifiers represent your ability, dice represent the randomness of chance,” so I try to avoid having things like the rogue with a +10 to their thieves’ tools check botching a dc5 lock; instead, it takes some extra time, or, worse, they open it… only to find that there’s a couple of guards in a foul mood right on the other side of the door
I love that! Personally, I always want to follow the rules-as-written “no critical failures on skill checks” but the accompanying “no critical successes on skill checks” is a hard sell to people when the technically-a-house-rule of having nat 1s and nat 20s on more than just attack rolls is so omnipresent.
I get why—it feels good to roll max and feels bad to roll low! There’s a sense of obligation to “honor” a nat 20 even if the rules don’t technically say you should, but I feel like people also tend to over-punish for natural 1s as a way of compensating. A nat 20 shouldn’t let you do the impossible and a nat 1 shouldn’t make you fumble the impossibly easy.
I’ve been considering using a “+/- 3 rule” instead (for 5e, where a bonus or penalty of 3 still kind of matters at later levels) where a nat 1 subtracts 3 from your roll after you add modifiers, and a nat 20 adds 3 after modifiers, but I don’t know if my players will be willing to go for it.
Yeah, I should have mentioned in the “catastrophe” post above…in that group’s games, just as a natural 1 on any d20 roll (even skill checks and saves) threatened a catastrophe, a natural 20 was always a crit threat. A confirmed crit on a skill check always gave some unexpected perk, and whenever possible the GM would tie it into the character’s own traits.
Or sometimes the traits would grow from the crit successes or catastrophes. I remember one character who gained a “Crazy Cat Lady” perk after a string of uncanny Handle Animal luck. (“You critically pet the cat. Again. You’re confident the local alley cats will have your back from now on.”) Another, an airship captain who hated horses, was pressured into competing in a horse race in a foreign capitol for the honor of her nation…and got a natural 20 on the ride check, another on the confirmation roll, and a third nat 20 on the confirmation-confirmation roll.
There is a wonderful sketch somewhere of Captain Sienna hanging on for dear life as her apparently-rocket-powered horse blurs toward the finish line. (In-world, the Captain naturally cast a baleful eye on the party’s alchemists. Miss Chesterfield and Doktor Krauss remain mum; the Thin Line of Science is sancrosanct. But if they’re guilty of horse doping, it’s only in a retroactive “of course they are” sense; the player really got that one-in-8000 string of rolls. On roll20, no less, so we can’t even wonder about her dice.)
On the flip side, the good Doktor should on paper have been a competent amateur violinist, but he crit-failed one too many performance checks, that was retconned to “he THINKS he’s a competent violinist,” and horrible screeching became his default play mode.
(I should mention that it was not the GM but the players, me included, who ruled that Krauss was officially an awful violinist. The GM would have stuck with his usual policy of “catastrophes are about luck and circumstance, not competence”…but it was funnier for the thunderously confident surgeon to simply have no idea how BAD he was at something.)
If the party doesn’t know an NPC is killed off-screen, is the NPC really killed off-screen?
That is, you had it in your notes that Milady was there, but the party never checked it, right? So… what stopped you from the instant decision that Milady has not yet entered the scene after all, and thus wasn’t obliterated? If she’s important, she should have plot armour from becoming collateral damage in a place where no player should ever expect her to be…
On the other hand, how else are they gonna learn the repercussions of reckless collateral damage
Well, you could let NPCs who are unimportant for the plot but dear to the players perish off-screen; while keeping the plot-crucial NPCs to only die off when the party can see them.
Depends on how you roll as a GM. GMs who favor “dice fall as they may” will kill off the NPC offscreen. GMs who prefer Quantum Ogres might not.
Personally I’m in the “Kill the NPC, save the documents” camp. Makes for better drama…
I let the NPC die, but gave her a dying reconciliation / exposition scene.
Her unfortunate lover gained something of a death wish at that point. I believe he volunteered to steer a skyship into a comet or some malarkey in the final session.
Our Barbarian in Mummy’s Mask went for the ‘smash on sight’ approach in the final few dungeons. It was allowed mostly cause we were a bit fed up with the absurd lethality and trapped nature of them.
Lots of Tombs of Horror is Osirion I take it?
Some wealth that is, if it doesn’t explode spectacularly when mixed haphazardly like that. Do they even use the potion miscibility table?
They’re about to.
I wonder what the insurance claim for Barbarian/Fighter related destruction would be. Force of nature? Malicious adventuring? Raging entity? Kaiju?
Occupational hazard.
Does anyone else think that detonating an entire necklace of fireballs should increase the radius as well as damage? If only to make players think twice about collateral damage before going nuclear.
With great realism comes great rules minutia.
There’s nothing like using a weapon with a blast radius larger than the range to make you appreciate the cover rules.
As the quote goes,
“I didn’t ask how big the room was, I said ‘I cast fireball’!”
lol. Very nice.
I once had a fireball sorcerer in my game. A couple of obnoxious wraiths were phasing in and out of the floor, so she was stoked to discover a trap door.
“I throw open the hatch and blast away!”
“Well it’s pretty dark down there.”
“Whatever. I reach my hand down and blast at the spot where they went through.”
She hit the side of the narrow passage. Straight up Daffy Duck.
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/28/bd/73/28bd73c832680898ca213ff893dd72dc.jpg
Over a million years ago, playing 2nd AD&D, the party was two Thieves/Psions, Bounty Hunter and Bounty Hunter. We both dual-wielded hand-crossbows and had various different melee options we preferred to never use… we also each had a Crossbow of Level Draining that recharged our PP when it triggered on a crit (don’t ask me where we got them, it was a wild and wooly campaign). Anyway we were adventuring in the of the Palace of the Silver Princess (green cover version, though we didn’t know there was a different version) and we’d developed a standard door opening procedure which was “Open door, shoot anything that moves”.
We were in a very ‘beer and pretzels” hijinx phase of high school roleplaying life.
So there we are, GM starts with his spiel, “The door opens, you see a shadowy movement by the flickering candlelight in the room-”
“I shoot it/I shoot it” we both chant in unison.
We both crit our Level Draining xbow shoots…
The Gm paused for several minutes of consulting different sections of the adventure. Then the monster manual. Then said “Let’s take lunch while I figure this out”.
Upon returning from a brief snacking, the GM relaunches into it, “From behind the thin gauzy curtain you just shot through, the slumped over figure stirs, and moans… the figure staggers forward tearing the curtain to reveal the Princess //you were here to rescue//, now an unleaded abomination…”
Yeah… turns out if the target had less levels than were level drained they didn’t just die. We started to opt not to double team foes we weren’t sure of in the future.
Oh the Princess? We redeaded her. And then blamed it on “she was like that when we first saw her” (technically true). And the poor cursed country never did get uncursed…
Didn’t want to shell out of for the resurrection, eh?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/hostage-crisis
In some cases it’s no so much the cash that’s the problem but the incriminating testimony… I have a feeling princesses tend to take unkindly to being killed, raised as an undead abomination, and killed again, regardless of whether they get to come back to life afterwards. “Lese-majeste” is the least of it!
To be honest at that point we figure the curse was a forgone, unliftable conclusion, we didn’t even want to be there, we were roped into it against our wills, we had a massive swag haul, and had found a way to escape.
We managed to escape before whatever permanentish calamity befell the rest of the kingdom, or whatever. Honestly we didn’t even pay attention to what exactly was happening. Well, at least I didn’t.
Oh yeah. My very first RPG campaign (nostalgic sigh). We were chasing masked cultists and we only knew two things about them: they kidnap children, and the cleric sensed some evil-undead vibe emanating from them.
So we reach a town in ruins after an attack from the cultists. All the children have been taken, and we are told that the cultists took them to an old abandoned mine nearby. After a short dungeon crawl in the mine, we reach a big ominous double door with eldritch symbols carved on it. The cleric senses a great evil presence on the other side. The alchemists chimes in with a brilliant plan: we open the door, he throws a fire bomb inside, we close the door. With some luck, this is the only exit, so all the bad guys will burn or suffocate. Everyone’s on board despite a “are you sure?” from the GM.
We open the door.
We throw the fire bomb.
We close the door.
The GM tells us “you hear children screaming”.
We forgot about the damn kids.
We don’t talk about what happened in the mine.
You know that episode of Batman: The Animate Series where Bats rescues a tribe of orphans from a Fagin-type villain and his sewer alligators? You know how he managed it with zero collateral damage? Don’t hold yourself up to impossible standards. Not all of us can be Batman.
I once planned for my players to walk into a room where they would meet one of the BBEGs top men, who would reveal that he was sick of serving him and was looking for new employment.
My players decided to just burst the door in, and unload spells on everyone in the room. Resulting in the top man going “Ah welcome, I greet youarrgh”.
The result was that he still joined them after some yelling, but that he and his henchmen were a fair bit weakened for the fight with the villain.
In the same campaign, a bit earlier, my players went utterly of the rails. The villain was a Rakshasa with a very powerful gladiator henchman. Several levels over my players. The plan was for the party to spend several sessions working with the slave resistance where they could gain levels, get loot and build a reputation, before they went after him to get the McGuffin they needed from him. Instead they just put on the worst disguises known to man, and looney tooned their way into and through his mansion, resulting in a daring escape to and from Hell. They had a load of fun, and I just laughed while trying to figure out what to do with the several sessions worth of material which was now completely irrelevant because the whole gameboard just changed completely.
That is a very understanding traitorous lieutenant.
Three kobolds in a trench coat, eh?
OOOF
Well, fireballs sure are one way to avoid relationship dramas, but OOOF nonetheless
GM’s dilemma. Do I actually follow through and do this to the hapless player, or do I secretly put his princess in another castle? Rough day at the office either way.
In this particular instance, I think the fact that the PCs were doing something that they really shouldn’t have been (fragging their countrymen as the nation is being invaded) justifies the consequences a lot more. If they’d just been using the fireballs as a brilliant trap to destroy the enemy army, I’d be more inclined to move the girlfriend. I wouldn’t specifically put her in the blast zone to punish the players if she hadn’t been there before, but with her already planned to be there, it seems like a perfectly appropriate consequence of their irresponsible actions.
I guess this is a variant of my fudging rule – I may fudge in the PCs’ favor, but only if they are actually TRYING to play the game. In the classic “I know the GM won’t let my character die, so I jump into the lava” straw man scenario, the player warrants no special intervention because they are deliberately breaching their part of the social contract.
I know that feel. In a previous campaign, our party was exploring a cultist lair at the bottom of a long vertical shaft. When we came across a treasure chest that we couldn’t open, my half-orc fighter had an idea. He picked up the chest, carried it up the ladder to the dungeon’s entrance, then dropped it down the shaft. It got the chest open, all right. But how was he to know that it contained priceless crystal statues?
Hey, it would have worked with coinage. How are you supposed to know some random cultists are art dealers?
In a very low-level dungeon, we had blundered our way through a labyrinth of teleportation archways in this maze-without-hallways until we found a room, fancier than anything we’d seen by far, with a sparkly treasure box in a wall niche guarded by an ornate guardian statue. While the party played tag with the stone guardian, my halfling thief (who, I reasoned, wasn’t much help in the brawn department) made the rolls to snag the box.
The rest of the PCs were still in a frantic and painful running combat with the stone guardian when my own curiosity got the better of me–surely we can carry the contents of the box more easily than the whole coffer; our employer didn’t EXPRESSLY state we shouldn’t open it first. The combat was so hectic, half the table didn’t know what was happening to the other half.
I made the Search check, but flubbed the Disarm roll. Somehow the treasure was also destroyed by the explosion. BUT (confession time), I made the IRL Bluff check to convince the other players that “The golem stepped on it and set off the trap.” Only the DM and I knew the truth of why (once again) the PCs weren’t getting paid, and he let me get away with the lie.
Sounds like a hectic battle. The rest of the party must have been arguing about life-and-death tactics or whatever, lol.
Smashing the chest has historically gone quite well for me. Chests have to have external hinges to open outward, so you can smash those with minimal risk to the loot.
Minor spoilers for Tomb of Annihilation. So there was this chest hanging by rusty chains over the water with a sign saying “I devour all but the greatest of thieves”. We paddled our folding boat over to it, and destroyed the chains so we could move it to dry land and get to work. That Guy’s Artificer immediately went for it, and the lock clamped down upon their thieves’ tools, breaking them. They were extremely upset that the chest did what it said it would do. (I learned after the fact that if you failed badly enough you would be teleported into the chest that was then supposed to drop into the water) I then proceeded to smash the hinges and get the chest open.
As my Paladin would say: (Read the following in a ~~cartoonishly thick New York~~ Dwarven accent) “Idiots think only of smashing. Pretentious idiots think smashing is beneath them. Smart people know smashing is a simple, direct, and effective tool that is not always applicable.”
I find it beyond my imaginative capabilities to Bronx up the word “applicable.”
I’ve mentioned my “+5 adamantine lockpick” before… aka a huge two-handed maul wielded by an absurdly strong barbarian. Not subtle, but very effective at opening the trickiest of locked doors and chests.
My best trick was using dispelling attack…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/rogue/rogue-talents/paizo-rogue-advanced-talents/dispelling-attack-su
…and convincing my GM that lockpicks counted as improvised weapons so that I could bust out of some dimensional shackles:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/c-d/dimensional-shackles/
Lots of ad hoc homebrew rulings on that one, but it was fun to pull off.
turns out that magic auras at the back of a room full of spiderwebs can actually be scrolls.
But webs burn so easily… Those scrolls were askin’ for it!
webs burn especially easily and happily after the 15 minutes adventuring day. When everyone is out of spells and hit points and really doesn’t care about encountering a spider swarm or something like that.
Party had arrived at the defunct wizards lair that was a step on the ladder leading to the major conflict I had all planned out.
Through some things that had happened in previous sessions, the party thief knew that the gnome fighter ‘s(party leader) horse was actually a mature gold dragon (long back story. He was doing a favor for a gnomish magic user who had romantic plans for the fighter). He had tried to blackmail the dragon, asking what it would give for him not to spill the beans. He seriously got his panties in a knot when the dragon told him, “your life”. Dragon lawful good is NOT the same as humanoid lawful good!
Well since that incident, the thief had been looking for a way to get back at the dragon. I had already had the lair mapped and ready before it happened and had forgotten that there was the body of a baby gold dragon in the mages laboratory. When the group found it, the thief snatched it up and ran outside yelling “LOOK WHAT WE FOUND”.
Okay, bit more dragon backstory. The dragon was willing to do the favor because he needed to get away from his mate for awhile. They had their baby from their last clutch killed by a group of hunters who had run across it while it was playing near their lair. His mate put the fault on him, saying he should have been there to keep an eye on the baby. Again, this was set up and part of the game way before this session.
Dragon(horse) lost it. Changed back to his normal mature dragon form and took off. Out of game, he went back, picked up his mate, picked up his own litter mates (all mature dragons), his and her parents (ancient dragons), did a scrying to find where the mage was (he was actually the big, bad for the whole war scenario and the group was supposed to find things in the lair to help bring him down later) and took off.
Mage was in the castle of the rulers of an evil, human kingdom and in the middle of a get together of all the leaders of the war to come. Again, this timeline was set up way before this session. So a wing of pissed off dragons shows up and does a Game of Thrones all over the castle and city, killing all of the bad guys (sigh). By the way, this was back in the 80’s, so GOT wasn’t a thing.
I’ve still got most of the war campaign written up and stored somewhere. Maybe I’ll get to run it before I die :).
Hear hear!
Nothing quite like a family reunion to ruin someone’s day.
I still don’t get why dragon-horse is so pissed off about the dead dragon. Wanting to seek revenge against the mage in the tower makes sense. Wrecking the BBEG of your campaign seems like a crazy overreaction though. Was this the dragon’s kid or some rando dead dragon baby?
To be honest that fireball-necklace thing is your fault for letting players make choices. Sorry to tell you that 😛
Also once one of the group players destroyed a city worth on NPC to move forward the campaign 😀
Your fault for giving them the “destroy city” button.
That would be the DM fault, i think the whole thing was more fun than the end of Infinity War. I like when lots of NPC die 😀
I think I‘ve talked about it at an earlier comic:
Falsely identifying a bottled Fireball as an Alchemist Fire.
on the plus side: All surviving ambushers fled.
on the plus side: The DM was kind enough to have Quest Giver have Resurrection on scroll.
“Fireball centered on yourself” is the reason no one likes wild magic sorcerers.
extra funny if casting Fire Resistance triggered it.
I haven’t asked the DM for clarity, but in our last session, I broke the container holding a plasma elemental (I’m pretty sure it homebrewed) well ahead of when he was probably planning on it. I think he intended for us to beat the otyughs around the container first, but in my mind it was better to have another hostile for the otyughs to focus on instead rather than just the four of us. Fortunately, he was flexible and what could have been a TPK was instead just a moderately tough fight.
In those three-party fights, I always struggle with how to direct the NPCs. It usually comes down to a judgement call about who would attack whom.
Agreed. It really comes down to a judgement call, which is of course no pressure at all for the poor GM. No pressure at all.
So I had an example of this comic in a LARP once. I spent ages making a potion kit for an important antidote, complete with stuff in little glass bottles. It was being guarded by a demon, and the player party are trying to fight it and it’s minions off while grabbing the box.
One of the player part was in the NAvy, and a very athletic man. He shouts to the others ‘I’ll get it,’ grabs the box and takes off at a run, chased by half the monster crew. Coming up to a barbed wire fence, he puts his Navy training into action, swan-dives over it, rolls on the other side with no damage to himself.
The glass vials inside the box, however …
It led to some fun RP as they had to try to replace some of the stuff he lost!
I’m glad the dude made his IRL athletics check. Barbed wire wounds don’t sound like any fun.
An example from myself and an example from my players:
Myself: On the second floor of a manor in eastern Taldor, the redeemer (Paladin but Neutral Good) has a Magus boss grappled and on very low hp. Having been Deafened by a spell earlier in the fight, my ranger does not hear the paladin telling the magus to stand down, she only sees the redeemer intercept the magus running for the door. She drops to a crouch, takes aim, and puts a crossbow bolt straight through the boss’s throat. Critical hit. In my defense, it was the magus’s fault I was deaf at the time.
My players: I believe the Dragon’s Demand module also takes place in taldor, so, actually still in taldor for this one. The players are investigating a kobold cave when they encounter a chained kobold ranger and her animal companion. Instead of untying the friendly (ok, she was still CE, but she would have been friendly to them) kobold ranger that gets them an ally in a later dungeon in the module, they killed her then and there.
Like my formative experience murdering the “magic orc” in Dragon Strike without asking why it’s a magical orc: ALWAYS TALK TO THE THING FIRST.
The classic G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (1978) actually accounted for this possibility: “If the party should manage to set the upper works of the Steading aflame, they will be forced to wait a week before trying to discover a way into the lower (dungeon) level, for the hot embers will prevent entry before this period of time. Note also that ALL loot from the upper works will be lost in such a fire.”
Players tend to go for the “burn it down” approach with alarming frequency. :/
Yeah. It was me. I assumed that pyrotechnics, wall of fire, and produce flame would be perfectly safe, given that “Normal fire will have only a 2% chance per round of burning or setting the place afire, and even magical fires will have only an 8% chance per round of the same.” Not sure if I should have paid better attention in Statistics or taken my luck to Vegas. The party would have preferred if I’d taken my pyromaniac tendencies and habit of improvising “the plan” elsewhere.
Important documents always miraculously survive in the rubble
Unlike important NPCs.
9 out of 10 chests turn out to be mimics anyway, so it’s best just to be sure.
What if we’re all mimics?
Man, how many magical and alchemical explosives must have been in that chest, now forever lost, to provoke that reaction from Sorcerer?