Tropic of Evil, Part 2/5: Kaiju
So no shit there they were, seeking for mystical keys sprinkled throughout the upper reaches of the megadungeon. They’d managed to track one all the way back to Level 10, a full six levels below their current APL. Wandering monsters are a joke at that point, and any traps that may have reset are more of an irritant than a danger. Despite all that, I was on the edge of my seat when they finally found the sigil they’d been looking for. It was only partially visible, sticking out from beneath an impressive set of golden doors.
“Red dragon,” said the party cavalier. “Remember? We found out that he’d been cursed with a palette-swap. Wish I knew that before I let him geas me.”
Indeed, they’d run into this particular big bad over two years ago IRL. The party had a nice Bilbo-meets-Smaug chat at the time. The cavalier agreed to run some info-gathering quests for the “goodly beast,” then they decided to let the big fella sleep. The revelation of the dragon’s true nature was more recent, and here at last was an excuse to pay back the deception.
“Alright guys. It’s high time we got rid of this punk. We’re way overlevelled. We got the tools and we got the talent. Let’s get some gold dragon boots!”
“Guys?” said the wizard. “We’re just here to pass some info along to the cavalier’s great and powerful patron, right? And we humbly apologize for taking so long to do so, don’t we?”
It was a desperate attempt to use Bluff to pass a secret message: “Do not go through with the attack.” The rest of the party got the message. Unfortunately, with his +42 Sense Motive, so did the dragon.
Have you ever realized that you were outmatched? Did you manage to talk you way out of the combat? Did you retreat? Die gloriously in hopeless battle? Tell us all about your most unfortunate boss monster moments down in the comments!
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For me, the best case of “player pays for their hubris” was in one campaign I’m playing that’s hit epic level. By now, the fighting-types have enough powerful magical weapons and sheer strength that they can reduce enemies to paste within one round… if they can close to melee range, that is. In one dungeon, we ran into a boss monster with a powerful melee attack that (a) had considerable reach, (b) could be used as a reaction when someone entered said reach, and (c) would send those hit by it flying across the room. Cue our brawler getting clobbered several times without a chance to hit back and nearly dying before my wizard could come help him. Moral of this story: Always make sure to have ranged weapons.
Heh. Reminds me of Laurel in our mythic game. She was the mounted fighter, and everything exploded in one round. Them we got to the mythic hydra, and its 15′ of reach, and its 7 attacks of opportunity….
Sometimes there’s a hard counter.
If it really was a 3.X epic game, the REAL moral is “wizards rulez, fighters droolz”
I skimmed through the archive just to make sure, but Necromancer’s mascara really does always look this way.
Not quite.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mean-girls-part-1-3
Ohhh, so now we can identify whether a strip takes place before or after “Mean Girls 2/3” based on the state of Necromancer’s mascara. We will have all the strips in chronological order yet, just you wait and see!
We once fought a hag that was holding an artifact we needed in her animated hut (a la Baba Yaga). We realized after a turn or two that we were kiiiiinda outmatched. Honestly the line between character knowledge and player knowledge was a bit fuzzy, because it’s hard to separate your own “well, that’s a very high level spell she casually threw at us, and we’re only level 6(?), holy shit” reaction with what your character would know.
Anyway we decided to go for a hail mary and then bail regardless of the results. Which is to say the paladin, sorcerer and barbarian drew the hag’s attention and the druid tried to keep them alive, while I bamfed into her hut with Misty Step and grabbed the artifact. But wait, the hut is animated and won’t let you take the artifact! Roll a strength check with your puny little wizard strength!
Well, as it always happen in those situations, I nailed the check with a nat 20. And then we ran like hell.
It was pretty fun honestly, because up until that point the DM had clearly been going easy on us, and we had asked him to turn it up a notch, because it didn’t really fit the theme of the module (those of you who’ve played it probably recognized what the encounter is, but for the others I won’t name it to avoid spoilers). This showed us that he listened.
Heh. I actually wrote a “the chicken hut is trying to kill you” encounter once upon a time. They were unsold property, desperate to be lived I’m, and attacked prospective home buyers with swallow whole. Good times.
Paladin, huh? And here I thought Necro and Fighter were an item… oh well, more fuel for the flames of rivalry.
What, this?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/venial-sins
I think maybe that date had more to do with Necromancer’s feelings for Paladin than Fighter.
Most of the time, conflicts in my games get resolved by an ambush or magical trap that leaves little room for being over matched. That,of course, iscounterbalsnced by the fact that getting into a straight fight with most serious opponents is liable to be a path to the grave. Despite the occasional miscalculation, most of time the players show their foes the respect they deserve and work around the toughest.
That said, two weeks from now one of them is planning on battling the warrior aspect of a deity in single combat, so I suppose that’s about to change!
I think “serious foes” is the tough part. It’s not always so clear what’s dangerous.
I mean, most of my PCs have the same reaction. It could be a single Kobold or an ancient Wyrm, they’ll try diplomacy because its generally smart to do. The paladin talks because being Good isn’t just not killing, its attempting to stop a fight from happening in the first place, especially with intelligent foes. Hell, even non-intelligent foes he tended to try and stop the violence if he could.
As for my current dnd PC, he tries talking because he assumes the kobold is actually a lv 15 sorcerer/assassin out to kill him. Why risk dying wen you could talk your way out of trouble?
That being said, in one WoD game, the PCs had a quest to defeat “the Great Beast” and figured they could handle it. 7 rounds of combat later between it and the three best fighters in the game, they were left broken because the Great Beast was way above their power level. They had to find its Bane first and they hadn’t done their research despite having the bane in their possession. It didn’t kill them since it was also badly hurt in the confrontation and didn’t want to risk it, but it did make them much smarter about the next fight. They finally won on the third actual battle.
How’d the second battle go?
They laid traps for it and then one of the 3 fought it one on one. The traps restricted movement, allowing them to do damage but at the end its power was still too great. Not feeling in danger, it drained them of all their energy (Bottle Glamour Dread Power) and inflicted a large amount of damage to convince them to stay away. It didn’t want to kill them that time since it figured they didn’t know its Bane and so would be free sources of Glamour if they kept it up.
Nice job rationalizing away the TPK. That’s not always easy to do gracefully.
It seems appropriate that the Evil Party’s reaction to getting stranded in a foreign place is to try and do a colonialism
There’s a research paper in there somewhere….
Imagine going into a full-grown dragon’s lair without making absolutely sure the fight will be as unfair as possible for it
– combat tactician gang
Yeah. I mean, I take it that players who can take a party of level 1 PCs and defeat an ancient dragon are not common.
(How? Let’s just say, if at any time the dragon rolls initiative against the PCs directly, the PCs have probably already failed.)
The dragons lives on Level 10. They had backtracked from Level 17. The pattern usually holds.
Usually.
It would have been funnier if the dragon was the only one who got the message. Ah well…
I just started DMing a campaign which started with a basic mission to get everyone back into the swing of things and used to the new third-party rules…and also to get the PCs away from their home long enough for a bunch of people too strong and numerous for their current level to set up camp there, introducing a major threat that the PCs need to gather strength to drive out.
We’re still in the “basic mission” phase, so I can’t tell you how well that plan is going to work. It’s entirely possible that the PCs will miss the memo and TPK themselves against a superior foe.
It was a funny moment as a GM. By telling them the result of the dragon’s sense motive roll (high 50-something) it was an opportunity to reinforce the power level of the critter. Weird little tricks to pass along meta information.
I’m currently stuck in that situation, in a ‘out of my league’ limbo.
Due to boredom and other reasons (the session had complications due to RL), I opted to trigger an obvious trap in an AP by yoinking a valuable from a statue by force, breaking the statue in the process (being a greedy Kobold and party leader, the party did not bother stopping him).
This triggered about 5 banshee-like ghosties to show up with a vengeance, one of which was probably suped-up. And I rolled poorly on initiative.
The session ended on that cliffhanger because there was no way we’d do that combat in time, and were already lacking a player.
So now, come Sunday, I will learn just how screwed I am and whether I’ll survive the impending death saves / caused a TPK.
Good luck!
My best advice it to get off the ground and away from the walls. It’s a lot harder for incorporeals to mess you about if they’ve can’t attack from inside solid objects.
That overhead view is quite interesting. You could make Roll20 tokens out of that perspective!
Well I mean, only if that’s something the patrons wanted….
Succubus’s pose is odd. Is she doing yoga? Dancing? Praying? T-Posing for authority? Or was she the one who had the speech bubble in a earlier draft?
She seems to be soaking up the sunlight, basking in the warmth. Did she maybe take off her wet clothes for a bit? Which would be why at least Witch and Antipaladin are looking away.
Why would Witch would be looking away? 😀
She and Succubus are competitors for the leadership role in The Evil Party. I won’t do to acknowledge your rival.
Um not be rude, but this all seems pretty tame for Kaiju. The pathfinder version of Ghidorah is terrifying. It can deal up to 120d6 damage in a single round, create massive firestorms, eruption from the ground like a volcano and deflect cold damage (the one thing it’s weak to). I saw it stat block over a year ago and still have nightmares.
1) This is a non-denominational comic. I’ll use stats and concepts from multiple systems (and pop culture) in the name of a gag.
2) Once you’re at CR +6, I don’t see much difference between kaiju and wyrm-level dragons. You’re gonna be dead either way.
had no idea what you where talking about, had a closer look at the comic and only just now noticed the footprint.
Took Oinkbane for you! lol
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Oinkbane
ah, good to have my avatar back now that I correctly guessed the addy I used.
Gravatar doesn‘t like my mobile browser anymore to just click on „get a gravatar“ to copy paste.
I received a depressing amount of spam after I used the other account to comment here.
omitting the AP to avoid spoilers…
using my Shadow Companion to explore we had the lay of the dungeon level, all enemies accounted for and we thought we where smart and jumped on the Biggest Monster in the dungeon, who was alone in a room.
Too bad the author of the AP thought it would be funny to have everyone to come to his aid in case of fight, and in case of going for every room one by one it would have been „nah, I‘m sure they can handle it“ in the heads of the enemies.
Shadow Dancer got away, because
1) Hide in Plain Sight and
2) Major Magic (Expeditious Re-Sneak)
My players once had a „nope“ moment in Kingmaker:
I made some char sheets for the Barbarian Lords with about CR+1 as the players.
Sorcerer used what felt like half his daily spell allotment to be quick and sneaky, had one good look at them gathered in their tent.
Sor: „I detect magic“
me: „you feel slightly dazzled“ + start to describe all the magical auras on the char sheets
Sor: „…“ invisible panic attack
goup: „so, we try diplomacy then?“
in RotR top of the church tower in Magnimar:
The lamia (end of book BBEG) „summoned“ some way too powerful hell monster.
It was only an illusion, but we didn’t know that.
The collective reaction was… „eh, I cant hurt THAT anyways, let’s focus on the summoner; maybe it will go away if we are quick“
Then a fumble happened (which the fumble card said was a crit to the tank) and we all died.
Hey man, you know my feelings on that stupid bell tower:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/white-haired-witch?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=white-haired-witch
” […] seeking for mystical keys sprinkled throughout the upper reaches of the megadungeon. They’d managed to track one all the way back to Level 10, a full six levels below their current APL”?
So the dungeon is a proper dungeon or a tower? o_O
I tell stories about “the megadungeon” I’m running for a reason. There’s one town. There’s one dungeon. The dungeon has many levels.
That doesn’t respond if the level go down or up 😛
Oh yeah. It’s a dungeon. The deeper they go the more dangerous it gets, with each level roughly corresponding to character level.
I like those XD
As a person running a very high-powered campaign with a lot of custom content to manage the high levels (The whole party is level 23+, and have fought multiple archdevils, demon lords, and archfey, and these fights often include at least one death, and many death saves), I think the biggest case of my party realizing they were in over their heads was several levels back when they about level 16-19 (levels varied a bit due to re-rolls and Deck of Many Things).
So, for a bit of context, I run a very open-world game, but there are hooks and stories all about, and for things the party doesn’t handle themselves, secret dice rolls determine outcome most times (representing other adventuring parties succeeding/failing).
Now, way early on, they had accepted a contract to investigate/handle a strange, enormous gathering of bugbears happening in the north. They also accepted several other contracts. Well, some of their other contracts went a bit south, several people died, and they got distracted by other things.
Fast forward about a year, and now there’s a giant bugbear wandering about with a massive following and causing some issues. Now their employer was a bit peeved about this and told them to get it handled because they were the ones that had said they would handle the issue.
So, they decide to go into the mountains, investigate a bit, and goddamn, that’s a lot of bugbears. Literal hundreds, if not thousands of bugbears, plus several thousand goblins, and a few hundred other types of goblinoids. They also found some signs of… a lot of killing. A lot of headless corpses. Headless giant corpses, headless dragon corpses, and more. A bit concerning.
In the middle of all this movement, there was a massive Temple of the Gods erected, heads of all types of powerful creatures sitting on pikes around it. Well, they didn’t want to go in there, so they decided to disintegrate the almost completed Temple. The almost-realized avatar of the Hruggek (the deity of Bugbears) who had been constructing this, was not pleased.
So, the army turned their attention to them, rallied by their leader. The party creates an avalanche, thinking this would solve their problem.
It did not. See, for every couple months that went by without being solved, this to-be avatar of a god also was accumulating champions, bugbears with their own swathe of magic items and a fair number of player levels, on top of which, the to-be avatar was, himself, a CR 26.
So their avalanche got rid of a lot of the riffraff, but there were these big boys left. Oh well, they’d just have their local archer flying up high sniping them, right?
That was a mistake. Even with a full 600 feet, he was not able to outrange the godly-empowered earthbind of this avatar, and he started plummeting. The party ran to assist them, and had the genius thought of force-caging the avatar. Unfortunately, our friendly avatar still had a large sleuth of magic at his disposal, including anti-magic field.
This was about the point they realized they needed to leave. They teleported out as fast as they could, but given their opponent, they had to leave behind the corpses – two corpses that really weren’t going to get recovered.
Given the fact that they, what is the term… ah yes, got absolutely demolished, barely damaging their enemy and barely escaping with most of their lives, they realized that there was actually no way they, on their own, could fight this opponent. Not even remotely close.
That ends the story of them realizing they were in over their heads. What follows is how they dealt with that.
Well, after their departure, and the destruction of the temple the avatar was working on making permanent, he went to realize his completion in a more straightforward manner – through a lot of bloodshed, and began marching a lot of bugbears/goblins/etc. on Ten Towns. The party, realizing that there were… more than a few problems for them if this happens, including deterioration of relations with their primary employer at the time, began the process of calling every favor, scrounging every resource, and bringing in any assistance they could to deal with this (Amongst their ‘hired’ help was Jarlaxle, Athrogate, and a very ancient dragon).
What ensued remains the largest fight I have ever run – nearly 12 hours long, literal thousands of npc’s represented by hundreds of tokens (Some tokens representing as many as 200 npc’s) on a map nearly a mile in each direction, and over 40 different types of npc’s, including entire spell caster squads, 10 unique npc’s (Almost all of which had high-level players classes, sans avatar). I also allowed the players to bring along their ‘alternate’ characters (I let my players have alternative characters they can swap to for whatever reason), so there were a total of 9 player characters on the field too. 12 hours and almost 20 rounds of combat later, they managed to come out victorious.
They still had two deaths in the fight, though both were related to poor decision making (Over-confident barbarian, and a fighter who went toe-to-toe with the avatar after most of his army was downed). Granted, they also had a couple cases of barely getting out safe – the bladesong wizard went toe-to-toe with the avatar for far longer than he had any right to thanks to my consistently terrible dice rolls.
But yeah, that’s my story of the party realizing they were in over their heads, and then turning around and doing something about it. Mostly because it would’ve damaged some very important relationships if they didn’t. They could’ve cared less about the city – they’re evil as ****.
Yo… I’m glad that I get to hear that story rather than run the encounter. There’s not a dining room table big enough in the world to run that mess!
Were you using any mass combat rules?
I was not using true mass combat rules. I did a lot of averaging, and general assumption of spacing/affected targets (I treated npc’s in a unit as 10 feet apart for AoE spells and tracking number killed, and shrunk large tokens representing large groups as they dwindled).
But as a whole – no, mass combat rules were not used, there was just a lot of working off the average for all the grunt units (I may be willing to do a lot, but I am not rolling several hundred saving throws/attacks at once). But the large grunt units were honestly some of the least work required since they got tsunami’d off the bat, so they just spent most rounds getting AOE’d or running. Also helps that I have had experience with resolving dozens/hundreds of npc’s fighting from other fights, so I was able to resolve the simple squads pretty fast even when they were in actual combat and not getting mowed down by spells.
The problem was all the elite units/champions/avatar himself.
I have yet to hit an encounter that we could tell was above our pay grade. It’s really hard to do that, because it’s very easy to think something is above grade when it just really isn’t.
What makes it worse is that often times, a series of bad rolls has made things that SHOULD have been a breeze some of our closest-to-TPK moments we’ve ever had.
5e also doesn’t have a lot of feasible exist strategies. The spells that are powerful enough to safely pull you out of danger are high enough level that they could have powered an attack that would have made the fight winnable. and if you use that attack, and THEN find out the fight wont be winnable, whoops, looks like you’ve also burned up your means of escape.
I read so many encounters in APs and modules that specify “monster X won’t pursue the PCs beyond point Y.” But that’s useless info because there’s no way to convey it to the players.
I sometimes think there should be a “discern encounter information” role similar to the “recall monster lore” mechanic.
Kobold party somehow got it into their head that they were going to go wipe out the local gnoll tribes despite being around level 4. Needless to say, that went VERY poorly, and the group didn’t do a great job at retreating in time (everyone kept running back in to allow a different PC to retreat, who then ran back in to let the first retreat, repeat until TPK).
Group ends up getting captured as the PC who missed the session starts planning to mount a rescue. Gnolls spend some type debating what to do with the captured PCs, and decided that making them slaves would work better than food. At that point, non-captured PC starts throwing alchemist’s fire onto huts to sow confusion and help break the rest out.
During the confusion, the Gnoll Leader seems oddly unfazed, issuing orders to others and not doing much himself. Only when the PC prisoners are released and starting to fight the Lieutenants does he finally sigh and get out of his chair and slowly make his way towards the combat. At that point, I describe how one of the PC’s Animal Companions has their legs buckle under them and nearly falls over from getting to close to the Gnoll and being influenced by multiple auras.
“Wait, multiple?” One of the PCs starts to realize how bad the situation is. Turns out the Gnoll leader was a high-level Antipaladin far beyond the group’s capability to fight. Group FINALLY gets the idea that they really need to run, and use a few hindering spells to make difficult terrain & keep the Antipaladin from catching up as they high-tail it out of there.
Overall, was my first experience as a GM trying to deal with party TPK and players not realizing that the world didn’t scale down to their level. Tried to balance the experience as a teaching moment that didn’t just kill the party and end the campaign, while also driving home the idea that some things were beyond their ability to handle at the moment.
Way to convey that info. Putting power levels in mechanical rather than narrative terms can help players understand the scope of a challenge.
Oh MAN, do I ever have a story to tell.
I played a fairly minmaxed Archery fighter for a year in a campaign, and we were about to complete a major quest to purify a forest corrupted by the Abyss, essentially by sending the abyssal shards scattered throughout it back to where they came from. The largest one was embedded in the back of an ancient green dragon, and after a climactic fight against it (with a lot of help from NPCs, we were level 11 and it could cast high-level spells as well) we were about to deal the final blow. As this was happening, the DM described a mysterious figure who was simply… watching the battle happen. The dragon eventually called out to it for aid, but it refused. We killed the dragon, and there was much rejoicing… for about 5 minutes. Then the figure revealed itself as a… thing, speaking in many voices, appearing dressed in a creepy harlequin’s cloak, and slow-clapping in that way that only the true bad guy does once you kill the thing you thought was the BBEG.
It demanded that we return its abyssal shard to it (yes, its abyssal shard, confirming that it was behind the whole forest corruption in the first place). We refused. After a brief standoff, initiative. Hoo boy, big mistake, as it revealed the following, in order: (1) it rolled a 36 on its initiative. (2) it had multiple 9th-level spell slots. (3) its save DC was 26. Again, we were level 11. Yes, this was 5e. It targeted my character as I had technically started initiative, using that one Abyssal Corruption feature from Mordenkainen’s. After failing several CON saves (again, DC 26), my archer was in a… bad state, to put it lightly, having arms replaced with masses of tentacles and several eyes grown in random places. At this point, it was clear that we wouldn’t be winning this fight, so we bargained with it. This thing demanded that we entertained it in order to let us leave. And the entertainment? We kill one of our own. Given that I was planning on switching characters anyway (note to self: don’t make a LG character in a CN party), this noble archer sacrificed himself for his friends. And so Kalza, Flint, Irven, and Saffron slew their companion Borovik with the knowledge that he would enjoy his reward in the afterlife.
DM: “Alright, Dave, Borovik’s soul, his ideal, perfected self, now free, departs for the afterlife. Give me a Charisma save.”
“You have GOT to be kidding me.” rolls a number that is lower than 26
DM: “And Borovik’s soul gets pulled into this figure’s amulet to be tortured for eternity! Satisfied, it departs with the abyssal shard. The rest of you are free to go.”
Well then. There’s one way to make your party hate the BBEG.
Did that thing’s power level feel like overkill, or were you a fan of the setup?
This thing isn’t the BBEG, as far as we know (The game is on hole indefinitely due to the pandemic). The DM has quite a few of these types of characters in his world (“transcendents”, as they’re called, their main defining points being have ability scores over 40. Yes, this is 5e)
right right right. But what I’m getting as is this: Do you like facing down that sort of overwhelming power level? Does that help to convey a sense of “real challenge?” Or is it just railroading dressed up in impressive stats?
No, I get what you mean. It was definitely railroad-y in the sense that we were never even supposed to fight this thing, it was just meant to do a lore dump and then leave with the crystal. And thinking back to how I RP’d that… well, I sort of deserved it. Like how Brian Murphy put it in Not Another D&D Podcast: “If you go into a mafia hideout and say ‘Fuck you, Al Capone!’ to his face, you’re gonna get shot.”
And besides, I was planning to retire that character at the end of that session anyway, so I was playing noticeably more fast and loose with him.