D&D Sep-25-2002: Death, Where is thy Sting?

[ralphmelton]

I am beating myself up about last night's D&D session.
Probably beating myself up to excess, but it is my way. I fudged too late, in the wrong places, and and I feel chagrined and ashamed.

Extremely dedicated readers may wish to reread my foreshadowing post as a windup for this discussion.

So the monster that they faced was a tendriculos. I liked the idea of a huge menacing plant-thing that would underscore the way the world itself is turning wrong. But the tendriculos is so flawed that I feel a need to make an itemized rant about its flaws at the end of the entry.

But I used it, even with its flaws, because I figured the PCs could handle it. And I was trying to play it straight, without weakening it, because I didn't think it would be necessary. I made one change: I made it rooted, so that it couldn't move around.

The party started by laying fireballs into it, reasonably enough. But then after it was softened up a bit, Turok stepped near (I'm not sure that Kevin realized that Turok was within range of the tendriculos)... and the tendriculos managed to bite him. And its grapple bonus was so incredibly high (+23) that there was no way for Turok to prevent it from grabbing him in its mouth, and no way for Turok to prevent it from swallowing him. And then in its stomach, Turok was paralyzed with nothing to do but get digested. Once they had the tendriculos unconscious, Liandra went to cut Turok out, but got to him one round too late.

I should have fudged there, really. If I had left out the paralyzation, it would still have had a great sense of peril, and there would have been excitement with Turok trying to cut his way out. Or if I had let Liandra get to him with 22 points of damage instead of 25, she could have gotten him out just in time. Either of those would have been much better.

But as it is, Turok was dead. Dead from a battle I had stuck in just to spice things up, not because it mattered to the plot.

I created an opportunity for them to get him reincarnated. (In this, the pendulum swung the other way--paying someone to cast reincarnate costs only 280gp. By comparison, a suit of plate armor costs 1500gp. Oy vey!) I let him roll the dice for his new incarnation... he came back as an owl. In case there was any doubt, owls do not make mighy fighters.

Kevin was looking ready to give up the character. I didn't want that--I like Turok's history, and I like Turok's contribution to the ongoing story.

So I waffled. And I waffled visibly, which all the GM advice books say should not be done, for good reason. I fear that my visible waffling has undermined the effectiveness of the gaming story. Blah.

I let Kevin reroll. It came up 'human', and that was too boring, so we let him reroll again, and he ended up as a halfling. (We came up with a good story about someone shouting "No!" as the owl body formed, and having it be replaced by another form--but some of the growth had been missed.

As a halfling, he's pretty challenged to use his bastard sword. Dani came up with a good solution for carrying it around, that used resources (the glove of storing) that the party already had. But Kevin still seemed to feel that it doesn't make sense for a three-foot halfling to use a sword bigger than he is--and I can see his point. Which is a shame.

If I were Kevin, I'd be feeling pretty detached from the character... all this random dorky stuff happening to a cool character, in a way that doesn't fit well with the general concept of the character.

So, bleah and bleah and bleah. I let the D&D rules overpower me, instead of taking control of them. Bleah.

I feel a certain temptation to give up the game as broken. But I'm not going to do that. One of the things I'm most proud of about this campaign is that it's still running. I've never managed to keep a game alive this long before, and I really want to see it through to the end.

I also feel a temptation to give in to the D&D-ness of the game, abandon my attempts to create rising tension and emotional investment in the story, and just make it a game of roaming around beating up on monsters and taking their candy, buying powerful magic items in every town, and treating death as a minor inconvenience. ("You seem to be stone dead. Best have that looked at soon.") I'm not going to do this either, for a couple of reasons:
1. It would be another way of giving up.
2. It would waste a lot of the build-up and plot development that I've been trying to build over this year.
3. And an ironic reason: if I were to do that, it would make this a much more open-ended game, and make it much less certain that the game would come to a satisfying end. :)

So I'm going to press on, and I'll wrestle the rules into submission to my whims. Somehow.

But I don't plan to run another campaign in D&D. The rules are getting in my way too often, and the game support is not supporting me as much as I want.

The promised list of flaws about the tendriculos:

• It makes no sense to me that this was a CR 6 monster. The PCs had to burn almost all their spells to get by, and even then it was far from dead.
  
• It definitely falls into the 'save or die' trap for a 6th-level human, since it's so hard to avoid the grapple. I wish I had realized this.
  
• So it regenerates damage at an astonishing rate, including slashing and fire damage, but it doesn't regenerate damage from acid and bludgeoning weapons? I can understand the acid, but I've totally failed to rationalize the bludgeoning thing.
  
• So it can fit two hill giants inside its stomach, but a human with a bastard sword can't get enough play to cut its way out? (I would have let Turok cut his way out with the bastard sword.)
  

Comments

[seanmcguire.livejournal.com]

Is Lori okay?

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

Her ankle is painful and swollen, but her doctor didn't think she even needed to go to get an X-ray. We'll keep an eye on things.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

Man, what a long post. I apologize for how stupefyingly boring that was.

[cellio]

Don't give up the campaign, and don't abandon your story plans. We have to find some way to make this work in a way that lets Turok remain and lets Kevin enjoy himself. Perhaps going back to that "boring human" result wouldn't be so bad. Or perhaps we can find a way to cast Enlarge+Permenancy (note: the latter spell is beyond our capability right now) so that he'd be a 5-foot halfling -- so there'd still be an effect from his death (not a reset), but he'd be a size that makes the character make more sense. Or maybe there's some other solution. Heck, maybe that magic ancestral sword will even adjust to the new body of its owner; we certainly don't know everything it can and can't do, and we do know that it has a will of some sort. Decide what kinds of solutions make sense to you, and I'll bet that out of character the players can help you solve the problem.

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

It's not boring, sweetie. And you already know my ideas about the problems Turok's death presents.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

You are right that, especially with the relatively low-level and often readily available in the typical world spells for raising people, death can be treated as merely another illness.

I have a feeling this is why Tal started having demons devour people's souls. That's significantly more permanent. :)

Reading the Tendriculos entry causes me bewilderment. Perhaps they intend the party to cut off the tentacles or something. It would make more sense to be weak vs. fire, cold, and bludgeoning, as there are significantly more spells to deal fire than anything else in levels I-III, and cold would seem an obvious anti-plant choice.
Bludgeoning can be rationalized that it destroys an area of the plant but leaves the material in place, unlike piercing or slashing which makes a hole. There's no gap to regrow into since there's already plant matter there (which is living and recovers at the 1/HD/day rate), so it can't regenerate the damage.

Maybe.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

The only reason I can think that the bastard sword couldn't be used in the stomach, despite how much could fit in, would be because of, well, squishiness. Like getting stuck in a large, slimy sleeping bag that's trying to squeeze you; even if there's plenty of space that it can expand to, it'll be clinging enough that there's not any easy way to maneuver an object that large competently. Though it might make more sense to have large weapons be at a penalty to damage for this awkwardness, rather than prohibiting their use entirely.

Still, I agree. A bit much for a CR 6 critter.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Enlarge+Permenancy

Or Polymorph Other, which the party probably can manage.

[cellio]

We looked at Polymorph Other; the problem is that he would get average stats, and a fighter with strength 10, constitution 10, dexterity 10 isn't very exciting. (In fact, his new stats would trigger the "unplayable character" guideline if he rolled it up fresh.)

In some places, death as a disease is both a bane, and a saving grace.

[the-phoenyx.livejournal.com]

In places like this, the fact that the character is still around is actually a major boon. And a place for a /major/ hook into him. You could always use it to your advantage to get the party moving in /any/ direction you wish. Simply leave hints about someone that might be able to help and start them in the right direction.

I think there are lots of different ways to recover from this. Either as a reward for good play (i.e a permanent effect potion/spell that only effects natrually courious halflings that drink it without thinking), or as some extra group reward after a hard session. The player should relize that yes, being no greater then the sword he carries does cause some problems.. but dying should have /some/ sting. The rewards for sticking it out and pressing on should always be greater then simply writing off a character as unplayable.

I wouldn't give up, or even feel overly bad. While I'd like to think that these are errors in the books, a part of me feels they do this on purpose. To make things more difficult then need be, and to force death upon the group as it is so easy to 'fix'. You only lost one character, and it is because he decided to run towards a huge plant that could eat 2 hill giants.

[cellio]

The CR6 rating is a mystery to me, but I am not sure in which direction.

If the thing were mobile, it would be way too powerful for a 6th-level party. Anything (of that level) that it touches is dead, for all practical purposes. On the other hand, with it being rooted, the challenge was reduced to delivering large-enough doses of damage to offset the regeneration. Strictly speaking, there would have been no need for any character to get within reach, especially once we figured out that acid and bludgeon damage weren't being regenerated -- unless we ran out of ammo.

As best I recall, I burned the following spells in this fight: Mage Armor, Alter Self (wings, in case I fell off the bridge -- which was only necessary because there was a river down there), four Fireballs, two Flame Spheres. This is a sizable chunk of my daily allotment (and almost all of the upper-level stuff), but on a "clean" day that would have still left me with a couple second-level spells and a bunch of first-level spells (Magic Missile being key among those). This wasn't a clean day; we'd had a fight earlier in the day. (The CR definition says that this should be a "moderate" challenge for a 6th-level party. Do they specify either the size of that party or the number of "moderate" encounters per day they expect a party to be able to handle?)

We have much more trouble against groups of opponents than against single opponents, for the most part. (Though the whatever-it-was that maanged to confuse some party members and trick them into attacking the party were quite effective even though we faced them singly.)

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

That's why you Polymorph him into a centaur instead. Saves on necessary horses, too. :P