Rainy Day, Stormy Game

Southern California has been experiencing several days of almost constant rain. I cannot remember the last time it rained so much and so hard. Well, as I said in a post from a year ago, I love rainy day gaming. The rain makes me want to game or at least to work on my game material. So inspiring.

Saturday afternoon we got to do one of our rare weekend sessions. Dan, freshly back from one of his international business adventures, was hosting us in his nice big house in the hills above Bel Air (near Mulholland Drive). It was just pouring non-stop for hours on end. I got soaked to the bone several times that day, but loved it. Dan’s living room has all glass walls looking out on his back patio (very “Los Angeles”). He has a view of a hill across the way, one of the Santa Monica Mountains, and it looked so wintery and wet. It had a real “misty mountains” look that had my “G Zone” (that hidden organ in us that demands that we roll dice and kill things) in high gear.

I went into this game really run down. I had been running ragged for weeks. Not just at work, but all the holiday parties and junk food, and all the high end booze had my innards working overtime. And at work I have been surrounded by sick, coughing and sneezing humanoids. Everybody who walked by my cube last week seemed to have this bad cold going around. Friday night I actually emailed Big Ben and told him to be prepared to run his D&D in case I was not up to it. You see, we are in the last couple of games (I hope) of the Night Below campaign, and running for high level characters is work enough. Adjudicating their assault on a Kou Toa city is another thing entirely. Walking into Dan’s house wet with shoes in hand had me doubting my abilities on this day, but the rain outside and the cheerfully snarky banter inside got my G Zone juicing and we were soon getting into the game after a relaxing half hour or so of goofing around, drinking Heinekens, and munching snacks and pizza.

Everybody seems to be enjoying their characters, especially Dan and Andy. I have to say, with my attitude towards their PC’s around a year ago or so at this time, I have to admit that I am fairly fond of these characters as well. Dan’s drow Krysantha is a killing and ass-kicking machine, and I think the others characters would be foolish to get on her bad side (and she only seems to have a bad side). Her murderous actions of the last game are forgotten now that the party is in situations that could translate into Total Party Kill. And Andy’s Vaidno, well, it is a great character. Not just heroic in good ways, but at the same time the bard is a hopeless showboater and showstopper who cheats death at every turn. Choices from the Deck of Many Things a few games ago gave him a tower (back home in the city area) and an 18 charisma, and it is kind of fun to see him beam with pride at this character that has survived one near-death situation after another and continued to thrive. “Vaidno SurvivnoThriveno!” Goddamn Andy.

Well, some time was spent preparing to sneak into the city (through cracked water pipes learned about from the thief Prentyss that Krysantha murdered last game). In they went and the action was truly on!

After dealing with crossing and fighting the affects of the Kuo Toa “Relaxation Pool,” Krysantha cast a mass insect swarm to molest a nearby section of the city, while the party ran through the town and towards the Illithid quarters in the hopes of taking possession of the Crown of Derro Domination. As groups of Derro and Kou Toa patrolled the streets, the party let loose with all 100 of the hydra teeth they had. *poit*poit*poit*poit* sounds filled the air as 100 skeletons appeared with sword and shield to do their bidding, and the skelly’s ran to attack the patrols to keep them off of the party.

At the Mind Flayer building, the party fought a hard battle against several of the monsters, but a combination of good tactics and good die rolls helped win the day there. Unfortunately, the main Illithid, Zantacore, was not present so the crown was not achieved. We had to end it around then, but we managed to leave off with the players having a great sense of the possibility of success in this assault on the city.

Really, my players are not known to me as great tacticians. With characters like Vaidno and Kryantha usually taking the lead, it was more about gung ho “let’s just take ‘em head on!” type stuff. But they actually thought this one out a bit, which made me kind of proud. It was a great game and a great wintery day to have it on.

Unfortuantly, we did not get to finish the campaign by the end of the year. But the good news is, by February I’ll get a break from AD&D and be able to refresh with some new genres. But boy, this is pretty exciting. I’m running a game for high level characters, which can be a decent amount of work. But now I am at a point where I can look back upon it all more and I have to say, this has been a fun campaign with a great group of people and characters.

TOTAL PARTY KILL!!!

Total Party Kill. Just the words together like that harkens to late 80’s/early 90’s sci fi movie techno-thrillers with phrases like MDK - Murder Death Kill or TNP - Take No Prisoners. Cold and scary.

When I was kid, the concept of an entire party of adventurers getting destroyed seemed a bit like an urban legend, and usually a slaughter at the breath weapon of some dragon that was too strong to kill. Back then we didn’t have a term for it.

I personally cannot remember one instance when I witnessed it, but I’m sure I did at some hobby shop or convention game room at some point. But maybe not - I didn’t spend much time at those places once I had my own regular groups and also started getting laid on a regular basis. Having seen it and remembering it would have meant the deaths had meaning, and in my personal games death always had big meaning. Hell, it almost never happens so when it does happen to a player in my game it is bigger than shit.

Am I just too easy-going as a DM? I’m not sure my players would describe me that way, but I’m sure they would say I am a player-friendly DM. In my AD&D games, I have a general rule that no player character will die in their first game – at least by my hand. If they end up into the negatives (as almost always happens in the first game to somebody), I just hold them up at around -5, and when they are healed they have some appropriate set-back (a few games ago a first level fighter got the shit stung out of her by a giant spider. When she got back to the positives in hit points, she had a nice little poison susceptibility). I also tend to molly coddle characters a bit until they hit 3rd level or so, trying to let them expand a bit as a character before they risk true deadly danger.

But we aren’t talking about being a nice guy DM here, we are talking about TPK, which has a tendency to occur at mid to high levels. They don’t always seem to necessarily happen at the climax of an adventure, unless that was the DM’s aim all along.

Columnist Roe Adams described it like this:

"A full TPK (total party kill) is an appalling abandonment of the players to the whims of gaming fate. It is a failure to be worthy of that trust they offered you when they sat down."(Adams III, Roe R. (2003-08-25). "First Night" (in English). RPGA Feature Article - Wizards of the Coast).

Wow. Well, it kind of is on the DM’s head, unless the party makes some foolish mistakes. I imagine it just cannot be helped in some cases. Poor strategy, bad roll, good DM rolls, all kinds of things enter into it. I decided to do a bit of research by starting a thread about it over at rpg.net. It got a big response, with lots of great stories of TPK. Here are a few excerpts from some responses:

… Most more often, one or two characters gets disabled, and the others keep on fighting in an attempt to turn the tide, and one by one they all drop as well…

… the characters completely misread a situation and blunder wildly, causing them all to be taken out of the game. Something like a pit of lava, but the characters somehow get the idea that the pit of lava is a gateway, so they all jump in (and they all die)…

…D&D 3.5 party beset wolves. the players wanted a 'straight up' fight, no DM fudging. nothing behind the screen, all rolls on the table. they lost…

… DnD 2e: Party of 1st-2nd level characters vs. one ghoul. Paralyzed all but the elf due to poor saves and mauled the elf to death. Party assumed to be eaten at leisure…

… Tomb of Horrors front entrance; party vs. a small flock of cocktrice. Failed saves aplenty and ended up with the mage up a tree trying to fend them off with a dagger….

… As GM: 3rd D+D. 5 players (2 totally new). 2nd level PCs, standard orc-ambush turns horribly bad. The scout goes ahead, gets caught in a trap (one he knew was there but wanted to see what happened anyway?). Others rush forward to save him, everybody dies no matter how much I fudge. The longest series of bad rolls ever…

… Cyberpunk 2020: With the smart players dead due to a variety of mishaps (including a headshot from a sniper) the remaining characters smart off to the cops after they get stopped for a traffic violation. After a couple of dead cops and a freeway chase SWAT gets mobilized and toasts the party van with the minigun from a AV-4…

… He wiped out the party at the climax of each of them. Sadly not because of anything the players did wrong but because he liked the whole "you think you've succeeded but you haven't" schtick and was loath to let our characters survive his campaigns. I think he was trying to teach us players something about life. The only lession we learned was how much arbitrary TPKs by a GM piss us off…



In looking at these and many other responses, I’d say the three most common reasons for the phenomenon of TPK are:

3) a miserable, asshole manchild GM with delusions of power who delights in making games shit for players. How do these guys get players coming back?

2) An encounter that is just too much for the groups power level (usually they have the option to run away, but do not.). A creature, like a ghoul or carrion crawler, that can paralyze multiple times, are common things I have heard killed low level parties.

1) A fair encounter, but the players roll terrible and the GM rolls great. Seems to be the single most common thing. More often than not, the players also have a chance to escape things, but often don’t realize how bad things are until too late. Things just happen too fast for them.

Is it best for the GM to fudge and save them? Very often I have heard of the GM just saying “ok, instead of killed you are all captured.” Or, amazingly and it happens more often than you think, the GM starts the entire scenario from scratch and let’s the party have another go at it.

Yeah, I have fudged once or twice, but in very minor ways, and never to save a character. Having said that, a side of me is a die roll purist. If you fudge things too much, you take away a lot of the chance aspect of the game, and as part of that you lose some of the life simulation aspect.

I thought about the whole Total Party Kill concept a lot in the last week, because the party in my AD&D game may be facing the possibility. A first in my games.

You see, in The Rainbow Mounds cavern, a PC hobbit cleric is tied up in a cave with a couple of old enemies, an orc troop leader, and a half elf enchantress, have her at their mercy. The enchantress (a high level illusionist) goes into her private room to freshen her make-up so she will look nice for the nasty things she is going to do to the hobbit. When she and her two charmed fighting men step away, the Orcs offer to let the hobbit go if she helps them “kill the bitch.” She is untied, gets her gear on, and the enchantress steps out with her men. The fight is on! Well, I stopped it there, because things were not going quite how I planned, and wanted to get back to it next time.

You see, the hobbit and the orcs are not much of a match for the Enchantress. As a high level illusionist, she is capable of some powerful things. Luckily, the hobbits friends are charging through the cavern system, knowing of her trouble and coming to save her. I have a certain time-frame, and the party has wasted a bit of time, including doing things like stopping to body search the few orcs they kill on the way, just for handfuls of silver. They know this hobbit chick is in need of help, but they will get there at best around 8 or 9 rounds after the fight has started, when my original “run like hell to help her” timeframe would have had them show up a round or two into the fight.

So what do I do? Fudge? Let them just show up on time, or delay them to show them the consequences of picking up chump change when a friend is in trouble. They will have a chance against the enchantress, but not as good if the hobbit and the orcs are dead when they get there and can’t assist them in the fight.

I think I’m going to let the chips fall where they may. And doing that, I may just be looking at the first TPK in my games.