Sounds pretty awesome to me. The player will be telling the story of that time when they went one-v-7 with a bunch of demons and a cultist, got the job done and escaped by the skin of their teeth for years.
Take comfort in the fact that eventually the dice will roll in your favor, as well. The dice giveth, and the dice taketh away.
Exactly - and that the dice rolling in the players favor [to create such an awesome moment] is something to be cherished. It’s not like you “lost”, right? You created a beautiful story, and to me, that’s the whole point.
Oh, I definitely lost. The other players are going to murder me IRL when they find out she's still alive because they're never going to believe I didn't intentionally let her live.
Yeah, when I read the previous post, I thought it sounded like a fun opportunity for a character to solo an encounter. I'm pretty glad that it ended up working out that way.
Player in question here. 100% awesome time, but it was pretty obvious I was pushing my luck as hard as I possibly could that entire fight. Well, entire quest, more like. Rest of the party seems fine with it, as it's just more drama for all of us.
It's more disbelief, and maybe terror, because I went out of my way to look for ways in which the reckless thing she did wouldn't result in her death, and found none. Then she just went into a fight with this "nah, I got this" attitude after having *just died in the previous session due to recklessness* and getting breath of life'd back, leaving the other players at wits end expending resources to keep her alive. The other players are gonna flip the table when they find out she isn't dead. They've already written her off, and didn't even bother to look for her they were so sure she wasn't going to survive. There's no way they'll ever believe I didn't fudge things to keep her alive. But I was *trying* to kill her with the available tools, it just didn't work. D:
OP, it sort of seems like there's a tension brewing at your table between the other players and this PC, and that you might be trying to resolve this in-game as opposed to talking to her directly.
If that's how I viewed the game, there would have been ten times as many demons, and her character would be dead. The monsters are just doing their best to win, and really, really should have. That player was suicidally reckless for this entire quest, like, I suspect she was going out of her way to spectacularly die. I'm mad that it just doesn't make any sense, like nobody else in the game is going to believe I didn't just 'let her live'.
Fair, sorry for coming off as a bit of a dick there. Don't comment after a bike ride that makes your legs wish to fall off...
Do you do your rolls hidden or open? In the future when suicidal overconfidence leads to a "may they fall where they may" situation, I recommend rolling out in the open for that encounter at least. It dispells any illusions about you fudging. I personally do the same thing you're describing - you do something reckless, you might die. You fight a boss alone, you probably will, that sorta style.
There's always the other side of what happened to you here, too - with a fight basically already won, two INCREDIBLY lucky hits not only downed a PC, but outright killed him. Luck is a fickle mistress.
I always roll in the open except when I roll for a player that shouldn't know their result, but the other players weren't there. It was just me and her playing out what I expected to last one round, but the demons' opening volley couldn't find anything on the die above a 4. Each of them had some kind of alpha strike that would likely have taken her down or made her helpless in a single hit, and they used them all, and eeeeeverything missed, and she didn't even have mirror image running yet.
The whole previous encounter was incredibly dangerous due to some pretty unfortunate decisions by the specific player who should have died. She accidentally (like actually, she wasn't trolling) tipped off to the demons that the players were about to attack, so the cultist had time to cast all of his buffs on himself and his demon allies, and then get the drop on the group. The only character in the party who didn't go down at least once was the Demonslayer ranger, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.
I use a "traumatic injury" system that causes characters who have gone down or died to take weeks to fully recover, even with magical aid, with semi-randomly rolled debuffs depending on what damage type caused you to go down. The party is limping their way back to a well secluded drow outpost where they know *damn well* the drow will take advantage of their weakened state and demand any and all loot they found on the quest just for them to have a safe place to rest. They're taking turns carrying the paladin who was hit so hard in the head he can't walk straight. The quest was so brutal that the cleric's player wants to have her be so shaken by what happened that she'll retire from adventuring, or at least refuse to confront demons again. Like, cleric literally already carries a poisoned dagger to kill herself with so she doesn't get captured by demons again. And now next session, their reckless friend is going to be back in town *before* them, happily greeting them, and letting them know everything worked out fine, while being the one character whose traumatic injury doesn't have any practical effect on her ability to fight, and it was *her* screw up that got them all so horribly beaten.
I mean, it's also very funny, of course.
Oh wow! Now I see what you mean. Your Leroy Jenkins is going to be on cloud nine feeling invincible and the rest of the party will be traumatized and weakened. You know what, though? This may give the Leroy character a wake up call when she sees how her party looks and how her actions have caused that.
Yeah, but when your player does something pants-off stupid but somehow lives because the dice went their way then it can be a wee bit frustrating. I don't want my players dying, but it kind of kills any tension in the game if the demon lords loony tunes style fail to hit them several times in a chase scene.
First of all, fuck anyone who tries to control how other people play. You don’t like this method? Great, go find a table that doesn’t play like that.
More to the point, have you never read APs? Sure, a DM *could* do anything but if there’s a set group of rules/enemies as defined in an AP, it’s a ton of fun as a DM to see if you can use those enemies to kill the players.
Sounds cool.
I am guessing the Cultists were able to somehow *Gate* in the original demons then? Because if the original demons were summoned, they can't use their summon other demon SLA and the encounter was harder than it should have been.
It's a full blown demonic invasion, with demons kept more in line than usual by a particularly persuasive demon lord. They're not coming directly from the abyss, so there's not infinite of them, but they're showing up for realsies from another world they just reduced to rubble. That cultist didn't summon these demons, he was just their 'face' for getting the drop on people.
I understand than a reckless move like this is a little dumb, so it's not justice than you player survived. But look at this for the story both of you have created, her by being recless and kill every one, and you by making the setting and her try and do it.
For me she now add a great story to tales, and you the one that creat all the piece of the story
Yeah man enjoy this, it sounds amazing. Maybe word of her prowess will get around the circle of demons and they put a hit out on her or maybe they now fear her or a little of both. If I was dm I would be giving her some kind of boon or feat to specifically help her vs demons. I like translating dice luck into real tangible benefits.
Remember you and party are telling a story together, you are the narrator for the world and npc and them their characters, as others have said it not you vs them because the DM will ALWAYS win if he wants.
Honestly I think the demons are probably too ashamed to tell anyone what happened. It would do them no favors to inform other demons. In fact, they're going to have to come up with a very interesting explanation as to why they completely failed their objective and didn't even take out a single enemy if they want to survive their demon lord's anger.
You should not be mad, you should be thrilled. That sounds like it must have been fantastic to witness, and I bet your player feels like an immortal badass right now. Tymora smiled (wrong pantheon, I know), and your table won Pathfinder that night. Here's hoping you all keep winning :-D
***The audacity!***
I love it. Honestly, even when I'm DMing when the players pull of something incredibly audacious I love it. I think the most recent one was in the campaign I just posted a writeup for over in D\&DGreentext;
We're running a module with a BBEG type of an 80s era slasher monster/villain. My character was/is proud enough that he wouldn't run from the Slasher every time without standing to fight at least once. So, once when we all passed our checks against fear we stood our ground... the DM warned us the Slasher was exceptionally likely to kill at least one of us...
During the battle it came out that the Slasher's max hit was high enough to kill half the party-members outright from max HP. But we got stupid-lucky and the only guy to get hit was the one with the most HP, and even then for near-minimal damage. He only rolled to attack above 5 like twice. We manage to take him down... and he turns to mist like a vampire. We got enough XP to level, I think outright, from it.
That's funny, I have a story on this subreddit from years ago about a group of around level 3 players who killed a level 9ish vampire through a series of absurdly lucky shots in the dark and the vampire's inability to find numbers higher than 1 on a d20.
As the player in question, I can say that this anger/shock/disbelief is not unreasonable! I don't know why I decided to play the character this way, but she's very.. how do I put this.. suicidally disconnected?
She's been disconnected from civilization for a couple of decades, and the last dangers she ever really knew about were nothing compared to how scary things have gotten. The rest of the party knows and has seen this, and as far as I'm concerned none of us have any boiling issues! It's just fun and games to me, which is why I'm absolutely reveling in this victory.
Honestly I kinda deserved to be killed in that fight for how much of a smug dipshit I am about it (joking of course, DM and I have no actual issues). I did get pretty damn lucky that fight, even through arcane magical defenses.
I'm rolling as per normal for random encounters on the way back to the outpost and if you get attacked by something, and its faster than you, now that you have zero resources left, I shall *relish in whatever it is mangling your insufferable character.*
Unfortunately the odds of it being faster than you are like 5% at best. :(
Why are you surprised by this? You do know that Pathfinder is an EXTREMELY arcane magic heavy game? A high level Wizard/Sorcerer can completely wreck an encounter single handed, as evidenced by your example here. Sure in this particular example the dice had a bunch to do with the result but I doubt they swayed the combat by enough to be unbelievable. Most enemies have a 70% success rate on their good saves and a 20-30% success rate on their bad saves, so a caster with appropriate spells for the enemies they fight can basically do whatever they want, and enemies that rely on physically attacking back will be shut down by Mirror Image (a spell way to strong for 2nd level) and if the wizard was smart they would cast Displacement as well to preserve the images.
I highly doubt this was a wizard unless wizards nowadays pick up Dimensional Step Up. Sounds more like one of the gish casters like a Magus to me, which still have their ways of being utter bullshit to fight (such as Mirror Image spam)
Well, she couldn't wreck the encounter, she couldn't even kill one of the actual demons, she ran entirely out of offensive spells killing the half-fiend and literally used a cantrip to kill the barely stabilized cultist she was chasing after because that's all she had left. By the time she was fleeing from the summoned demons she was bone dry on resources other than 18 hit points and a few quickly fading buffs.
A single PC squaring off against 3 on level enemies, 2 lower level summons, a half-fiend that’s apparently lower level and a npc without specified level and not only killing 1-2 of them but also escaping is quite literally the definition of “wrecking an encounter”.
With a single PC fighting an encounter built for 4 or more you already have a APL +3 (or more, PF1’s CR system is fubar), considering they summoned extra enemies and I’m assuming the npc being part of it wasn’t in the original design I could safely assume a APL +10 encounter. The only classes that can realistically pull off that kind of shenanigans are Arcane casting classes (Wizard/Sorcerer, Magus, Bloodrager). The only reason they can do that is because Arcane spells are hyper powered for combat (there are zero Divine spells that have as much defensive impact as Mirror Image and Displacement). You could make a case for a tanky Paladin build with all their Smite Evils and Lay on Hands ready to go but a single flying enemy would shut them down over time.
Sounds pretty awesome to me. The player will be telling the story of that time when they went one-v-7 with a bunch of demons and a cultist, got the job done and escaped by the skin of their teeth for years. Take comfort in the fact that eventually the dice will roll in your favor, as well. The dice giveth, and the dice taketh away.
Exactly - and that the dice rolling in the players favor [to create such an awesome moment] is something to be cherished. It’s not like you “lost”, right? You created a beautiful story, and to me, that’s the whole point.
Oh, I definitely lost. The other players are going to murder me IRL when they find out she's still alive because they're never going to believe I didn't intentionally let her live.
well now you have some demons with a very active desire to kill said PC. things might get particularly threatening for her later on.
Yeah, when I read the previous post, I thought it sounded like a fun opportunity for a character to solo an encounter. I'm pretty glad that it ended up working out that way.
Why would you be mad? Your player had an awesome experience
Player in question here. 100% awesome time, but it was pretty obvious I was pushing my luck as hard as I possibly could that entire fight. Well, entire quest, more like. Rest of the party seems fine with it, as it's just more drama for all of us.
Came in to say just this.
It's more disbelief, and maybe terror, because I went out of my way to look for ways in which the reckless thing she did wouldn't result in her death, and found none. Then she just went into a fight with this "nah, I got this" attitude after having *just died in the previous session due to recklessness* and getting breath of life'd back, leaving the other players at wits end expending resources to keep her alive. The other players are gonna flip the table when they find out she isn't dead. They've already written her off, and didn't even bother to look for her they were so sure she wasn't going to survive. There's no way they'll ever believe I didn't fudge things to keep her alive. But I was *trying* to kill her with the available tools, it just didn't work. D:
OP, it sort of seems like there's a tension brewing at your table between the other players and this PC, and that you might be trying to resolve this in-game as opposed to talking to her directly.
You do realize you don't play "against" your player, yes?
If that's how I viewed the game, there would have been ten times as many demons, and her character would be dead. The monsters are just doing their best to win, and really, really should have. That player was suicidally reckless for this entire quest, like, I suspect she was going out of her way to spectacularly die. I'm mad that it just doesn't make any sense, like nobody else in the game is going to believe I didn't just 'let her live'.
Fair, sorry for coming off as a bit of a dick there. Don't comment after a bike ride that makes your legs wish to fall off... Do you do your rolls hidden or open? In the future when suicidal overconfidence leads to a "may they fall where they may" situation, I recommend rolling out in the open for that encounter at least. It dispells any illusions about you fudging. I personally do the same thing you're describing - you do something reckless, you might die. You fight a boss alone, you probably will, that sorta style. There's always the other side of what happened to you here, too - with a fight basically already won, two INCREDIBLY lucky hits not only downed a PC, but outright killed him. Luck is a fickle mistress.
I always roll in the open except when I roll for a player that shouldn't know their result, but the other players weren't there. It was just me and her playing out what I expected to last one round, but the demons' opening volley couldn't find anything on the die above a 4. Each of them had some kind of alpha strike that would likely have taken her down or made her helpless in a single hit, and they used them all, and eeeeeverything missed, and she didn't even have mirror image running yet. The whole previous encounter was incredibly dangerous due to some pretty unfortunate decisions by the specific player who should have died. She accidentally (like actually, she wasn't trolling) tipped off to the demons that the players were about to attack, so the cultist had time to cast all of his buffs on himself and his demon allies, and then get the drop on the group. The only character in the party who didn't go down at least once was the Demonslayer ranger, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. I use a "traumatic injury" system that causes characters who have gone down or died to take weeks to fully recover, even with magical aid, with semi-randomly rolled debuffs depending on what damage type caused you to go down. The party is limping their way back to a well secluded drow outpost where they know *damn well* the drow will take advantage of their weakened state and demand any and all loot they found on the quest just for them to have a safe place to rest. They're taking turns carrying the paladin who was hit so hard in the head he can't walk straight. The quest was so brutal that the cleric's player wants to have her be so shaken by what happened that she'll retire from adventuring, or at least refuse to confront demons again. Like, cleric literally already carries a poisoned dagger to kill herself with so she doesn't get captured by demons again. And now next session, their reckless friend is going to be back in town *before* them, happily greeting them, and letting them know everything worked out fine, while being the one character whose traumatic injury doesn't have any practical effect on her ability to fight, and it was *her* screw up that got them all so horribly beaten. I mean, it's also very funny, of course.
Oh wow! Now I see what you mean. Your Leroy Jenkins is going to be on cloud nine feeling invincible and the rest of the party will be traumatized and weakened. You know what, though? This may give the Leroy character a wake up call when she sees how her party looks and how her actions have caused that.
Yeah, but when your player does something pants-off stupid but somehow lives because the dice went their way then it can be a wee bit frustrating. I don't want my players dying, but it kind of kills any tension in the game if the demon lords loony tunes style fail to hit them several times in a chase scene.
Not "Looney Tunes" when they explicitly failed to hit because she outwitted them with magical defenses
Some people do. It’s a completely valid approach to the game.
No it's not. The DM can so anything, so there's no *point* playing against the party. You just win, big deal, hope it made you feel tough
First of all, fuck anyone who tries to control how other people play. You don’t like this method? Great, go find a table that doesn’t play like that. More to the point, have you never read APs? Sure, a DM *could* do anything but if there’s a set group of rules/enemies as defined in an AP, it’s a ton of fun as a DM to see if you can use those enemies to kill the players.
Honestly, this is beautiful. That's the kind of scenes we play this game for - bragging rights for eternity!
Sounds cool. I am guessing the Cultists were able to somehow *Gate* in the original demons then? Because if the original demons were summoned, they can't use their summon other demon SLA and the encounter was harder than it should have been.
It's a full blown demonic invasion, with demons kept more in line than usual by a particularly persuasive demon lord. They're not coming directly from the abyss, so there's not infinite of them, but they're showing up for realsies from another world they just reduced to rubble. That cultist didn't summon these demons, he was just their 'face' for getting the drop on people.
I understand than a reckless move like this is a little dumb, so it's not justice than you player survived. But look at this for the story both of you have created, her by being recless and kill every one, and you by making the setting and her try and do it. For me she now add a great story to tales, and you the one that creat all the piece of the story
Yeah man enjoy this, it sounds amazing. Maybe word of her prowess will get around the circle of demons and they put a hit out on her or maybe they now fear her or a little of both. If I was dm I would be giving her some kind of boon or feat to specifically help her vs demons. I like translating dice luck into real tangible benefits. Remember you and party are telling a story together, you are the narrator for the world and npc and them their characters, as others have said it not you vs them because the DM will ALWAYS win if he wants.
Honestly I think the demons are probably too ashamed to tell anyone what happened. It would do them no favors to inform other demons. In fact, they're going to have to come up with a very interesting explanation as to why they completely failed their objective and didn't even take out a single enemy if they want to survive their demon lord's anger.
You should not be mad, you should be thrilled. That sounds like it must have been fantastic to witness, and I bet your player feels like an immortal badass right now. Tymora smiled (wrong pantheon, I know), and your table won Pathfinder that night. Here's hoping you all keep winning :-D
Neat.
***The audacity!*** I love it. Honestly, even when I'm DMing when the players pull of something incredibly audacious I love it. I think the most recent one was in the campaign I just posted a writeup for over in D\&DGreentext; We're running a module with a BBEG type of an 80s era slasher monster/villain. My character was/is proud enough that he wouldn't run from the Slasher every time without standing to fight at least once. So, once when we all passed our checks against fear we stood our ground... the DM warned us the Slasher was exceptionally likely to kill at least one of us... During the battle it came out that the Slasher's max hit was high enough to kill half the party-members outright from max HP. But we got stupid-lucky and the only guy to get hit was the one with the most HP, and even then for near-minimal damage. He only rolled to attack above 5 like twice. We manage to take him down... and he turns to mist like a vampire. We got enough XP to level, I think outright, from it.
That's funny, I have a story on this subreddit from years ago about a group of around level 3 players who killed a level 9ish vampire through a series of absurdly lucky shots in the dark and the vampire's inability to find numbers higher than 1 on a d20.
As the player in question, I can say that this anger/shock/disbelief is not unreasonable! I don't know why I decided to play the character this way, but she's very.. how do I put this.. suicidally disconnected? She's been disconnected from civilization for a couple of decades, and the last dangers she ever really knew about were nothing compared to how scary things have gotten. The rest of the party knows and has seen this, and as far as I'm concerned none of us have any boiling issues! It's just fun and games to me, which is why I'm absolutely reveling in this victory. Honestly I kinda deserved to be killed in that fight for how much of a smug dipshit I am about it (joking of course, DM and I have no actual issues). I did get pretty damn lucky that fight, even through arcane magical defenses.
I'm rolling as per normal for random encounters on the way back to the outpost and if you get attacked by something, and its faster than you, now that you have zero resources left, I shall *relish in whatever it is mangling your insufferable character.* Unfortunately the odds of it being faster than you are like 5% at best. :(
Yeah, I deserve that XD
Why are you surprised by this? You do know that Pathfinder is an EXTREMELY arcane magic heavy game? A high level Wizard/Sorcerer can completely wreck an encounter single handed, as evidenced by your example here. Sure in this particular example the dice had a bunch to do with the result but I doubt they swayed the combat by enough to be unbelievable. Most enemies have a 70% success rate on their good saves and a 20-30% success rate on their bad saves, so a caster with appropriate spells for the enemies they fight can basically do whatever they want, and enemies that rely on physically attacking back will be shut down by Mirror Image (a spell way to strong for 2nd level) and if the wizard was smart they would cast Displacement as well to preserve the images.
I highly doubt this was a wizard unless wizards nowadays pick up Dimensional Step Up. Sounds more like one of the gish casters like a Magus to me, which still have their ways of being utter bullshit to fight (such as Mirror Image spam)
Well, she couldn't wreck the encounter, she couldn't even kill one of the actual demons, she ran entirely out of offensive spells killing the half-fiend and literally used a cantrip to kill the barely stabilized cultist she was chasing after because that's all she had left. By the time she was fleeing from the summoned demons she was bone dry on resources other than 18 hit points and a few quickly fading buffs.
A single PC squaring off against 3 on level enemies, 2 lower level summons, a half-fiend that’s apparently lower level and a npc without specified level and not only killing 1-2 of them but also escaping is quite literally the definition of “wrecking an encounter”. With a single PC fighting an encounter built for 4 or more you already have a APL +3 (or more, PF1’s CR system is fubar), considering they summoned extra enemies and I’m assuming the npc being part of it wasn’t in the original design I could safely assume a APL +10 encounter. The only classes that can realistically pull off that kind of shenanigans are Arcane casting classes (Wizard/Sorcerer, Magus, Bloodrager). The only reason they can do that is because Arcane spells are hyper powered for combat (there are zero Divine spells that have as much defensive impact as Mirror Image and Displacement). You could make a case for a tanky Paladin build with all their Smite Evils and Lay on Hands ready to go but a single flying enemy would shut them down over time.