Critical Failure: Insight

So Lair Assault happened last Monday. I had been prepared to continue The Elder Elemental Eye, but for the  first time in a long while new players showed up and they wanted to throw down against the Tyrantclaw, so against my better judgement I caved and decided to try my hand at murdering my players with a horde of orc-mounted dinosaurs.

It sucked.

First, I had not really read the booklet ahead of time. The owner at Knightfall is good at hooking me up with stuff, but I was not on the roster for running Lair Assault. Still it was just one encounter…how hard could it be? (Hint: I forgot to flip the map over on round five and to add an additional dinosaur to each wave.)

Second, a least a few of the players were cheating. A lot. In the spirit of the event I was trying to roll out in the open so that they could see what I was doing, but two were–among other things–using their dice bags and soda cans to conceal attack and damage rolls. I am not sure how a level 6 fighter frequently rolls mid-30’s on an attack roll, but after crunching the numbers all I could surmise was that he was using imaginary numbers, a weighted die, or both.

I guess that if there was a highlight, it came about when Kamon asked about the pair of huts on the map, mainly if they could shield him from a theoretical t-rex assault (we had kind of played the scenario before). I flipped the book open to the part on terrain features, and matter-of-factly read the description as follows:

“Characters in the hut gain a +5 power bonus to all defenses and have fast-healing 10. The huts are indestructible and are too small for the t-rex to enter.“

Now I have been told that I can muster up a really good dead-pan expression, even while making the most absurd of statements. Thankfully Kamon had known me long enough to pick up when I was making a bullshit statement solely off of what I was saying. He still asked, “Really?” I replied no, and that they conferred no bonuses whatsoever but were pretty darned comfy, what with the firepit and all at the center.

The battle trudged on until eventually the person they were trying to protect turned into a t-rex and started chowing down. The dinosaurs fled, they dropped the last of the orcs, and…then they started booking it for the huts, even at the cost of taking opportunity attacks. I figured that they were hoping to gain some sort of concealment bonus, or perhaps delay it for a bit while it presumably would stop to use an action or two to smash the hut open.

Until they asked me for those “bonuses” again.

On one hand, they had never played with me before. On the other I had assumed that by citing utterly absurd benefits with absolutely no pretense that they would have caught on. That and the fact that I clarified that they did nothing after Kamon asked. Oh well, after two hours of dealing with players who did not know the rules or accurately track their resources, at least I was able to walk away with a story to tell.

Critical Failures: What Color Was That Dragon, Again?

This happened like, the session before we stopped running my first homebrew 4th Edition campaign over a year ago. I had gotten Player’s Handbook 2 months before and was itching to run something with a tight primal/Feywild/celtic theme. The main quest was that the players were searching for pieces of a song that had been written by a long-dead bard that for some reason a bunch of other major players–eladrin, drow, and fomorians to name a few–were also looking for.

Over the course of some ten levels, they plundered an eladrin crypt, found the ashes of someone who knew the location of one part, had a ghostspeaker pry the information out of it, liberated a town from a haunted castle, navigated a forest half stuck in the Feywild, delved into an ancient druid pyramid, and eventually found the first piece. They also found a map with two parts clearly marked: an island far to the north, and a dwarven city that was pretty close by. They decided to go to the dwarven city first, and were surprised to find it occupied by drow.

Not that they get along with any elves, really.

Even so, they somehow managed to sneak inside and make their way to the castle, only to be spotted while scaling the gate. At some point while they were fighting off drow, giant spiders, and web golems I decided to throw in a dragon to mix things up. Not just any dragon, mind you, but something that I felt best represented what the Underdark had to offer: a purple dragon.

Now, I chose a purple dragon because they also lived underground, and I figured that drow could strike a bargain with one. Also I had never gotten a chance to use one before, and have the mini and everything to go with it. Unfortunately having never used them, I was not privy to a very specific weakness until several rounds into the battle, that being sunlight. When purple dragons are exposed to sunlight they react almost the same way as most vampires do, in that they can only take one action a round and take a fuckton of damage to the tune of 160.

Each round.

They are like the mogwai of dragons.

What should have happened was that the dragon should have instantly exploded, probably like the boss at the end of the first Blade movie, just to drive home how silly the mistake was. I ended up retconning the dragon into being a black one, dropping its level considerably as a concession since I could not conceive of a situation where a purple dragon would ever venture to the surface during the day. In retrospect I should have read more carefully (or just kept my mouth shut), but in all fairness this was the original 4E statblock format, so the weakness was mentioned almost at the very bottom. 

Critical Failures: So, You Had a Twin Sister

This is just a story about something that a player did–or rather, did not do–during one of my campaigns that we still bring up from time to time.

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About a year ago I had started running a campaign set in Eberron’s Shadow Marches, which relied heavily on aberrant cults gradually weakening Gatekeeper seals, raising sunken cities, summoning aberrant stars, etc. When planning a campaign I like to get input from my players on their character’s history, motivation, and goals so I can fine tune the campaign (similar to how it is done in Dresden Files). My philosophy is if i can get the players to step up and willingly do something without having to be prodded, I am good. The only real stipulation was that the characters had to have a reason for heading out to a remote mining town deep in the Marches.

Well, one of the characters wanted to play a changling rogue named Moxie, so we worked out a background where her sister had joined up with a guild in Zarash’ak when they were young in order to make some quick cash to pay for her illness (the character had a Con of 8). Her sister stopped coming home at some point, and after discovering the guild she joined Moxie signed up because they were not exactly going to give anyone a roster (not that looking for a changling exactly helped). So she toughs it out, does some menial jobs, and eventually gets signed up to do quite a bit of dragonshard smuggling from a remote mining town called Shardpit to the tune of 3,000 gps.

Fast forward six levels and a couple star-worshipping hellholes, and the characters are finally back at Zarash’ak with only a couple thousand gps worth of dragonshards to their name. Mind you, two characters went to Shardpit due to terrible visions (and belonged to the Cerulean Sign), and the other was a guide. Moxie’s player divulged any information about who she was or what she was doing, and in fact in character they were not even aware that she was a changling.

They head to the Tharashk enclave in order to be debriefed, explaining what happened in Shardpit and Greyshore, and hand over their pittance of shards after learning about the shortages (other mining towns are being raided by orcs) before hitting the town to sell their loot, buy new stuff, and catch up with key NPCs.

Once they were sufficiently split up they run into some hired muscle, who threatens to kill Moxie unless she can come up with the dragonshards within a very short time frame. The party is now surprised to learn that she is part of the local thieves guild and that she was supposed to smuggle dragonshards. They ask her if she has anything else she’d like to share. You know, like her motivation (or at least her race). She tells them no, and decide to take the offensive and attack the guild. They ask around, beat up some people, find an entrance, and proceed to cut and blast their way through their ranks.

Once they are almost done, they run into something a bit different.

In the midst of the usual suspects of brutish thugs they run into a cloaked figure who is dashing and flipping about, wielding sword and dagger, dealing sneak attack damage with a flank, and faking them out like a changling would. Since Moxie’s player was not getting the hint I even described the opponent’s fighting style as “very similar to Moxie’s”.

It didn’t work.

Eventually, everyone is dead and I describe how the cloaked figure reverts to its true form in changling fashion, and basically have to spell it out that she is Moxie’s sister, the player evidently having completely forgotten what she was doing the whole time. Everyone at the table is surprised to learn that A) she is a changling, and B) that she even had a sister. Moxie’s player is also surprised at this, despite knowing that this was the guild her sister joined and that she fought in an almost identical manner, tricks and all.

So…yeah. It was just one of those things that probably would have had an impact at all if the player had actually divulged any information to anyone and/or paid attention.