viktor_haag (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
viktor_haag) wrote2010-03-23 10:42 am
viktor_haag) wrote2010-03-23 10:42 am
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Didn't fear the Roper
Last night, for the first time in a long time, there was a character death at my gaming table. I did not mishandle the situation, but I didn't really handle it all that well either. The moment was a bit shocking, and abrupt. Shocking, OK, but abrupt, I have to bring on myself for not properly pacing things a bit better.
As part of our Rise of the Runelords campaign's effort to transition to the new-ish Pathfinder rules, the Monday PM players created new characters of their own, from scratch (when we started RotRL, we used the stock characters provided). I decided to use the first two or three original 3.0 "adventure path" modules ("Sunless Citadel", "Forge of Fury", and "Speaker In Dreams") to get these new characters up to the same level as the original four they'd already played through RotRL pts I and II, so that at the end of this diversion we'd have a stable of eight characters that could move forward into RotRL pt III and onwards.
Well, the Roper in "Forge of Fury" reared up and smacked them. The Roper is no doubt deliberately placed as a "you must learn to negotiate" impasse: he's without doubt the toughest opponent in FoF, and perhaps tougher than anything the PCs might face in the next module as well. Not only does the Roper have more hit points than God (well, OK, he doesn't, but he easily has more hit points than the party does amongst them), but he's cunningly designed to be a one-trick-pony party killer.
Its initial ranged attacks are subtly nasty: no damage, just a STR drain. It ropes you, and pulls you in. Slowly. It's the "slowly" part that is horrid: it, combined with the high AC of the creature and its tendrils, can lead the characters not to take it's danger seriously enough. Because once it gets you next to it, it's average melee damage is 36 points.
Our party got roped, and managed through luck and reasonable tactics to get themselves all free of tendrils and decided to run. Unfortunately, one character in the party was lower in the initiative order than the Roper: this meant that everyone else took off, and poor Marna was left standing there, agape, as the Roper re-roped her. On her turn, she tried to free herself, and was unable (she actually missed her roll by one). It pulled her in; one of the other PCs tried to run in to rescue, but before an escape could be effected, the creature had Marna next to it, and subjected her to a bite: it scored a critical hit for 74 hit points of damage. I looked at the dice, and said, "Well, the creature swallows the top half of Marna; there is a horrible crunching noise, and the top-half of Marna is gone."
Stun.
The most "meta-game-aware" player was not in attendance last night. If he had been, I imagine there would have been a panicked "Jimminy! That's a Roper! We have to leave now" exclamation earlier in the encounter. As it was, the Roper's game mechanics led to doom for these players, just as it has for so many before them. The Roper rope-a-dopes like the best of them.
I view encounters like this with an extremely jaundiced eye: what exactly is the purpose of the Roper's placement in this module? To me, it's more about teaching players to fear the Roper than it is about the story going on in the module itself. And really, how much utility will that have? When will these players next have occasion to face a Roper, really? Rarely, I suspect.
To make this death pay off, I have to now pledge to seed a Roper (perhaps this Roper) somewhere forward in this campaign, to make that meta-game cost the players anted last night come home to roost. Otherwise, the PC death seems horribly wasteful.
As part of our Rise of the Runelords campaign's effort to transition to the new-ish Pathfinder rules, the Monday PM players created new characters of their own, from scratch (when we started RotRL, we used the stock characters provided). I decided to use the first two or three original 3.0 "adventure path" modules ("Sunless Citadel", "Forge of Fury", and "Speaker In Dreams") to get these new characters up to the same level as the original four they'd already played through RotRL pts I and II, so that at the end of this diversion we'd have a stable of eight characters that could move forward into RotRL pt III and onwards.
Well, the Roper in "Forge of Fury" reared up and smacked them. The Roper is no doubt deliberately placed as a "you must learn to negotiate" impasse: he's without doubt the toughest opponent in FoF, and perhaps tougher than anything the PCs might face in the next module as well. Not only does the Roper have more hit points than God (well, OK, he doesn't, but he easily has more hit points than the party does amongst them), but he's cunningly designed to be a one-trick-pony party killer.
Its initial ranged attacks are subtly nasty: no damage, just a STR drain. It ropes you, and pulls you in. Slowly. It's the "slowly" part that is horrid: it, combined with the high AC of the creature and its tendrils, can lead the characters not to take it's danger seriously enough. Because once it gets you next to it, it's average melee damage is 36 points.
Our party got roped, and managed through luck and reasonable tactics to get themselves all free of tendrils and decided to run. Unfortunately, one character in the party was lower in the initiative order than the Roper: this meant that everyone else took off, and poor Marna was left standing there, agape, as the Roper re-roped her. On her turn, she tried to free herself, and was unable (she actually missed her roll by one). It pulled her in; one of the other PCs tried to run in to rescue, but before an escape could be effected, the creature had Marna next to it, and subjected her to a bite: it scored a critical hit for 74 hit points of damage. I looked at the dice, and said, "Well, the creature swallows the top half of Marna; there is a horrible crunching noise, and the top-half of Marna is gone."
Stun.
The most "meta-game-aware" player was not in attendance last night. If he had been, I imagine there would have been a panicked "Jimminy! That's a Roper! We have to leave now" exclamation earlier in the encounter. As it was, the Roper's game mechanics led to doom for these players, just as it has for so many before them. The Roper rope-a-dopes like the best of them.
I view encounters like this with an extremely jaundiced eye: what exactly is the purpose of the Roper's placement in this module? To me, it's more about teaching players to fear the Roper than it is about the story going on in the module itself. And really, how much utility will that have? When will these players next have occasion to face a Roper, really? Rarely, I suspect.
To make this death pay off, I have to now pledge to seed a Roper (perhaps this Roper) somewhere forward in this campaign, to make that meta-game cost the players anted last night come home to roost. Otherwise, the PC death seems horribly wasteful.
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Pretty much all on her own, Marna removed 120 HP from the creature.
If it had been me, I'd have been screaming, "We did how much damage and the thing is still up? We need to book, now!"
Granted, the party did at that point realize they were well in over their heads, but they weren't able to fully extricate in time. 25% party losses seem rather better than things might have ended up.
I was least kind enough to only assess the STR drain on "first contact of filament" and not as ongoing damage, or even "every time you get hit with a filament", and this probably saved our heroes from a TPK.
I was told, grimly, to save the home-fashioned creature token and not recycle it, because, "we'll be coming back". Fair enough. At least they now know how deadly the damn thing is, and how susceptible it is to fire... and how many experience points the thing is worth (::shudder::).
The trouble with the Roper's position in the module is the Big Boss Fight really is a doddle if the party has any kind of success against the Roper... 8P
Mind you, I have some plans for when the party finally makes it into the Big Boss Fight that will toughen it up significantly (and help to tie the module better into the overall RotRL story). Not revealed here for obvious reasons.... 8)
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By offering myself as a hostage while negotiations took place and being in immediate harm's way I was also right on the spot to hurl that magic token down the gullet of the Roper that split that Roper from the inside out when I shouted the activation.
::B::
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Many modules have it .. the encounter that is too damn tough. Maybe it's a trap (and traps suffer from "it wouldn't have been that bad if only they made a roll" syndrome). In a recent Darwin's World/Savage Worlds game there was a crossfire ambush that, if allowed to execute in it's native d20, would have been a withering ambush, like taking the entire party to a Hit-point grinding wheel for a couple of rounds. I altered it a bit .. made it the classic war-time dilemma .. in this case a wounded Enforcer scraming for help .. with the bodies of the two dead Enforcers who tried to help him providing a warning to the players' characters. Combined with the much more heroic system they came out okay, and effected a rescue. But even one or two open-ended rolls for damage would have turned the profusion of close calls, minor scrapes, and cuts (from a half-dozen "shaken" results while they were pined down) into a PC charnel house.
I'm fairly opposed to PC death these days. Each PC is such an integral part of the story, and fitting a new one in quickly can strain credibility .. the suspenders of disbelief, if you will.
Yet on the other hand, I roll dice out in the open, the results are clearly visible, and no secretly fudging results is going to work. So death due to die-roll is out there .. lurking.
It forms a conundrum that I often find myself conflicted over.
Doug.
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My group is much more sanguine over mortality than I am: I suspect that the game itself can't help but incorporate PC death, because the mechanics are pretty darned lethal if "things go sour".
I do what I can, including a small amount of fudging, to ensure PC survival. In nearly all cases, the fudging is done with adjustment to tactical choices, and not actual die-roll results. And in this encounter, that, too, was the case:
• The rules weren't really crystal clear on how/when I should assess the 1D6 STR damage from the Roper's filaments, so I went with the kindest interpretation: you take the 1D6 STR damage upon first contact from a filament, and not really thereafter.
• There were several rounds when the Roper didn't make full, effective use of its filaments (either by range, or by number).
• The Roper purposefully didn't drag people into the swiftly running, terribly cold stream in front of it, and let the PCs have to deal with that danger as well.
• The Roper is intelligent, and the module clearly states that it is willing to negotiate, especially for food. At one point, the Roper grabbed the Druid, and clearly made a proposition to the PCs that it would trade her life for a much larger supply of meat. The PCs started very briefly down that path, but then things went pear-shaped, and I couldn't in good conscience stretch the Roper's bounds of plausibility much further to not have him make an effective demonstration (and meal) of Marna the Druid. The Roper has every reason to feel that it is in a position of power, and the PCs are not in a position to bargain much, or cadge, or treat it violently (after soaking up 3/4 of its massive HP reserve): the PCs had a brief moment where prostration and grovelling followed by swift, grim, meat collecting might have saved Marna's life. It was mishandled, spectactularly unfortunate rolls were made in the open as a result, and Marna met her gruesome end.
At times, I have been known to "interpret" die rolls in the players' favour in order to ensure a tense but survivable encounter (the PC's fight against the Lamia Matriarch at the end of RotRL II was certainly a case like this -- she has a massive array of dangerous tactical options at her disposal, and I honestly can't see that, played with full and deadly abandon, the PCs could survive a stand-up fight with her. Still, my PCs chose to pursue a stand-up fight with her, and I brought several of the characters to the brink of death as a result.
As to the "fitting in" of the next character, I don't have to stretch geography too much -- immediately after the death of Marna, the PCs more fully explored the "backdoor tunnel" to the other face of the mountain and we ended the evening with them outside on the slopes looking down into the woods. A chance encounter with someone else is not out of the realm of possibility, especially since the party has already freed the townsfolk that the Orcs were holding prisoner, and word may therefore have reached someone interested in coming to the party's aid (for one reason or another).
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Someone really needs to write that filk, I'm afraid.
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