Action Point: Death by Chocolate

Action Point is going to be my "normal" DM post that seems to be a staple of D&D blogs everywhere. It's a recap of my latest game session and philosophizing over whatever D&D rule/concept/etc. that bugged me/impressed me the most during said session. Ok, ready to go? Yeah? Good.

I thought last night's game went extremely well, despite the fact that I sent more than half the group home in body bags...

Money Money Money Mooooney!

We started the session the instant after the party had finished off a large group of undead, an encounter that went quite well (despite some strange tactical choices from my player group). I had taken the time to flesh out the room's treasure and wow, what a difference. I went into this edition of D&D with a very cynical view of treasure: why bother detailing exactly what kinds of gems the party finds, art objects, non-monetary treasure, and so on, when my players are just going to fence everything? Sometimes, players don't even bother to fence; they hear the item's value and add it to their gp total...and unless you're a truly anal DM, you let them get away with it. Otherwise, you're forcing a level of realism on your players that they obviously have no interest in. If this is what most players do, though, what's the difference between detailing the loot in a room and just listing off a gp total of everything they find?

Thing is, it does make a difference. For one thing, it helps with pacing. 4th Edition encounters tend to be on the long side; if there's a good chance your players are going to walk from one combat into another, provide the most intricate treasure details possible, and make sure to put lots of stuff in the room for the players to poke and prod. Sometimes, the players might find a seriously weird item with no monetary value. They make check after check and they just can't figure out what it is. If the item is peculiar enough, you can bet on them hanging onto it, and when that item turns out to be important down the road, the players feel rewarded for their decision to keep it.

You can also use "worthless" treasure to make your dungeon feel more alive. Those wooden animals next to the servant girl's bed might not be worth a cent, but if something later in the dungeon reminds the players of that find, such as the introduction of a new NPC with a connection to those carvings, it'll feel like everything is clicking into place. Your new NPC already feels more real to them than the most intricate description would allow.

Anyway, I've been getting more and more into treasure details and it has been paying dividends in my game. The players love to go through it, it makes my dungeons feel more alive, and it gives everybody something to do between combat encounters in the event of back to back fights. I'm not saying an approach like this one isn't without merit (I actually think the wealth system Chatty DM has developed is pretty cool), and it certainly doesn't squelch the players' ability to find valueless trinkets here and there...but why would they bother searching if they knew there wasn't any money in it for them?

Perhaps it's different for other groups, but I know that something would be lost if I did away with loot. My players don't have the time or interest to read up on every magic item in the game, so when they find something really cool they've never heard of before, they get pretty excited. They're growing to enjoy this aspect of the game more than ever before, and I'm growing to really enjoy the character moments this space between encounters allows...I just have to make time to fill the room with interesting things!

Skill challenge? Fun? A fun skill challenge?!
I'm a big fan of the bulk of Wizards' 4E line, but to me the two DMGs stand head and shoulders above anything else they've published thus far. The first offered incredibly good advice on how to run a game that could easily be applied to any system. The DMG2 is more focused on D&D 4E's mechanics, and that's a very good thing. There are plenty of cool toys in there, and they've done an excellent job of responding to the gripes some people had with the first DMG. They've expanded the rules and tips for custom traps, monsters, artifacts, etc...but best of all, they've completely overhauled skill challenges.

Skill challenges were sort of a mess right after 4th Edition hit. They sounded okay on paper, but in practice they didn't really work - they weren't fun and they didn't make sense. Many DMs dropped them altogether, and those that kept them ended up house ruling the system (including many DMs up at WotC HQ, apparently). Here, they are seriously fun. It might take a little more work to put them together, but it's worth it, friends. I can't go into much detail here (my players haven't completed the challenge yet), but if you haven't already, read the chapter on skill challenges in DMG2 from start to finish as soon as possible. It will completely change your view on skill challenges.

I'm going to end it there, as I still haven't gotten to what I really want to talk about today, but I'm sure I'll revisit this sometime after the party completes the challenge.

A shotgun to the face

 So this skill challenge was moving right along and everybody was having a good time. The players were in the midst of a "scavenger hunt" of sorts: each had received a specific vision revealing the location of a particular item, and as far as they knew, they needed to find all five to move on to the next stage of the challenge.

One of these pieces required the completion of a difficult combat encounter to acquire. So, the players headed to the encounter site and managed to summon the monster - a nasty fellow inspired by Diablo's notorious Butcher. There were definitely a couple of things I would have liked to have changed about the fight - I hadn't properly warned the players how tough it was going to be, the room was too small, and I had given the monster a damage reduction ability I sorely regretted (I've decided to scrap it if they try the fight again). Protip: damage reduction auras on standard leader monsters? Good idea. Damage reduction auras on nasty solo monsters? Bad idea. Lesson learned.

What really killed the players, though, was a burst attack called Flay the Helpless, which dealt significant damage in a close burst 5 and caused vulnerability to necrotic and poison damage. A potent ability, sure, but it was on recharge 5-6. Statistically speaking the characters would have to worry about it once every three or four rounds. Well, as we all know, sometimes the dice are for the players, and sometimes the dice are against the players. Not only was the Butcher managing to recharge the attack every round, but he was rolling ridiculously long strings of high attack rolls..and if he did roll low, it would be targeting someone who had a low enough fortitude to get hit anyway.

Towards the end of the combat, my rogue player was already down, a couple more were clinging to life and my shaman player was out of healing spells...and the Butcher wasn't even bloodied. Just as the heroes started to discuss retreating, something miraculous happend - my warlock player rolled a crit with a daily, dealing well over fifty points of damage (for a level 7 character, that's pretty damn good). Everyone started to celebrate...it was bloodied! There might a shot at victory after all! Well, not so fast. Like most solo monsters, the Butcher had a nasty trigger waiting for the players to bloody him. Yep, Flay the Helpless immediately charged and went off (AGAIN) as an automatic reaction to the Butcher becoming bloodied. Two more players went down. My rogue was now DEAD dead. The shaman and the warlock managed to get out by the skin of their teeth...and that was that. It was getting close to our normal end time, so we called it quits.

Despite all this, I still thought the session went well, and I said so. Everyone agreed (even my player who hasn't really bought into 4E yet admitted he had a good time), although clearly, nobody was happy about dying or failing to kill the Butcher. Regardless, the crew seemed to shrug it off. We chatted for a few minutes and I went out for a smoke, as I typically do when a session is wrapping up.

People started filing out into the damp, cool night. As the first player passed by, I lamented the occasional cruelty of dice. "Well," he shrugged, "there's always DM's discretion...just because you have a shotgun in our face doesn't mean you have to use it."

"True," I replied, "but the game wouldn't be much fun if you guys knew you couldn't die."

"Well, you've already proved that a few times."

"Touché," I laughed, and let it drop.

Based on the absurd amount of time I've spent reading Dragon Magazine, Dungeon Magazine, various forums and several blogs, I don't feel like I run a "high casualty" campaign. I'll go so far as to claim I know I don't. I'd say one character gets KO'd every three or four fights, sure, but they rarely actually die. I've never withheld raise dead from my players; I've always made it as simple as heading to town and taking a break. Is the player perception of character KO any different from their perception of character death? Perhaps not...and I think that's probably my fault, since I've always made it about as easy to resurrect themselves as it is to stand back up after a fight...just more expensive.

That's not the important point, though it is an interesting train of thought I'll have to pursue sometime. No, this isn't really about death. It's about fudge. If you're a player (I'm not specifically referring to my players here), this is an important point to understand:

If your DM is a good DM, you'll never know when he fudges.

I try my damnedest to never fudge dice rolls in full view of the players. I've done it once in the course of this campaign, and I regret it to this day because I know how toxic it can be; I've experienced it firsthand. In one of the first games I ran, I fudged absolutely everything. I knew my players didn't like to die, and I wanted them to like me, as a DM and as a friend (gimme a break, I was twelve). I didn't want to risk losing a friend over a dumb game. So...what happened? The players took increasingly foolish and unrealistic risks, never giving a second thought to tactics, knowing they couldn't really be hurt. Eventually, they had conquered every plane of existence and amassed an absurd mound of powerful magic items and gold...and that's right about when the game fizzled.

That's an extreme example, and I learned quite a bit from it. I still fudged, and I slowly trained myself to hold back as often as possible. However, I had yet to sort out the other important law of fudging: that it must be done in secret.

Why'd you save his character, but not mine? What's different about this crappy roll? Why did you let us die this time? Eh, this victory is kinda meaningless; we only won because the DM stepped in. On and on and on. Such are the wages of sloppy fudging. You know that one fudge in this campaign the players know about, in which I saved a character from falling into an endless abyss? I am never going to be able to escape that decision, at least not in this campaign. If the characters ever find themselves in a situation even remotely similar to that encounter, and someone screws up or gets very unlucky with the dice, I will have to choose between more fudging or allowing a seed of resentment to start growing at my table.

Summing up - through all of these experiences, I've come to believe in two laws essential to a healthy campaign when it comes to fudging:

1) Players need to be punished for poor tactical decisions.

2) The threat of bad luck must remain a constant.

Both of these came into play last night. If the players watched me roll for the Flay the Helpless recharge, saw the 6 and I decided to use the Butcher's weaker attacks regardless, the dice would have lost some of their power. The players should always be worried about that 6. They should never find themselves saying "well, half the group is bloodied and one guy just kissed the pavement. This recharge roll doesn't matter because the DM will back off." That may seem like mercy, but it can lead to boring scenes, what's worse, boring scenes when the tension should be at its peak.

And what about the bloodied rogue with no healing surges still going toe to toe with the Big Bad so he can roll his sneak attack dice? Of course he's going down. Hell, if the area attack hadn't gone off round after round, he would have been my first target with the monster's basic attacks. Evil entities tend to notice when you're bleeding out. What about the warlock who launched that daily in a desperate bid to bloody the monster while the party was coming to terms with their worsening situation? That may be the only critical hit with a daily we ever see in the course of the campaign, and it's going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons (although I hope we'll be laughing about it by next week).

I'm not pointing this out to disparage my players, who may very well end up reading this. I'm only pointing it out to show how everyone makes mistakes, DM and player alike, and it's only fair that we all pay the price for those mistakes. Believe me, players have the better deal. If you make a mistake, particularly in combat, you have the opportunity to learn from it and hopefully think twice the next time you're in that situation. Ultimately, the mistake is rewarding...this is true for DM errors as well, although recovering from that mistake can be a bit more...complicated on our end of the table. I have plenty of experience with this; I've done a LOT of stupid things running games over the past seventeen years. You figure out what you should have done differently and file the memory away so you can refer to it the next time you're in a similar situation (and if you're a DM, you hopefully recover some face, too).

As that player pointed out last night, yes, I have demonstrated that the game can be deadly. I have shot each of my players in the face once or twice. But that doesn't mean I'll stop demonstrating it. That's not a game I'm willing to run. Sometimes, players make mistakes that turn out to be deadly...and sometimes the dice are just against you. Sometimes, heroes die. There is no "god mode" in D&D. No invincibility cheat. That's not to say I'm going to stop fudging; quite the opposite. But if my players know I fudged, that means I screwed up...and I'm going to pay for it.

In the end, I would ask any player reading this to chew on this - the next time you escape something nasty by the skin of your teeth, or get incredibly lucky with some sort of check you were almost certainly going to fail, ask yourself - did I really get that lucky?

Tomorrow: the minorogue, levels 1-10.