I smell a TPK!


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


We've gotten into a bit of a curious situation in a particular adventure path. Which one? Not relevant :P

The group has a wizard, played by me, a fighter, a paladin, an inquisitor and an alchemist. I'm pretty much the only caster.

Alas, I was just killed this session. It wouldn't be that much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that the only reason we could reach the place where we are is because of me, pretty much. Wall of Ice as a bridge has quite some utility.

We managed to just reach the hideout of the big bad himself when I got killed by a monster just outside his door. This left the other characters in a bit of a pickle. They couldn't go back, because there was no way back and so the only way was to enter the door ahead.

It's slightly frustrating having to watch the final fight without being able to do anyting. Especially since I had prepared specifically for this fight...

A well timed use of Dimension Door allowed him to escape to another room to prepare more obstacles for us and at that point we had to end the session.

The Exchange

they should be able to climb/swim/walk out of it. A bridge is nice but it is not like it is a bottomless pit.

Some groups could just hide until his preparations fade and he has no good buffs.

//no clue what AP.


Yeah I'm being deliberately vague so as to avoid spoiling it for someone else or getting spoiled myself :P

As for the pit, no it isn't a bottomless pit... It's a lake of boiling tar. (and a churning river of watery death too, but that one is a lesser obstacle)

Though I do realize now that the alchemist should be able to copy fly from my spellbook and cast that to get people over the tar IF they survive the remainder of the boss encounter.


Well, it's your GM's job to make things fun for you. If he thinks the boss is too hard without a wizard, then he needs to decide whether having a very challenging battle that you could quite likely lose will be fun. (For some groups, it can be! Striving against overwhelming odds can tickle some people's hero bone, and the gritty realism of being defeated can make you feel like you earned what success you had.) If he doesn't think it's fun, he can make the battle easier in some way, possibly by hitting the boss with a nerf bat, reducing mooks if there are any, adding a 'refresh' station in some way (you stumble upon the boss's secret cache of potions?) or giving you an advantage. Seriously, just giving you a surprise round can make the difference in many cases. Your team still has hellacious offensive capabilities. Paladin smites, Fighter does his thing, inquisitor uses bane and alchemist either does feral mutagen and runs in there or tosses as many bombs as he can (If he's at least 8th level, he can do three bombs per round with rapid shot or two-weapon fighting) and you can do a ridiculous amount of damage very quickly.


If you were killed by the monster outside, what makes you think you'd have been effective against the BBEG?

Oh well, that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Just enjoy the show, take it in stride, and either get revived or look at it as a chance to try out a new concept.


aegrisomnia wrote:

If you were killed by the monster outside, what makes you think you'd have been effective against the BBEG?

Oh well, that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Just enjoy the show, take it in stride, and either get revived or look at it as a chance to try out a new concept.

Because the fight against the monster was us fighting something that we were handling easily when a rule disagreement started and everyone started flipping rulebooks AND taking their turns at the same time.

I was distracted enough to forget to move back after casting a spell, so I was within the monster's 15 foot attack range when it full round attacked me.

Of course I'm going to wait until I get revived. The question is if the rest of the group can survive long enough to revive me.

It's a bit irritating that this is the first fight in the whole campaign against a spellcaster, and I'm dead when we finally get to it (we're level 8).


Another week until next session.

I'm mostly worried that they will be killed before being able to resurrect me. In that case, we're pretty much doomed... The big bad would probably turn our corpses into undead.

Though interestingly enough... I just realized that ONE PERSON actually knows exactly where we are seeing that we used his services to teleport us here in the first place, so it's possible that we could arrange some kind of rescue mission...

Next session will probably be a long one too. If my suspicions are correct, he'll fight them with a large group of zombies. (30 of them)

That's something I have no idea how they will deal with.


If they were down your guy, sounds like they're lucky the encounter with V ended with him being forced into a tactical dimensional retreat. With one man down, if the GM wanted to go for blood, it could have gone much worse.


Well I guess you could enquire as whether you spontaneously rise as a ghost or some other type of undead. For story reasons you could make a case.

Still revivable and does a heck of a lot for later char development.

Hmm


I obviously don't know the AP. From what I gather you're dead on the doorstep of a powerful badguy and the party is between a rock (said baddie) and a hard place (river of tar). I also don't know what level you guys are or your skills.

Could be that the paladin has a mount that can help or the inquisitor can summon a monster to aid you. Maybe the alchemist has a way to preserve your corpse. At the very least I'd say they should barrel ahead into the BBEG fight while slicing off a pinky to get you rezzed later.

If the party is in such dire straits without you alive, this may be a wakeup call for the other players that it's time to diversify and stock up on consumables. I know you can't plan for every possibility but someone in the party should always consider, "what happens if THAT guy goes down?"


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Ok i know what you are playing, it's

spoiler:
kingmaker, specifically book 3 varnhold's vanishing (the spelling might be wrong)
i played that AP nearly to the finish. I don't quite remember the whole way to the castle (but i remember the lake of tar) and it wasn't hard to pass through it, why exactly your party doesn't throw your body in a bag of holding/portable hole and get out of there?


Rogue Eidolon: The paladin not only critted twice but managed to knock him off his concentration when casting a spell that most likely was enervation at the alchemist. Of course I don't know his spell selection so it's hard to say how optimally our GM played him.

Valrydus: lol. I will check with gm about that xD

Mark Hoover: We're all level 8. I think it's mostly a problem in this scenario because we REALLY relied on my spells to get where we currently are. It took 2x wall of ice and liberal use of dimensional step (or was it shift?) to get here.

One of the things we lack is a reliable method of transportation across pits.


Ganryu wrote:
Rogue Eidolon: The paladin not only critted twice but managed to knock him off his concentration when casting a spell that most likely was enervation at the alchemist. Of course I don't know his spell selection so it's hard to say how optimally our GM played him.

Aha--that sounds like everyone should have given the paladin a huge high five! Our GM buffed V a lot, so he can't do this to you, but for us he led off with quickened greater dispel selecting death ward and then used that one power that his race has to auto-crit someone with an empowered maximized enervation. That was really dangerous.


The fight basically played out as I will describe below, but from it we learned something incredibly important, something that can only be learned through experience, and not just through experience points granted from the GM but through actual play and defeat... That kind of experience.

You can't rely on ONE character for utility powers. That simply doesn't work. I mean, some utility is too useful and applicable that you need to be able to provide it through alternate means when the need arises. It's easy to forget this because the character providing the needed utility is pretty much always there, but when he isn't? Need some kind of backup then...

What happened was the badguy teleported out from the fight with dimension door, buffed himself like mad, and came back in. This wouldn't really be a problem, except the group fighting him consisted of

1: Melee inquisitor
2: Melee paladin
3: Melee unarmed fight
4: Alchemist

One of his buffs was flight.

The alchemist could have used dispel bomb to deal with it, but the badguy cast dominate person on him. With no ability to grant flight, and no ability to remove flight nothing could be done. The paladin was paralysed, then the inquisitor, then the fighter and then the dominated alchemist.

Everyone except me survived, but paralysed.

We have a continuation planned. We'll see what happens with it. It will likely be a bizarre rescue mission of some kind...

The Exchange

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In PFS we are taught that at mid levels there are 3 things every character needs to be prepared for, invisibility, darkness and flight. And of course providing healing for yourself.


None of them even carried bows? An inquisitor or a paladin with a bow should have been able to shoot the bajeezus out of V.

Well, except to the extent he has mirror images and displacement. Hmmm.

Yeah, sounds like you're bringing in new characters unless the GM goes somewhere weird. Which he might.


Jeff Morse: Yes. We will need to pay more attention to consumable backup items for these situations.

Zhangar: We had bows, but nothing that could beat his damage reduction.

Dark Archive

Was the paladin out of smites for the day? Smiting bypasses DR.


Jim Cirillo wrote:
Was the paladin out of smites for the day? Smiting bypasses DR.

We should have looked that up closer.

The paladin player thought that it would bypass DR, but GM was sure it would only bypass alignment based DR. I was not present at the session when this was being discussed (5 minutes late) otherwise I would have looked up the rules for it.


Now I'm going off on a tangent here, but Pathfinder (or DnD 3.5 for that matter) is really complex in a way that isn't strictly rules related, but rather in knowing what works and what doesn't.

Character generation traps, for example. Kingmaker was our first attempt at running something long term and we all started with characters at first level so you really got to learn the outs and ins of your character. Some characters were replaced through the adventure as things happened.

The Alchemist previously played a Witch. The Paladin previously played a Cleric. The Inquisitor played a Ranger. The Fighter joined us for this book of Kingmaker.

It really shows too how some classes are much harder to make sense of than others. The witch was pretty useless aside from the Slumber Hex. The Cleric lacked a clear direction. Was he a fighter? Was he a caster? These things are not really easy to make out.

The Alchemist player (who played the Witch) is playing an Alchemist a lot better, because it's so OBVIOUS that they are good at bombs. There's little confusion. The Paladin in a similar way is much more obvious to build. You know what you need to do. (of course exceptions are odd alternative builds)

One thing I found notable is that you learn that things in practice can be completely different from what you read on forums. I initially had a high opinion of pit spells, but I had to drop them from my list of regularily memorized spells in favour of other spells.

Teleportation class abilities of Teleportation Subschool Wizard have proven incredibly useful. Resilient Sphere has saved many lives. Summons started out great but gradually lost usefulness. Now I no longer use them.

It's too bad we lost before getting to level 9. I wanted to play around with level 5 spells. Overland Flight...


Didn't the inquisitor dispeled the fly spell?


He doesn't have dispel magic :(

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