When the players break the module


Advice

Sovereign Court

I recently ran a pre-constructed three-part module for a group of novice players through the internet. The premise is essentially that a party of neutral and good characters happens upon an oppressive Lawful Evil town ran by a corrupt Duke. He has roughly 50 loyal guards at his disposal.

The module essentially calls for them to do one of three things: incite a popular uprising, fight the guards or try and kill the Duke. Assassination was intended to take part at a certain place in the module.

But here's what the PCs did. They had one of the rogues create doses of drow poison, then mix it with poison they extracted from an arrow that a good NPC had given them. They successfully completed this.

Then in the night they sent the Wizard north of the town. He had prepared Silent Image and Ghost Sound. The wizard created an illusion of a Goblin army assaulting the town, and cited that the guards would need to interact with the illusion before it was found out. So this took care of a detachment of guards.

One of the party rogues, the poisoner, crept in the night to outside the Duke's mansion and threw alchemist fires in each level of the building, then booked it. He rolled high enough stealth and attack to not get found out.

In the ensuing chaos, the party CN Half-Orc Barbarian put on a black cloak and assaulted the front gate. On the first round he cleaved two of the guards in half. Many of the others were killed in the ensuing combat, since raging he had a 24 STR.

The Vanaran rogue and the alchemist snuck around back. Using his climb speed the rogue scaled the walls and lowered the rope. They crept in and through clever use of Silence and Stealth, were not caught poisoning the duke in his sleep. The Duke failed his FORT saves the following days, and eventually died.

I was blown away with the luck and creativity of the players, and how they absolutely trashed this module.

TL;DR version: The players were way smarter than the writers of this module, what do?


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What do?

Give the players a slow clap, and run another module.

Heck, run the same module in the next town over, but reskin the setting.

Sounds like a fun creative bunch.

Silver Crusade

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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

A party of neutral and good characters poisoning people in their sleep, yeah.

Sovereign Court

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Applaud their tactical skill; they earned that. But ask them if they really think they're playing Good, or if they'd be more comfortable playing Neutral people doing "good, by any means necessary".


How it worked out is acceptable, but I think I would have been more... cruel, but realistic. Ghost Sound would get tons of will saves. Perhaps have volleys of arrows or a magic missile shot at the group, and hit nothing. Suspicious.

Crafting drow poison would take a DC 13 craft alchemy check & costs 750 silver. It would take... a craft: alchemy check of 58 to complete a single dose with a week of time. Assuming he can find raw material for it. I don't think poisons can be combined either, though there's probably an alchemist discovery or something for that. And last, most filthy rich people can afford several castings of neutralize poison. No way would his people just watch him die for days.

Again, it worked out & sounds really fun too. And that's just fine for a lotta people, the ease is justified b/c it's getting way too fun. Besides, even without those issues the plan had a decent chance of working anyway with just the infiltration & a coup de grace.


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Gorbacz wrote:
A party of neutral and good characters poisoning people in their sleep, yeah.

Once you've decided to kill a man, that's that. Stabbing him in the face satisfies your martial pride, but it doesn't make him any more or less dead than poisoning*.

In fact, given that you've decided to kill this Duke, the responsible thing to do is whatever is most likely to succeed without excessive collateral damage. Losing an honorable duel kills yourself, doesn't do anything for the people you intended to help, and in fact invites retribution on them.

*Poisoning people to death doesn't really work by the rules of the game, which is bullshit.

Sovereign Court

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In a way, killing the duke yourself is better than inciting a popular rebellion. Rebellion gets a lot of level-1 commoners killed.

Killing the duke's guards... well, that was always going to happen. In a way, it's the guards' responsibility because they work for an evil duke. I'm not saying excessive guard-killing is desirable, but necessary killing wouldn't count as evil.

Poison... poison isn't honorable. But honor is a weird concept in PF anyway. Honor is when someone in full plate with a big sword and full BAB wants to fight you. Poison is dishonorable because his armor and BAB don't protect him from that, making it "unfair". (Ignoring for the moment that he probably has a good Fort save.)

So how honorable is it for a paladin to challenge a wizard to a swordfight?

I think the concept of "honorable combat" doesn't translate well to a world where a slight majority of the classes fights in entirely different ways.

Liberty's Edge

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Gorbacz wrote:
A party of neutral and good characters poisoning people in their sleep, yeah.

Sure, why not? Poison isn't Evil. Assassination isn't necessarily Evil, depending on context.

You could maybe argue it was an Evil action to kill him in his sleep without first having talked to him and given him some chance to come to terms, and thus not Paladin allowed even sans poison, if you wanted (I might well even agree with you), but for anyone not a Paladin, the Good action of liberating the town overshadows the very minimal Evil of it quite a bit. Nobody's Alignment is changing over that, and nobody here seems to have been a Paladin...


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Ascalaphus wrote:

I think the concept of "honorable combat" doesn't translate well to a world where a slight majority of the classes fights in entirely different ways.

Even in our world, "honorable" always translated to "in a way that favors the guy with better diet, better training and better equipment".

Sovereign Court

To be clear the module itself mentioned one possible way to end the Duke's reign was to assassinate him. But it assumed the players would try to assassinate him in a public way (for whatever reason.. Ugh). They assumed the fortress he resides in would be too impervious to assault for any frontal assault.

I guess they didn't count on level 1s drawing the guards out, setting his home on fire and ultimately having a climb speed to get up the wall. I know I sure as heck wasn't.

Ultimately the PCs were RAW correct on how illusions work. The guards receive no save to disbelieve until they're already outside the gates of the town dealing with the illusion. The arson of the Duke's personal estate would easily lead to a large detachment being sent there. Poisoning a sleeping guy with silence cast on a Rogue with +15 sneak (5 DEX, 5 skill plus boots...) Yeah, I mean that's just win.

The guards wouldn't be loyal to a dead man, and the townsfolk hated this guy for his hording of wealth, killing rebels, unreasonable treatment and starving his own people.

Unlike what most of this forum thinks, I think that "murdering" a Lawful Evil tyrant is pretty much morally legitimate for any character aside from a Paladin. This party had no Cleric or Paladin, so while it's not a clean way... It's absolutely not an evil act to kill a tyrant in his sleep. Especially when he's little more than a power abusive despot killing his own people with his short-sighted greed and ignorance.

I'm going to call this module over and get a new scenario for next time. Thanks for the input guys.

Edit:

They did technically try to negotiate with the Duke and his men. His response was to have half the party thrown in the dungeon. They ended up sneaking out by faking a fight between two of the party, getting a guard to come in to break it up and then knocking the guard out. They hid the body in their bag of holding (knew I shouldn't have given them that.. grumble grumble).

The way I read the SRD on alignment, poisoning isn't evil. Neither is a political assassination, especially since this guy is far from 'legitimate' authority. He's not a proper noble, king or anything just some strong man that took over a town and does a pretty rotten job of leading his people.

Actually the way I read the Paladin code of conduct, it may have even been legitimate for a Paladin to kill this guy in broad daylight. He had over 5 HD, so he'd detect as evil. Plus he was "hurting the innocent" and was far from sorry about it. Add to that he is absolutely not legitimate authority...

Yeah this one goes to the PCs, as much as I hate it when the modules are broken.


I mean yay, but if the rules were followed to the letter a lot of that simply should not have worked - silent image certainly cannot replicate a goblin army.


Broken, I second that!

Silver Crusade

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Done is done. I'll rant first about good players assassinating with poison, then finish by congratulating your players on creativity.

Shakespeare set the tone for the contemporary view on poison: a dishonorable tool allowing those with lesser strength, wits, and political power to prevail, thus serving as a tool against order and hierarchy. Contrast this with combat, believed to be righteous because divine providence was afforded an opportunity to intervene (whether it did or not is another question...)

Poison strips men of defenses normally guaranteed them by strength or skill. We see this with Hamlet. His superior skill with a sword allowed him to hit Laertes mutliple times, but then Hamlet is hit with an otherwise non-fatal wound that carries poison. A foe with poison needs no skill, no courage, no wits, to slay someone of greater skill and status. A servant can kill a king.

Assassination means the players have taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner, without consideration of the citizens or what they want (or who they want to rule them...may be odd but a corrupt ruler may protect them from far greater harm).

With that rant out of the way, your players may not have been role-playing alignments as I might see it done, but they engaged in some creativity that you properly let play out. Chances are they'll be talking about that one for awhile, and why not. So, I'd chalk it up as a good day for everyone and a good game overall.


Either move on (as suggested by others), or create a Sauron to take over for your Melkor.

Liberty's Edge

Touc wrote:

Done is done. I'll rant first about good players assassinating with poison, then finish by congratulating your players on creativity.

Shakespeare set the tone for the contemporary view on poison: a dishonorable tool allowing those with lesser strength, wits, and political power to prevail, thus serving as a tool against order and hierarchy. Contrast this with combat, believed to be righteous because divine providence was afforded an opportunity to intervene (whether it did or not is another question...)

Poison strips men of defenses normally guaranteed them by strength or skill. We see this with Hamlet. His superior skill with a sword allowed him to hit Laertes mutliple times, but then Hamlet is hit with an otherwise non-fatal wound that carries poison. A foe with poison needs no skill, no courage, no wits, to slay someone of greater skill and status. A servant can kill a king.

Assassination means the players have taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner, without consideration of the citizens or what they want (or who they want to rule them...may be odd but a corrupt ruler may protect them from far greater harm).

All that seems, to me, to be arguments why it's Chaotic, not Evil. Good cares about mercy, kindness, and the dignity of sentient beings. Poison's no more of an affront to those than a sword is. Law is the alignment that cares about honor and fairness per se.


Broken Prince wrote:
I mean yay, but if the rules were followed to the letter a lot of that simply should not have worked - silent image certainly cannot replicate a goblin army.

I'm going to "third" this. Some of the things that happened there went well outside of the RAW adjudication. The crafting and illusion are the two most prominent examples. I'm also going to point at the rogue's climb check. That's a STR based check, and if I were GMing I'd be setting the DC at a minimum 25, for "A rough surface, such as a natural rock wall or a brick wall." Each set of the rogue's movement speed up the outside wall requires a separate check, and if he fails he's then taking some damage, or making an insane (45) DC check to catch himself. That right there would have given a lot of players pause to think.

Kudos to the players for ingenuity. I love to award thinking like that as a GM, but I also make sure everything they're thinking of fits mechanically within the rules.

Edit: Just noticed you said the rogue had a climb speed... which discounts all my above problem. Still, the crafting and illusions needed some adjudication adjustments.

The Exchange

Occasionally, players wreck "the story". Luckily you have a week between these cataclysms to build a new story. Killing off the evil Duke in a creative way was the kind of fun you don't get from a computer RPG and does no long-lasting harm. With no info about the rest of the story that was supposed to happen I can't tell you 'how to get there from here,' but I can offer a little advice. The evil Duke probably wasn't working in a vacuum; introduce an allied corrupt noble, a mercenary captain who did his dirty work, or some other substitute villain who can carry on the work in a different style. To reward the PCs, make sure this replacement doesn't have as many resources as the original villain. Alternately, create an immediate civil war among the former servants of the duke; his next-of-kin might oppose a usurper, neither of which are nice people and give the PCs an opportunity to play one side against the other - an opportunity that I suspect your particular playing group will enjoy.


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Heck this adventure is entirely salvageable.

Maybe a peasant from a neighboring community approaches them because of how famously they handled this lord, or if it's a secret, maybe they're approached by a secret group looking to take care of another evil lord.

Either way, the group in on to a new town to save by another greedy tyrant. This one is better prepared having heard what the PC's did last time, and therefore the same tricks won't work.

Really, the only thing that changes is the re-skinning of the previous characters, and shoring up some of the last dukes holes in defense.

This works especially well since it happened so early in the adventure path that hardly any plot was probably developed.


What modules were these?

If you're worried about spoilers, you can PM me.

I can absolutely guarantee that I'm not one of your players, by the way. :D

Sovereign Court

I like the idea that the Duke had evil relatives. Certainly a power vacuum is going to occur now that he's gone. I've decided to scrap the AP entirely and just develop my own plot out of this. Basically Duke has some relatives in the Cheilax empire that are devil-worshipers. They'll figure out who off'd him through divination magic and slowly plot some revenge against these upcoming goody so and so's.

One of the rogues was a poisoner by profession, so I think it makes sense he'd kill a corrupt official (if nothing else just to gain notoriety). Actually it turns out that the Barbarian is CN and the Alchemist is apparently evil aligned. Altogether it actually fits for them to murder a "head of state".

I plan to make them deal with how they escape the town next time, since the Duke still had many loyal men. Certainly they'll need to go on the lamb to avoid being arrested for murder and put on trial in some kangaroo court. Should be interesting to see how they deal with the next town over. In character, none of the PCs seem to realize they're in a LE nation.

If I pull the card "The Duke had connections". Then it'd be totally believable that his family gets word via some magical message spell and has the borders shutdown and deploys the Hellknights to apprehend the culprits. Thanks for all the ideas, guise.


Sounds like awesome fun...although why is the Duke asleep while a goblin army is invading and the front gate is being assaulted and the main building is in flames.

Generally the first thing done in all three of these situations is wake the commander.

But whats done is done. If you don't feel the adventure is now over or you want to play more you can do any of the following.

1. The Duke is not dead because ...make up a reason (immune to poison, only in comma, it was his twin brother, etc.

2. Duke has been raised from dead and seeks to retake his castle with forces from his neighboring hunting lodge or second castle or a nearby city, etc.

3. Another nearby evil lord sensing an opportunity and power vacuum moves in with his even bigger and more oppressive army.

In all three of these situations you can either continue the mission as planned simply replacing the original duke/location with a new location to assault or

You can turn the tables and now the PC's are on the defensive which can be a new kind of fun altogether (running/repairing the settlement and fighting off an attack.)


Gorbacz wrote:
A party of neutral and good characters poisoning people in their sleep, yeah.

Remember that "good" characters are still allowed to do evil things, just that the vast majority of their actions must be categorized under good.

Depending on the poisoned person killing them in any way can be neutral at worst.
If someone poisoned Hitler, for instance, only his fanatical followers would consider ending him in such a way to be "evil."

Sovereign Court

Honestly I feel #3 is a bit gimmicky. #2 sort of undermines everything the players sought to correct, and it wouldn't really fit that the Duke just happened to have a level 10+ Cleric on hand (he was not that high level himself...).

I'd like to give it to the PCs and just say yeah they got him unfair and square. The guards arrive to wake him and find the master is dead. The arson and fake Goblin attack might very well be blamed on a rival village or even on neighboring Andor.

Actually I like the idea that the players inadvertently bring Andor and Cheilax to the brink of open warfare by accidentally assassinating a well connected Duke on the eve of an important Cheilax historical event. Just as an unpopular Gray Corsairs detachment happened to be doing military drills near the border...

I'm going to run with that (:

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