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I think I screwed up running Masks of the Living God, and I'm trying to figure out how to fix it. I wouldn't be concerned, except this is being played as part of a Thornkeep arc.
the party chose Masks over Thornkeep 2, partially because the player in question is familiar with Thornkeep and was worried about its lethality. fortunately, he wasn't familiar with Masks, which is no cakewalk itself.
the party infiltrated the temple well enough, and seemed to enjoy the flavour and side quests. it's a well balanced party of six. one character, played by a good friend of mine, is a cowardly rogue, based loosely on Malak from Conan. he has a great backstory and roleplays the rogue well. the PC is not optimized for combat, but very good at stealth, disable, perception, etc.
after meeting with their NPC contact and getting their instructions how to finish the module, they formulated a plan.
the alchemist spent three rounds with the golem, rolled a 19, 17 and 18 on his will saves vs its mask effect (I never saw that die roll less than a 16), and egarthis decided to show himself. since it was just one person, I didn't pull out the big guns. I hit him with burning hands. then he destroyed the golem, so egarthis hit him with a scorching ray, dropped him and went back to his room.
all the while this was happening, the rogue was searching for the evidence. the alchemist mentioned (for not the first time) that the rogue was useless. meanwhile, the alarm had been triggered, and the rest of the party was in the main area below dealing with the incoming horde. I essentially threw the entire temple at them at once, knowing they had two choke points to hold them off.
this is where I have a problem with what happened. the player got visibly upset at his situation. he blamed the "useless rogue" for abandoning him, knowing full well the rogue was not combat oriented. the rogue also doubled back the long way, then tried to go back up the outside, before double back a second time. the rogue also shouted "run! I have the goods!" before the alchemist decided to attempt suicide.
when the alchemist failed his first death check and realized he would need to roll a natural 20 to live, he started demanding someone heal him. he was by himself. with a hellhound looming over him. and a CR6 boss between him and anyone else. the cleric couldn't make it there in time, as he had been rescuing the fighter who got dropped by the CR5 mini-boss. ultimately, the blaster caster made his way into the room, survived two AoO attacks from hellhounds and succeeded a UMD to activate his wand of cure light. he also managed back to back crits on the hellhounds, essentially saving his worthless teammate.
and all the alchemist had to say was it was the rogue's fault.
I am really regretting letting him live. especially since this player, as a GM, revels in killing off characters. he's an optimizing rules lawyer and likely doesn't even grasp how many times I let him off light.
and now that the party has murderhoboed their way through the temple, there is little left to do but mop up and try to explain why they didn't get the authorities involved (as they were instructed to). and I will have to deal with this player/character for the next four levels of Thornkeep.
so what do I do? he's not going to accept responsibility for his actions. had he stayed put and let the "useless rogue" do his thing, none of that would have happened. he nearly died, TWICE, because he has to be involved in everything, whether it makes sense or not.
I can tell him that I've already killed him twice now, and the next time I won't pull punches? I don't like killing characters. especially in a long story arc, when they don't have the prestige to raise dead. but at the same time, this player is so difficult, I suspect I will regret my leniency.
how can I fix this, to reinforce that he got off light not once, but twice, and that he needs to be a better team player? that next time I won't pull punches? I should have just hit him with the BBEG, fully buffed, until he was dead. hell, I should have just had the golem pound him into paste, but I didn't.
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If the players survived masks at level 1 and 0 xp and even came close to winning i'm impressed.
Masks is 3rd level adventure, you're supposed to play it as 2nd, 3rd, or 4th level PCs. Your whole run was kinda... erm.. not legal. Not sure how to fix that really.
You could just record it as being run by 4th level pregens?
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If the players survived masks at level 1 and 0 xp and even came close to winning i'm impressed.
Masks is 3rd level adventure, you're supposed to play it as 2nd, 3rd, or 4th level PCs. Your whole run was kinda... erm.. not legal. Not sure how to fix that really.
You could just record it as being run by 4th level pregens?
I believe he said they ran Crypt of the Everflame first and Thornkeep 1 prior to Masks, so they were 3rd level and legal.
When players make Bad Decisions, I usually try to give them an out. I also try to make it very clear that I'm giving them an out. Frequently, it just means repeating their intended action back to them out loud:
"So you want attempt an Acrobatics check to pass through the threatened square of three enemies--which will mean three separate checks at an increasing DC--and end up next to the guy with the Greataxe? How many hit points do you have left?"
If they choose to proceed, that's on them. At some point, they have to be responsible for their choices. Now, Masks is an early level module, but when characters are hitting level 3 or so, they need to start taking hints and realizing that reckless actions often have bad endings.
I do feel that continuing to softball such a player does him a disservice, as eventually he will run into a GM who is not going to bend over backwards to protect him and it will be a rude awakening.
The other bit--calling another player and/or their character useless? That's not okay from 0XP on.
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Well, alright. I'll chime in here as well I guess now that you provided full details.
First off, you can't really fault the player for showing up to a PFS event with a slightly higher XP character than everyone else since that is sort of the idea behind the campaign is to bring whatever character you want that fits into a given scenario/module. If you really wanted everyone to be first level and have 0 xp you should have made that very clear to begin with and simply told him so to get him to make a new character. I also think opting for Masks before Thornkeep was a reasonable decision as well, since Thornkeep does have a bit of a reputation and after experiencing part 1 even without prior knowledge it could probably be surmised that it would be a PITA. If you had an issue with that decision you should have just told the guys what they were playing next and not given them an option.
Alright, now down to the plan.
That plan seems like a reasonably course of actions and if none of the players had a serious issue with it I don't see how the alchemist going along could have been seen as a bad thing. Being invisible does make it pretty hard to open doors and all. In addition, if things were to hit the fan it is always better to have two guys.
So they get upstairs and set off a trap, and proceed into the room with the golem. Golem box texts happens and the high INT presumably low charisma alchemist responds with a smart ass response. No real surprise there. He then apparently asked if he should know the answer to the riddle due to having a high INT. It isn't his job to ask if he can make an INT check, that should have been your response to that question if you found that an intelligent character probably would know the answer to a given riddle. Now the 2 scouting PC's have failed to satisfy the golem's demands and have triggered initiative. Temple wide alarm to go off in 1d4 rounds. The PC's don't know an alarm is going off, so they have two reasonable options at this point. Those options are: Take out the golem by themselves if they think they can or fall back to the party and claim they forgot the password to the golem or something along those lines (Which wouldn't have worked once the alarm sounded). The reason for bringing two people in the first place seems to be to be able to deal with fights like this, so fighting the golem isn't the worst idea in the world. Opening a door into an unexplored room on the other hand probably is a REALLY REALLY bad idea every time you are in a fight that has gotten out of control. Calling the rogue "useless" might have been a bit much but I'd certainly expect a player to get mad when his only friend in life decided to bail and possibly trigger another encounter and in this case does.
You then go on to say that "the alchemist spent three rounds with the golem, rolled a 19, 17 and 18 on his will saves vs its mask effect (I never saw that die roll less than a 16)." This says you saw him rolling a die, and he got lucky. Your quote seems to be included to make the player look like a cheater though. So far this post reads like an attempted character assassination than an advice thread.
Back on track, so the golem is destroying the alchemist and the rogue has continued exploring. The enemy Wizard comes out with the sounding of the alarm, and knocks out the alchemist. Egarthis then should have coup de graced the alchemist and proceeded downstairs to deal with the alarm based off his tactics imo. If you felt like being nice, simply leaving him there to die with the slim chance of the cowardly rogue coming back to revive him with a potion. Either way the guy should have went downstairs to assist his acolytes with dealing with the PC's. This is the part of the module where everything comes down on the PC's and they need to find a choke point and hold it or flee the temple. If they don't, they simply all die.
So you gave your player an extra chance, since Egarthis wasn't around (Despite what the module says to do with the guy) and revived a PC with an acolyte during a fight with the PC's? Wow, you're a REALLY nice GM. At any rate, I would have just left him to die. Once he was revived however I am confused as to what happened. After being beaten unconscious he just walks into the boss fight which you were nice enough to not throw at the party instead of trying to help his friends downstairs? That is idiotic, he deserved to die for the second (or third) time now. I agree that using the collar is likely a standard action and players do tend to question weird rules so I don't mind his response. Good job finally actually putting him down with the hellhounds.
Now is where this gets problematic. This guy did something unquestionably stupid and you were being overly nice to let him live this long. Being mad at the rogue for initially abandoning him in the first place I can understand, this second predicament is entirely his fault though. He shouldn't of even had those rounds to ask for healing, he should have died right there on the ground at the BBEG's feet for the second time today. When the player started metagaming to get healing, I certainly would have coup de graced him on the spot, as I'm not a fan of telling a player that they can't do something like run into the room to heal the guy. (Which I am confused as to how the mage did in the first place since he would need to move a substantial distance, pull a wand and take a standard to heal the dude.All while under fire from a bunch of bad guys)
I really don't understand how any of your PC's made it out alive, except for the ones that ran away if any. This should have been a massacre from the way you put it. The guy was being quite rude in blaming the rogue for the whole thing the second time. He certainly should have died, along with probably a few other players.
Now we're back to calling names. I don't see how the player in question being an optimizer,a rules lawyer or a brutal game master plays into your regret. He should have died plain and simple no matter who he was.
I wouldn't say that I was pulling punches in order to save him; however, I would stop doing that. You've been far to nice. If his attitude is a problem, address that problem at face value. Fault him for saying the rogue was useless even if the rogue made a bad decision. People make bad decisions sometimes. I wouldn't give him any heat over his characters decisions though, just make sure he cuts the metagaming by demanding healing and saying he is 1 HP from death and to cut back on the vitriol towards other players.
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We did something very similar, meaning just wading into the cult enforcers, golem et al, but were granted a near total party kill instead. And that's how your session should have ended too. A split party, members down and out, the entire complex roaring for their heads, etc.
I guess you have a kind heart. I tend to softball too, but since death is so cheap in PFS, compared to AP play for instance, my softballing tends to involve avoiding frustrated players post-game rather than giving a heck over their toons. Frustrated players mean metagaming, second-guessing and rulebook fiddling and I'm stressed enough, being a newbie gm, as it is.
Anyhow, let the hammer fall next time.
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Personally, I think the only thing that really needs addressed is for you to take a private minute with the player in question before the next game, and just tell the guy something along these lines:
"I understand that tense moments at the table can be stressful for some players, but if you want to continue to play with us, I am going to have to ask you to please examine your own in-character decisions and actions, and avoid condescending or otherwise being rude to the other people at the table."
For most reasonable adults, that sets a boundary that fixes most future issues. For unreasonable adults, neither this nor anything else you can so or say will fix the situation, and you simply have to decide whether to deal with the player's attitude or plan the game sessions around his presence.
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Venture-Captain, Germany—Hamburg
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and I will have to deal with this player/character for the next four levels of Thornkeep.
My first thought about this was "Why exactly do you have to deal with him? If he's really disruptive to the game and can't be talked to, you can just tell him to leave."
On the starting-with-2-XP-problem: From a rules perspective, you wouldn't even been able not to have him play if he showed up with 5 XP (Crypt is sanctioned for tier 1-2), although he wouldn't have been able to play in Thornkeep 1 then.
On the other hand, you explicitly asked your players to show up with a 0 XP character, so this tells you a lot about that player's attitude.
Given this, and the fact that he apparently tried to solo everything and treated the other characters as his minions, I agree that you shouldn't have been mercyful when this same attitude led to his character being smashed to pieces.
It isn't his job to ask if he can make an INT check, that should have been your response to that question if you found that an intelligent character probably would know the answer to a given riddle.
I disagree on that part. If the player feels he isn't quite as intelligent as his character, and if he knows he's bad at riddles, it should be his own responsibility to ask if he can try an INT check.
Giving the players a riddle and at the same time saying "alternately, you can make an INT check" makes the actual riddle completely useless and reduces an otherwise cool scene to a bunch of die rolls.Also, this particular password-question is no classic riddle. I don't think a player would easily see the answer as the logical solution to the question, so unless they get lucky or did some eavesdropping, this question seems to be built for the characters to give the wrong answer and trigger combat with the golem.
Oh, and if a player readily gives a smart-ass response, that's what they chose to say. If the player then sees that this wrong answer triggered a hard combat, they can't go back to "but I would have known the answer and answered correctly". That's metagaming.