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He really, really should have flown back to the party. The inquisitor might have been able to heal him. At the very least, a CDG wouldn't have been an option.
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Again, they aren't pixies. Sorry, this is starting to drive me nuts.
Also, the OP actually describes what some of the characters were capable of. One of them was a climbing alchemist. Another was, of course, a flying paladin, who might have been able to help the others had he shown some sense and not blundered off to tell his own story.
I do wonder what the inquisitor and rogue were doing, though. Given that the other players had fun after the paladin left, I'm inclined to guess they were able to contribute in some way, but it's hard to say. It seems like the rogue was stealthing around, while another was playing spotter.
If the Sprites are the same on the book, they have a +8 to attack with 1d2-2 damage. Factor Deadly Aim, that's 1d2 damage.
The only way to win this fight was to basically stay in the snow and use Crossbow/bow. There is no other way the PC could've reached the Sprites due to their 60ft flying speed. With that kind of speed and intelligence the Sprites had, it was impossible to kill them in any other way.
There's also no reason for them to get closer, unless visibility was an issue.
I guess the Paladin did what any uninformed melee character would've done: engage the enemy in melee, the only thing I'm decent at.
It could be counter-intuitive sometimes when the best tactic is to stay inside the snow and just use bows hoping for high enough roll to kill them. I'm guessing they probably had like 6 HP top.
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10 point buy and no full casters and purposely killing off characters in the first sesion no less how did you manage to get any players in the 1st place? the 10 point buy alone is a turn off then you ban the only type of characters that make it work
I use 15 point buy, actually. The players have the same point-buy at NPCs.
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Yes, the OP explained that the sprites were capable of doing lethal damage with Deadly Aim. That's not up for debate.
The paladin should have flown back to the party the instant he recognized what he was dealing with. He also should have stayed by his party. Everything bad that happened to him was a consequence of abandoning his allies.
And everything you're complaining about was part of the adventure, not the GM's choice.
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he also tuned the sprites to be abnormal giving them a feat they wouldn't normally posses and used a mechanic that the module probably didn't account for as for the imbalance of casters yes its imbalanced as they are the only ones that can work properly with such abysmally low point buy as for the players loving the game i think they just glossed over the fact that the gm will just kill them 1st chance he gets dude killed a guy like half an hour into the session or so this isn't call of chathulu as for unusual races i don't see any one in the party running any as they are at level one and thus can't really play monstrous races
Actually, the sprites I used were right out of the book and more or less followed the tactics given them by Paizo. Well, when one of them was spotted, she didn't run up and color spray the paladin.
THANKS PAIZO! =P
So, the CdG was a bit harsh. Call him, apologize, but only for that. Say "we're ending it with you in neg HP but stabilized in the snow...."
Do NOT say it's his fault. Let the players criticize the tactics.
But yeah, splitting the party is a HUGE NO NO.
Lady-J, not only are you entirely wrong (as demonstrated by myself, the OP, and a third poster), aasimar are unusual. They're a monster race, and this player tinkered with the race to make it especially powerful.
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So, the CdG was a bit harsh. Call him, apologize, but only for that. Say "we're ending it with you in neg HP but stabilized in the snow...."
Do NOT say it's his fault. Let the players criticize the tactics.
But yeah, splitting the party is a HUGE NO NO.
Coup de grace is a matter of GM preference, not a black-and-white right-and-wrong issue.
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I never coup de gras first level players.
But the person left beforehand, so I can see why it was done.
Some GMs do. That's an issue for the Civil Gameplay Discussion, not here.
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Trying to get traffic to your civil game play thread. :-)
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At a guess, he was probably allowed to use the table of alternate abilities in Blood of Angels. One of the options there is a 20-foot fly speed with poor maneuverability.
Pretty much this.
He was chatting with me on Telegram in our group chat (which he hasn't left, yet) and was like, "Man, all I need now is a fly speed." So I told him that if he wanted to, he could choose to take the fly speed instead of his SLA per the chart.It does say that with GM approval, you can just choose one (but not two).
umm the paladin did not smite to boost his AC or laying on hands to heal him self???? I am totally confused how the paladin lost. where they level 1? Sound like the guy was a total new and had no system mastery, what about fighting defensively to boost his ac. why was he using a cross bow against them instead of flying to them killing them with melee weapon and smite?? So confused by this encounter. I would have killed him to just because he Isolated him self. but I seen player do this and still take out 3 or 4 creatures before having to run.
1st level paladin, yes.
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The guy actually had substantial system mastery, from what we've heard. He was just bad at tactics.
1. He couldn't Lay on Hands because he was first level.
2. He might have smited (and should have), but a small bonus to his AC might not have saved him.
3. He couldn't reach them to fight in melee. His speed was slow, which is why he never, ever should have gone so far from the party.
Frankly, if I was running a game that was intended to be harsh and deadly, I would see the CDG as an excellent move. It shows the players that if they act like fools and fail to work as a team, there will be consequences. It shows them that death is a real risk, not just something that happens to NPCs. And for Chaotic Evil enemies far away from any potential interference, it makes sense.
Remember, they were about two or three rounds' worth of paladin flight away from the party. With the snow, catching up with the paladin would have taken a lot longer. The sprite was in no danger. The paladin made CDG a pretty damn viable tactic.
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"Do you want to die!!" - Dwight Schrutte.
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I was pretty much with you until the coup de grace. This violates what is by far the number one rule above all others for any game.
The rule of fun.
You didn't have to kill him. You could've easily left him bleeding out and given the party a chance to get to him. This pretty much tells me you were trying to do one of three things.
1. Teach him a lesson. Utterly pointless, he's already been disabled. Most players are very quick to pick up on things after a near death experience. At this point it just comes off as spiteful.
2. "Win" A trap many new GMs fall into. The game is not you versus the players. The game is cooperative, and the GM has the most power by far. Players will make mistakes. They'll do stupid things. They'll have bad luck. The GM will too, but at that point it's just one encounter down. When it happens to a PC, it's a player death. It's sort of a bigger deal.
3. Role-play the villains. That's nice and all, but try to remember the players in front of you are people. You are a person. Your actions affect them and their fun, not just their characters.
Some players enjoy cutthroat games. But it is NOT the general rule. If you're gonna run that kind of game, players need and deserve a warning.
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For the record, I actually do prefer to avoid tactics like CDG in my games. My players don't generally enjoy death, so I humor them. In another PbP I'm starting right now, I'm including a system called Lifelines, which are basically Hero Points but for death aversion—spend one to convert a death into a plot twist.
But I don't think my playstyle is the only playstyle that's valid. I once killed a wizard in their second encounter (they dumped Con and cast a spell un-defensively in melee), and that has set an interesting tone for the rest of the campaign.
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Having run RoW myself, I can vouch for that encounter being extremely lethal to a party that does not recognize what is going on and adjusts their tactics accordingly. Splitting up would help avoid the color spray (which it sounds like the GM opted to not use anyway), but flying that far away from the party just sounds like it'd draw aggro from all of them until the paladin is plinked to death, which is exactly what happened.
I have no opinion of the CdG. I won't do it on PCs if there are still active threats on the field (for much the same reason PCs don't do it to NPCs), but in this case, the player walked the moment he fell unconscious. Seeing as it was unlikely they would rejoin the table, the GM just killed off the PC onscreen instead of offscreen. The CdG was effectively a wasted turn for the sprite, because that was a turn spent removing something that wasn't a threat vs moving towards the remaining threats (I'm assuming based on the OP that the rest of the party was more than 60ft + bow range increment away from where the paladin fell, meaning it'd need a full round to catch back up to the rest of the sprites). In that regard, it was another act of pulling back the punches on the rest of the PCs to make the encounter more bearable.
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I think generally, CdG at first level is a bad idea, but if someone gets up and leaves because he was knocked below 0, then I'm not sure what else could be done.
I know when we ran the encounter it wasn't a big deal, but we had an elven archer, so.
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Not once he was 90 - 120 feet away from them.I disagree. Stabbing a downed enemy gives the other enemies time to maneuver against them. He can bleed out just fine on his own, especially with falling damage.It ultimately doesn't matter, he decided to quit the game the moment he fell unconscious. The environmental conditions meant that the players might have seen the direction he'd flown in, but they would be unlikely to actually pinpoint him, but let's sake for sake of argument that they were able to see him perfectly and had LOS through the trees. Let's reduce the penalty for movement from chest high snow to waist high and just make it difficult (10 movement per 5 feet instead of 20). Lets also say the PCs make their acrobatics checks to full round run. The fastest person would only be able to run 60 ft. in the conditions.
The enemy (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) would have been able to finish him off no problem. I didn't even factor in the fall damage. Hell, I even ignored the miss chance for his attacks to give him the best shot, but it is what it is.
This should really be the end of discussion. I would happily coup de grace an unconscious PC whose player (rage?)quit. It's basically a favor to the whole party, since it slows down the enemy and eliminates an NPC they feel'd morally obliged to waste healing on.
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My party had a ranger who utterly despised fey and a barbarian with a cold iron axe. Also, a dinosaur. I'd unwisely placed the fey low to the ground. They had some amazing Perceptions, too.
The ranger actually missed every shot, but the barbarian and dinosaur massacred them. They see it as one of their easiest encounters in what's otherwise a really rough game. They lost their witch to a zombie—the zombie had been ordered to kill him, so it kept hitting him after he went unconscious. But since I run easy with death, the witch returned...
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It has been a point of discussion for awhile now. I have always run it as the paladin being able to cast the spell as normal with a cone, or to use it as a move action as you describe. So the paladin has an extra option on top of the standard use. Admittedly, this is because I played in 3.5 where the paladin just had the standard action use, and Pathfinder added the move action use.Hmm, I don't have any issues with how the DM played this, though I now have a question regarding Detect Evil for Paladins.
I always played it as the Paladin needing to actually target it on someone/something. i.e. it didn't work as the Cleric version which detects evil in a radius around him over 3 rounds.
A paladin can, as a move action, concentrate on a single item or individual within 60 feet and determine if it is evil, learning the strength of its aura as if having studied it for 3 rounds. While focusing on one individual or object, the paladin does not detect evil in any other object or individual within range.
Have I been doing this wrong?
The paladin's detect evil text really reads as if the paladin has the standard spell AND the move action option.
As a current player of RoW, I can say that the first book is really a killer (although we've had only one death there), and especially so if someone moves away from the party with all the halved and quarter movements and limited to no visibility. The player's actions seem really stupid in context of the game and especially conditions. But, I probably wouldn't have CDG him if there were other targets even though it would have been a rational decision for the fey.
As a rules guy I couldn't leave this alone - sorry, this has been answered in the FAQ
On topic, the only thing I would have changed is the same as most others, CdG is the only bit that in my opinion you went too far, not in terms of what the bad guys would do, but in terms of what would likely be more fun.
Inadvertently maybe turned out for the best though, I have concerns (based solely on your account - my opinion might be different if I was there ofcourse) about what a player who walks out like that would be to play with in the long run.
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THe CdG depends, imo. Is the campaign ran that way? No room for mistakes? Are all enemies going to Cdg? Why did the Srpites cdged the paladin?
Some enemies might not care about it entirely. I'm just confused about what the party did meanwhile.
I mean they had like 7 turns to get close, or even shout at the Paladin:
"you're a moron, you're going alone and you will die".
I know some DMs do not allows offrol conversations, but this is a death situation, usually people pitch in to help.
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Okay, but the coup de grace should not be an issue. The GM did not coup de grace a PC. They coup de graced an NPC. Period.
The guy actually had substantial system mastery, from what we've heard. He was just bad at tactics.
1. He couldn't Lay on Hands because he was first level.
2. He might have smited (and should have), but a small bonus to his AC might not have saved him.
3. He couldn't reach them to fight in melee. His speed was slow, which is why he never, ever should have gone so far from the party.Frankly, if I was running a game that was intended to be harsh and deadly, I would see the CDG as an excellent move. It shows the players that if they act like fools and fail to work as a team, there will be consequences. It shows them that death is a real risk, not just something that happens to NPCs. And for Chaotic Evil enemies far away from any potential interference, it makes sense.
Remember, they were about two or three rounds' worth of paladin flight away from the party. With the snow, catching up with the paladin would have taken a lot longer. The sprite was in no danger. The paladin made CDG a pretty damn viable tactic.
yeah totally bad tactics, never ever split up at level 1. lol no one has enough hp or AC to do that.
But declaring smite attacking and moving to cover would have bumped his ac by a fair bit, combined with fighting defensively, that +6 to to all targets, Then deflection from cha mod to target of smite. odds are he not going to hit them but he not going to hit either. +6 or more to ac is massive at level 1.
Cross bow was bad choice of a weapon, should have had short bow or some spears or even rocks for throwing at that level. that way he can draw them while he moves from cover to cover to cover. It would have given him enough time to get back to the party or have them meet up with him.
Hindsight and all that.
We don't know whether or not he used smite. He should have fled back to cover with his allies, though.