| Happy Little Trees |
So I'm a player and let's just say one of the other party members made a not so informed or sensible choice to divert power causing the super weapon to charge faster. We got through the bbeg guy made by the devourer fight and with divert power and due to an action he made before dying we supposedly had 1 minute before anything happened. This 1 minute disappeared instantly though as we tried to interact with the computer console to obviously try and stop the super weapon. Then in part due to a poor description (party thought electricity shooting out meant the computer console broke) the console was destroyed. The whole party then did everything they could with wire disconnects and such amd got too where the 1 spellcaster could do the arcana check with the reactor and the skittermander went through the small hole and found out about the blue wires. We quickly broke the window and obliterated about half the wires or so. DM himself said that we got to the final point where only a nat 20 by the gun could successfully fire... and that's what was rolled. A secondary flat check (maybe much easier) or something in the case of nat 20's I feel may be necessary here because our party literally just got wiped by an unbeatable initiative (our highest bonus operative had nat 20 initiative of one lower) rolling a nat 20 to fire at the start of round 5 before we could do anything. Lower hazard initiative or a fallback such as 2 easier flat checks to make failing harder after a checkpoint of progress would just feel much better than this ending.
TLDR: One dumb player decision, One misunderstanding and a Super Weapon Nat 20 turned an intense close call but we are at 99% completion exciting adventure and turned into an oops we all die cuz one dice roll.