May22
on May 22, 2014
Meta-Gambiting
A Total Party Kill is hard for GMs, especially ones that invest a lot of time and work into the campaign. The villain has an evil scheme that needs to be thwarted, which might tie into the backstory and motivations of the party. There are NPCs with relationships to the PCs. There are personal quests and all the little subplots.
All that hard works goes to waste if the party does something stupid and all die.
When a GM has to choose between their grand story and its rich tapestry of plots and characters and the results of a random dice roll, it’s really tempting to change things in favour of the players. Oh, that crit is just a normal hit, or their AC just dropped by 5 points because a buff spell expired. The adventure must go on!
Our level 6 party of a mage and 2 rogues is now supposed to kill a kraken. We’re playing Midnight, and the quick breakdown of things is this:
-big bad has won, and everyone is oppressed
-big bad has evil clerics basically being the Gestapo
-evil clerics set up “Mirrors” through which big bad gives them their powers
So we made 3 plans to kill this kraken because killing it just on our own would be impossible, or very improbably without the help of many 20s.
Plan A: Unite the sea people that the kraken has been enslaving and terrorizing and set forth to kill it with an army.
Plan B: Grow a mile high tree using Plant Growth and Wood Shape, have a branch that extends a ways over the sea, and drop 20ft long stone spears coated in a casting of Grease to minimize friction between the spears and the water, hoping to kill the kraken with a slow but powerful barrage of stone spears traveling at terminal velocity
Plan C: go find a Pale Mirror (the weakest king of Mirror), somehow drag it back to the sea, somehow bring it up a good bit, evacuate a 2 mile radius, and drop it because when mirrors are destroyed they explode in a blast of negative energy.
We’re still deciding, but this isn’t the first time we’ve come up with bizarrely elaborate plans to solve something.