Roleplaying
Yes, it is true, I killed the party, everyone, a TPK.
I haven’t done that in DnD since the 88, and then it was when I was DM:ing in the AD&D tournament at Gothcon, and I still was voted the best DM in that tournament, my day of glory.
OK this is the story, I was to show a friend 4E, as he is a 3.5 player and hasn’t tried it yet. 4E is one thing reading about, and another thing playing. Me and my son were at the cottage over the weekend fixing things, like painting and burning weeds and branches, so my friends came by to play.
So, As I would DM for my son and my friend, only two players, and I wanted to show a what I like the most i 4E, the interactions between the four roles , I had a DM PC with them.
I made a Shifter Barbarian, Int 8, to avoid being the brain in the party, you think, I kill was the motto. My son did a Human Warlord, and my friend had created a Deva Invoker, all characters were level 0ne.
I wrote a small level one side track adventure the evening before, three encounters, three pretty tough encounters, but they should manage, I thought.
They did well at the first encounter, a Kobold ambush, and they then moved quickly by following some tracks and came to an apparently abandoned building. The second encounter was some bandits and guards and two evil level 2 clerics guarding the place. There they fought pretty good, and did a lot of good thing, but now the dice started to show their faces, like when the Deva Invoker wanted to shift away of the stairs to the front port, and had roll an Athletics check, DC 5 to handle the 3 feet drop, rolled 4, and fell.
The number of ones rolled, by me when I rolled for the DM PC Barbarian started to be alarmingly many.
They took a short rest and went down the stairs in this half demolished house , and walked across a large room to the double door at the end, and did an Arnold style “Kick in da door!”. Surprise, two secret doors opened och each side of the large hall they just crossed, and they now faced for armed guards, and was surrounded, and the fight was really tough. They missed everything almost. I rolled pretty normal for the baddies, but I rolled two rolls over 10 in 13 tries with my DM PC, six of them were ones, including the Daily and the Encounter power, and the other also missed everything, action points were spend with almost no success, and when the Barbarian fell, the Warlords strike gave him back a lot of HPs, but the next round both the Deva Invoker and the Warlord we down doing death saves, and the Barbarian kept missing all attacks, but the baddies missed him too, two baddies down, two standing and the totally insane and possessed BBEG was standing in the door to his crypt firing magic missiles randomly at the party.
Everyone said, we are doomed, but on the third death roll, both the Invoker and the Warlord rolled natural 20s, they were miraculously on there feet again, the tide has turned, and the Barbarian rolled a crit and killed the third enemy, just one left, and the BBEG. Or was that just?
The next round Magic Missiles suddenly hit and the Warlord missed him Opportunity Attacks, and went down again, and the Barbarian went down, and the Deva missed both his attacks with his spells fir the 4th time in a row, and he was changed by the last standing guard, he fought and it suddenly it all went black.
As this adventure started out on a wedding (to avoid the Cliché tavern for once), I will call it A wedding and four funerals.
I wore this T-Shirt, and it proved to be a little too to the point….
Btw, I tried a hand made version of the Initiative trackers I wrote about earlier, and it was a great experience.
This is how it looked.
Meshdij was the human Warlord from the deserts, Anhil the Deva, and Roaring Rock, the DM PC Barbarian.
For the Baddies on the PC side of the notes, it just said Enemy, so I could hang notes for in this case the hidden Kobold Slinger.
And yes, I do have a lot of dices, and they all roll like crap.
I think I should write down this adventure, maybe do it the same way I do the recreation of carnival at Marda-Zam, as it has some pretty nice environments that will be very nice maps, that of cause can be used for almost any encounter. Who doesn’t need a temple dressed for a wedding, or an abandoned, half ruined building in a forest?
It was a good game, and my friend Daniel liked what the game was like, despite the fact he probably played the shortest 4E game ever. And, there are people bashing 4E because it is to hard to die?
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