WOW! At the end of tonight's session of Carrion Crown, I finally managed to kill off a pc! It's taken me a while.... but finally..... pcs at low levels are so much more susceptible to .... death....
The intrepid heroes had been investigating the ruins of Harrowstone prison.... trying to vanquish the haunts and put an end to the lingering evil there.... They had managed to destroy one of the 5 major haunts there.... amongst other minor haunts....but, without them knowing, they had managed to disturb the spirit of Fr Charlatan who had since been following them around the prison..... and whose presence was triggered when a pc is 'downed'.... so when the party decide to take on the executioner's spirit on the prison balcony, the executioner's scythe gets lucky on a natural 20, which was confirmed, causing 8d4 damage, dropping Ric's pc, the alchemist Dr Victor Pruce....when Stuart's cleric of Iomedae channelled positive energy to heal his wounds, Fr Charlatan used his corrupting powers to change his positive energy into negative, thus killing Dr Pruce with a wave of negative energy..... we left the session on that shocker....
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| Dr Victor Pruce, R.I.P. |
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Ric has a right to feel cheated there, I think. In Runelords players were punished for stupidity -- running across an obviously trapped rope bridge -- but here we were punished for doing exactly what we should have done. One could argue that we could have used a wand, potion, or the healing kit to stabilise Doctor Pruce, but the important thing is that we had no idea that there was any danger in the cleric using his magic.
ReplyDelete(I suspected that there was something up when you called for a percentile roll every time Stuart cast a spell, but that's out-of-character knowledge.)
It's even more arbitrary than an old-school save-or-die effect because both options here were death, and there was no way of knowing or preparing. If the rest of the campaign adventure path is like this, then we may as well roll a dice each at the beginning of each adventure to see if our characters survive!
This isn't whinging; the dice fall where they fall, and the critical damage was fair. It's what happened after that seems unfair, and I wonder what the designers were playing at.
;)
ReplyDeleteI wish I could show you the mechanics behind what happened. There were strategies which could have avoided what happened but they were quite specialised!! But it is a dangerous haunted house and full of risks!! I can see why you think it is random. Ier should become clearer after the next session!!
ReplyDeleteThere were strategies which could have avoided what happened but they were quite specialised
ReplyDeleteExactly!