So it’s been confirmed Ashly didn’t know what she was up against with Lorenzo and co. Which means this falls mostly on Matt, outside the poor choices of lowering team dps and fighting a large group of enemies. Matt has the tools as a DM to modify encounters on the fly, that’s kind of the point of being a DM. All I’m looking for is for him to own the choice, rather than making lots of excuses about dice and luck and rolls. How that encounter worked out was a choice, whether or not Matt has any regrets about it, I can respect owning it. I’m a bit :/ about just shrugging and saying that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
So I’m a person who loves character death. I’ve had heaps of characters die in my games, I’ve died plenty of times myself as a character, but even by my own slightly morbid standards tonight’s ep felt a little... cheap. I’m going to do the adult thing and try to analyse why, so I can avoid it with my players and maybe some of you can too idk. The usual disclaimer: DnD is hard, its improv, and choices made in the moment vs hindsight are always a bitch (for DM and players alike). I think you should be able to criticise things without hating on them, especially if it’s done for learning purposes other than to just blame people.
ANYWAY.
This encounter was way too hard for the party to cope with.
Which is fine, by itself. That fact is more obvious to anyone who DMs a lot (while all the players have DMed oneshots, I’m going to guess they didn’t dig too deeply into the meat of encounter difficulty calculation). The more enemies you add, the exponentially harder an encounter gets. One boss monster may many times be easier to defeat than three medium minions, for the simple rules of turn economy. Your big boss monster might miss every attack on your player characters, and even with multiple attacks it usually can’t occupy or split up multiple resources. Multiple enemies means more rolls (kinda like giving advantage), a higher degree of aggro control over the battlefield to split up firepower. This is why multi enemies usually have pretty low HP pools compared to their relative damage output - lots of glass cannons if you will.
So even on paper, fighting a party of 7 with only 5 members is a bad idea. It’s going to be a tough encounter. While there was some suggestion of the level of deadly, based on previous party experience they’d had with multi enemies, there wasn’t a great deal of foreshadowing or warning about the fact that this encounter potentially broke the cardinal rule of multi-encounters, which is where enemies usually have low hp high damage, or high hp and low damage per turn.
Which brings us to Lorenzo. It took me a while to work out what he was exactly. Ashly said he was a fighter to the party, which based on what he just pulled seems like a misleading description if Matt gave it to her. Cone of Cold is a level 5 spell, which is insanely powerful and could have TPKed the whole team. Let that sink in. It is also only available on sorcerer and wizard spell lists (and as a hexblade pact spell), however at no point is it ever available to an Eldritch Knight (fighter subclass). Even at level 20, they can only cast up to level four. I also thought it might have been a hexblade thing, however glaives are two handed heavy weapons and are therefore unavailable as a hexblade weapon. Add to this fact that Matt mentions that Lorenzo uses his action surge, which is a fighter trait, acquired at level 2. Cone of cold is available to wizards and sorcerers at 9th level.
So this dude is at least a level 11 fighter/caster build, possibly level 14 (I’d need to rewatch to check for other multi attacks). That’s putting him in the realm of CR8 territory, which by himself is a hard encounter for a party of five level five characters. Adding only one or two CR1 creatures to this moves it into deadly territory, and those are the sorts of enemies they were crushing several levels ago. Adding an additional six, presumably of CR 2-3 territory puts this into actually bonkers territory, without a lot of warning or viable escape routes for your players.
I think there may have been some degree of over-compensation for things like magical weapons, but no one would accuse the M9 of breezing through their previous encounters, which had party members close to death in them consistently. The difficulty curve increase comes left of field and was poorly telegraphed. ‘Making an example’ of players is something I only normally like to apply to players who are actively out of line, pushing the limits or generally trying to break the game. I’ve put dozens of ‘you will not win this with violence’ encounters in my games, most of which only end in death if players pursue them past the point of all warnings and by refusing to back out. While the same could be said of the M9, I don’t feel the warnings justify the outcome or the severity of the encounter.
Things you can use to avoid things like this:
Non-lethal punishments, where the PCs wake up captured or otherwise incapacitated, perhaps without resources, gold or other boons they’d previously acquired. Servitude to gods, curses, contracts etc are also good options. A good example here would be pressganging them into the slaver’s ring as well.
Gradual escalation of combat, and pointed descriptors early to help PCs know when it’s time to bail. This includes things like their attacks doing very little damage, or scaring them with initial outlay of damage.
Consistent signposting of encounters that shouldn’t be taken by force (if your players value their lives). Keg was an excellent way to help with this, but I feel Matt may have undersold the severity of the threat they were facing based on what Ashly said.
Providing exit routes: you should make it clear that running is always an option.
You can only do so much, and sometimes the dice will roll against your players in ways that feel unfair or left of field (especially if you’re like me and regularly roll poorly). The best you can do is prepare your players for it and make it feel more like a consequence of a choice, rather than of chance. If you think you’ve made a mistake (and Matt may have underestimated just how badly this would go) don’t ‘apologise’ in as many words, but use it as a storytelling opportunity and try to course correct. Personally I’d use this as a chance to bring back Lucien, but we’ll see how Matt and Taliesin choose to proceed.
It is very likely that the war between the Dwendalian Empire and Xhorhas, sure to be a deadly conflict with far-reaching consequences, was precipitated by the failure of the Xhorhasian spies to recover the Dodecahedron. Both sides lost track of an artifact of awesome and unknown power. Neither side knows what happened to it, and they probably believe the other to be in possession of it.
Meanwhile, The Mighty Nein just used it to win a drinking competition.
I think every time they come into a town and meet a stranger willing to give ‘em the grand ole tour I’m going to think it’s the traveler. But like especially with Rissa (?) She gives me major Garmelie vibes
So what the Gentleman actually heard was Jester’s voice in his head saying “Hey, Mr. Gentleman, we found your safehouse, we cleared it out of a bunch of fish people, don’t worry, everything’s fine now, okay, we also –”
