A moment of silence please...
I'm disappointed by this, not because he is dead. I've had many characters die. I'm disappointed because of the circumstances of this death. First it was TPK, or Total Party Kill, meaning that we all died. Second, we were rolling badly. I was rolling alright for most part. But even I wasn't rolling great. Third, we were not working well as a team. Bran is really only effect if he has someone to work off of. And when I was trying to work off the Ranger in our group. He'd move or do something to mess it up. I never really had a chance to work off our Paladin. Lastly, I acted out of character too much. Lets face it Bran is only interested in Bran. He gave his only heal potion to one of the other characters to save his life when it could have been used to save his life later. He came back when he could have escaped. Granted it is a game and some level of not playing true to your character is expected. I couldn't just let the other get killed, but Bran could have. That last one was my fault. Our DM (Dungeon Master) thought it was cool monster to get killed by, and it may have been. But to me it was just some blue slime monster, meh, the White dragon we faced in the first adventure would have been a much cooler monster to get killed by.
Ultimately their death came down to rolls. Story be damned. This is the reason why I was disappointed with his death. Bran had a great story potential, a great chance for character growth, and now we will never know how he would have developed. His death was meaningless, empty, boring, unheroic. D&D says it wants you to play heroes, it says so in the Players Handbook,
"The thirty levels of your career are divided into three tiers: the heroic tier (1st level through 10th level),...but has a mechanic that puts the control of the characters death into a series of dice rolls. To me this is the greatest flaw of the system. But that's for another time. Nobody wants to read a story, or see a movie, about the character dies way before his time. The same is true for our characters in our story. There was no growth to our characters. Our characters did not develop or change from the experiences they faced. Because there was no time for them to grow. That is the true tragedy of their deaths. It would be like going to a movie and sitting though the first half hour of the story and then watch as the main characters are killed off and never having it explained why it was relevant to the story or why we should care that the characters were dead or to explain how there deaths effect those around them. The movie just continues on as if nothing had happen. Think about Lord of the Rings books. What if Frodo and the other hobbits died when they first encountered the Ringwraiths in the forest? The book ends at that point, with no explanation as to what happens to middle earth. That's what Bran's death feels like.
In the heroic tier, your character is already a hero, set apart from the common people by your natural talents, learned skills, and some hint of a greater destiny that lies before you."
Our DM said he was sorry he killed us all. And he probably is. But he is also the one in control of the story. Which means there are things he can do to change the outcome.
Like, the monster suddenly has fewer hit points, (Bran got in at least one good hit before going down. That could have ended the fight. It's not like we were keeping track of the monsters hit points.)
He could have given us more action points. (Action points are little rewards the players get to do cool stuff; like having more attacks, maybe use an addition healing???, or re-roll a bad dice roll. I don't know all the uses but they make you cooler.) I'm not sure how many we were suppose to get, but it just seemed like we weren't getting them as often as we did in the first adventure.
Then there is always Deus Ex Machina. (from the Latin, meaning "god from a/the machine". It's a plot devise were an external source, like a god, intervenes when the situation has turned hopeless.) I'm not a big fan of this technique but it's still an option and would have been a better outcome then a TPK. We had a Paladin and just as Bran goes down, the Paladin's god shows up and heals him a bit. The Paladin saves our asses. But now we (or at least the paladin) owes the god a favor. During the whole first adventure, Bran was giving the Paladin shit about his "New found faith" saying stuff like, "Where's your god now?", or " If he's so great why doesn't he just smite this goblin down." All the stuff a skeptical atheist would say to a christian. That would have been an eye opening experience for Bran, definitely one that would have changes his perspective of the gods.
3 comments:
I would have to say that learning when to toss the rules out the window to keep the fun and excitment alive is the last thing a good dungeon master tends to learn. Almost every RPG has a paragraph in the front of the book that says to ingnor rules that spoil the fun and flow of the adventure but it seems that most fledgling DMs tend to miss that one or just forget how to apply it.
And, when a really great DM is on the job and remembers how to keep the game alive in the players minds, the players never know he adjusted anything to begin with. They just get the excitment of a "close call" fight with a dramatic "by the hair of our teeth" ending. Therefore they dont learn the skill by playing.
I guess what I am getting at is that all DMs tend statisticly to go down the same learning curve in all RPGs.
(bows his head for poor Bran)
Do not think Bran got off so easily, after some careful thought and an epiphany of sorts, hang onto his character sheet...this is not the last of Bran, his quest to find his wife's murder is far from over..
Now that I got that off my chest, in hind sight, I was probably playing a different game. The other players didn't seem too up set with their characters death, it was almost expected. They didn't put the work into their characters like I did. So then they died they weren't out anything. Kind of like when a character dies in a video game, you reset and continue. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what you want to play. I guess I'm just prefer a different style of game.
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