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Cheesy74
2010-05-03, 04:01 PM
I've been putting my players through a relatively weak area, largely to show them that they're getting extremely strong relative to most of the world (they're tenth level). However, at the conclusion, where I pitted them against a lammasu with class levels and some shadows (a CR 11 encounter, which was pitiful considering how well-optimized they are), one of the players halted the game for a solid ten minutes when the wizard died, furious with me for "not balancing encounters" and "not understanding how to run a continuous narrative". The encounter was won within the next round or so, so I know that my DMing judgment isn't a problem. The problem is that the players feel immune to death because they're central characters in a story.
How do I make them more cautious and, more importantly, accepting that death is a common occurrence on this job without throwing overly powerful creatures at them?

Reynard
2010-05-03, 04:04 PM
Kill them more often.

Or at least, beat them unconscious a few more times, but don't do any permanent damage.

Same for their characters.

Flob
2010-05-03, 04:07 PM
Yeah, just throw things at them that are stronger than they are, so they have to run away. I used to think my characters were invincable (due to one that survived to level 19 and never even went below -5, the campaign remains unfinished). Than a monk I was playing got eaten by a giant shark... I learned that, just because your the main character, doesn't mean your invincable.

Project_Mayhem
2010-05-03, 04:08 PM
Kill them more often.

This, really. The only way to make them fear death is if they consider it a real consequence

Altair_the_Vexed
2010-05-03, 04:14 PM
Don't let up.

Don't just hit them with harder and harder stuff - that's boring. Steal their kit, kidnap their friends, that sort of thing. Use clever gangs of low level mooks - low enough level that they don't even get XP for defeating them...

The flip side of being the most powerful people for miles - which I inflicted on my group not so long ago - is that no-one can help them. No-one has cooler kit than they do, and no-one is going to sell them useful magic items. They have to make their high level items for themselves. If they want something done, they have to do it themselves. There is no cavalry to come and get them out of trouble.

Anyway, in vanilla D&D, at 10th level, the PCs can raise a dead guy after the combat.

Divide by Zero
2010-05-03, 04:14 PM
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/raiseDead.htm

In pretty much all games, characters can die. In D&D, that is even less of an issue.

GenPol
2010-05-03, 04:16 PM
Kill them more often.

Or at least, beat them unconscious a few more times, but don't do any permanent damage.

Same for their characters.

Great quote! :smallbiggrin::smallamused::smalltongue:

Yeah, maybe throw something at them that is obviously too powerful, and see if they have the brains to run away. Kill one of them off if they don't, and see if that gives them a wake up call.

Eldariel
2010-05-03, 04:17 PM
I've been putting my players through a relatively weak area, largely to show them that they're getting extremely strong relative to most of the world (they're tenth level). However, at the conclusion, where I pitted them against a lammasu with class levels and some shadows (a CR 11 encounter, which was pitiful considering how well-optimized they are), one of the players halted the game for a solid ten minutes when the wizard died, furious with me for "not balancing encounters" and "not understanding how to run a continuous narrative". The encounter was won within the next round or so, so I know that my DMing judgment isn't a problem. The problem is that the players feel immune to death because they're central characters in a story.
How do I make them more cautious and, more importantly, accepting that death is a common occurrence on this job without throwing overly powerful creatures at them?

OOC chat to make them understand that they're powerful, not immortal, and that they're far from being the most powerful creatures in the world or even in any given region. They're players, not rulers - they're strong enough to have a say in most places and matters, but not strong enough to defeat anything, rule through power or any such.

You may ask them to read the "Player Characters Out Of Control"-part in the DMG themselves. And the Random Encounter Tables and point out that you aren't even matching them up against as hard things as that table tells you to (the book tells you to run impossible (CR 5+) encounter every now and then so the PCs learn they need to run or talk sometimes too). And point out that Resurrection isn't there just for the hell of it. What Hinjo said about Atonement goes here too: It wouldn't exist if it weren't needed sometimes.

Pepz
2010-05-03, 04:17 PM
I don't think you did anything wrong, really. Except maybe give them easy encounters, but you had a good reason to.

If your players feel they should be able to kill everything without any danger to themselves, maybe they should play Loony Tunes' Playground Adventure.

If you roll the die, accept that you can (die).

Math_Mage
2010-05-03, 05:09 PM
Kill them more often.

Or at least, beat them unconscious a few more times, but don't do any permanent damage.

Same for their characters.

Since killing 10th-level characters doesn't do any permanent damage, I fail to see any reason to let up. :smallcool:

Private-Prinny
2010-05-03, 05:30 PM
Kill them more often.

Or at least, beat them unconscious a few more times, but don't do any permanent damage.

Same for their characters.

Do you mind if I sig this?

Reynard
2010-05-03, 05:34 PM
If you want to, I suppose.

Yay I got sigged.

...

OOhh, Idea. Throw them up against Tucker's Kobolds.

Mando Knight
2010-05-03, 05:42 PM
Here's the DM's little helper: No, not the ad-hoc +2, this (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/dragonTrue.htm). Nothing messes up players than running into a dragon in an area that isn't to the player's advantage.

What's that? How do you justify an area that's to the dragon's advantage? It's called a lair, silly. Dragons have Darkvision. Therefore, they can go without light entirely. They might have traps that let off paralysis spells, vast pools of elemental death that they live in, complex tunnels that allow them to swing around and catch the enemy by surprise. An older dragon is nearly impossible to defeat in its own lair, if the DM puts a bit of effort into making it feel like home.

cupkeyk
2010-05-03, 06:21 PM
How can a level 10 wizard lose to a lammasu with a CR of 11? Beat up the wizard's player, he should be ashamed of himself. The lammasu wouldn't have lasted past initiative round with a proper wizard.

jiriku
2010-05-03, 06:28 PM
How do I make them more cautious and, more importantly, accepting that death is a common occurrence on this job without throwing overly powerful creatures at them?

Couple of methods I use:


I discuss OOC that while difficulty is generally tuned to player level, they're not going to find level-appropriate encounters in the local bar or in the Fire Swamp.
Players occasionally encounter NPC adventuring parties who have taken casualties and are sitting around because they haven't yet found enough new recruits to get back up to fighting strength.
They also occasionally run into NPC adventuring groups only to learn a little while later that some or all of the adventurers have died horribly.
I use my desktop during play. The back of the monitor is decorated with flaming skulls. I add one every time I score a player-kill. I've got five skulls so far this campaign. :smallcool:

Curmudgeon
2010-05-03, 06:57 PM
You've been coddling them. Check out the "CHALLENGE RATINGS AND ENCOUNTER LEVELS" treatment in the DMG, especially the "Encounter Difficulty" table on page 49. Fully 5% of all encounters should be overpowering (EL 5+ higher than party level). One party death but still a win indicates merely "very difficult", and that should be happening 15% of the time.

Make them run away, or all die, roughly every 20 encounters. If they squawk, show them the rules.

Asheram
2010-05-03, 07:01 PM
There's always the opportunity (if you want to change the setting to another country) to drive the Tarrasque through the area. Either they stay and die, or flee.
Works well for prideful players.

snoopy13a
2010-05-03, 07:03 PM
If your players feel they should be able to kill everything without any danger to themselves, maybe they should play Loony Tunes' Playground Adventure.



But if the players want to play "Loony Tunes' Playground Adventure" then why not construct the campaign that way?

Threeshades
2010-05-03, 07:15 PM
Yeah just recently I let a boneclaw tear the entire party up. They got saved by npcs before they died but they did learn not to take a fight to lightly, and reminded them of their characters' mortality.
That's what hit points and rules for death are for after all, they don't only concern npcs and monsters.

Also I hope it taught them to recognize the signs of a boss fight when they see them. (it's not like two chests full of healing potions, a long ceremoniously decorated corridor with a giant door at the end wouldn't scream "Something important is happening here!")

AslanCross
2010-05-03, 07:21 PM
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/raiseDead.htm

In pretty much all games, characters can die. In D&D, that is even less of an issue.

Make it extremely hard to access resurrection magic. In my current campaign, the PCs are the highest-level casters in a 120-mile radius. If they die, no one has the spells to raise them.

Superglucose
2010-05-03, 07:23 PM
Push them. Give them hard encounters, give them several hard encounters.

Make sure you don't overwhelm them though; losing once in a while can be fun, but winning is the ultimate high.

Reynard
2010-05-03, 07:25 PM
After a run-in with Tuckers Kobolds, even completely ordinary corridors get me on edge.

Gigantic, obvious boss rooms don't phase me, even ones with a sand floor. Twisty, 5ft corridors interspersed with pot holes, pits, vents, etc, get me panicking and telling the cleric to get his act together and buff the designated trapfinder's Wisdom and Dexterity scores like mad. If I am the Cleric, I send up the DMM persist-ed buffs of Wis, Dex, and even Light (always Light) at the first hint of them.

Math_Mage
2010-05-03, 07:28 PM
Make it extremely hard to access resurrection magic. In my current campaign, the PCs are the highest-level casters in a 120-mile radius. If they die, no one has the spells to raise them.

That sounds like the sort of thing you'd do with characters TOO comfortable with death, not the other way around.

Lin Bayaseda
2010-05-03, 07:50 PM
I've been putting my players through a relatively weak area, largely to show them that they're getting extremely strong relative to most of the world (they're tenth level). However, at the conclusion, where I pitted them against a lammasu with class levels and some shadows (a CR 11 encounter, which was pitiful considering how well-optimized they are), one of the players halted the game for a solid ten minutes when the wizard died, furious with me for "not balancing encounters" and "not understanding how to run a continuous narrative". The encounter was won within the next round or so, so I know that my DMing judgment isn't a problem. The problem is that the players feel immune to death because they're central characters in a story.
How do I make them more cautious and, more importantly, accepting that death is a common occurrence on this job without throwing overly powerful creatures at them?

Please bring this player to your computer, open this page, and tell him to read this:
Dude, you're an ass. So your character died, big whoop. It's just 5,000 gp to raise him, you know? Fictional gp even. Grow up, will ya? Oh, and CR 11 for an optimized level 10 party? No big deal, really. My players dealt with CR 13 by that time.

Roderick_BR
2010-05-03, 07:57 PM
Just put more dangerous situations, not only creatures. Strength in numbers.
Also, a good trick:

Look up revivify: Make it a 3rd level cleric spell (it's currently 2, I think). Caster receives a negative level when casting it. It's just a sorta "CLEAR" kind of spell.

Make Rise Dead a 6th level spell (instead of 5th). Add a XP cost.

Make Ressurrection a 9th level spell (instead of... whatever). Caster loses a permanent character level to use it.

None of these spells can ever be found in magic itens.
True Ressurrection can only be used by epic casters or deities.

Don't make death TOO dangerous and permanent. Just make it more than a temporary nuisance. Finding someone to rise a friend may be a whole adventure, and in-combat rising nearly suicidal/impossible.

Story-wise: The characters are heroes of their own local story, yes, but you can show large events happening outside their sphere of influence. War among nations, or lord scheming against each other, SPECIALLY if the players are just arriving, and are caught in the middle. They can help influence a side, but most of what is happening is based on other people (careful to not rail road. though).

Claudius Maximus
2010-05-03, 08:05 PM
Look up revivify: Make it a 3rd level cleric spell (it's currently 2, I think). Caster receives a negative level when casting it. It's just a sorta "CLEAR" kind of spell.

Revivify is actually a 5th level spell. Since we're discussing costs, it does have a 1000 gp material component.

Math_Mage
2010-05-03, 08:13 PM
I'm still confused. The players aren't used to dying, and everyone seems to want to make resurrection more difficult? "Wups, you died, and oh by the way, it's now harder to get resurrected than RAW allows" is not going to go over well with players who weren't expecting a lot of death in the first place. I get that revolving-door syndrome is a well-established problem for PCs, but it's not one that this group has. Increasing resurrection penalties is the right solution to the wrong problem.

gibbo88
2010-05-03, 08:14 PM
Also I hope it taught them to recognize the signs of a boss fight when they see them. (it's not like two chests full of healing potions, a long ceremoniously decorated corridor with a giant door at the end wouldn't scream "Something important is happening here!")

One of my friends and I have the phrase "This looks official" for situations such as these showing its time to save/buff/consider chances of survival/plan courses of action. Also helps to check the map so you know where the hell to run to if the boss starts clawing/stabbing/biting/blasting or clubbing you a new orifice.

PlzBreakMyCmpAn
2010-05-03, 10:55 PM
Start throwing horribly under-CR'd encounters. But do so with the borked stuff like that damn crab, and ethereal clerics. This will mean they will have large difficulty winning, when they are supposed to be steamrolling.

Then when they just barely won (make sure no one dies), tell them the exact CRs of all the creatures and show them the XP tables. After a few no-xp encounters, they will think twice about how awesomely optimized they are. :smallbiggrin:

erikun
2010-05-03, 11:03 PM
It doesn't sound like you need to increase the difficulty of encounters, if the PCs are dying occasionally. Perhaps increase the difficulty of the "lesser" encounters to closer to the party level, or drop hints in-game about the big scary bad guy they will be facing. Foreknowledge is forearmed, after all.

Sucrose
2010-05-03, 11:14 PM
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/22/

This seems relevant to your interests.:smallsmile:

Beyond that, explain to them OOC that steamrolling things that aren't threats hardly makes them epic heroes, and so in a properly balanced situation, there is such a thing as danger. As such, some of them could die. Also, explain that there are things which are far stronger than them which exist in the world, and that even as they tower above the townsfolk, that hardly means that they will handily defeat all that they face.

Others have provided ample ways to demonstrate this fact to them.

Umael
2010-05-04, 12:59 AM
Whoa, whoa, whoa.

I think a few things got missed here.

Everyone is talking about how the players were getting too cocky and how they need to be reminded about how just because they are PCs doesn't make them immortal and all.

But the first thing I got was how one of the players stopped the game for ten minutes.

I don't know about the rest of you, but that kind of thing grabs me. A player should not be getting upset over a game so much that they stop the game because they are upset. My initial thought after that was something along the lines of the player being a bit prickly about it.

Then I re-read.

A player should not get upset over a game, true, but just because the player gets upset does not mean that it is solely the player's fault.

The OP mentioned a series of easier encounters, and then a CR 11 encounter, that was something a little harder that turned out to be enough to kill the wizard.

The phrasing that the player used was about balancing the encounter equal to the character level (which, I agree, is bogus) and the unrealistic narrative. I'm not sure what that second part mean, but I would like some clarification.

Did this last encounter seem mismatched or out-of-place? Was it reasonable to assume that because there was a series of weaker encounters than a stronger one would be making its way over soon?

Was the death of the wizard appropriate? Were the monsters fighting with as much cunning as they should have?

What are the opinions of the other players?

To me, the other side of the equation of "just because you are PCs doesn't mean that your character will not die" is "just because there is a monster that can kill you doesn't mean that it has to be there". Example: Hill giants exist in the wilds, but if the King's Road hasn't seen trouble in fifty years, the 1st-level PCs shouldn't be running into them just because.

Thajocoth
2010-05-04, 01:26 AM
The players won't feel as safe if you let a poisonous snake loose in the room. "When you've finished the encounter, I'll put him back in his cage."*


*This is actually a bad idea. Trust me.

Deathrevived
2010-05-04, 01:38 AM
I must agree with a lot of the other posters, in the sense that one does not necessarily need to start throwing encounters that are obviously to difficult and kill them off to teach mortality to players (Though it sure is a fun way to do so ;) haha)

I have always been a big fan of crippling members of the party is entertaining ways that teach them caution.

-Once a party I had was so convinced in their ability to defeat any encounter that came their way, so they simply stopped posting someone to play sentry as they slept. It just happened that after that the paladin had his grandfather's + enchanted longsword replaced with a big stick and a note of "Haha, thanks mister". They spent the better part of two sessions demanding to search for that sword, since it was prophesied that it was key to defeating the "great evil" that threatened their country. They were not impressed when it never materialized and no clues were ever found, they just had to start their quest from the beginning, those guys never got cocky at night again.

-Another time I had roughly the same problem you mentioned, where players got angry and took it personally when their characters died, or when another's response to having his rogue die from rushing headlong into battle was that, "Oh well, guess I'll owe the cleric some cash for the raise dead". this also took me back a bit, and truth be told I have yet to find the best solution to this problem...

Best of Luck

Zeta Kai
2010-05-04, 05:12 AM
It's easy to feel safe when you're dead; nothing can hurt you any longer. :smallamused:

WildPyre
2010-05-04, 05:16 AM
And here I felt bad for crippling my players' level 7 fighter this Sunday when I targeted him with a level 1 ray of enfeblement spell... dropped his str so low he literally couldn't move in that nice full plate, carry his tower shield and his bastard sword... lucky for them most of the mobs had been taken down by then.

Tiki Snakes
2010-05-04, 10:16 AM
It's easy to feel safe when you're dead; nothing can hurt you any longer. :smallamused:

If they can't hurt you any longer, then they just aren't trying hard enough. :smallwink:

Lin Bayaseda
2010-05-04, 10:30 AM
It's easy to feel safe when you're dead; nothing can hurt you any longer. :smallamused:Wrong. Speak with Dead + "I know where your family lives" hurts plenty.

Person_Man
2010-05-04, 10:45 AM
Wrong. Speak with Dead + "I know where your family lives" hurts plenty.

For this reason, my character are always orphans who grew up as loners. Having a back story that includes people you care about is just an invitation for your DM to mess with them.

Zeta Kai
2010-05-04, 12:47 PM
For this reason, my character are always orphans who grew up as loners. Having a back story that includes people you care about is just an invitation for your DM to mess with them.

You're the kind of guy that runs from plot hooks, aren't you? :smalltongue:

Nero24200
2010-05-04, 04:18 PM
Sorry, but characters die, that's part of the game. If they want a game that doesn't feature death you're going to need to remove alot of D'n'D and may as well just give the PC's infinate hit points.

Skaven
2010-05-04, 06:24 PM
I've been putting my players through a relatively weak area, largely to show them that they're getting extremely strong relative to most of the world (they're tenth level). However, at the conclusion, where I pitted them against a lammasu with class levels and some shadows (a CR 11 encounter, which was pitiful considering how well-optimized they are), one of the players halted the game for a solid ten minutes when the wizard died, furious with me for "not balancing encounters" and "not understanding how to run a continuous narrative". The encounter was won within the next round or so, so I know that my DMing judgment isn't a problem. The problem is that the players feel immune to death because they're central characters in a story.
How do I make them more cautious and, more importantly, accepting that death is a common occurrence on this job without throwing overly powerful creatures at them?

Attrition.

Put them in a situation where they must go for a duration and use up their resources without trips to towns to re-stock. Throw at them multiple encounters or challenges designed to while away their spells and HP.

Mando Knight
2010-05-04, 06:31 PM
I discuss OOC that while difficulty is generally tuned to player level, they're not going to find level-appropriate encounters in the local bar or in the Fire Swamp.

If RUSes are appropriate level encounters, then I'd expect that the Fire Swamp has level-appropriate encounters.

PersonMan
2010-05-04, 07:43 PM
The players won't feel as safe if you let a poisonous snake loose in the room. "When you've finished the encounter, I'll put him back in his cage."*


*This is actually a bad idea. Trust me.

"Okay. Nobody eat the snake, guys! It's poisonous! I'm glad that no venomous snakes are here, or I'd feel unsafe!"

Thajocoth
2010-05-04, 07:50 PM
"Okay. Nobody eat the snake, guys! It's poisonous! I'm glad that no venomous snakes are here, or I'd feel unsafe!"

...Same difference.

PersonMan
2010-05-04, 08:06 PM
...Same difference.

Remind me not to go to a snake-infested area with you.

It'd make me feel unsafe. :smalltongue: