Immediate Action + Free Action out of turn and others.

[Zatsupachi]

So. As my first foray into GMing a Pathfinder game, I've set upon an RP20, Epic Fantasy setting starting at Lv11.

We're 7 sessions in and I'm kinda already used to the Dragon Ball-levels of ridiculousness the PCs and NPCs can pull. But one particular situation bothers me from our latest session.

In an attempt to recover the corpse of a fallen party member who went alone on a dangerous mission, they managed to track their way back to the boss character I placed a few sessions back. She's received quite a few more abilities from last time because of the plot's McGuffin. So the party does battle with her 4 vs 1, one of the party members being their first session in the campaign, and the other a cohort of another party member.

After some time, the boss uses her ultimate attack. It deals a whopping 172 holy damage, a resounding "oh no" was felt across the table.

It is enough damage to kill the cohort and the guy who just entered the campaign(eventhough he passed the save).

One of the party members and his cohort both Aegis, uses a "Quickened"(?) Reconfigure to their Astral Suits to enlarge them to give enough reach for Extra Passenger to save the cohort and the new guy from certain death.

Now. I know Psionic classes have powers but Reconfigure is a class feature and takes a standard action to do, if it was possible to Quicken it to "Immediate" then, the second problem arise in where putting someone in Extra Passenger is a Free Action, which typically something you can only do in your turn unless stated otherwise.

Looking through general consensus, I've mostly got "no" as an answer. But yeah, I'm willing to "screw the rules" and lean on saving the new guy from death with some sort of Deus Ex Machina. Mainly because it's disheartening to kill off a Lv12 spellcaster class he paved for 2 weeks and not because of ill-intent to the other player's cohort.

We held off the results of the encounter until our next session, so there's time for a bit of debate.

Am I making the right judgment call?

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Whatever makes the game more fun for everyone is the right call.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Honestly? No.
To me, if you're willing to change the rules on the fly to save characters from dying the game loses any tension it had. It's no fun playing a game you can't lose.
I also dislike DMs who give monsters custom new powers because "plot". The rules are extensive enough to build anything you need.
If you're going to ignore the rules anyway you might as well play a more freeform RPG instead of a rules-based one.

The way i see it if you give your monsters custom powers that do 150+ damage at level 11 you're accepting that some of your players will likely die. I'd even say you're aiming for it.
I prefer monsters to be build within the rules and then let the dice fall where they may. Sometimes PCs will die, but it's not going to be because of some bull**** DM fiat.
And it's not like there aren't resurrection spells available for precisely that situation, so it's all part of the game.

YMMV, but that's the way i DM and the way i like to play.

[Zatsupachi]

Hm.

The Epic Fantasy Setting alone warrants certain death if a build is particularly vulnerable to a very ordinary thing like damage.

I've seen builds within our group that exceed 200+ damage in levels slightly below this(there is one currently in the party). So yeah, I'm used to hyper-powered bs in this. It's just quite unfortunate that certain builds in PF are just way stronger than others especially PF's myriad of third party content, which I should've sifted through better.