Games Gone Horribly Wrong

Well I suppose its never too late for that to happen, though we'd be more suspicious about it now.

I made the villain of a two year game too convincing at the end when the party finally confronted him and learned the truth of why he was basically leading a terrorist cult. All but one person sided with him.

I meant for him to be kind of sympathetic, since his goals for the world and the goals of any good person arent' that far off, but he was supposed to clearly be crazy enough to assassinate world leaders to go about it. Instead the party signed on and the only reason he didn't win was the one who didn't blew up a bunch of stuff with an earthquake.

>though we'd be more suspicious about it now.
Right, that's the part where your DM screwed up. The way it is right now, your party probably feels Strahd is strong but you've got a weapon he's afraid of.

I mean, you'd be pissed if you'd been tricked into giving the Sun Sword away in some master plan made by Strahd. But you'd be impressed with how smart a villain he is, wouldn't you? And you'd be that much more invested in defeating him.

The curse of strahd book says strahd is supposed to show up every couple of sessions to taunt/fuck with the party, weather its vampire minions or hostile adventurers or the bad boy himself. The whole spies thing requires the party actually interact with NPC's who aren't rictavio and co, and unless the PC's are originally from Barovia, or really give a shit about an NPC theres no one to kidnap.

I've been running Curse of strahd for the past few months now. Half my players died in the basement of death house, two sessions later 2/3's of them contracted lycanthropy. They're trying to get the wine fee for Krezek to see "the holy healer" that might be able to save them. Last session they killed all the druids... while managing to set the winery on fire... and used two of the barrels of wine to put it out before just knocking down the wall that was a flame.

Lol, so I'm playing a game in which we have 4 players. 2 of the players were flakes and didn't come to a session, and one of the 2 remaining players (a fighter) had decided to play in the fog and had 4 or 5 levels of exhaustion as a result.

So we fought some ghouls, which obliterated the fighter and left the rogue to run away and explore the rest of the dungeon alone while the ghouls feasted.

I thought about running this for my first 5e game with a bunch of brand new players.

I'm glad I chose Lost Mines instead.

A Paladin in my group almost died because 5 goblins swarmed him and got great rolls while the party got like 3 critical failures in a row, causing the monk to throw a dart into his own foot and a barbarian to throw a javelin backwards.

The Ranger got down and actually managed to stop the bleeding, and when the Warlock tried to restore hit points so the paladin could get up and swing back he opened the wounds up again on accident.

Luckily they won the fight when the natural order was restored and they got good rolls.

Curse of Strahd is actually pretty fun, it's just rough at first. Especially if you consistently roll shit dice.

To give you an idea, I had a set of dice that used to do me great justice. Instead, I rolled '2' on about 8/11 of my combat rolls. I switched to another pair of dice which helped, but having one character contributing nothing to combat really hurt.

How are your warlock and paladin getting along? I played a pact of the tome old ones warlock once, had a lot of fun being LE, but definitely butted heads with some party members, like the LG paladin.

Actually ended up killing the paladin with finger of death and some well aimed eldritch blasting over an argument about how to handle some surviving prisoners or something, I forget exactly what it was but it was something along those lines. He also started the fight which no one else wanted to get involved with.

The worst part was how booty blasted he got when the warlock decided to fight back (crazy, right?) and then when he got BTFO because his combat dice were shit and I fingered him, crit him with eldritch blast, and then coup de graced him when he was down. The DM had to shut his ass down when he tried to build a brand new clone character specifically to try to murder my warlock. The guy just stewed and made the rest of the game fairly unpleasant after that until he eventually stopped showing up because we got sick of his shit.

We've only had one session so far, and as far as the interactions between the Paladin and Warlock goes it's been fine. For all the party knows the Warlock is just any other wizard. He's been sticking to himself and just helping out in fights when he can, but I know he plans on doing creepy evil shit soon since he's an old one's pact.

The actual good character interactions so far have been with the barbarian and paladin. Barbarian wanted to turn back after the fight where the paladin went down, get a good rest so the Warlock could get his spells back and the paladin could heal beyond just using lay on hands on himself. Paladin demanded they keep pushing on to slay the goblins and rescue the guy he thought they had captive. It was kind of fun.

I've actually been planning a lot with the Warlock since I see him the most often out of everyone in my group, and we decided he's going to slowly use his creepier spells till the party starts to distrust him. For example when he finally uses dissonant whispers I'm going to describe it from the party's perspective of seeing the Warlock whispering then the enemy grabbing his head and screaming while his ears start to bleed before he foams at the mouth and dies.

I want to create some good old fashioned tension in the party.

When I was a warlock the DM ended up making me the surprise villain in the end. Or rather, one of them. My god commanded me to join forces with the enemy and betray my comrades, so I did.

Which was a lot of fun. There was some salt because most of the party ended up getting killed, but that was largely because the rogue decided to also betray the party and killed the Cleric when I dropped him. That was a surprise, I hadn't played a game before that in which the evil party members came out on top/where the good characters didn't come out on top just because they were good.

The DM admitted that he hadn't intended the party to lose, but that's how it was played and that is how the dice fell.

Anyway, you have a barbarian, paladin, warlock and what else in the new party, and what are their alignments?

I might take that idea depending on where we go after the premade adventure. Sounds fun.

It's a 5 player party with

Chaotic Neutral Barbarian
Lawful Good Paladin
Lawful Neutral Monk
Neutral Good Ranger
and I think the Warlock told me he was Neutral Evil, but I don't really care too much about alignment unless it affects gameplay in some way.

The ranger is super new to the game, so I'm hoping she gets more involved than just shooting arrows when asked to.

The monk is also kind of interesting because he grew up on the streets before joining the monestairy in his youth to find a new path in life, so he has some good abilities to turn into a thief, but has to resist the temptation to use them.

Half of my party is entirely new to d&d, I told them ahead of time Curse of Strahd would probably kill them Multiple times. They love it, also helps that we try to keep the atmosphere light when possible.

Nice, I might go to that one next since it's super easy to transition to other adventures from Lost Mines and I think they're going to want to keep their characters. They'd be overleveled at the start, but I could easily just bump up the number of enemies they run into or something.

I'll just ask them soon what they want in their future adventures, but I like running darker toned campaigns a lot of times which was what attracted me to Strahd.

I just starting playing a Ranger, been having a lot of fun with it. I primarily stand back with a heavy crossbow, but since I have crossbow expert I use a rapier and hand crossbow and move in for close quarters combat when I'm needed. I like that using the hand crossbow with crossbow expert is a bonus action. And with colossus slayer and hunter's mark, you can really put out some damage.

So far though, Warlock has been the favorite class I have played in 5e between a Fighter, Barbarian, Cleric, Bard, and Ranger. I like the look at a Fiend warlock, because their ability to slam enemies through the plains of hell is fucking great. A pact of the blade Fiend warlock would be lots of fun.

Strahd is definitely pretty dark, I've been enjoying it. But you will definitely need to increase the number of enemies and maybe artificially increase the health and damage of certain enemies in order to balance it out/make it more brutal. So far, Curse of Strahd has played as if it is intentionally designed to be brutal doom so you'll want to keep them sweating.

Yeah, it's going to be really cool when everyone levels up in our next session. I was going to highly recommend the hunters mark to the Ranger since they're all hitting level 2 and that'll really help the damage output.

The warlock is actually planning on using the invocation that lets him use disguise self at will mixed with the natural telepathic powers he gets and 20 charisma to be a spy most of the time at lower levels till he gets more spell casting power under his belt. It'll probably be pretty entertaining to roleplay.

I took eldritch spear, agonizing blast, and the one that gave me knock back. Made eldritch blast pretty brutal. Also levitation at will and devil's sight because spooky warlock needs to be spooky.

I'm DMing for the first time and I had two players die in the Death House optional starting adventure for CoS. Probably would've been worse but I had a DMPC eat some hits in their place a few times.

>Only War
>Small fireteam of 6 players are to sneak into a base to destroy Anti-Air and rescue prisoners
>What could go wrong
>Night operation
>Get to the base
>Lights everywhere
>Holy shit it's bright, like, the fuck.
>Take out a guard position and reposition one of the lights to not draw attention.
>Make it halfway across the compound.
>Insanely hard rolls but passed all of them
>Final roll near main building
>All of the team pass. Except One.
>Commissar rolls a Natural 100 on a +60 stealth test and crit fails.
>All eyes on us.
>Heavy weaponry open fire on us.
>Anti-Air Hyrda's brought to bear.
>We run like crazy.
>Make it inside the building.
>Everyone else secures the door.
>Commissar decides to check ahead for danger.
>Commissar runs into blood covered room, Limbs and corpses everywhere.
>"Ivan the Butcher" walks out of a side door with a bloodied blade.
>Commissar is forced to roll willpower for the amount of blood.
>Crit fails
>Rolls D10 to determine amount of insanity gained.
>Gains 10 insanity
>Commissar reaches 102 Insanity points.
>GM takes character sheet away from Commissar's player.
>Commissar throws 10KG of plastic explosive at Ivan and detonates it at point blank range.
>Ivan survives and the Commissar is saved by a conversion field.
>Meanwhile in the other room the building shakes and all the other characters watch a babbling commissar run past them.
>As the commissar runs out of the building he begins taking all the weapons fire.
>His field saves every single shot.
>As he runs into the distance he's just throwing grenades left, right and even at his feet.
>Ivan walks out of exploded room.
>The Sgt. Attempts to take Ivan on in hand to hand.
>Everyone else is to save the prisoners.
>Rest of squad "Save" 200 odd prisoners and tell them were the armoury is.
>The armoury thats outside.
>They don't mention the heavy weapons outside.
1/2

>194 prisoners die in the escape. (Condensing events for time purposes)
>Ivan gets stronger for every person killed, Now Impossible to beat.
>Sgt. Makes a tactical retreat.
>Whole squad decides it's time to leave.
>Tech Priest rips three Anti-Air Hydras to shreds before bugging out.
>Somewhere along the line another PC died to heavy weapons fire.
>Make it back to base with six prisoners
>Find out we only took out a quarter of the anti-air
>Sgt. and Squad is sent on suicide mission as punishment duty.
>Job is to locate a hidden enemy FOB and mount an assualt.
>Find base, Sneak in and inform HQ of it's location.
>HQ calls in an artillary strike on the base and it perish's with the rest of the squad.
>Bad end.
2/2

Fucking Crit fails.

I'm really interested in Only War, I have some experience with Dark Heresy, how does it compare to that?

No idea.
I've only done Only war and Rouge Trader.
Mainly Only war though, the group I'm with has problems when not given specific instructions.

Okay, playing in a store game with a semi rotating player count through Adventurers League. Curse of Strahd, about level 5.

We are fleeing the Abbey in Kresk. Some new guys ambled into an ongoing combat and tried to fireball a tight hallway against a singular enemy and catch us all. Other new guy, a wizard, stopped him.

As we are fleeing, goes to pet a sleeping silver wolf near the now destroyed gazebo. Turns out its Strahd.

Threatens us with taking our ally if we keep dawdling and avoid coming to his invited dinner.

No one knows this guy from Adam and he didn't sign the party charter.

Like five people at the same time, "No, stop, don't" as deadpanned and as half assed as we can muster.

DM is near to laughing, but Strahd is confused with out abandonment of a seeming ally.

My first D&D game, 5e

>be playing fighter
>we're all level 5
>be in party with a rogue, sorcerer, and warlock
>we're basically murder hobos, so you know we're gunna git it at some point
>end up in prison
>warlock is a pact of the tome warlock
>performs ritual to get his spell book back
>unseen servant gets keys to let us out
>release prisoners to create chaos and indiscriminately murder guards as we make our way out
>find our gear, so now the warlock doesn't have to carry the party
>escape the city, DM places a bounty on our heads
>so now we keep playing with the knowledge that at some point some adventuring party is going to come for us
>go dungeon crawling a few sessions later
>we've largely forgotten about the bounty and are pretty far away from the city
>finish dungeon crawl, pretty weak
>warlock and sorcerer are basically out of spells
>new npc adventuring party is waiting for us at the entrance to the dungeon while we haul out our loot
>new party absolutely obliterates us despite being CR3, which the DM did not intend
>DM rolls a few unlucky crits on me, I'm down
>Rogue flips out and tries to run back into the dungeon when combat goes badly for him
>doesn't disengage because he wants to get one more attack in, so he gets opportunity attacked when he runs, is crited by a half orc barbarian and gets absolutely rekt
>sorcerer is the next to go
>warlock is the last to go down in a hail of eldritch blasts
>tfw entire party killed by lower level npc adventurers who proceed to loot our gear, our dungeon loot, and collect our bounty

>>doesn't disengage because he wants to get one more attack in
You what m8? Rouge gets Cunning Action at level 2, he could have attacked and used his bonus action to disengage.

Lol well then I guess he's retarded for not using it and that this situation could possibly have been avoided. I've never played a rogue.

When I was starting out I found it helped if we all read a bit into everyone's class so if there was something like that and we forgot about a feature we could remind each other. Maybe suggest that, using this as an example of what could be prevented?

Eh, it was tragic at the time. But it was also deeply amusing about a week later when we rolled new characters. But you are correct, that would be a good idea.

How the fuck do people keep dying in the Death House? It's not like it's the Tomb of Horrors or something.

I mean, what chain of bad decisions leads to someone in a party of 4+ dying to a ghoul, an grick, or a shambling mound, even at level 1?

I mean that last one you linked didn't have that problem, obviously.

I had a Strahd game where we lost one guy to the 4 ghouls but that only happened because 2/4 of the players weren't playing that session, including our sword and board fighter. 4 ghouls between 2 level 2 characters wasn't exactly fun.

Not trying to tell you how to play, just trying to offer advice that may or may not help.

I just played it in AL, we all survived but I can see how some of the shit can be pretty lethal. We nearly had a TPK (only one person left conscious) when we ran into some ghouls/(ghasts?) and a mimic.

Also shambling mound crits are fucking brutal.