This is a post about choices, for both the party and the DM's side. This will not be a blow-by-blow post like the other sessions. I will have one last session post where the party successfully defends themselves. Let's recap quickly before I get into the mechanics of a TPK and a near-TPK scenario.
Outside, the orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and kobolds have arrayed themselves to crush the party. Here are the dynamics of this order of battle. The B2 booklet explains how the two orc bands have an alliance; they are effectively one group. The same goes for the hobs and gobs.
In every session post, I have stated that every monster group was planning to kill the annoying kobolds until the appearance of the party. The party's presence in the Caves of Chaos has delayed the planned attack on the kobolds. We have three forces outside working together to kill the party. However, they don't entirely like each other. This is important for morale, which is a big deal in BX.
Here is a link to these books on DriveThruRPG: Basic and Expert. One of the great things about DriveThru is that they actually update titles and send notifications when they do so. Maybe this is really the author doing it. In any case, I noticed that the Expert book has a POD option. As soon as the Basic book has the same, I will order them both.
Back to morale.
The orcs will not roll morale if something happens to the hobs and goblins and vice versa. If anything bad happens to the Kobolds, these two groups will react positively, as they want them dead. This will prevent them from running off if the party defeats the kobolds. Also, it allows coloring, as these forces will cheer the party's successes against the kobolds, which is all rather ominous for the party.
For sanity, I grouped up the monsters:
- 2 groups of 8 Goblins each
- 1 group of 10 goblins
- 3 groups of 8 Orcs each
- 1 group of 10 Kobolds
- 2 groups of 9 rats, led by 2 Kobold handlers each
- 2 groups of 6 Hobgoblins
You see why this ended in both a TPK and a near-TPK. That's 94 monsters and I haven't even mentioned the leaders and their bodyguards.
Two other events are going on outside. The party's mule has escaped and is running around. It reacts to the monster's movements, so the party does receive an alert when the monsters move. The second event is that the drover family has pulled a wagon up to the southeastern edge of the map with six crossbowmen. They will not enter the fray or the valley, but are watching.Inside the cave, we have the party starting in two groups. Belaphon, Thomas the Cleric, and Sybil the second Magic User are all near the cave mouth. There is a raging fire in Room 17. At the end of the last session, Sybil went to Room 17 to see what was happening.
All of these character links go to PDFs of the character sheets on my Google Drive account. If you like them, you can always use them in your campaign. You could also hit Support Me on KoFi on the upper right to send me money. Either way, I would really appreciate it if you used them at your table.
In the TPK scenario, Rety decides to array the party in roughly equal groups to defend both entrances. We have a Cleric, a Fighter, and a Knight at both entrances, plus two Magic Users at each. Solvo the Elf is with the group near Room 18, and Rety is at the other cave mouth leading that group.
Wave upon wave of monsters eventually breached the caves and crushed the party as they retreated to Room 18.
The primary issue was that the Magic Users and missile-armed fighters held the monsters off outside the cave entrances using sleep and arrows on whatever wave they were facing. Since the sleeping monsters were outside, they could be woken up again and form another group of attackers. Once the spells ran out, the battle quickly descended into melees that the heroes couldn't win. The archers never ran out of arrows because they were pre-stocked in various places. It simply didn't help.
In option two, the near-TPK scenario, the party blocked up the secret door and focused on only the cave mouth. Basically, the same thing happened. The party ran out of spells and retreated to Room 18. They managed to unblock the secret door and fled to the waiting wagon. Once the party started the breakout, I ran the scenario 3 times. The Fighters, Clerics, Rety, and Knights died over and over again, and usually only the Magic-Users made it to the wagon.
What helped the party was that ALL of the monsters participated in the breaching of the cave mouth, leaving a very weak force outside to stop the party. Whoever made it outside simply needed to outrun the leaders and bodyguards, who were already disinclined to get into melee.
I'd like to talk about this scenario because I tried several game-breaking options to allow the heroes to escape. From the DM's perspective, these were all bad choices because they would have killed follow-up sessions and possibly my whole campaign. In my opinion, TPKs happen because players make bad choices. It is not up to the DM to try to fix it by breaking rules. Let the party find out what works and what doesn't.
First, I did the easy thing and cheated by letting the magic users enter the fray with undeclared spells. I simply let them have whatever spell they deemed necessary. This is a really bad choice, AND it didn't help the party at all. I posted about letting Magic-Users hot swap spells in Session 6.5. This is a non-combat event, NOT at all appropriate for what happened here. Second, allowing MU's the ability to just select spells at the time of casting gives them too much power and takes away from the spontaneous casting that Clerics can do. This would damage future events by giving too much power to the spellcasters. I do let clerics spontaneously cast. If your god needs you to do it, you can do it. Clerics have that kind of power. Magic-Users do not.
Magic-Users firing crossbows is also "just ok", as they would face serious penalties to their die rolls.
Clerics and bows should be right out. They won't use sharp weapons against living creatures by choice or oath. Sharp weapons tend to be ineffective against the undead in most cases. They have better tools in these scenarios, like spells or turn undead.
In all cases, none of this cheating actually helped the party, and as a DM, I damaged my ability to run future sessions because I broke major rules. I would never do this with players at the table.
I DO allow MU's and Clerics to use bows and sharp weapons under very strict conditions. Clerics can have the ability to use ANY weapon under non-combat conditions. They can't hurt people with them, so this is limited to sparing or target practice. They never get to roll damage, so no harm, no foul.
For Magic Users, I allow them to use darts for 1d3 damage at very close range. They can have a very wimpy hand-pulled crossbow for flinging darts if they so choose. Most players try this and determine if hand-throwing a dart and firing one from a crossbow does the same exact thing; they won't carry the crossbow to save weight. The weak, hand-pulled crossbow is a campaign flavor thing with some historical notes.
Did you know they made clay pellet bows and crossbows for game hunting? Stonebows were completely ineffective in warfare. I would imagine someone tried it to find out how bad it was. Of course, there is a video or 10 on YouTube.
In these two scenarios, the party's choices and the DM's choices lead to a Total Party Kill and a near TPK, with only random characters escaping over a couple of replayed events.
In the next post, I will do a nearly round-by-round description of how the party avoided both of these scenarios. The clever party came up with some great ideas that required some game-changing adjudication by the DM. This would completely change the flavor of a campaign and needed to be handled strictly by me so as not to cause problems in the future.
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