Ok so for context, we've been playing this campaign for 3-4 months with on and off attendance, which I took from an online DND homebrew I follow and did my best to translate into our game as there are no "official" materials. It's been going pretty well so far with everyone having a good time and getting invested, though not enough to recall all the lore without me having to just remind them of what they should know.
Encounters thus far have been rather fair with some bosses getting literally steamrolled in the early game. Their first boss got locked down super hard and couldn't do anything, but as we've gone on I've gotten better at planning for those scenarios and making the fight at least challenging. I've never been too harsh, play by rule of cool a lot, and even fudged a few rolls or checks just to let them do as they please.
Currently my players were in an actual dungeon *gasp* and working through a series of challenges to escape. Going into this session, I've been hinting and outright saying this is where they all die and it's gonna be a real hard fight so they should be ready. I'm not very subtle about it. Going into the session everyone is at full heath and has all their skills. Then, on the way to the boss room, despite having an easy method to reach it on a 70 foot high cliff, one player decides to climb it and after several failed attempts has lost 17 hp before even reaching the boss.
The players were two rogues (inquisitor and Swashbuckler), a Forge Cleric, an Evocation Wizard, and Glamor Bard.
Not a big deal as there are 5 level 5 players going up against a solo CR 7 boss. I was honestly concerned because up till this point the fights that were even were ones with hordes of enemies with a few tough ones as boss fights and the last solo humanoid encounter is the one they stomped. All my prep and research told me it would be rather one sided, so I had a few extra enemies prepared in case my tactics controlling the boss weren't enough. I immediately realized I wouldn't need them.
So the fight starts off rather poorly for them with a lot of low rolls, saves being me, or the boss being outright immune to certain spells (Charmed condition). Either way, it's a 5 on 1 fight, so it should still be rather fair from my perspective. I play the boss as an intelligent being who has fought for hundreds of years, so they use tactics like teleporting around the room in and out of reach (Fey Step), using legendary actions to get in extra hits, and a lair action as well.
Like I said, this was their first REAL boss fight.
The only time I may have overdone it was when I used their third legendary action which did a little too much damage, something the players pointed out didn't seem fair. I agreed after seeing how much damage one player took and I didn't use it again or even attempt to the rest of the fish. In my defense, the move takes a lot of set up, having to attack several times beforehand to set up leaf traps, then summon them all back dealing damage per leaf (6d4 per hit) and then a big AOE move for 10d4 within ten feet of boss. They had all bunched up, so how could I not use the bosses strongest attack.
Either way, they still put up a great fight, getting the boss down to 123 HP taken out of 151 and nearly knocking her off a cliff, which was a really clever plan. This is where I admit I got a little desperate not to have the fight end in such a way and had her roll a dex save to see if she could save (as the cliff she fell off had another within arms reach below it.) She did have one legendary resistance left at this point, so for the players it was all just trying to make her fail twice. Then the players tried and failed to knock her off with her succeeding on saves (without using her resistance) before she teleported back up and managed to finish off the remaining players.
None of them were mad at me as they knew I made it clear this fight was a real boss with me not pulling punches this time, though I could tell they were disappointed at the loss. Again, it wasn't my intention to actually kill them, but I did promise a deadly encounter where they could die and didn't just let them keep getting up like a goblin boss or wild animal might. I did not abuse my position as DM and force rolls into my favor or make things up. If I was ever unsure of how to rule (in my or their favor) i rolled a dice for it.
I felt really bad afterwards and felt like I could have fudged some things to let them have won, especially at the end. I do know my players aren't optimizers or used their best tactics given one had heat metal which they could have used on her armor for consistent damage throughout the fight (something he literally did in their last fight to great effect) as an example. The wizard kept using save or suck spells instead of any more aggressive attacks and it took them time to try burning through her 3 legendary resistances, which I established early she had.
So what do you think? Am I the bad guy here for actually following through on my deadly encounter or am I overthinking it? We still plan on probably continuing the campaign, just come up with an explanation on how they move forward and survived or possibly have their 6th party member (a fighter) come in and try to finish the boss as he wasn't there last session, so we'll just say he was in the corner taking a nap or something.
If nobody was mad and the struggle was fun, then everything was fine. Sometimes the bad guy wins. It helps people to learn to psychologically deal with disappointment in a healthy manner.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
Sometimes you need an encounter like this so the players know you really will kill them. You did forewarn, but players at our table ignore that regularly, but we've been killed before, even a tpk and we've had hundreds of hours of enjoyment since then. They will take party composition more importantly in the future. Learning to have a tank and not bunch up is an essential learned skill. Have a session where you all talk about what went right and where things went wrong and if changes could have helped the outcome. This is a good tough lesson for everyone. I look forward to you having many good years to come with this group and have other growing pains!
First of all, I agree with what Meta says above. As long as everyone has fun and is ready to get back on the horse you're good. Maybe they've learned a thing or two.
But I also try to learn from stuff like this as the DM. I would point to a couple things tipping this situation towards a TPK.
First, it's a custom monster - which is fine, but it means you need to take a close look at it. CR is a vague measurement and the official calculations struggle with taking into account big charge-up moves. A level 5 character has what like 40hp or so? A move that can essentially do 16d4 - which is an average of 40 - to multiple characters would worry me. That move can TPK all by itself.
Which isn't a dealbreaker, but it means you need to telegraph to your players that the BBEG is setting up something they should be worried about and provide a way they can understand how to mitigate the impact of it. My players have learned that when a boss leaves behind something like a golden leaf, they are going to want to make a knowledge check to know what I'm setting up. I also lower the threshold of what it takes to do a knowledge check as a battle progresses both action-wise and DC-wise because it only makes sense that you learn about an enemy as you fight it.
How much you tell your players is a personal preference, but I've found that this kind of info is great for building tension and encouraging smarter play which leads to more satisfying wins.
Your boss isn't CR 7 -- she has effective hp 211 (legendary resistance on a tier 2 counts as 20 hp per use) and effective AC 17 (+2 for magic resistance) for a defensive CR of 10. Offensive CR is harder to math out because of the complexity of the leaf traps (also, it makes a big difference whether the PCs figured out that the leaves mattered). Doing a typical math:
Round 1: razor-leaf wave (on 2 targets) 38, uses fey step to spawn another leaf.
Legendary Actions, Round 1: three leaf attacks (42). Total up to now 80
Round 2: two more leaf attacks (28). Total now 108.
Legendary Actions, Round 2: golden storm. Recall 7 leafs, a leaf can hit more than one target but can also hit zero targets, we will evaluate this as hitting 5 targets (75). The vortex is assumed to hit 2 targets (58). Total now 241
Round 3: two longsword attacks; 3 more longsword attacks with legendary actions. Total now 331.
That's 110 dpr, for a raw offensive CR of 17, reduced to 16 for low accuracy.
Final CR: 13
None of which means you were being a bad DM, but may account for the fight being more challenging than you expected.
Really appreciate all the advice you're all giving. Yes I realized during the fight the CR7 might not have been accurate and once I saw how much damage her higher level moves used, I didn't use them again, mostly focused on sword and teleporting around throwing a leaf every now and then. I definitely tried not to play too aggressive with big damage moves and just played smart, plus I had actually forgotten about her resistances, so that never became a factor either.
Glad to know this for next time I DM and we still plan to play regularly, just keep this game going or start a new one. Thanks again!
Just with sword moves she's at 90 dpr and offensive CR 14, though since it sounds like the fight was close, that might have been enough. Personally, I would probably have allowed the PCs to throw her off the cliff, then have her be lost from view on the way down, so the PCs would wonder 'did we kill her... or not?'. Then later she can reappear with a new set of abilities.
The leaf mechanics are pretty interesting, because they're something with counterplay options if you figure out how it works, but you can't really figure out how it works without seeing it work at least once, so I'd tend to make it less powerful but also cheaper to use. For example (also reduced general damage a bit)
Bonus Actions
Fey Step: Alea teleports up to 30' to an unoccupied space she can see, leaving a golden leaf in the space she left.
Actions
Multiattack: Alea may use Recall Leaves, then makes two attacks with dawn-touched longsword, golden leaf, or a combination.
Dawn-Touched Longsword: change damage to 1d10+4+2d6 (expected 16.5, instead of 18).
Golden Leaf: change damage to 2d6+4 (11).
Razor-Leaf Wave: change damage to 4d6 (14).
Recall Leaves: Alea recalls any scattered leaves, which will (if possible) travel in a straight line towards her. If a leaf passes through the space of a creature, that creature must make a Dexterity save (DC 15) or take 2d6(7) slashing damage. A creature may be hit by more than one leaf, but a leaf may not hit more than one creature.
Legendary Actions
Teleport: changed to cost 1.
Golden Storm: removed.
If we value recall leaf at an expected damage of 5 (some will not manage to target anyone... but most will) this means either the longsword or the golden leaf has an expected damage of about 16; razor-leaf wave has expected damage 28 (2 targets) +15 (recall) = 43, so damage per round is down to about 90.
Reevaluate the homebrew CR rating? that was a bit of a miss i guess. I think that creature is more CR10-12.
I think the ultimate thing here is how do you proceed. IMO, if i see that TPK coming, i'm probably looking for a situation where the baddie turns my party into minions under some sort of mind control or amnesia or something, forces them to do her bidding for a while, and then slowly in the next few sessions they regain their senses (perhaps one with the highest in a specific score) and they eventually stage an escape, regroup, and a rebattle once they achieve maybe level 6 or 7, or maybe if they set her up with some sort of debuff by taking advantage of her not knowing. I'm always looking at things as "heres your warning sign, you now have to fight through this effect, and it's not going to be particularly fun for some of your characters, but it'll be a session or two of tough love" and then back to being more realistic about things.
Never a jerk for punishing the party, i think this is a double-edged sword of a learning lesson :)
I think the most valuable tool at your disposal for when you feel like you've unexpectedly gone harder than you intended is to change the priorities of the boss.
If you feel the encounter going a way that's stacked against the players too hard, don't fudge die rolls, simply change their motivation. Suddenly this fight to the death is a fight to the capture, or maybe a fight to escape, or maybe the boss pushes the party off the cliff and they survive heavily wounded to come back another day.
I didn't look too close at the homebrew monster, but if it's an intelligent boss, it could always nab the first player to go unconscious and retreat further into the lair to hold hostage or use to fuel some dark ritual, etc. If it's an unintelligent beast, then maybe it preserves it's prey in it's lair, preferring fresh game (a la the Wampa in Empire-- Luke comes to hanging from the ceiling, providing an opportunity to escape rather than unsatisfyingly killing him while he's out), or maybe it's just defending itself, and once the players are no longer a threat it isn't interested in them.
If you're uncertain about whether yours is a campaign where people die or not, or if you just find TPK's narratively unsatisfying, there's always a plausible reason for most of the party to survive. Changing how you the DM look at the fight can go a long way towards avoiding a TPK without sacrificing a challenging combat encounter.
The only thing you did that I would have done differently is the ruling for shoving her off a cliff, and probably realized that with those legendary actions she's quite a bit higher than a CR 7. There are rules for shoving and falling and they should be adhered to rather than the DM suddenly giving the boss a way to guarantee an escape because they don't want to see their boss killed that way, this is especially true if that happened near the end of a fight that's going badly for the party.
It's not the DMs job to ensure the players always win, but it is something that should be discussed in session 0. Some players enjoy playing D&D because they want a power fantasy and are perfectly happy steamrolling encounters and never really feeling like they are about to die, others love the risk of TPK. If you're unsure about it after this session, just ask them how they felt about that level of difficulty, and adjust accordingly.
It's also ok for players to be down at the end of a session, narrative fiction always has ups and downs in the story otherwise it would get boring. We just had a session a few weeks ago where one character betrayed another and we ended up sacrificing two innocent lives to bring a potential BBEG into the world. Sure we were all down at the end of the session, but it was still a great session and we're looking forwards to where that subplot goes.
just come up with an explanation on how they move forward and survived or possibly have their 6th party member (a fighter) come in and try to finish the boss as he wasn't there last session,
I'd strongly advise against either of those. It cheapens the character death, if you are going to have deadly encounters in your game then player character death should mean something. If you're just going to ret-conn or deus-ex-machina undo the deaths then what's the point of having them die in the first place? Plus it sets a bad precedent if you want them to take deadly combats seriously in the future.
My suggestion would be to :
(1) Have the Fighter who wasn't present have been immoblized by some kind of trap and unable to have helped the party so that it certainly is not their fault that the rest of the party TPKed. That sort of guilt can be really toxic to make sure that is not what any of the players are thinking.
(2) Then you have a decide how to deal with the dead characters, and this is best done in discussion with each player completely privately outside of the game between sessions:
The character can stay dead the player can make a new character (maybe with ties to the previous character and seeking revenge, or someone else emprisoned by / captured by the same BBEG that the Fighter can rescue, or someone else hunting that BBEG that the Fighter can find.
The character can get resurrected at a cost - maybe they have to make a deal with some otherworldly being (you don't need to be a warlock to do this), or maybe the fighter can retrieve the body and have them be reincarnated by some nearby druids in exchange for a favour (or something else) or the BBEG resurrects them and charms/enslaves them and the fighter has to help rescue them.
Ok so for context, we've been playing this campaign for 3-4 months with on and off attendance, which I took from an online DND homebrew I follow and did my best to translate into our game as there are no "official" materials. It's been going pretty well so far with everyone having a good time and getting invested, though not enough to recall all the lore without me having to just remind them of what they should know.
Encounters thus far have been rather fair with some bosses getting literally steamrolled in the early game. Their first boss got locked down super hard and couldn't do anything, but as we've gone on I've gotten better at planning for those scenarios and making the fight at least challenging. I've never been too harsh, play by rule of cool a lot, and even fudged a few rolls or checks just to let them do as they please.
Currently my players were in an actual dungeon *gasp* and working through a series of challenges to escape. Going into this session, I've been hinting and outright saying this is where they all die and it's gonna be a real hard fight so they should be ready. I'm not very subtle about it. Going into the session everyone is at full heath and has all their skills. Then, on the way to the boss room, despite having an easy method to reach it on a 70 foot high cliff, one player decides to climb it and after several failed attempts has lost 17 hp before even reaching the boss.
The players were two rogues (inquisitor and Swashbuckler), a Forge Cleric, an Evocation Wizard, and Glamor Bard.
Not a big deal as there are 5 level 5 players going up against a solo CR 7 boss. I was honestly concerned because up till this point the fights that were even were ones with hordes of enemies with a few tough ones as boss fights and the last solo humanoid encounter is the one they stomped. All my prep and research told me it would be rather one sided, so I had a few extra enemies prepared in case my tactics controlling the boss weren't enough. I immediately realized I wouldn't need them.
Here is a link to the boss for more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/i497to/alea_knight_of_autumn_cr7_fey_bossbattle/
So the fight starts off rather poorly for them with a lot of low rolls, saves being me, or the boss being outright immune to certain spells (Charmed condition). Either way, it's a 5 on 1 fight, so it should still be rather fair from my perspective. I play the boss as an intelligent being who has fought for hundreds of years, so they use tactics like teleporting around the room in and out of reach (Fey Step), using legendary actions to get in extra hits, and a lair action as well.
Like I said, this was their first REAL boss fight.
The only time I may have overdone it was when I used their third legendary action which did a little too much damage, something the players pointed out didn't seem fair. I agreed after seeing how much damage one player took and I didn't use it again or even attempt to the rest of the fish. In my defense, the move takes a lot of set up, having to attack several times beforehand to set up leaf traps, then summon them all back dealing damage per leaf (6d4 per hit) and then a big AOE move for 10d4 within ten feet of boss. They had all bunched up, so how could I not use the bosses strongest attack.
Either way, they still put up a great fight, getting the boss down to 123 HP taken out of 151 and nearly knocking her off a cliff, which was a really clever plan. This is where I admit I got a little desperate not to have the fight end in such a way and had her roll a dex save to see if she could save (as the cliff she fell off had another within arms reach below it.) She did have one legendary resistance left at this point, so for the players it was all just trying to make her fail twice. Then the players tried and failed to knock her off with her succeeding on saves (without using her resistance) before she teleported back up and managed to finish off the remaining players.
None of them were mad at me as they knew I made it clear this fight was a real boss with me not pulling punches this time, though I could tell they were disappointed at the loss. Again, it wasn't my intention to actually kill them, but I did promise a deadly encounter where they could die and didn't just let them keep getting up like a goblin boss or wild animal might. I did not abuse my position as DM and force rolls into my favor or make things up. If I was ever unsure of how to rule (in my or their favor) i rolled a dice for it.
I felt really bad afterwards and felt like I could have fudged some things to let them have won, especially at the end. I do know my players aren't optimizers or used their best tactics given one had heat metal which they could have used on her armor for consistent damage throughout the fight (something he literally did in their last fight to great effect) as an example. The wizard kept using save or suck spells instead of any more aggressive attacks and it took them time to try burning through her 3 legendary resistances, which I established early she had.
So what do you think? Am I the bad guy here for actually following through on my deadly encounter or am I overthinking it? We still plan on probably continuing the campaign, just come up with an explanation on how they move forward and survived or possibly have their 6th party member (a fighter) come in and try to finish the boss as he wasn't there last session, so we'll just say he was in the corner taking a nap or something.
If nobody was mad and the struggle was fun, then everything was fine. Sometimes the bad guy wins. It helps people to learn to psychologically deal with disappointment in a healthy manner.
Sometimes you need an encounter like this so the players know you really will kill them. You did forewarn, but players at our table ignore that regularly, but we've been killed before, even a tpk and we've had hundreds of hours of enjoyment since then. They will take party composition more importantly in the future. Learning to have a tank and not bunch up is an essential learned skill. Have a session where you all talk about what went right and where things went wrong and if changes could have helped the outcome. This is a good tough lesson for everyone. I look forward to you having many good years to come with this group and have other growing pains!
First of all, I agree with what Meta says above. As long as everyone has fun and is ready to get back on the horse you're good. Maybe they've learned a thing or two.
But I also try to learn from stuff like this as the DM. I would point to a couple things tipping this situation towards a TPK.
First, it's a custom monster - which is fine, but it means you need to take a close look at it. CR is a vague measurement and the official calculations struggle with taking into account big charge-up moves. A level 5 character has what like 40hp or so? A move that can essentially do 16d4 - which is an average of 40 - to multiple characters would worry me. That move can TPK all by itself.
Which isn't a dealbreaker, but it means you need to telegraph to your players that the BBEG is setting up something they should be worried about and provide a way they can understand how to mitigate the impact of it. My players have learned that when a boss leaves behind something like a golden leaf, they are going to want to make a knowledge check to know what I'm setting up. I also lower the threshold of what it takes to do a knowledge check as a battle progresses both action-wise and DC-wise because it only makes sense that you learn about an enemy as you fight it.
How much you tell your players is a personal preference, but I've found that this kind of info is great for building tension and encouraging smarter play which leads to more satisfying wins.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Your boss isn't CR 7 -- she has effective hp 211 (legendary resistance on a tier 2 counts as 20 hp per use) and effective AC 17 (+2 for magic resistance) for a defensive CR of 10. Offensive CR is harder to math out because of the complexity of the leaf traps (also, it makes a big difference whether the PCs figured out that the leaves mattered). Doing a typical math:
That's 110 dpr, for a raw offensive CR of 17, reduced to 16 for low accuracy.
Final CR: 13
None of which means you were being a bad DM, but may account for the fight being more challenging than you expected.
Really appreciate all the advice you're all giving. Yes I realized during the fight the CR7 might not have been accurate and once I saw how much damage her higher level moves used, I didn't use them again, mostly focused on sword and teleporting around throwing a leaf every now and then. I definitely tried not to play too aggressive with big damage moves and just played smart, plus I had actually forgotten about her resistances, so that never became a factor either.
Glad to know this for next time I DM and we still plan to play regularly, just keep this game going or start a new one. Thanks again!
Just with sword moves she's at 90 dpr and offensive CR 14, though since it sounds like the fight was close, that might have been enough. Personally, I would probably have allowed the PCs to throw her off the cliff, then have her be lost from view on the way down, so the PCs would wonder 'did we kill her... or not?'. Then later she can reappear with a new set of abilities.
The leaf mechanics are pretty interesting, because they're something with counterplay options if you figure out how it works, but you can't really figure out how it works without seeing it work at least once, so I'd tend to make it less powerful but also cheaper to use. For example (also reduced general damage a bit)
If we value recall leaf at an expected damage of 5 (some will not manage to target anyone... but most will) this means either the longsword or the golden leaf has an expected damage of about 16; razor-leaf wave has expected damage 28 (2 targets) +15 (recall) = 43, so damage per round is down to about 90.
Fudge rolls? Nah
Pull Punches? Not Really
Reevaluate the homebrew CR rating? that was a bit of a miss i guess. I think that creature is more CR10-12.
I think the ultimate thing here is how do you proceed. IMO, if i see that TPK coming, i'm probably looking for a situation where the baddie turns my party into minions under some sort of mind control or amnesia or something, forces them to do her bidding for a while, and then slowly in the next few sessions they regain their senses (perhaps one with the highest in a specific score) and they eventually stage an escape, regroup, and a rebattle once they achieve maybe level 6 or 7, or maybe if they set her up with some sort of debuff by taking advantage of her not knowing. I'm always looking at things as "heres your warning sign, you now have to fight through this effect, and it's not going to be particularly fun for some of your characters, but it'll be a session or two of tough love" and then back to being more realistic about things.
Never a jerk for punishing the party, i think this is a double-edged sword of a learning lesson :)
I think the most valuable tool at your disposal for when you feel like you've unexpectedly gone harder than you intended is to change the priorities of the boss.
If you feel the encounter going a way that's stacked against the players too hard, don't fudge die rolls, simply change their motivation. Suddenly this fight to the death is a fight to the capture, or maybe a fight to escape, or maybe the boss pushes the party off the cliff and they survive heavily wounded to come back another day.
I didn't look too close at the homebrew monster, but if it's an intelligent boss, it could always nab the first player to go unconscious and retreat further into the lair to hold hostage or use to fuel some dark ritual, etc. If it's an unintelligent beast, then maybe it preserves it's prey in it's lair, preferring fresh game (a la the Wampa in Empire-- Luke comes to hanging from the ceiling, providing an opportunity to escape rather than unsatisfyingly killing him while he's out), or maybe it's just defending itself, and once the players are no longer a threat it isn't interested in them.
If you're uncertain about whether yours is a campaign where people die or not, or if you just find TPK's narratively unsatisfying, there's always a plausible reason for most of the party to survive. Changing how you the DM look at the fight can go a long way towards avoiding a TPK without sacrificing a challenging combat encounter.
The only thing you did that I would have done differently is the ruling for shoving her off a cliff, and probably realized that with those legendary actions she's quite a bit higher than a CR 7. There are rules for shoving and falling and they should be adhered to rather than the DM suddenly giving the boss a way to guarantee an escape because they don't want to see their boss killed that way, this is especially true if that happened near the end of a fight that's going badly for the party.
It's not the DMs job to ensure the players always win, but it is something that should be discussed in session 0. Some players enjoy playing D&D because they want a power fantasy and are perfectly happy steamrolling encounters and never really feeling like they are about to die, others love the risk of TPK. If you're unsure about it after this session, just ask them how they felt about that level of difficulty, and adjust accordingly.
It's also ok for players to be down at the end of a session, narrative fiction always has ups and downs in the story otherwise it would get boring. We just had a session a few weeks ago where one character betrayed another and we ended up sacrificing two innocent lives to bring a potential BBEG into the world. Sure we were all down at the end of the session, but it was still a great session and we're looking forwards to where that subplot goes.
I'd strongly advise against either of those. It cheapens the character death, if you are going to have deadly encounters in your game then player character death should mean something. If you're just going to ret-conn or deus-ex-machina undo the deaths then what's the point of having them die in the first place? Plus it sets a bad precedent if you want them to take deadly combats seriously in the future.
My suggestion would be to :
(1) Have the Fighter who wasn't present have been immoblized by some kind of trap and unable to have helped the party so that it certainly is not their fault that the rest of the party TPKed. That sort of guilt can be really toxic to make sure that is not what any of the players are thinking.
(2) Then you have a decide how to deal with the dead characters, and this is best done in discussion with each player completely privately outside of the game between sessions: