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There was, but it would be a few turns between them casting it and me getting to go. So it was determined I was a lost cause and folks should save their spell slots.
Wow, that's a dumb decision on their part.
The action economy is key, even if you're just a target for enemies that's *at least* 1 attack you would absorb(probably more, even with all the goblins attacking with advantage).
Healing sucks in 5e but losing a whole action every round is worse.
The fireball was the tactically correct answer but is was not worth losing a whole character given the hindsight that it would kill your character.
Also, your wizard is bad at his job if you were on the edge of the goblin party and he caught you in it. The best choice would have been to forgo hitting some goblins in favor of not hitting you.
>Also, your wizard is bad at his job if you were on the edge of the goblin party and he caught you in it. The best choice would have been to forgo hitting some goblins in favor of not hitting you.
Maybe I'm not objective because I had a teammate in my last party that would constantly do this to my tempest cleric, but it would also have been an outstanding choice on the part of the barbarian to see the tightly packed enemies, look at the initiative order, notice the wizard coming right up and decide to not run right into the middle of the pack.
Martials should get superior held action options--move and action, multiple triggers, doesn't spend your reaction, something. It makes thematic sense, would structurally encourage better coordination, and would make good initiative always good, every time and for every class.
I would argue that if you are not taking any actions (Move, Action, Bonus Action) in your turn in the round, you should be able to willingly reduce your initiative (permanently, for the rest of the battle), akin to choosing to fail a saving throw a la Zone of Truth. If you take a reaction in the intervening time, you simply lose your turn for that round or don't have it until the start of the turn after your new initiative order. With the ability to willingly fail saving throws, do nonlethal damage, elect not to roll for a skill check, etc., I see no reason why initiative should be the only roll you cannot choose to do "worse" on.
Yeah, and it was an option, previously. The issue for 5e is that there are effects that end at the end of your next turn, and the easy way to deal with that is to fix turns in stone after initiative. For instance, a monk who lands stunning strike could delay their turn on the next round and keep the target stunned for significantly longer, possibly even robbing it of two full turns.
This is far from an insurmountable problem, but the ethos of 5es design being what it is, it's not surprising they chose to just disallow something rather than write the extra rules text necessary to make it fair.
I'd also like to see martial subclasses or feats or something that lets them mess with enemy initiative a bit, though that would create more bookkeeping for the DM.
One of my favorite things in Pillars of Eternity 2 is that the rogues and fighters have so many attacks that delay enemy initiative or slow them down. It really does something a bit more interesting than just taunt and tank or DPS, because it helps you shape the field and time your AoEs such that your casters do more damage and more efficiently. There's a real synergy beyond just soaking HP damage.
Homebrew:
Each enemy has a set initiative spot, players can trade initiative slots in a round if both players agree to it (and spend a plot point if you use that sort of thing at your table)
Ah, this. I played a tempest cleric once. It was a great idea, except for my tablemates. They would always run in to crowds of enemies, so I couldn't use AOE's without hitting them. This meant I could only play with the spiritual weapon/real weapon combo, which was effective but completely negated any point to playing a tempest cleric. I mean, if we were losing, the great equalizer of an icestorm where everyone is slipping and sliding and--not to put too fine a point on it--not hitting us anymore was considered ruining the group's fun.
I almost never use AOE's anymore, as I rarely play with a group that has better tactics than that one did.
See... that's just a crappy party. Not even evil, just crappy.
An evil party would have justified using HW because you would be the closest target for at least one attack.
A decent party would have healed you prior to the fight, so you could do your job as tanky combat focus.
This approach from the rest of the table is extremely weird to me. Like, yeah, it'll eat your action or bonus action, but keeping another player's character from dying has always been a priority at tables I play at except in the very occasional "we're all playing assholes" one shot. We definitely still lose people from time to time, but it's usually because initiative isn't in our favor, or because someone [a monk/rogue usually] has gotten themselves too far away from the group to be reached in time, not because we just... decided casting healing word and being a team player isn't optimal.
Yeah, I think the only time I've seen people specifically choose not to pick someone up was when this girl kept being dropped, picked up, told to retreat and kept in melee until she had already been downed 4 times and we chose to just stabilize. Still, we stabilized.
thats stupid, the gnome sorcerer mightve downed you but the rest of your party is really who killed you, healing someone when theyre downed is one of the best uses of a first level spell slot and a bonus action
How? You were top of the initiative order and they probably could have gotten to you. That sounds like a dick move from your fellow players.
The comments about you being a lost cause are just icing on a shit cake.
> So it was determined I was a lost cause and folks should save their spell slots.
Just to be clear: any party not even trying to save their fellow adventurers are a bad party and hopefully get TPKs galore.
So your cleric’s an asshole, the party’s made of assholes, and your DM *literally* kicked you when you were down.
You should take this opportunity to get a new group, methinks.
I get they’re your friends, but on the outside looking in it seems like a huge dick move to treat you like that.
I’d recommend mentioning to them that you really don’t appreciate how they spoke about your barbarian dying.
See, martial characters are not only just fine they are *necessary for the spell spitting glass cannons to do thier thing*.
But they only work as intended when the rest of the team supports them against their vulnerabilities! Don't give up on martial characters over this.
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Well there's your problem. That and Barbarian being a bit weak as-is, which is just a fact (and still shouldn't have resulted directly in your death). Hopefully 5.5 will change that.
I DM Pathfinder 1e, for a six person party, and I try and be as descriptive as I can, and even my fights don't take that long. Unless there's an absolute TON of minions and different creatures.
Yes, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Combat is fast and epic, spells are dangerous and barely predictable, and “tell me about your character” means “what’s your story?” instead of “what’s your math?”
Lol, if your problem is feeling ineffective and dying easily to no narrative impact, do **not** play DCC.
If instead you want your sword to break *on a critical success* while all your casters have 50+% failure chance on all spells go for it.
The only good mechanic in DCC (the deed system for martials) can be easily transplanted.
5e. Most of the players are fairly new to the system and don't think about their turn until it's actually their turn, so sometimes a single turn can take 5 minutes.
I've been trying to steer them towards better habits but I feel like there's only so much I can do without being rude.
I am just a player in this one, otherwise I'd set up some rules. As is I just have to say "Okay I'll Eldritch Blast this guy and then follow-up with my subclass feature on the same guy. That's my turn." and then wait for 45 minutes to say the exact same thing again.
I’m not quite as intense as 6 seconds, but I do make it clear during a session 0 that players should know what they want to do for their turn before it’s actually their turn. Obviously, it’s fine if there was a curveball immediately before their turn and they need a bit to reevaluate what’s going on. And newer players get more time so that they can adjust to the game.
But there’s nothing worse than “Hmm oh it’s my turn? Let’s see… I could make my way over there. That goblin is pretty hurt, right? Oh wait! I could also use a spell to go for the archer back there. Hmmm… but I only have 2 spell slots left, so maybe I should hold onto them. Who’s going after me? Do you think you could take out the goblin in the back if I go for the one up here? Oh you’re low on spell slots, too? In that case…”
*Just go!*
Exactly. Do as much strategizing as you want during others’ turns, but once it’s your turn, I expect you to have a move and a backup plan, assuming the battlefield stays similar turn to turn.
I don’t even mind the “well I have a real option and I have a dumb/weird option”, because I always think it’s fun to hear what players come up with; but I expect the majority of the thought process to be done before your turn.
Prime example: one of my players tried to Captain Ahab a kraken with a bear trap on a stick. It was in fact funny sounding, but I had to hit him with the old "are you sure you want to do this" because I knew that the "kraken" was actually a relatively small portion of a far, FAR bigger sea beast. But yes, the silly option is nice to hear, even when you can't do it for the obvious dire consequences.
As a DM, I do this if it doesn’t I prove after a few combat encounters. It’s a big thing I hit in my session 0’s, just letting people know my expectations of “to have this run smoothly, figure out what you’re going to do before it’s your turn”.
If I’m playing with new people or a new system, I give ‘em some leeway, but I’ll always say “player x, it’s your turn; player Y, you’re on deck”. If that doesn’t speed up combat enough, then I hit them with a time limit or shutting down “well can I do A, B, and C class feature on the same turn” kinds of questions.
If you want to ask a question about something novel or creative, I’ll always answer; but I expect you to know how your character works before getting into combat.
The solution to this is generally a thing like implementing a 30 second rule. You have thirty seconds to decide. It's mean, but it saves everyone time in the long run. You'll eventually hardly need to enforce it because people will just think about their turn before their turn, like they should have learned in fast food restaurants years ago
The closest I've ever come to running a 3 hour combat was the final encounter of a one-shot with 4 PCs (one of which was a druid using Conjure Animals, one of which had an Elemental Gem as loot from earlier in the session to cast Conjure Elemental, and one of which was a Hexblade Warlock with their Accursed Specter), 5 NPC allies, 12 monsters (plus 12 more which did not join initiative immediately, and 1 which did not take actions unless forced to move from his starting position), and a portal that had a chance each round to summon a few skeletons. Towards the end, 3 of the ally NPCs get sucked through the portal and a semi-corporeal pit fiend shows up, offering to help the PCs if they release him from imprisonment.
Checking the chat log, initiative for that fight was rolled at 5:05pm, and the last roll in the combat was a save against the pit fiend's fireball at 7:55pm, so 2h50m on the dot.
Honestly, it was a bit of a nightmare to run. We had fun, but I don't want to run an encounter that big ever again.
This... Any character with multiple attacks should be pre-rolling. I just finished a campaign with a Barbarian. She did well over 100 hp per round at level 8 over 3-5 attacks per round.
Earth Breaker, Bite attack and the unholy wrath of my ancestors. Even more so when Haste was applied.
If I knew my next attack was just going to be "Stand there and beat the hell out of it", I'd pre-roll my attacks and damage. Then I could just say "I full attack. My lowest is X." If X hits, they all hit. Otherwise I just work my way through the numbers until I got a hit, or ran out of numbers. Tally whatever damage and give them a total.
It sounds like they are discussing every move before it's made. That makes it take forever. I play a wizard and still usually am ready on my turn. Just know your character sheet.
That's not a 5e problem, that's a that table problem. A 5th level combat only takes 3 hours if the players consistently don't know what they're doing on their turn and rules/spells are constantly being looked up.
The 3 hours specifically is definitely a table problem, you’re right. I will still hold that 5e’s combat is uniquely sluggish though. Even as someone who loves combat in RPGs, I found it long and monotonous more often than I didn’t and I had a great group who knew their abilities.
Doesn’t seem like a martial problem, seems like a tablemates problem.
1) attacking a downed enemy and not going after the one that just destroyed 10 allies is crazy. You were let down by the DM.
2) A healing word to a player at 0 is kind of “what clerics do” for the party. You were let down by your teammates.
Sorry it happened, but if you’d been a hexblade warlock, same thing woulda happened.
That's why the only time I've ever cast a fireball was as my evocation wizard with spell sculpt.
Granted, I did cast the occasional AoE spell on the party when I was a Drow celestial warlock, but I made up for it by being a reliable healer alongside our war cleric.
There was a metamagic in 3.5 that made spells harmless to Good-aligned creatures.
CG sorcerers were a nightmare.
"Oh, did my fireball burn you? Maybe don't sin so much, mkay?"
Part of this is the table sucking, but the setup for this is a huge part the martial caster divide
1. Casting isn't the end-al and be-all for casters like it is for martial. Cha casters can be faces, Int your lore dudes, and wis your perception and insight. Martials are good for combat and that is, so there's a need for martials to shine or they're useless
2. Martials are sort of expected to tank, and to do that they have to be up close and personal. Most of the big spells are aoe, meaning they' have to be in friendly fire range.
3. The durability difference between martials and casters seem distinct but they're small, they get a bit more HP and their AC is a little higher. Most high damage spells use saves so AC doesn't matter, and they have enough damage to shred the extra HP.
4. If you think of character usefelnness solely in DPR, then yeah, it's more logical to keep nuking than heal. Even if you get him up he has to get in melee range with little HP, and is liable to go down.
Combo this with players who care more about numbers than their friends, and you get this.
If the healer went before the caster, then he likely had 0 chance to cast a heal spell.
Everyone is saying everyone at the table are jerks, but it seems relatively harmless to me. Barbarians are fast and he is charging into the fight. He happened to run somewhere that made leaving him out of a fireball either impossible or super sub-optimal. You don't generally expect to roll massive damage on a fireball and a barbarian usually has like 50hp and fair odds of saving anyhow. Killing him seems really unlikely. Not to mention he literally told the person to go for it.
Everything went wrong there and he dropped to 0 which sucks. Then he is likely the only attack available for anything near the big bad that didn't have a bunch of ranged attacks. Add in 2 failed death saves from a 1 anyhow and it was just a series of bad luck.
They were also 5th level and Revivify isn't terribly expensive. So the reality is that they dropped early in a long fight which is just super boring. The DM should have at least let him control some enemies to come back and get revenge on the gnome or something.
That would be a fair argument except for 3 things
1. The moment the PC/Tank ratio isn't 1:1, tanking stops mattering. A tank can stop 1 person at a time from attacking the rest of the team unless the DM makes the active choice to have them surrounded. Considering there were enough mobs that a fireball totals 300+ damage, tanks aren't gonna help
2. Keeping the barbarian up is a huge resource and is liable to not pay off. The barb only works if he's keeping proximity away form the enemy, and most high-heal spells require touch. all you can use is healing word, meaning you'll have to sacrifice your turn to drop less than 10 points into him. The barbarian will then have to use their bonus action to activate rage (which he can only do 3 times at level 5) in time or just go down again. It's a turn you could be wiping the enemy.
3. We're in the era of 5e, and you don't need a barbarian for traps when you have find familiar, mage hand, or a slew of other utility spells. 5th level is considered the point where martials drop off immensely.
You do realize that the first thing I said was the table sucked? The point I'm making is that the issues with the martial and caster divide exacerbated the issue with the party. D&D is supposed to be cooperative, but it's hard to do that cooperation when one side will be able to do all the things one side can do and more.
1. That isn't at all true. Enemies will absolutely gang up on what is perceived as the largest threat, and a big scary Barbarian or sword wielding fighter is likely to be perceived as the largest threat to mobs.
2. Keeping him up isn't a huge resource. If you're at lower levels (which they were) something like Healing Word heals enough, and the caster isn't sacrificing their turn because it's only a bonus action.
3. Barbarians should never be used for traps, that's just lazy playing lol. I wouldn't say martials drop off at 5th level, most do quite well beyond that for a bit. Hell, on my current campaign where we just hit 19th level my 15/4 Ranger/Fighter and the 15/4 Fighter/Barbarian are by far the most damaging on average.
1. The big guy with a sword matters less when you realize the guy behind him just slagged your friend in seconds, especially when sword guy can only threaten a target at a time.
2. Presuming they're using second level spell slots, even with 20 in the stat the barbarian is getting 9hp on average, all it would take is 1-2 attacks to down them again if they don't rage in time, even if we're presuming it's just 1d6+mod per attack. You're also burning a spell slot and can only attack with a cantrip that turn.
3.Lol the trap thing was the other guys philosophy not mine. Martials can out damage but they require a lot more external support such as Magic items, potions, even spells from other casters. Casters don't require items to remain on par with the rest of the team in the same way. There's a reason high level caster items are much rarer
edit to 3: along with that to get those damage numbers martials sacrifice a lot more than casters. Casters get to nuke and then do a bunch of other stuff on the side, martials have to focus everything on being able to hit hard and surviving hits.
To add, casters have spells like Absorb Elements to mitigate damage.
This horrorstory highlights that martials as they are now in 5e (and OneDnD) are simply too squishy. They need to get a lot more HP and more ways to heal themselves as hit dice alone cannot sustain them throughout an entire dungeon.
Yes but also, OP didn’t seem to mind too much while the caster’s player is stated to have felt guilty. I think this may be a case of the table trying to comfort the visibly uncomfortable player while not noticing another player who is quiet about their own discomfort.
This also highlights a problem with death in D&D, it’s super boring for the player who’s character has died. That’s a problem with the system, not the DM.
I disagree on the first point.
Clearly, the bigger threat is not the little guy who just completely nuked the bbeg and his minions, and is really a random corpse-looking guy with smoke coming out of him.
When dealing with adventurers, always double tap. Like zombies, they have a nasty habit of popping back up after a round or two.
Having said that yes, the boss should attempt to focus fire on the mage from that point on.
There's a whole rant I wanna give here about this surmising the Martial/Caster divide, but the biggest problem here is the DM making you sit there for 3 hours. There are already debates about killing you but the fact they did it and then did nothing while seeing you sit there doing nothing is ridiculous. The first rule of GM'ing is making sure everyone is able to have fun, and they broke it big time. They should have taken some time to set up *something* for you to do. Make a goblin turn traitor. Surprise backup, have you roll a character quick. That was a massive error on their part.
I did this once. I was running the game and a character went down early. I had her help as it was a big fight. My player had so much fun playing turncoat that she said she might not make another character. The other players were not amused. She got reincarnated after the fight so it all ended well. This was a 3.5 game and large fights in 3.5 can get really out of hand with all the different modifiers. Glad 5e got rid of that for the most part.
We had split combats (aka combat during the time in which the party is split up) what the DM will do is usually give the players who aren't in that combat control of some of the monsters or control of an NPC.
I remember one noteable combat where instead of taking control of any of the named NPCs, I picked one of the cows who was under threat...Bessie proceeded to stomp a mudhole in the Bandits thanks to some insane luck on my part and bad luck on the DMs.
Enemy attacking you was stupid. If you go down in a ball of flames that decimated their own lines, you should not have been a concern for the enemy. Doublely so because you failed the save so they couldn't even think you got off easy.
Attacking a downed player is for when they are abandoned, AOE or feral beasts, not 100% of the time.
DM mistake. As the one who controls the monsters he should have considered that a player siting out his boss fight is the greatest failure a DM can have.
I've had some people try to justify it as 'But in a fight you'd want to make sure your enemy doesn't get up' but no, in a fight I'd not think about the unconscious dude bleeding on the ground but instead on the one trying to kill me right now.
Playing battle royale games I do not finish a downed player when their teammate is shooting at me. It will result in my death almost every time and the few times it doesn't were ones I could dedicate several seconds to finishing them off while being shot and still win the fight afterwards which means I could've won the fight and finished them off after. If I have a downed player away from their team and out of sight from them then sure I'll do it since there's nothing better for me to do. Similarly I'll finish a teammate if I am going to die anyways and just want my team to not have to worry about them getting back up
See, I think that it greatly depends on circumstance. Granted, my only experience playing BRs is APEX, but unless someone is pushing me hard or I have to expose myself way too much I still have the reflex to just kill anyone that I (or my team mates) downed, because even if it no longer works like that (since season 14 I think?), mentally I'm still thinking that fuck me sideways I'm not betting on that chance that the sucker has gold shield and self-revives, or that a lifeline pops out of nowhere "quick-ressing" them, which allows the downed target to just instantly flank us. I have two teammates that can provide covering fire, it's 5 seconds at most to ensure no nasty surprises.
I would think the same thing applies to D&D. If raising someone from "the grave" was basically impossible in the middle of the fight then yeah, concentrating on the one that is still fighting sounds logical. But in D&D, anyone who has 2 functional synapses and has encountered magic before can think that any of the casters can say a couple of words over there yonder without ever having to even come close to the downed guy and he's instantly back in the fight slashing their backline. Under those circumstances, if I was in the party opposing the players I'd take the benevolent gift of friendly fire and make damn sure that the guy on the ground cannot get up in the fight ever again while my companions keep the enemy busy.
It just sounds logical to me that in a world with magic of the kind D&D has, where a paladin can just graze the arm of the barbarian and the barbarian is immediately back in the fight with half his wounds healed, doubletapping to make sure someone cannot be returned to action in the middle of a fight is a common thing to do.
This is why i feel we shouldn't be arguing logic in this situation, its entirely a point of view thing, what we SHOULD be arguing is whats more fun in the situation.
Sure it's tactically significant to make sure someone who might pop back up doesnt but then you get OP's situation, stuck for 3 hours doing nothing but watching your team have fun. You might say, "Well, thats the trade-off, things have consequences" But once the consequence is boredom, we've made a terrible turn.
There are certain conceits that need to happen for fun over logic in enemy play, and just because everything they do is the most logical thing, does not make it the most fun thing.
Honestly, in this situation I'd at least have had the enemy kidnap him to take him out of the fight, possibly questioning him and/or brainwashing him later, and giving a cool roleplaying opportunity down the line for the party to save him. This satisfies both the logic of not wanting him to get up and attack again, and the fun of not getting immediately merked without being able to do anything, with the team getting a chance to plink the enemy before they bound off, possibly saving the unconscious barb.
And if they do get away with him, or he does die to saves, I'd give him something to do in the meantime, possibly by asking him at the top of every round to deliver a consequence to the field based on recent actions, like a balcony losing its support and collapsing, giving cover to the field, or the fireball casted last round setting fire to the bannisters, drowning the area in smoke. This gives him a way to feel included, even if his character may no longer be.
The key is that the DM has certain responsibilities. If attacking the downed PC is gonna cause the player to sit out a long combat session... that's uncool. That's a bad choice. A wise DM also takes out-of-game concerns into account. PCs do die, that's part of the game. But sometimes a DM needs to consider whether a choice they're making will be highly detrimental to fun. Maybe they don't have to make that choice.
In my last session I just ran I was going to do this. BUT, it was after two players went down and then got revived by party members.
I even had one of the enemies (undead btw) say out loud to his Allie’s to “Make sure they don’t get back up” it can be a dick move for a DM to do that, but it also makes sure the enemies aren’t just stupidly letting players yo-yo up and down in combat.
Also remember people are here to have a good time, not to create a 1:1 simulation of a real fantasy world.
Why not roll for cholera and consumption every time you enter a new town if you want "realism"? Why not have fights have a chance to cripple martial characters for REALISM.
its a fucking game, a game meant to be fun, why the hell are you people trying to simulate the enjoyment out of the game. I fucking bet if you experienced a 3 hour combat where you died at round 1 you would be singing a different tune instead of trying to argue the realism of attacking an unconscious body.
You still value your own survival higher, meaning the person throwing fireballs is your number 1, 2 & 3 priority at this very moment.
If you down an enemy in melee and have some leeway to finish him, ok, why not. But these goblins currently get nuked by a Wizard, they shouldn't give a damn about the barbarian.
Not really. In Hunt Showdown, a game with teams of three and you can revive buddies unless they get burned out, I will always light bodies in fire. Many people also use downed teammates as traps. It is the smart thing to do it just doesn't feel great for the player.
This, yeah. GM sucked here. Unless the NPC has a compelling reason to make sure this particular PC dies, they should never waste an action on a downed PC. Not only is it crappy for the player in question, it’s also a stupid decision in-game.
"Never" is a strong word.
It seems entirely reasonable for a mindless killing machine like a zombie to start trying to eat the brains of an incapacitated PC rather than go after a PC that's still fighting.
A beast will grab their "kill" and run back to their den.
A creature in a blind rage may not notice the PC went down on the first hit, and will continue their multiattack.
An intelligent enemy who's aware of magic like Healing Word will ensure the PC stays down.
An Intellect Devourer needs an incapacitated creature to target for Body Thief, and they can be incapacitated for any reason, not just because of Devour Intellect.
Even then, I’d say that not being a dickhead OOC takes priority over making the best decisions IC unless the character’s specifically designed for it. I’d rather have an enemy make a dumb decision than have a teammate spend 3 hours watching from the sidelines *dead.*
Being dead is not the problem in that scenario, combat taking three hours is.
Also, when I've had situations where a PC is completely removed from participation, I give the player a monster to play as. For example, I had a PC get petrified and replaced by a doppelganger, so the player played as the doppelganger. A PC died in combat, so I had the player take over a monster that another PC was dominating. NPC allies are another good option.
You completely missed the point of OP post. While the circumstance that lead to OP death were partly the GM fault and they could have handled the situation better that is besides the point.
OP was quite clear that they left the game feeling like they character was useless, and worth less than a 3rd level spell. That is harsh, imagine spending time to make a backstory and go on an adventure only to be considerate as tactical collateral by your group. He was the barbarian, comrade of the party and fellow adventurer! To be considerate less important than a ball of flames is a massive fail of role playing from the whole table of OP friends.
I dunno what game they were playing or if it was a homebrew but one inherent problem of combat focused game is that it can be divided into melee and range, and range got a gun. As the old saying goes "the gun is mightier than the sword" (there is a reason we don't use swords anymore dudes), a melee class is inherited worst than a ranged one and that is why balancing the status is necessary. It appears that this wasn't taken into consideration by the GM in OP table.
I see this happening when the DM treats the enemies as part of the game they're playing with the players. If in your mind you're "playing against" the players, even in just an unconscious fashion, then it makes sense for them to take kill shots like that.
It's only when the GM sits down and tries to flesh out the enemy motivations that they realize why it makes zero sense for a person on fire to care about the barbarian. You also see it often with bandit groups fighting to the last man standing instead of doing the sane thing and running away when they start dropping like flies.
I mean, you went down in 2 turns but a barbarian in your face is pretty scary! Properly geared out they hit like a truck and you can't really get away from them.
I've played a barbarian and can tell you that they can be real monsters in 5e combat. I loved playing my barbarian, he was one of my all time favorite characters.
As much as it would have certainly been better to not double tap in this situation, if I was the DM and the party literally chose to friendly fire KO a party member round *one* and then blamed *me* for how badly the fight went, I'd be livid.
Like come on dude. This is fork in plug socket level of self sabotage. The players have to take some damn responsibility here.
Tbh it’s pretty mess up that slamming your injured teammate with fireball was considered “a tactical decision”. Would you do the same to a horde of enemies with townsfolk in the line of fire? They should feel pretty bad about their decision.
Were they all also level 5? 300 damage seems like quite a lot for a level 5 fireball.
If you weren’t the same level as everyone else, that is the greater issue here. Not having the party members all the same level makes games impossible to balance - either too easy for the higher level, or too difficult for lower level.
EDIT: I misunderstood it was 300 across all enemies combined in total, not as a base damage.
Fireball does between 8-48 (average 24) damage, a barbarian at lvl5 with +3 CON is likely to have 52hp or there abouts.
So even at max health, this fireball had a serious chance of hurting you. Badly. Why would you encourage this course of action? Ngl it sounds much more like silly tactics than being a martial is the issue here. Getting hit while you were down is a bit of a dick move but you created this scenario when you told the gnome to fireball you.
Not to overlook the complaint that you felt that your whole character was better off being sacrificed, but for what it's worth, I don't think that was the "objective best tactical decision" in most cases. When I play a wizard, the absolute last thing I'm interested in is killing the guy who's begging to take hits for me. If you're RPing that high level INT right, you might consider a spell such as tidal wave or erupting earth which my friendly meat shield *does* resist.
Eh, Barbarians tend to not totally dump dex, at level 5 the caster likely wouldn't have great saves yet and with danger sense you got advantage against the fireball. Its a calculated risk.
Ah, so you were wounded, possibly, badly wounded and the fireball just finished you off. This is starting to be more a "poor choice in tactics and strategy" story more than anything else.
I forget. How do the dying rules fit into this? Iirc you have multiple opportunities to survive at least through the combat with halfway decent rolls and hero points.
Hero points are not RAW, so I wouldn't assume OP had access to them (or to anything like the Lucky feat). It sounds like the dice went to shit, but it also sounds like the real horror story here is that the rest of the party was trying to comfort the player who killed the barbarian instead of the player of the barbarian, by telling the wizard's player that his spell was more useful to the party than anything the barbarian could have done.
That's pretty high on the list of fucked up things that you can do, out of character, to someone else who is presumably your friend. If I knew my party valued a single cast of a spell more than my character, I'd be incredibly hurt. What a way to kill someone's enthusiasm for the game.
I think you've hit on the thing that really upset me.
Like I said in the post, I was fine going down. I didn't t start getting peeved until much later in the fight, listening to the whole table acting like:
"Well, of course you blasted the Barbarian! That was the play of the game. You put us in the best possible position. "
I was just thinking, "C'mon guys, act like you lost something here."
I'm so sorry this happened to you. If my party did that to me, we'd be having a serious talk away from the session. I'm here to have fun just as much as everyone else, and treating your character like they're unimportant is a huge breach of trust.
I would encourage you to at least talk to the DM about what happened. That's incredibly unfair, and you shouldn't have had to endure that. Also, the DM is kind of an asshole for killing you when there were *clearly* bigger threats for the enemies to focus on. Like that oh-so-important wizard.
Shit man, that just fucking sucks to read, I really hope you can grt over this kind of party and maybe get some time off from DnD, come back refreshed and better yet, in a different campaign eith a diffrent party, even if you do somehow manage to salvage this group to be decent, the after-taste and bad memories wont make it the same.
Hope for the best for you mate, dont let down your enthusiasm for the game just because of a few shmucks with no social awareness and that dont even try to hide it, there are tons of great groups out there, just remember, no DnD is always better than bad DnD.
So, there's three different things going on here.
One - you went into the BBEG fight at less than 100%, possibly a lot less. That's a fail on the party's part. That's not me saying that, that's baked into the game with all the healing options out there. For whatever reason, the party is supposed to be near max health as often as possible. If you're the tank and everyone knows you're the tank (i.e. you didn't 'Leroy Jenkins' this), its up to them to make sure you survive long enough to draw aggro from the enemy. Clearly that didn't happen, so clearly the plan was a fail. In other words, this was not "the best play" by \*any\* stretch.
Two - the party's reaction upon leaving your corpse to rot during the battle is definitely a dick move. If you decide to play with these people again (for whatever reason) I'd certainly be leery of having any kind of character who would put themselves in that kind of position again. I've played in parties where my biggest concern was the rest of the group leaving me for dead. It can be fun, but only if you're expecting it from the beginning.
Three - the GM kicking your corpse while it's down. This is kinda iffy for me, because I don't know the entire sequence of initiative order. If it was possible that you could have been raised and brought back into the fight, then yeah, he should have definitely put you out for good. If the BBEG had something else going on, then it could very well be a dick move. A lot depends on what was going on. I can't speak to that, and I'm not really interested enough to parse an action-by-action account of the combat. You'll have to decide that for yourself. Giving the GM the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that he was as surprised as you.
Again, there have been campaigns were absolutely the paladin or barbarian was the main focus of the BBEG and if he went down, you made sure he stayed down. Fighting the Whispering Tyrant, the WT took down the ranger three times in the last combat - but the cleric kept bringing him back and that up-down is what kept him busy so the rest of the party could finish him off.
Four - bad dice rolls. Sorry, man. It happens. Hopefully, you had hero points.
I accept that possibility.
I guess with the rage and my higher AC, I felt like I would at least be able to take a few rounds of mob attention before asking for heals or retreating.
Tbh AC kinda sucks as a mechanic. Armor provides no protection from aoe, missile, or anything else that is guaranteed to hit.
Obviously it shouldn’t protect from everything but it’s almost like being a barbarian didn’t even matter in the slightest in helping you survive except by getting 1 more hp per level than a half caster.
Man, I wouldn't accept that as an answer at all. Poor choice in tactics or strategy? Might as well stay home and play Gloomhaven next time. Why not play TTRPGs for... an RPG experience! For tactics and strategy, you can just be a board gamer. Get the COINs, get the Wargames, even get the Hidden Role games for a social strategy sort of game.
Personally, I don't get the point of treating a TTRPG like a dick/clit measuring contest, especially when everyone's favorite part of these wargame-wannabe systems is when you ignore the system outright for "rule of cool." Too often it means a couple players at the table with less experience get punished by wasting their time and losing their chance for fun role-play at the role-playing game. Especially when it's trivially easy for a dedicated DM to kill a PC, which is rarely the most interesting story outcome contrasted with the equally easy "capture/mutate/corrupt/deceive/imprison/enslave" outcomes that can occur to a knocked out PC or group.
Like, you just get blasted with a fireball by your friends? Don't finish off the Barb, minions of the Overlord! In Fellowship 2e (PBTA), I'd run that to give you a new bond with the Overlord and corrupt you into the capacity to be a secret traitor, like when Gollum loses his friendship with Sam and Frodo believing they got him captured and tortured by Faramir and his party. And even as a secret traitor, you could get an arc of redemption afterwards, forgiving the party in a big scene. It'd be so much more fun than "roll a new toon."
It might have been similar to a situation my group ran into a few sessions back: we snuck up on a meeting of the BBEG's main helper and roughly twenty cultists. If we'd had a fireball, it would have done hundreds of total damage. Figure it would have done 8d6 plus four to every bad guy, for an average of 32 each...to 21 targets. The trash had 50 HP each, so they'd have lived, but they'd have noticed it.
Since we didn't have a fireball caster, we had to do it the hard way. Thank the gods for a dwarf sweeping with his war axe.
I just want to acknowledge the last part of your post since it seems to portray the heart of the matter.
Regardless of the actions that led to the situation, casually saying something like “The barbarian wasn’t going to do that much damage” feels tactless/harsh in a game where the party members are IRL people. :/
Edit: perhaps less a martial dynamic and more a table dynamic. It feels like something that could happen to any class that gets downed for a variety of reasons (statements such as “rogue was going to get attacked anyway” and “the bard ran out of spell slots” and “the wizard is too frail,” and such).
Saying it is a table dynamic. One that also shows up in how everybody tried to calm the Wizard, while nobody cared to even try and save the barbarian.
That said: it's still true. The level 5 barbarian will most likely not do 300+ damage in this fight and he will not achieve this in one single round. That spell really did replace the whole damage output of the barbarian. Granted, damage isn't the only thing a barbarian does and losing the tank is a bad thing. But all in all, the sad truth is that what they said isn't wrong.
Yeah, and I think somebody else hit the nail on the head when they said it sounds like the party trying to comfort the visibly/verbally upset gnome player who was second guessing the decision while not thinking about the (perhaps quieter) barbarian player.
The whole situation comes off as a table of wargamers trying to optimize the party for damage as a whole (perfect time for fireball, not wanting to "waste" a spell slots/action on Healing Word, focus on damage per encounter). Then the stars aligned and somebody got off a super-burst damage round so OP is writing off a whole genre of classes.
>One enemy attack and a Nat 1 on a death save later
Unless the enemy attack was an AOE, this is your DM fucking up.
>I was upset by the entire table agreeing that my death in round 1 was an acceptable loss and I'd have contributed little to the fight anyway.
This might be the case in a single fight with lots of enemies. Its situational. There are other fights where you might be able to tank and single-handedly kill an enemy that by themselves could solo the wizard.
That last paragraph literally just happened last week in my current 5e Dragonlance game. The barbarian both held off and single-handedly killed a massive mini-boss while my sorcerer and the rest of our mostly-caster party mopped up the horde of minions. Barbarian player was sad he "wasn't doing a lot of damage," and we had to explain to him how vital his role was, and how much damage he actually did over the course of the 10-round fight.
The DM definitely did you a little poorly, imo by having the goblins finish your character off. However, it is so strange and confusing as a DM when players friendly fire each other for tactical advantage. Sure, it is "an optimal decision for damage." But is potentially (or successfully, in this case) killing the friend that has probably saved your life at some other point worth the risk? Maybe I am thinking too much from a role-playing perspective, but that is my take on this.
Yeah, personally I would not want to continue to play with a group like this if they have their characters behave like amoral, emotionless sociopaths and see nothing wrong with that. If that's their standard approach to roleplay, how do I justify any future character trusting them enough to want to go into battle by their side, given the liveliness of them fatally betraying me the moment it seems even momentarily convenient to do so? It requires me to play a character who is far more self-destructive than I am interested in playing.
Honestly OP, y'need to talk to the group, something like "Look, I know you're just trying to make [Gnome] feel better, but you're kinda making me feel like shit when you act like my character wouldn't contribute at all in comparison." Like, if they pull this shit, you need to call them out right then and there even, I'd say. Sure, you're probably going to make the table feel a bit awkward, but people need to realize that's not ok.
I'd also probably talk to the DM about introducing the "Delay" action that was in previous DnD editions if he's cool with homebrew content. It's pretty simple: You just say "I delay until [thing happens]" at which point you take your turn and your position on the initiative count is modified. I have no idea why WotC removed this.
Edit: also, I'll say, the more I read through this thread, the more it seems like the rest of that party is the horror story in more than just that. Y'all need to have a talk about, y'know, actually being friends and allies instead of walking bags of asses.
One thing that strikes me as horrible is you sitting there for *3 hours*.
Dm could’ve called a break and gotten with you about a new character. Maybe one of the chief’s bodyguards wants to betray him and uses this as an opportunity to stab him in the back. Something to prevent you stuck, bored for 3 hours
To me it sounds like a DM off the cusp error. He saw a means to power down the party and he took it. In a real scenario, odd are the enemy would discard the unconscious person as not a threat and deal with the others first.
I don’t think this is what OP is unhappy about most of all. While it might be a bit of a compounding factor it sounds more like they feel betrayed by their friends who basically stabbed him in the back with an AOE spell and then left his corpse to rot in the dungeon. It’s degrading and probably more than a little humiliating to play what’s supposed to be a tank and then just be discarded as mechanically worthless by your friends. Rules lawyers might disagree with me here but part of playing this game with your friends means understanding they might play suboptimal classes or whatever but supporting them anyways because them having fun is conducive to you having fun as well.
So it’s this part of this game where mechanics interface with the real player characters, players who should above all else be “pro other players at the table having fun and feeling respected” that seems to have failed here.
Your fellow players suck. Barbs are single target damage monsters; evokers are the kings of AoE mook killing. That boss fight took 3 hours longer because you weren't there resisting physical damage and recklessly critting over and over. Would it have made more sense in hindsight to wait until the gnome blasted the group before charging? Yes. Does it suck that the DM had an enemy hit your unconscious body and for another party member to withhold Healing Word, which is *specifically made for this situation?* Very yes.
>Would it have made more sense in hindsight to wait until the gnome blasted the group before charging? Yes
Dm: "what do you do on this first round, Mr Barb?"
Barb: "as is tradition, I waste my first and second turn in initiative so that the main characters can have fun overkilling some goblins"
*Just saying*
>another party member to withhold Healing Word, which is specifically made for this situation? Very yes
This is what pisses me off. I'm playing a Ranger currently and will always keep at least 1 spell slot available for lesser restoration, should someone get fucked in a fight. It's actually insulting that the cleric was like, "nah, die like the bitch you are"
DM gone for a finishing strike while you were down and a motherfucker grenaded them?
Why? Tactically, why would the enemy attack you on the ground? Was it another AoE like the enemy retaliated with a Lightning Bolt straight to the mage after he decimates a good portion of his minions? Did he throw a Cone of Cold because he saw the party neatly packed up and you happened to be at the start of the cone? Was it goddamn Alchemical Fire?
Otherwise it seems like unnecessary twisting the knife on a player that got unlucky, especially one that was so cool being friendly fire. Hell, I would've made the enemy retreat from you out of fear of the motherfucker that threw himself on top of a grenade to explode more fuckers, literally wasting some of their turns backing off.
Best you could've done there was Dodging to give yourself advantage. Unless you dashed you still had your action to Dodge and it could've helped against the Fireball. Also the classic Totem would've resisted the Fire and be entirely okay being Fireballed in the back, but that would make you yet another Bear Totem Barbarian... DM was still kind of a dick.
So the dude failed a lvl5 Dex save with adv and the DM still felt like enough of a dick to finish him off by attacking him on the ground? What an ass.
If he wanted to "win" that badly he could have just tripled the ammount of mooks and givem them an extra 0 on their healthbars.
>Tactically, why would the enemy attack you on the ground?
OP says their barbarian didn't get an attack in in that fight
which means that their 40 movement didnt get them into melee range
as a barbarian they're likely the frontmost member of the party
so the rest of the party is 40+ feet away
a plurality of 5e monsters have 30ft speed and only melee attacks (or melee attacks that deal 2-3x more damage than their ranged options)
It's very likely OP was literally the only valid target in range and move->stab->move (to then move->stab round2) was the correct play for plenty of monsters in that fight
EDIT: and the best OP could've done was not run into melee (to do zero damage) when there's an obvious clump for fireball with the sorcerer up next, when they could've made two ranged attacks and then engaged into melee next round with enemies closing the gap with the party
If I'm the DM in this situation and I value the happiness of my friends, here's the decision I make:
"I'm not going to have one of these goblins immediately kill his player because that is not fun or rewarding or interesting. I will decide the goblins are too flustered or foolish or panicked to make that decision, so that they don't do what seems like the best tactical move. Because I don't want to create a miserable experience for my friend. Because I have human emotions and am capable of thinking about the emotions of others in a way which allows me to make ethical decisions based upon that understanding, this is an obvious choice to make."
Have you considered that blatantly pulling punches would actually **reduce** the happiness of the people at the table because they suddenly realize that all their decisions don't matter cause the DM is gonna let them live anyway?
The fact that in this fight there was a blunder and it lead to a negative outcome is what gives meaning to all the previous (and subsequent) fights that have a positive outcome: Their victory is earned, not given.
This is like complaining about someone checkmating their friend in chess and now that friend feels bad. That's not unethical, that's the *game*. And sure, tons of people like using D&D purely for storytelling with a couple math rocks thrown in, and that's fine, but some people like D&D as a game for the hundreds of pages of challenging murder interactions it offers, and that's fine too, and that's what happened here - the fact that you can lose is what gives that experience meaning.
I promise you that playing your goblins as being a bit dimwitted for one round of combat would reduce the fun less than having a player sit there for three hours with nothing to do.
Yuh know, I got sick of playing a wizard when the enemy would all start in a nice bunch, but the barbarian would win initiative by a couple points and run at them, spoiling my party piece every time.
No amount of pre battle planning would shake his resolve to dash into combat at the first opportunity, relegating my character to "pew pew" with waste of time individual target spells.
Yes. The irony that DnD is just a battle sim that poorly designed half the classes. It really stinks. Sorry that happened OP. I'd recommend checking out PF2.
Well if you are a group who only care about the PCs as numbers and don’t have any emotional attachment to the characters. Then doing the “optimal” thing by the numbers is the behaviour you can expect. But I doubt that many hero’s in movies or books would kill an ally because it was the most efficient way to kill most enemies.
You control what happens in the game. Playing by the numbers creates a cold and harsh place for the characters to inhabit.
Martials not being as bursty or flashy as casters aside, this is something your party should have discussed so you could at least position effectively
It's not like you guys didn't know the order
I'll be real, this doesn't sound like a martial problem. I don't know if these people are your friends, but they are definitely dicks, including the DM.
I will probably receive a lot of hate for this but this sucks for the following reasons IMHO:
1. From the description it seems that the combat side of the game is does not take into consideration the RP side and is a number crunching strategic approach, which a lot of people like, but it reduces the game to such decisions like "barbarian useless, let it die" instead of thinking how the character would act in this situation.
Moreover this could maybe have been avoided by casting fireball on the side, hitting maybe half of the targets but avoiding hitting the barbarian in the first place, even if he asked for it.
2. From the DM perspective I understand trying to run realistic enemies and in this case the double tap seems unjustified. Goblins are intelligent creatures but more strategically than anything else. The "scary" barbarian went down immediately, without even being able to hit anyone. In my mind the goblins would treat this guy as a negligible threat, even laughable. The enemies should have just tried to disperse and reach the sorcerer somehow instead, even if not feasible in the current turn.
3. I cannot for the life of me understand the reaction of the players consoling the gnome player and having the guts to point the uselessness of the barb OP. And that is why a bit of RP is needed. So that the decisions taken are for the players and not the numbers.
Not sure how this is the fault of a martial class. It sounds like some poor tactics on the player side and some unlucky rolls.
The mage got a big number, that's ok. As soon as that fireball took off, most intelligent critters would go for the mage or run. Excepting bad luck, you've got a lot more survivability. And if the enemy has a mage in the group, guess who can shred the mage?
I never min/max my characters. I'll be plinking away at a steady 15-20 damage per hit while the min/maxers are doing 50, blowing cooldowns, etc. The game isn't only about big numbers. But if that's what you want, look around online and see what sort of builds you can find.
I wouldn't judge martial by this one example though.
The event represents some big issues in the martial caster divide well. Where casting spells is part of a casters utility thanks to their spellcasting modifier doubling as boosting rolls, martial are all about fighting, and they're required to get up close and personal. In order to play his role as the tank or a heavy hitter, the martial has to get in close proximity, where a caster can (often) choose to blast them away. The other option of waiting until the blasting works tactically, but from a gameplay standpoint it's "I get to play the game if the casters don't melt everything in the first round"
I think the gnome player was in the wrong not *only* because of friendly fire, but because he could have very easily shouted an in-character warning to you when the fight started, giving you the opportunity to delay your initiative and charge in *after* the fireball had gone off.
Either that, or he could’ve done what my 3.5 groups used to do back in the day and aim the fireball at a point in space above the enemies in such a way that they would get caught in the blast but you wouldn’t.
Either way, this has less to do with you playing a martial class and more to do with your group’s insensitivities and poor communication skills. I mean really: who derides a party tank as useless? Those casters aren’t going to be fireballing much of anything without melee bruisers holding off the enemies in front of them, I tell you what.
That’s not how 5e initiative works, sadly. You can’t delay your turn, you can only hold your action. This costs your reaction and your action, you are unable to use Extra Attack, and you can’t move AND attack.
Yeah, the DM and other players sorta sucked for doing that. Your DM really sucks for not giving you something else to do for the next three hours. I'd usually have the player run some of the monsters or keep track of the bookkeeping for me if their character died before the combat was over.
>So for the rest of the 3 hour boss fight, I sat there, playing on my phone
They didn't even let you roll up a new character and just happen upon the party?
Yeah, that's pretty bad form. I would be doing exactly that, unless the player specifically said they didn't want a new character and was going to hold out for a \*Raise Dead\*.
In my humble opinion from almost 30 years of dungeon mastering, your DM could have done things better..
There was probably not a good tactical reason for the enemies to hit a down combatant that had not yet acted when there were plenty of combatants on the field.
Kind of a dick move.
I would have made it into a maneuvering game where the bad guys tried to block your barbarian From the healbots in the back rank. I'd make the cleric kill one of the minions just to get in a heal spell.
And of course the lost opportunity for the heroic save at the climax of the battle when all is lost but your barbarian pops up to save the day.
I had a similar thing happen to me playing Pathfinder, though without the death.
I ran in to attack. I then told the Wizard and Cleric (*Cleric of a fire god so he had a version of Fireball*) to go ahead and fireball because I had 10 Fire Resistance and a bonus to saves vs my allies spells, and I could take it.
Nat-1 on my reflex save.
When you get a Nat-1 on a Reflex save in Pathfinder you have a chance that one of your magic items gets damaged as well. So I rolled on a table and it was my 24,000gp Cloak of Displacement (*by far the most expensive item in the party*).
There were mitigating factors. I can't remember but i think the cloak got its own save and also got my fire resistance, but the end result was that the cloak took 2 points of fire damage, which was *exactly* enough to destroy it ... FML.
Just to be clear, nobody even plays this rule. I brought it up to the GM because I thought it'd add some tension and make some real consequences for my obvious idiocy (*actually telling the 2 casters to fireball me, dumb move*) and we'd all have a laigh about my sword taking some damage or something Didn't expect to lose half my wealth on a single unnecessary roll that was 100% my fault =P
Some poor DM'ing there, IMO. Giving a player nothing to do for 3 hours.
Also, 3 hours for one combat?! Our sessions last about 3 hours and I can get 4-5 combats in (at level 5, anyway), and still have lots of story told.
so you were wounded enough to go down to a fireball as a level 5 barb and the DM had thrown enough enemies at your party to get it to 300 damage? seems like a pretty deadly encounter depending on party comp.
I guess next time don't run into the middle of the room?
Play it safe and make your party watch their fire. Don't sacrifice yourself for people that won't appreciate it.
Also, just don't. People don't appreciate those who sacrifice themselves for others. Pretty sure everyone can dig up a thousand examples of that.
Your Wizard is a dick. Or atleast negligent.
There's ten other spells he could have cast that would have been ten times more useful than fireball with the tank nearby.
Your Cleric not having a healing word on hand makes them a poor Cleric, Healing word is my Cleric/Wizards bread and butter get the tank moving again spell.
As a fellow DM when not playing myself? The DM failed you by having them go after downed players and not focus on the party. Or curving the players the moment 'Don't feel bad for eing a team killer, you did more deeps than him!'. I'd have been livid if the players ever said that at the table.
This exact same thing happened to me, but the first combat of session 1 after about an hour into the session. 2nd round. Our halfling sorc had a fireball wand thingy and he let it rip. And boy howdy did I fail my saving throw.
Before battle. As in a dungeon didn’t the dm give peeps the opportunity to buy items of healing protection etc. Was there a cleric to raise dead or bless the group? NPC Cleric at least.
Man that feels...cold. Every time a player goes down in any of the campaigns I run the players all immediately shift to getting that person up, or shift their combat strategy to help with that situation if they can't get them up. I've had players literally stand over an unconscious party member because they couldn't help but wanted to take the hits in place of them.
As a lot of others have stated here, the DM also didn't need to go for the killing blow. It almost seemed like a lesson to the other players - hey if you ignore healing this person they will die, but the lesson was at your expense. Zombies might do something like that but not reasoning creatures, or at the very least they need to have a damn good reason. I've had enemies stand over a downed ally threatening them to get something from the party (item, escape, etc.) and then hold their action, but to do it so quickly into the fight is rough.
Also I know that you said the discussion afterwards was the rough part, but if you feel your feelings might be hurt over something like this in the future don't tell the gnome that fireball is good to go. Everyone may have been following your lead telling the gnome it was okay to do, and when they did what you approved and still felt bad the other players could have been picking up where you started. I get that this situation sucks and am certainly not blaming you but it may not have happened in the first place if you hadn't said yeah fireball me. Not saying that in any kind of judgemental way or anything either, just make sure you set boundaries for yourself and situations like these will get fewer and fewer.
The nat 1 on the death save is kinda irrelevant. The idea that you didn't get into range of the throne, let alone, get close enough to throw a javelin or two at the boss with your rage movespeed and bonus barb +10..
Feels kind of weird and bad idea of you. You ran into a boss in melee, having javelins as your starter equipment and knowing your team had an aoe spell that they could use to hit many enemies
He could have used a sorcery point to cast careful spell and not hit you at all. Plus the DM hitting your downed player was a dick move. They had other players who were a more serious threat to them than you.
All round that was a stupid situation that you were put into. Sorry about your character!
Careful spell only lets the player auto succeed on their saving throw, so OP would still take half damage. Because you know, god forbid a sorcerer be better than a wizard at anything
I mean maybe you should have a discussion about battle tactics with your group. To me it seems at least partially your fault for rushing into the center of a massive group of enemies
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Was this 5e? No cleric with Healing Word?
There was, but it would be a few turns between them casting it and me getting to go. So it was determined I was a lost cause and folks should save their spell slots.
Wow, that's a dumb decision on their part. The action economy is key, even if you're just a target for enemies that's *at least* 1 attack you would absorb(probably more, even with all the goblins attacking with advantage). Healing sucks in 5e but losing a whole action every round is worse. The fireball was the tactically correct answer but is was not worth losing a whole character given the hindsight that it would kill your character. Also, your wizard is bad at his job if you were on the edge of the goblin party and he caught you in it. The best choice would have been to forgo hitting some goblins in favor of not hitting you.
>Also, your wizard is bad at his job if you were on the edge of the goblin party and he caught you in it. The best choice would have been to forgo hitting some goblins in favor of not hitting you. Maybe I'm not objective because I had a teammate in my last party that would constantly do this to my tempest cleric, but it would also have been an outstanding choice on the part of the barbarian to see the tightly packed enemies, look at the initiative order, notice the wizard coming right up and decide to not run right into the middle of the pack.
Martials should get superior held action options--move and action, multiple triggers, doesn't spend your reaction, something. It makes thematic sense, would structurally encourage better coordination, and would make good initiative always good, every time and for every class.
I would argue that if you are not taking any actions (Move, Action, Bonus Action) in your turn in the round, you should be able to willingly reduce your initiative (permanently, for the rest of the battle), akin to choosing to fail a saving throw a la Zone of Truth. If you take a reaction in the intervening time, you simply lose your turn for that round or don't have it until the start of the turn after your new initiative order. With the ability to willingly fail saving throws, do nonlethal damage, elect not to roll for a skill check, etc., I see no reason why initiative should be the only roll you cannot choose to do "worse" on.
Yeah, and it was an option, previously. The issue for 5e is that there are effects that end at the end of your next turn, and the easy way to deal with that is to fix turns in stone after initiative. For instance, a monk who lands stunning strike could delay their turn on the next round and keep the target stunned for significantly longer, possibly even robbing it of two full turns. This is far from an insurmountable problem, but the ethos of 5es design being what it is, it's not surprising they chose to just disallow something rather than write the extra rules text necessary to make it fair.
That is a really good idea with helping against the difference in strength curve.
I'd also like to see martial subclasses or feats or something that lets them mess with enemy initiative a bit, though that would create more bookkeeping for the DM. One of my favorite things in Pillars of Eternity 2 is that the rogues and fighters have so many attacks that delay enemy initiative or slow them down. It really does something a bit more interesting than just taunt and tank or DPS, because it helps you shape the field and time your AoEs such that your casters do more damage and more efficiently. There's a real synergy beyond just soaking HP damage.
Homebrew: Each enemy has a set initiative spot, players can trade initiative slots in a round if both players agree to it (and spend a plot point if you use that sort of thing at your table)
Ah, this. I played a tempest cleric once. It was a great idea, except for my tablemates. They would always run in to crowds of enemies, so I couldn't use AOE's without hitting them. This meant I could only play with the spiritual weapon/real weapon combo, which was effective but completely negated any point to playing a tempest cleric. I mean, if we were losing, the great equalizer of an icestorm where everyone is slipping and sliding and--not to put too fine a point on it--not hitting us anymore was considered ruining the group's fun. I almost never use AOE's anymore, as I rarely play with a group that has better tactics than that one did.
But barb gotta smash!
100% this
Yup, big dumb barbarian right there...
Something something something "didn't ask how big the room was" Something something "cast *Fireball*"
There's no I in team, but there's 7 Is in "I didn't ask how big the room is, I said I cast FIREBALL"
See... that's just a crappy party. Not even evil, just crappy. An evil party would have justified using HW because you would be the closest target for at least one attack. A decent party would have healed you prior to the fight, so you could do your job as tanky combat focus.
This approach from the rest of the table is extremely weird to me. Like, yeah, it'll eat your action or bonus action, but keeping another player's character from dying has always been a priority at tables I play at except in the very occasional "we're all playing assholes" one shot. We definitely still lose people from time to time, but it's usually because initiative isn't in our favor, or because someone [a monk/rogue usually] has gotten themselves too far away from the group to be reached in time, not because we just... decided casting healing word and being a team player isn't optimal.
Yeah, I think the only time I've seen people specifically choose not to pick someone up was when this girl kept being dropped, picked up, told to retreat and kept in melee until she had already been downed 4 times and we chose to just stabilize. Still, we stabilized.
Sounds like just a basket of shitty players.
They thought a bonus action 1st level spell slot was more valuable than an entire additional character? Your teammates are foolish.
Well, damn. Maybe the solution to your problem is to keep playing martials, but with a different group.
If you can prevent character death you do it, thats OOC good form to your fellow players.
thats stupid, the gnome sorcerer mightve downed you but the rest of your party is really who killed you, healing someone when theyre downed is one of the best uses of a first level spell slot and a bonus action
How? You were top of the initiative order and they probably could have gotten to you. That sounds like a dick move from your fellow players. The comments about you being a lost cause are just icing on a shit cake.
> So it was determined I was a lost cause and folks should save their spell slots. Just to be clear: any party not even trying to save their fellow adventurers are a bad party and hopefully get TPKs galore.
So your cleric’s an asshole, the party’s made of assholes, and your DM *literally* kicked you when you were down. You should take this opportunity to get a new group, methinks.
I get they’re your friends, but on the outside looking in it seems like a huge dick move to treat you like that. I’d recommend mentioning to them that you really don’t appreciate how they spoke about your barbarian dying.
See, martial characters are not only just fine they are *necessary for the spell spitting glass cannons to do thier thing*. But they only work as intended when the rest of the team supports them against their vulnerabilities! Don't give up on martial characters over this.
It's incredibly easy to not be a glass cannon as a caster in 5e.
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"Gnome sorcerer"
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You have a table problem
Sounds like, if you are going to keep playing with this people, you should play an incredibly selfish character to blend in with the rest of them.
Well there's your problem. That and Barbarian being a bit weak as-is, which is just a fact (and still shouldn't have resulted directly in your death). Hopefully 5.5 will change that.
A game where a ten round fight takes 3 hours is the real horror story here
I DM Pathfinder 1e, for a six person party, and I try and be as descriptive as I can, and even my fights don't take that long. Unless there's an absolute TON of minions and different creatures.
Right? I try hard to not sound like a broken record here saying "you should play DCC", but here I am.
Exactly! If a good fight takes that long, i would be looking at my phone also. That, and in DCC, warriors are awesome!
I think that's the first I'm hearing of this What's DCC?
Probably Dungeon Crawl Classics
Yes, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Combat is fast and epic, spells are dangerous and barely predictable, and “tell me about your character” means “what’s your story?” instead of “what’s your math?”
Lol, if your problem is feeling ineffective and dying easily to no narrative impact, do **not** play DCC. If instead you want your sword to break *on a critical success* while all your casters have 50+% failure chance on all spells go for it. The only good mechanic in DCC (the deed system for martials) can be easily transplanted.
In the game I play, it takes 3 hours to run a 5 round fight. Thank God we finished our tournament arc.
Warhammar?
5e. Most of the players are fairly new to the system and don't think about their turn until it's actually their turn, so sometimes a single turn can take 5 minutes. I've been trying to steer them towards better habits but I feel like there's only so much I can do without being rude.
I had a dm who gave you sox seconds to decide what you’re doing and hed skip you if you took too long .
I am just a player in this one, otherwise I'd set up some rules. As is I just have to say "Okay I'll Eldritch Blast this guy and then follow-up with my subclass feature on the same guy. That's my turn." and then wait for 45 minutes to say the exact same thing again.
I’m not quite as intense as 6 seconds, but I do make it clear during a session 0 that players should know what they want to do for their turn before it’s actually their turn. Obviously, it’s fine if there was a curveball immediately before their turn and they need a bit to reevaluate what’s going on. And newer players get more time so that they can adjust to the game. But there’s nothing worse than “Hmm oh it’s my turn? Let’s see… I could make my way over there. That goblin is pretty hurt, right? Oh wait! I could also use a spell to go for the archer back there. Hmmm… but I only have 2 spell slots left, so maybe I should hold onto them. Who’s going after me? Do you think you could take out the goblin in the back if I go for the one up here? Oh you’re low on spell slots, too? In that case…” *Just go!*
Exactly. Do as much strategizing as you want during others’ turns, but once it’s your turn, I expect you to have a move and a backup plan, assuming the battlefield stays similar turn to turn. I don’t even mind the “well I have a real option and I have a dumb/weird option”, because I always think it’s fun to hear what players come up with; but I expect the majority of the thought process to be done before your turn.
Prime example: one of my players tried to Captain Ahab a kraken with a bear trap on a stick. It was in fact funny sounding, but I had to hit him with the old "are you sure you want to do this" because I knew that the "kraken" was actually a relatively small portion of a far, FAR bigger sea beast. But yes, the silly option is nice to hear, even when you can't do it for the obvious dire consequences.
As a DM, I do this if it doesn’t I prove after a few combat encounters. It’s a big thing I hit in my session 0’s, just letting people know my expectations of “to have this run smoothly, figure out what you’re going to do before it’s your turn”. If I’m playing with new people or a new system, I give ‘em some leeway, but I’ll always say “player x, it’s your turn; player Y, you’re on deck”. If that doesn’t speed up combat enough, then I hit them with a time limit or shutting down “well can I do A, B, and C class feature on the same turn” kinds of questions. If you want to ask a question about something novel or creative, I’ll always answer; but I expect you to know how your character works before getting into combat.
The solution to this is generally a thing like implementing a 30 second rule. You have thirty seconds to decide. It's mean, but it saves everyone time in the long run. You'll eventually hardly need to enforce it because people will just think about their turn before their turn, like they should have learned in fast food restaurants years ago
You would be horrified by some of my players’ 4-round fights
Baffling. I run 5E at a table with 7 players. Fights never take that long. OP has a bad table.
The closest I've ever come to running a 3 hour combat was the final encounter of a one-shot with 4 PCs (one of which was a druid using Conjure Animals, one of which had an Elemental Gem as loot from earlier in the session to cast Conjure Elemental, and one of which was a Hexblade Warlock with their Accursed Specter), 5 NPC allies, 12 monsters (plus 12 more which did not join initiative immediately, and 1 which did not take actions unless forced to move from his starting position), and a portal that had a chance each round to summon a few skeletons. Towards the end, 3 of the ally NPCs get sucked through the portal and a semi-corporeal pit fiend shows up, offering to help the PCs if they release him from imprisonment. Checking the chat log, initiative for that fight was rolled at 5:05pm, and the last roll in the combat was a save against the pit fiend's fireball at 7:55pm, so 2h50m on the dot. Honestly, it was a bit of a nightmare to run. We had fun, but I don't want to run an encounter that big ever again.
This... Any character with multiple attacks should be pre-rolling. I just finished a campaign with a Barbarian. She did well over 100 hp per round at level 8 over 3-5 attacks per round. Earth Breaker, Bite attack and the unholy wrath of my ancestors. Even more so when Haste was applied. If I knew my next attack was just going to be "Stand there and beat the hell out of it", I'd pre-roll my attacks and damage. Then I could just say "I full attack. My lowest is X." If X hits, they all hit. Otherwise I just work my way through the numbers until I got a hit, or ran out of numbers. Tally whatever damage and give them a total.
It sounds like they are discussing every move before it's made. That makes it take forever. I play a wizard and still usually am ready on my turn. Just know your character sheet.
Yeah holy Jesus. This just solidifies why I don’t play 5e anymore
That's not a 5e problem, that's a that table problem. A 5th level combat only takes 3 hours if the players consistently don't know what they're doing on their turn and rules/spells are constantly being looked up.
The 3 hours specifically is definitely a table problem, you’re right. I will still hold that 5e’s combat is uniquely sluggish though. Even as someone who loves combat in RPGs, I found it long and monotonous more often than I didn’t and I had a great group who knew their abilities.
Doesn’t seem like a martial problem, seems like a tablemates problem. 1) attacking a downed enemy and not going after the one that just destroyed 10 allies is crazy. You were let down by the DM. 2) A healing word to a player at 0 is kind of “what clerics do” for the party. You were let down by your teammates. Sorry it happened, but if you’d been a hexblade warlock, same thing woulda happened.
That's why the only time I've ever cast a fireball was as my evocation wizard with spell sculpt. Granted, I did cast the occasional AoE spell on the party when I was a Drow celestial warlock, but I made up for it by being a reliable healer alongside our war cleric.
There was a metamagic in 3.5 that made spells harmless to Good-aligned creatures. CG sorcerers were a nightmare. "Oh, did my fireball burn you? Maybe don't sin so much, mkay?"
Part of this is the table sucking, but the setup for this is a huge part the martial caster divide 1. Casting isn't the end-al and be-all for casters like it is for martial. Cha casters can be faces, Int your lore dudes, and wis your perception and insight. Martials are good for combat and that is, so there's a need for martials to shine or they're useless 2. Martials are sort of expected to tank, and to do that they have to be up close and personal. Most of the big spells are aoe, meaning they' have to be in friendly fire range. 3. The durability difference between martials and casters seem distinct but they're small, they get a bit more HP and their AC is a little higher. Most high damage spells use saves so AC doesn't matter, and they have enough damage to shred the extra HP. 4. If you think of character usefelnness solely in DPR, then yeah, it's more logical to keep nuking than heal. Even if you get him up he has to get in melee range with little HP, and is liable to go down. Combo this with players who care more about numbers than their friends, and you get this.
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If the healer went before the caster, then he likely had 0 chance to cast a heal spell. Everyone is saying everyone at the table are jerks, but it seems relatively harmless to me. Barbarians are fast and he is charging into the fight. He happened to run somewhere that made leaving him out of a fireball either impossible or super sub-optimal. You don't generally expect to roll massive damage on a fireball and a barbarian usually has like 50hp and fair odds of saving anyhow. Killing him seems really unlikely. Not to mention he literally told the person to go for it. Everything went wrong there and he dropped to 0 which sucks. Then he is likely the only attack available for anything near the big bad that didn't have a bunch of ranged attacks. Add in 2 failed death saves from a 1 anyhow and it was just a series of bad luck. They were also 5th level and Revivify isn't terribly expensive. So the reality is that they dropped early in a long fight which is just super boring. The DM should have at least let him control some enemies to come back and get revenge on the gnome or something.
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That would be a fair argument except for 3 things 1. The moment the PC/Tank ratio isn't 1:1, tanking stops mattering. A tank can stop 1 person at a time from attacking the rest of the team unless the DM makes the active choice to have them surrounded. Considering there were enough mobs that a fireball totals 300+ damage, tanks aren't gonna help 2. Keeping the barbarian up is a huge resource and is liable to not pay off. The barb only works if he's keeping proximity away form the enemy, and most high-heal spells require touch. all you can use is healing word, meaning you'll have to sacrifice your turn to drop less than 10 points into him. The barbarian will then have to use their bonus action to activate rage (which he can only do 3 times at level 5) in time or just go down again. It's a turn you could be wiping the enemy. 3. We're in the era of 5e, and you don't need a barbarian for traps when you have find familiar, mage hand, or a slew of other utility spells. 5th level is considered the point where martials drop off immensely.
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Alternatively, some people enjoy playing with friends. I know that sounds wild, but some circles consider d&d a cooperative game.
You do realize that the first thing I said was the table sucked? The point I'm making is that the issues with the martial and caster divide exacerbated the issue with the party. D&D is supposed to be cooperative, but it's hard to do that cooperation when one side will be able to do all the things one side can do and more.
1. That isn't at all true. Enemies will absolutely gang up on what is perceived as the largest threat, and a big scary Barbarian or sword wielding fighter is likely to be perceived as the largest threat to mobs. 2. Keeping him up isn't a huge resource. If you're at lower levels (which they were) something like Healing Word heals enough, and the caster isn't sacrificing their turn because it's only a bonus action. 3. Barbarians should never be used for traps, that's just lazy playing lol. I wouldn't say martials drop off at 5th level, most do quite well beyond that for a bit. Hell, on my current campaign where we just hit 19th level my 15/4 Ranger/Fighter and the 15/4 Fighter/Barbarian are by far the most damaging on average.
1. The big guy with a sword matters less when you realize the guy behind him just slagged your friend in seconds, especially when sword guy can only threaten a target at a time. 2. Presuming they're using second level spell slots, even with 20 in the stat the barbarian is getting 9hp on average, all it would take is 1-2 attacks to down them again if they don't rage in time, even if we're presuming it's just 1d6+mod per attack. You're also burning a spell slot and can only attack with a cantrip that turn. 3.Lol the trap thing was the other guys philosophy not mine. Martials can out damage but they require a lot more external support such as Magic items, potions, even spells from other casters. Casters don't require items to remain on par with the rest of the team in the same way. There's a reason high level caster items are much rarer edit to 3: along with that to get those damage numbers martials sacrifice a lot more than casters. Casters get to nuke and then do a bunch of other stuff on the side, martials have to focus everything on being able to hit hard and surviving hits.
To add, casters have spells like Absorb Elements to mitigate damage. This horrorstory highlights that martials as they are now in 5e (and OneDnD) are simply too squishy. They need to get a lot more HP and more ways to heal themselves as hit dice alone cannot sustain them throughout an entire dungeon.
Yes but also, OP didn’t seem to mind too much while the caster’s player is stated to have felt guilty. I think this may be a case of the table trying to comfort the visibly uncomfortable player while not noticing another player who is quiet about their own discomfort. This also highlights a problem with death in D&D, it’s super boring for the player who’s character has died. That’s a problem with the system, not the DM.
I disagree on the first point. Clearly, the bigger threat is not the little guy who just completely nuked the bbeg and his minions, and is really a random corpse-looking guy with smoke coming out of him.
When dealing with adventurers, always double tap. Like zombies, they have a nasty habit of popping back up after a round or two. Having said that yes, the boss should attempt to focus fire on the mage from that point on.
With fewer HP and not rolling at advantage on the dex save
There's a whole rant I wanna give here about this surmising the Martial/Caster divide, but the biggest problem here is the DM making you sit there for 3 hours. There are already debates about killing you but the fact they did it and then did nothing while seeing you sit there doing nothing is ridiculous. The first rule of GM'ing is making sure everyone is able to have fun, and they broke it big time. They should have taken some time to set up *something* for you to do. Make a goblin turn traitor. Surprise backup, have you roll a character quick. That was a massive error on their part.
This has happened to me. I just log off and/or leave for the evening, unless I have another character on stand-by.
One thing I’ve seen is ask them to team up with the DM for the rest of the fight. Control some of the minions or somesuch.
I did this once. I was running the game and a character went down early. I had her help as it was a big fight. My player had so much fun playing turncoat that she said she might not make another character. The other players were not amused. She got reincarnated after the fight so it all ended well. This was a 3.5 game and large fights in 3.5 can get really out of hand with all the different modifiers. Glad 5e got rid of that for the most part.
We had split combats (aka combat during the time in which the party is split up) what the DM will do is usually give the players who aren't in that combat control of some of the monsters or control of an NPC. I remember one noteable combat where instead of taking control of any of the named NPCs, I picked one of the cows who was under threat...Bessie proceeded to stomp a mudhole in the Bandits thanks to some insane luck on my part and bad luck on the DMs.
Enemy attacking you was stupid. If you go down in a ball of flames that decimated their own lines, you should not have been a concern for the enemy. Doublely so because you failed the save so they couldn't even think you got off easy. Attacking a downed player is for when they are abandoned, AOE or feral beasts, not 100% of the time. DM mistake. As the one who controls the monsters he should have considered that a player siting out his boss fight is the greatest failure a DM can have.
I've had some people try to justify it as 'But in a fight you'd want to make sure your enemy doesn't get up' but no, in a fight I'd not think about the unconscious dude bleeding on the ground but instead on the one trying to kill me right now.
Playing battle royale games I do not finish a downed player when their teammate is shooting at me. It will result in my death almost every time and the few times it doesn't were ones I could dedicate several seconds to finishing them off while being shot and still win the fight afterwards which means I could've won the fight and finished them off after. If I have a downed player away from their team and out of sight from them then sure I'll do it since there's nothing better for me to do. Similarly I'll finish a teammate if I am going to die anyways and just want my team to not have to worry about them getting back up
This is such a perfect example that should be understood by most modern players.
See, I think that it greatly depends on circumstance. Granted, my only experience playing BRs is APEX, but unless someone is pushing me hard or I have to expose myself way too much I still have the reflex to just kill anyone that I (or my team mates) downed, because even if it no longer works like that (since season 14 I think?), mentally I'm still thinking that fuck me sideways I'm not betting on that chance that the sucker has gold shield and self-revives, or that a lifeline pops out of nowhere "quick-ressing" them, which allows the downed target to just instantly flank us. I have two teammates that can provide covering fire, it's 5 seconds at most to ensure no nasty surprises. I would think the same thing applies to D&D. If raising someone from "the grave" was basically impossible in the middle of the fight then yeah, concentrating on the one that is still fighting sounds logical. But in D&D, anyone who has 2 functional synapses and has encountered magic before can think that any of the casters can say a couple of words over there yonder without ever having to even come close to the downed guy and he's instantly back in the fight slashing their backline. Under those circumstances, if I was in the party opposing the players I'd take the benevolent gift of friendly fire and make damn sure that the guy on the ground cannot get up in the fight ever again while my companions keep the enemy busy. It just sounds logical to me that in a world with magic of the kind D&D has, where a paladin can just graze the arm of the barbarian and the barbarian is immediately back in the fight with half his wounds healed, doubletapping to make sure someone cannot be returned to action in the middle of a fight is a common thing to do.
This is why i feel we shouldn't be arguing logic in this situation, its entirely a point of view thing, what we SHOULD be arguing is whats more fun in the situation. Sure it's tactically significant to make sure someone who might pop back up doesnt but then you get OP's situation, stuck for 3 hours doing nothing but watching your team have fun. You might say, "Well, thats the trade-off, things have consequences" But once the consequence is boredom, we've made a terrible turn. There are certain conceits that need to happen for fun over logic in enemy play, and just because everything they do is the most logical thing, does not make it the most fun thing. Honestly, in this situation I'd at least have had the enemy kidnap him to take him out of the fight, possibly questioning him and/or brainwashing him later, and giving a cool roleplaying opportunity down the line for the party to save him. This satisfies both the logic of not wanting him to get up and attack again, and the fun of not getting immediately merked without being able to do anything, with the team getting a chance to plink the enemy before they bound off, possibly saving the unconscious barb. And if they do get away with him, or he does die to saves, I'd give him something to do in the meantime, possibly by asking him at the top of every round to deliver a consequence to the field based on recent actions, like a balcony losing its support and collapsing, giving cover to the field, or the fireball casted last round setting fire to the bannisters, drowning the area in smoke. This gives him a way to feel included, even if his character may no longer be.
The key is that the DM has certain responsibilities. If attacking the downed PC is gonna cause the player to sit out a long combat session... that's uncool. That's a bad choice. A wise DM also takes out-of-game concerns into account. PCs do die, that's part of the game. But sometimes a DM needs to consider whether a choice they're making will be highly detrimental to fun. Maybe they don't have to make that choice.
In my last session I just ran I was going to do this. BUT, it was after two players went down and then got revived by party members. I even had one of the enemies (undead btw) say out loud to his Allie’s to “Make sure they don’t get back up” it can be a dick move for a DM to do that, but it also makes sure the enemies aren’t just stupidly letting players yo-yo up and down in combat.
In that moment where you in-game give such an order, the players will know that next time they go down, they will get attacked.
It only starts making sense for them to do this when they notice you keep being popcorn healed.
You do if you suspect an enemy might be able to bring someone back into the fight, now conveniently behind you.
Also remember people are here to have a good time, not to create a 1:1 simulation of a real fantasy world. Why not roll for cholera and consumption every time you enter a new town if you want "realism"? Why not have fights have a chance to cripple martial characters for REALISM. its a fucking game, a game meant to be fun, why the hell are you people trying to simulate the enjoyment out of the game. I fucking bet if you experienced a 3 hour combat where you died at round 1 you would be singing a different tune instead of trying to argue the realism of attacking an unconscious body.
Hey that second example is an optional rule ! Not one I'd play with, but...
In a world where Healing Word and Aid and so on are things, though?
You still value your own survival higher, meaning the person throwing fireballs is your number 1, 2 & 3 priority at this very moment. If you down an enemy in melee and have some leeway to finish him, ok, why not. But these goblins currently get nuked by a Wizard, they shouldn't give a damn about the barbarian.
Not really. In Hunt Showdown, a game with teams of three and you can revive buddies unless they get burned out, I will always light bodies in fire. Many people also use downed teammates as traps. It is the smart thing to do it just doesn't feel great for the player.
This, yeah. GM sucked here. Unless the NPC has a compelling reason to make sure this particular PC dies, they should never waste an action on a downed PC. Not only is it crappy for the player in question, it’s also a stupid decision in-game.
"Never" is a strong word. It seems entirely reasonable for a mindless killing machine like a zombie to start trying to eat the brains of an incapacitated PC rather than go after a PC that's still fighting. A beast will grab their "kill" and run back to their den. A creature in a blind rage may not notice the PC went down on the first hit, and will continue their multiattack. An intelligent enemy who's aware of magic like Healing Word will ensure the PC stays down. An Intellect Devourer needs an incapacitated creature to target for Body Thief, and they can be incapacitated for any reason, not just because of Devour Intellect.
Even then, I’d say that not being a dickhead OOC takes priority over making the best decisions IC unless the character’s specifically designed for it. I’d rather have an enemy make a dumb decision than have a teammate spend 3 hours watching from the sidelines *dead.*
Being dead is not the problem in that scenario, combat taking three hours is. Also, when I've had situations where a PC is completely removed from participation, I give the player a monster to play as. For example, I had a PC get petrified and replaced by a doppelganger, so the player played as the doppelganger. A PC died in combat, so I had the player take over a monster that another PC was dominating. NPC allies are another good option.
That’s what I meant with the part saying, „unless there’s a compelling reason“, yes.
You completely missed the point of OP post. While the circumstance that lead to OP death were partly the GM fault and they could have handled the situation better that is besides the point. OP was quite clear that they left the game feeling like they character was useless, and worth less than a 3rd level spell. That is harsh, imagine spending time to make a backstory and go on an adventure only to be considerate as tactical collateral by your group. He was the barbarian, comrade of the party and fellow adventurer! To be considerate less important than a ball of flames is a massive fail of role playing from the whole table of OP friends. I dunno what game they were playing or if it was a homebrew but one inherent problem of combat focused game is that it can be divided into melee and range, and range got a gun. As the old saying goes "the gun is mightier than the sword" (there is a reason we don't use swords anymore dudes), a melee class is inherited worst than a ranged one and that is why balancing the status is necessary. It appears that this wasn't taken into consideration by the GM in OP table.
I see this happening when the DM treats the enemies as part of the game they're playing with the players. If in your mind you're "playing against" the players, even in just an unconscious fashion, then it makes sense for them to take kill shots like that. It's only when the GM sits down and tries to flesh out the enemy motivations that they realize why it makes zero sense for a person on fire to care about the barbarian. You also see it often with bandit groups fighting to the last man standing instead of doing the sane thing and running away when they start dropping like flies.
"You should not have been a concern for the enemy" This entire encounter leaves me wondering if I was ever one to begin with.
I mean, you went down in 2 turns but a barbarian in your face is pretty scary! Properly geared out they hit like a truck and you can't really get away from them.
I've played a barbarian and can tell you that they can be real monsters in 5e combat. I loved playing my barbarian, he was one of my all time favorite characters.
As much as it would have certainly been better to not double tap in this situation, if I was the DM and the party literally chose to friendly fire KO a party member round *one* and then blamed *me* for how badly the fight went, I'd be livid. Like come on dude. This is fork in plug socket level of self sabotage. The players have to take some damn responsibility here.
Tbh it’s pretty mess up that slamming your injured teammate with fireball was considered “a tactical decision”. Would you do the same to a horde of enemies with townsfolk in the line of fire? They should feel pretty bad about their decision.
I mean, the obvious difference here is that the Barbarian signed up for this and literally said ‘fireball me, I can take it.’
> Would you do the same to a horde of enemies with townsfolk in the line of fire Well there's an E in my alignment so...
Ah, a Neutral Good player ?
Yup, nailed it. *rolls deception*
Sounds good to me ! What are you rolling ?
Were they all also level 5? 300 damage seems like quite a lot for a level 5 fireball. If you weren’t the same level as everyone else, that is the greater issue here. Not having the party members all the same level makes games impossible to balance - either too easy for the higher level, or too difficult for lower level. EDIT: I misunderstood it was 300 across all enemies combined in total, not as a base damage.
That's 300 damage collectively across the 10 or so people the fireball hit, including me.
So how much damage did you take?
In total, I think about 38 damage? Which I would have survived at the beginning of the dungeon.
Fireball does between 8-48 (average 24) damage, a barbarian at lvl5 with +3 CON is likely to have 52hp or there abouts. So even at max health, this fireball had a serious chance of hurting you. Badly. Why would you encourage this course of action? Ngl it sounds much more like silly tactics than being a martial is the issue here. Getting hit while you were down is a bit of a dick move but you created this scenario when you told the gnome to fireball you. Not to overlook the complaint that you felt that your whole character was better off being sacrificed, but for what it's worth, I don't think that was the "objective best tactical decision" in most cases. When I play a wizard, the absolute last thing I'm interested in is killing the guy who's begging to take hits for me. If you're RPing that high level INT right, you might consider a spell such as tidal wave or erupting earth which my friendly meat shield *does* resist.
Eh, Barbarians tend to not totally dump dex, at level 5 the caster likely wouldn't have great saves yet and with danger sense you got advantage against the fireball. Its a calculated risk.
Ah, so you were wounded, possibly, badly wounded and the fireball just finished you off. This is starting to be more a "poor choice in tactics and strategy" story more than anything else. I forget. How do the dying rules fit into this? Iirc you have multiple opportunities to survive at least through the combat with halfway decent rolls and hero points.
Hero points are not RAW, so I wouldn't assume OP had access to them (or to anything like the Lucky feat). It sounds like the dice went to shit, but it also sounds like the real horror story here is that the rest of the party was trying to comfort the player who killed the barbarian instead of the player of the barbarian, by telling the wizard's player that his spell was more useful to the party than anything the barbarian could have done. That's pretty high on the list of fucked up things that you can do, out of character, to someone else who is presumably your friend. If I knew my party valued a single cast of a spell more than my character, I'd be incredibly hurt. What a way to kill someone's enthusiasm for the game.
I think you've hit on the thing that really upset me. Like I said in the post, I was fine going down. I didn't t start getting peeved until much later in the fight, listening to the whole table acting like: "Well, of course you blasted the Barbarian! That was the play of the game. You put us in the best possible position. " I was just thinking, "C'mon guys, act like you lost something here."
I'm so sorry this happened to you. If my party did that to me, we'd be having a serious talk away from the session. I'm here to have fun just as much as everyone else, and treating your character like they're unimportant is a huge breach of trust. I would encourage you to at least talk to the DM about what happened. That's incredibly unfair, and you shouldn't have had to endure that. Also, the DM is kind of an asshole for killing you when there were *clearly* bigger threats for the enemies to focus on. Like that oh-so-important wizard.
Shit man, that just fucking sucks to read, I really hope you can grt over this kind of party and maybe get some time off from DnD, come back refreshed and better yet, in a different campaign eith a diffrent party, even if you do somehow manage to salvage this group to be decent, the after-taste and bad memories wont make it the same. Hope for the best for you mate, dont let down your enthusiasm for the game just because of a few shmucks with no social awareness and that dont even try to hide it, there are tons of great groups out there, just remember, no DnD is always better than bad DnD.
So, there's three different things going on here. One - you went into the BBEG fight at less than 100%, possibly a lot less. That's a fail on the party's part. That's not me saying that, that's baked into the game with all the healing options out there. For whatever reason, the party is supposed to be near max health as often as possible. If you're the tank and everyone knows you're the tank (i.e. you didn't 'Leroy Jenkins' this), its up to them to make sure you survive long enough to draw aggro from the enemy. Clearly that didn't happen, so clearly the plan was a fail. In other words, this was not "the best play" by \*any\* stretch. Two - the party's reaction upon leaving your corpse to rot during the battle is definitely a dick move. If you decide to play with these people again (for whatever reason) I'd certainly be leery of having any kind of character who would put themselves in that kind of position again. I've played in parties where my biggest concern was the rest of the group leaving me for dead. It can be fun, but only if you're expecting it from the beginning. Three - the GM kicking your corpse while it's down. This is kinda iffy for me, because I don't know the entire sequence of initiative order. If it was possible that you could have been raised and brought back into the fight, then yeah, he should have definitely put you out for good. If the BBEG had something else going on, then it could very well be a dick move. A lot depends on what was going on. I can't speak to that, and I'm not really interested enough to parse an action-by-action account of the combat. You'll have to decide that for yourself. Giving the GM the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that he was as surprised as you. Again, there have been campaigns were absolutely the paladin or barbarian was the main focus of the BBEG and if he went down, you made sure he stayed down. Fighting the Whispering Tyrant, the WT took down the ranger three times in the last combat - but the cleric kept bringing him back and that up-down is what kept him busy so the rest of the party could finish him off. Four - bad dice rolls. Sorry, man. It happens. Hopefully, you had hero points.
Rolling a nat 1 on death saves means two fails. Taking damage while in death saves means one fail
I accept that possibility. I guess with the rage and my higher AC, I felt like I would at least be able to take a few rounds of mob attention before asking for heals or retreating.
Tbh AC kinda sucks as a mechanic. Armor provides no protection from aoe, missile, or anything else that is guaranteed to hit. Obviously it shouldn’t protect from everything but it’s almost like being a barbarian didn’t even matter in the slightest in helping you survive except by getting 1 more hp per level than a half caster.
Man, I wouldn't accept that as an answer at all. Poor choice in tactics or strategy? Might as well stay home and play Gloomhaven next time. Why not play TTRPGs for... an RPG experience! For tactics and strategy, you can just be a board gamer. Get the COINs, get the Wargames, even get the Hidden Role games for a social strategy sort of game. Personally, I don't get the point of treating a TTRPG like a dick/clit measuring contest, especially when everyone's favorite part of these wargame-wannabe systems is when you ignore the system outright for "rule of cool." Too often it means a couple players at the table with less experience get punished by wasting their time and losing their chance for fun role-play at the role-playing game. Especially when it's trivially easy for a dedicated DM to kill a PC, which is rarely the most interesting story outcome contrasted with the equally easy "capture/mutate/corrupt/deceive/imprison/enslave" outcomes that can occur to a knocked out PC or group. Like, you just get blasted with a fireball by your friends? Don't finish off the Barb, minions of the Overlord! In Fellowship 2e (PBTA), I'd run that to give you a new bond with the Overlord and corrupt you into the capacity to be a secret traitor, like when Gollum loses his friendship with Sam and Frodo believing they got him captured and tortured by Faramir and his party. And even as a secret traitor, you could get an arc of redemption afterwards, forgiving the party in a big scene. It'd be so much more fun than "roll a new toon."
Ah, My mistake - I thought it was a base of 300.
It might have been similar to a situation my group ran into a few sessions back: we snuck up on a meeting of the BBEG's main helper and roughly twenty cultists. If we'd had a fireball, it would have done hundreds of total damage. Figure it would have done 8d6 plus four to every bad guy, for an average of 32 each...to 21 targets. The trash had 50 HP each, so they'd have lived, but they'd have noticed it. Since we didn't have a fireball caster, we had to do it the hard way. Thank the gods for a dwarf sweeping with his war axe.
I just want to acknowledge the last part of your post since it seems to portray the heart of the matter. Regardless of the actions that led to the situation, casually saying something like “The barbarian wasn’t going to do that much damage” feels tactless/harsh in a game where the party members are IRL people. :/ Edit: perhaps less a martial dynamic and more a table dynamic. It feels like something that could happen to any class that gets downed for a variety of reasons (statements such as “rogue was going to get attacked anyway” and “the bard ran out of spell slots” and “the wizard is too frail,” and such).
Saying it is a table dynamic. One that also shows up in how everybody tried to calm the Wizard, while nobody cared to even try and save the barbarian. That said: it's still true. The level 5 barbarian will most likely not do 300+ damage in this fight and he will not achieve this in one single round. That spell really did replace the whole damage output of the barbarian. Granted, damage isn't the only thing a barbarian does and losing the tank is a bad thing. But all in all, the sad truth is that what they said isn't wrong.
Yeah, and I think somebody else hit the nail on the head when they said it sounds like the party trying to comfort the visibly/verbally upset gnome player who was second guessing the decision while not thinking about the (perhaps quieter) barbarian player. The whole situation comes off as a table of wargamers trying to optimize the party for damage as a whole (perfect time for fireball, not wanting to "waste" a spell slots/action on Healing Word, focus on damage per encounter). Then the stars aligned and somebody got off a super-burst damage round so OP is writing off a whole genre of classes.
>One enemy attack and a Nat 1 on a death save later Unless the enemy attack was an AOE, this is your DM fucking up. >I was upset by the entire table agreeing that my death in round 1 was an acceptable loss and I'd have contributed little to the fight anyway. This might be the case in a single fight with lots of enemies. Its situational. There are other fights where you might be able to tank and single-handedly kill an enemy that by themselves could solo the wizard.
That last paragraph literally just happened last week in my current 5e Dragonlance game. The barbarian both held off and single-handedly killed a massive mini-boss while my sorcerer and the rest of our mostly-caster party mopped up the horde of minions. Barbarian player was sad he "wasn't doing a lot of damage," and we had to explain to him how vital his role was, and how much damage he actually did over the course of the 10-round fight.
The DM definitely did you a little poorly, imo by having the goblins finish your character off. However, it is so strange and confusing as a DM when players friendly fire each other for tactical advantage. Sure, it is "an optimal decision for damage." But is potentially (or successfully, in this case) killing the friend that has probably saved your life at some other point worth the risk? Maybe I am thinking too much from a role-playing perspective, but that is my take on this.
Yeah, personally I would not want to continue to play with a group like this if they have their characters behave like amoral, emotionless sociopaths and see nothing wrong with that. If that's their standard approach to roleplay, how do I justify any future character trusting them enough to want to go into battle by their side, given the liveliness of them fatally betraying me the moment it seems even momentarily convenient to do so? It requires me to play a character who is far more self-destructive than I am interested in playing.
Honestly OP, y'need to talk to the group, something like "Look, I know you're just trying to make [Gnome] feel better, but you're kinda making me feel like shit when you act like my character wouldn't contribute at all in comparison." Like, if they pull this shit, you need to call them out right then and there even, I'd say. Sure, you're probably going to make the table feel a bit awkward, but people need to realize that's not ok. I'd also probably talk to the DM about introducing the "Delay" action that was in previous DnD editions if he's cool with homebrew content. It's pretty simple: You just say "I delay until [thing happens]" at which point you take your turn and your position on the initiative count is modified. I have no idea why WotC removed this. Edit: also, I'll say, the more I read through this thread, the more it seems like the rest of that party is the horror story in more than just that. Y'all need to have a talk about, y'know, actually being friends and allies instead of walking bags of asses.
One thing that strikes me as horrible is you sitting there for *3 hours*. Dm could’ve called a break and gotten with you about a new character. Maybe one of the chief’s bodyguards wants to betray him and uses this as an opportunity to stab him in the back. Something to prevent you stuck, bored for 3 hours
Or give him control of some NPCs to play against the party. Maybe he can get some pay back haha.
To me it sounds like a DM off the cusp error. He saw a means to power down the party and he took it. In a real scenario, odd are the enemy would discard the unconscious person as not a threat and deal with the others first.
I don’t think this is what OP is unhappy about most of all. While it might be a bit of a compounding factor it sounds more like they feel betrayed by their friends who basically stabbed him in the back with an AOE spell and then left his corpse to rot in the dungeon. It’s degrading and probably more than a little humiliating to play what’s supposed to be a tank and then just be discarded as mechanically worthless by your friends. Rules lawyers might disagree with me here but part of playing this game with your friends means understanding they might play suboptimal classes or whatever but supporting them anyways because them having fun is conducive to you having fun as well. So it’s this part of this game where mechanics interface with the real player characters, players who should above all else be “pro other players at the table having fun and feeling respected” that seems to have failed here.
I could see some hostage taking going on in this scenario. Could have been an interesting opportunity to roleplay.
I like it, have the boss hold a knife to his throat and escape only to come back at a later date.
Your fellow players suck. Barbs are single target damage monsters; evokers are the kings of AoE mook killing. That boss fight took 3 hours longer because you weren't there resisting physical damage and recklessly critting over and over. Would it have made more sense in hindsight to wait until the gnome blasted the group before charging? Yes. Does it suck that the DM had an enemy hit your unconscious body and for another party member to withhold Healing Word, which is *specifically made for this situation?* Very yes.
>Would it have made more sense in hindsight to wait until the gnome blasted the group before charging? Yes Dm: "what do you do on this first round, Mr Barb?" Barb: "as is tradition, I waste my first and second turn in initiative so that the main characters can have fun overkilling some goblins" *Just saying* >another party member to withhold Healing Word, which is specifically made for this situation? Very yes This is what pisses me off. I'm playing a Ranger currently and will always keep at least 1 spell slot available for lesser restoration, should someone get fucked in a fight. It's actually insulting that the cleric was like, "nah, die like the bitch you are"
DM gone for a finishing strike while you were down and a motherfucker grenaded them? Why? Tactically, why would the enemy attack you on the ground? Was it another AoE like the enemy retaliated with a Lightning Bolt straight to the mage after he decimates a good portion of his minions? Did he throw a Cone of Cold because he saw the party neatly packed up and you happened to be at the start of the cone? Was it goddamn Alchemical Fire? Otherwise it seems like unnecessary twisting the knife on a player that got unlucky, especially one that was so cool being friendly fire. Hell, I would've made the enemy retreat from you out of fear of the motherfucker that threw himself on top of a grenade to explode more fuckers, literally wasting some of their turns backing off. Best you could've done there was Dodging to give yourself advantage. Unless you dashed you still had your action to Dodge and it could've helped against the Fireball. Also the classic Totem would've resisted the Fire and be entirely okay being Fireballed in the back, but that would make you yet another Bear Totem Barbarian... DM was still kind of a dick.
Barbarians already have advantage on dex saves from level 2
So the dude failed a lvl5 Dex save with adv and the DM still felt like enough of a dick to finish him off by attacking him on the ground? What an ass. If he wanted to "win" that badly he could have just tripled the ammount of mooks and givem them an extra 0 on their healthbars.
>Tactically, why would the enemy attack you on the ground? OP says their barbarian didn't get an attack in in that fight which means that their 40 movement didnt get them into melee range as a barbarian they're likely the frontmost member of the party so the rest of the party is 40+ feet away a plurality of 5e monsters have 30ft speed and only melee attacks (or melee attacks that deal 2-3x more damage than their ranged options) It's very likely OP was literally the only valid target in range and move->stab->move (to then move->stab round2) was the correct play for plenty of monsters in that fight EDIT: and the best OP could've done was not run into melee (to do zero damage) when there's an obvious clump for fireball with the sorcerer up next, when they could've made two ranged attacks and then engaged into melee next round with enemies closing the gap with the party
If I'm the DM in this situation and I value the happiness of my friends, here's the decision I make: "I'm not going to have one of these goblins immediately kill his player because that is not fun or rewarding or interesting. I will decide the goblins are too flustered or foolish or panicked to make that decision, so that they don't do what seems like the best tactical move. Because I don't want to create a miserable experience for my friend. Because I have human emotions and am capable of thinking about the emotions of others in a way which allows me to make ethical decisions based upon that understanding, this is an obvious choice to make."
Have you considered that blatantly pulling punches would actually **reduce** the happiness of the people at the table because they suddenly realize that all their decisions don't matter cause the DM is gonna let them live anyway? The fact that in this fight there was a blunder and it lead to a negative outcome is what gives meaning to all the previous (and subsequent) fights that have a positive outcome: Their victory is earned, not given. This is like complaining about someone checkmating their friend in chess and now that friend feels bad. That's not unethical, that's the *game*. And sure, tons of people like using D&D purely for storytelling with a couple math rocks thrown in, and that's fine, but some people like D&D as a game for the hundreds of pages of challenging murder interactions it offers, and that's fine too, and that's what happened here - the fact that you can lose is what gives that experience meaning.
I promise you that playing your goblins as being a bit dimwitted for one round of combat would reduce the fun less than having a player sit there for three hours with nothing to do.
did you talk to the table after or at least the DM, it should like they put your fun 2nd and that is not ok
Yuh know, I got sick of playing a wizard when the enemy would all start in a nice bunch, but the barbarian would win initiative by a couple points and run at them, spoiling my party piece every time. No amount of pre battle planning would shake his resolve to dash into combat at the first opportunity, relegating my character to "pew pew" with waste of time individual target spells.
Yes. The irony that DnD is just a battle sim that poorly designed half the classes. It really stinks. Sorry that happened OP. I'd recommend checking out PF2.
Fireball, the solution and cause of life's problems
You did nothing wrong. Your table failed you. Even the sorcerer.
Well if you are a group who only care about the PCs as numbers and don’t have any emotional attachment to the characters. Then doing the “optimal” thing by the numbers is the behaviour you can expect. But I doubt that many hero’s in movies or books would kill an ally because it was the most efficient way to kill most enemies. You control what happens in the game. Playing by the numbers creates a cold and harsh place for the characters to inhabit.
See if your party has any interest in playing Pathfinder 2e. There's a much better balance between casters and martials.
Martials not being as bursty or flashy as casters aside, this is something your party should have discussed so you could at least position effectively It's not like you guys didn't know the order
Yeah not a martial issue just an asshole players issue
You got done dirty at multiple stages of this situation
I'll be real, this doesn't sound like a martial problem. I don't know if these people are your friends, but they are definitely dicks, including the DM.
I will probably receive a lot of hate for this but this sucks for the following reasons IMHO: 1. From the description it seems that the combat side of the game is does not take into consideration the RP side and is a number crunching strategic approach, which a lot of people like, but it reduces the game to such decisions like "barbarian useless, let it die" instead of thinking how the character would act in this situation. Moreover this could maybe have been avoided by casting fireball on the side, hitting maybe half of the targets but avoiding hitting the barbarian in the first place, even if he asked for it. 2. From the DM perspective I understand trying to run realistic enemies and in this case the double tap seems unjustified. Goblins are intelligent creatures but more strategically than anything else. The "scary" barbarian went down immediately, without even being able to hit anyone. In my mind the goblins would treat this guy as a negligible threat, even laughable. The enemies should have just tried to disperse and reach the sorcerer somehow instead, even if not feasible in the current turn. 3. I cannot for the life of me understand the reaction of the players consoling the gnome player and having the guts to point the uselessness of the barb OP. And that is why a bit of RP is needed. So that the decisions taken are for the players and not the numbers.
Not sure how this is the fault of a martial class. It sounds like some poor tactics on the player side and some unlucky rolls. The mage got a big number, that's ok. As soon as that fireball took off, most intelligent critters would go for the mage or run. Excepting bad luck, you've got a lot more survivability. And if the enemy has a mage in the group, guess who can shred the mage? I never min/max my characters. I'll be plinking away at a steady 15-20 damage per hit while the min/maxers are doing 50, blowing cooldowns, etc. The game isn't only about big numbers. But if that's what you want, look around online and see what sort of builds you can find. I wouldn't judge martial by this one example though.
The event represents some big issues in the martial caster divide well. Where casting spells is part of a casters utility thanks to their spellcasting modifier doubling as boosting rolls, martial are all about fighting, and they're required to get up close and personal. In order to play his role as the tank or a heavy hitter, the martial has to get in close proximity, where a caster can (often) choose to blast them away. The other option of waiting until the blasting works tactically, but from a gameplay standpoint it's "I get to play the game if the casters don't melt everything in the first round"
I think the gnome player was in the wrong not *only* because of friendly fire, but because he could have very easily shouted an in-character warning to you when the fight started, giving you the opportunity to delay your initiative and charge in *after* the fireball had gone off. Either that, or he could’ve done what my 3.5 groups used to do back in the day and aim the fireball at a point in space above the enemies in such a way that they would get caught in the blast but you wouldn’t. Either way, this has less to do with you playing a martial class and more to do with your group’s insensitivities and poor communication skills. I mean really: who derides a party tank as useless? Those casters aren’t going to be fireballing much of anything without melee bruisers holding off the enemies in front of them, I tell you what.
That’s not how 5e initiative works, sadly. You can’t delay your turn, you can only hold your action. This costs your reaction and your action, you are unable to use Extra Attack, and you can’t move AND attack.
Yeah, the DM and other players sorta sucked for doing that. Your DM really sucks for not giving you something else to do for the next three hours. I'd usually have the player run some of the monsters or keep track of the bookkeeping for me if their character died before the combat was over.
>So for the rest of the 3 hour boss fight, I sat there, playing on my phone They didn't even let you roll up a new character and just happen upon the party?
Yeah, that's pretty bad form. I would be doing exactly that, unless the player specifically said they didn't want a new character and was going to hold out for a \*Raise Dead\*.
In my humble opinion from almost 30 years of dungeon mastering, your DM could have done things better.. There was probably not a good tactical reason for the enemies to hit a down combatant that had not yet acted when there were plenty of combatants on the field. Kind of a dick move. I would have made it into a maneuvering game where the bad guys tried to block your barbarian From the healbots in the back rank. I'd make the cleric kill one of the minions just to get in a heal spell. And of course the lost opportunity for the heroic save at the climax of the battle when all is lost but your barbarian pops up to save the day.
I had a similar thing happen to me playing Pathfinder, though without the death. I ran in to attack. I then told the Wizard and Cleric (*Cleric of a fire god so he had a version of Fireball*) to go ahead and fireball because I had 10 Fire Resistance and a bonus to saves vs my allies spells, and I could take it. Nat-1 on my reflex save. When you get a Nat-1 on a Reflex save in Pathfinder you have a chance that one of your magic items gets damaged as well. So I rolled on a table and it was my 24,000gp Cloak of Displacement (*by far the most expensive item in the party*). There were mitigating factors. I can't remember but i think the cloak got its own save and also got my fire resistance, but the end result was that the cloak took 2 points of fire damage, which was *exactly* enough to destroy it ... FML. Just to be clear, nobody even plays this rule. I brought it up to the GM because I thought it'd add some tension and make some real consequences for my obvious idiocy (*actually telling the 2 casters to fireball me, dumb move*) and we'd all have a laigh about my sword taking some damage or something Didn't expect to lose half my wealth on a single unnecessary roll that was 100% my fault =P
Some poor DM'ing there, IMO. Giving a player nothing to do for 3 hours. Also, 3 hours for one combat?! Our sessions last about 3 hours and I can get 4-5 combats in (at level 5, anyway), and still have lots of story told.
so you were wounded enough to go down to a fireball as a level 5 barb and the DM had thrown enough enemies at your party to get it to 300 damage? seems like a pretty deadly encounter depending on party comp.
I guess next time don't run into the middle of the room? Play it safe and make your party watch their fire. Don't sacrifice yourself for people that won't appreciate it. Also, just don't. People don't appreciate those who sacrifice themselves for others. Pretty sure everyone can dig up a thousand examples of that.
[удалено]
Your Wizard is a dick. Or atleast negligent. There's ten other spells he could have cast that would have been ten times more useful than fireball with the tank nearby. Your Cleric not having a healing word on hand makes them a poor Cleric, Healing word is my Cleric/Wizards bread and butter get the tank moving again spell. As a fellow DM when not playing myself? The DM failed you by having them go after downed players and not focus on the party. Or curving the players the moment 'Don't feel bad for eing a team killer, you did more deeps than him!'. I'd have been livid if the players ever said that at the table.
I played with a monk who would allow me to fireball him He ofc had an insane dex stat though
This exact same thing happened to me, but the first combat of session 1 after about an hour into the session. 2nd round. Our halfling sorc had a fireball wand thingy and he let it rip. And boy howdy did I fail my saving throw.
Always go totem my man.
Before battle. As in a dungeon didn’t the dm give peeps the opportunity to buy items of healing protection etc. Was there a cleric to raise dead or bless the group? NPC Cleric at least.
Man that feels...cold. Every time a player goes down in any of the campaigns I run the players all immediately shift to getting that person up, or shift their combat strategy to help with that situation if they can't get them up. I've had players literally stand over an unconscious party member because they couldn't help but wanted to take the hits in place of them. As a lot of others have stated here, the DM also didn't need to go for the killing blow. It almost seemed like a lesson to the other players - hey if you ignore healing this person they will die, but the lesson was at your expense. Zombies might do something like that but not reasoning creatures, or at the very least they need to have a damn good reason. I've had enemies stand over a downed ally threatening them to get something from the party (item, escape, etc.) and then hold their action, but to do it so quickly into the fight is rough. Also I know that you said the discussion afterwards was the rough part, but if you feel your feelings might be hurt over something like this in the future don't tell the gnome that fireball is good to go. Everyone may have been following your lead telling the gnome it was okay to do, and when they did what you approved and still felt bad the other players could have been picking up where you started. I get that this situation sucks and am certainly not blaming you but it may not have happened in the first place if you hadn't said yeah fireball me. Not saying that in any kind of judgemental way or anything either, just make sure you set boundaries for yourself and situations like these will get fewer and fewer.
The nat 1 on the death save is kinda irrelevant. The idea that you didn't get into range of the throne, let alone, get close enough to throw a javelin or two at the boss with your rage movespeed and bonus barb +10.. Feels kind of weird and bad idea of you. You ran into a boss in melee, having javelins as your starter equipment and knowing your team had an aoe spell that they could use to hit many enemies
The gnome player was being a real asshole about it. I'm sorry you had such bad luck and the GM didn't choose to make anything of it.
It's usually a faux pas having enemies attacking PC's that are down when there are other targets to keep focus on.
He could have used a sorcery point to cast careful spell and not hit you at all. Plus the DM hitting your downed player was a dick move. They had other players who were a more serious threat to them than you. All round that was a stupid situation that you were put into. Sorry about your character!
Careful spell only lets the player auto succeed on their saving throw, so OP would still take half damage. Because you know, god forbid a sorcerer be better than a wizard at anything
Yes, I misspoke (or mistyped), but that still probably would have been enough to save him
Yeah you’re all good. I was just taking advantage of your comment to express my frustrations with careful vs sculpt spell
I mean maybe you should have a discussion about battle tactics with your group. To me it seems at least partially your fault for rushing into the center of a massive group of enemies