Sometimes when I'm in my bed half-asleep, I see blocks of text before my eyes, and errors in the sentences of those texts. And I automatically set forward to fix the errors, and have to remind myself, "no editing in bed." Then I realise I can't edit the errors anyway, because I'm not in front of my computer. And it doesn't matter, because the text isn't real.
It's important to remember that the brain isn't a perfectly functioning apparatus. In fact, it deduces lots of ridiculous things, it plays hell with memory, it gets regularly flooded with chemicals from the hormonal system that goofs up the machinery. Often, we hold our brains in too high an esteem. It isn't reliable. It lies. It experiences system fails. We put up with them, and often ignore the fails, because that's how our brain works. It covers up its own mistakes.
At the same time, as I say often, the brain is a muscle. If we add more weight to the metaphorical mental barbell the brain is lifting, the organ rises to the challenge. It can be taught to handle more and more information, if we go at it patiently and don't throw so much weight on that we get stressed and cognitively injured. The brain isn't strengthened in a day or a year. It takes a long, long time.
On the other hand, if we lighten the load ... if we remove all the weights ... if we exchange the iron bar for a light pine rod, our brain will increasingly grow slack. It doesn't mind not working; and if given the opportunity, it's capacity to push will diminish until it fails to get the body out of the way of a bus. Obvously it helps if we further drown the brain in chemicals and such, but this really isn't the point here.
All this goes to discussing a lot of things we might do in our lives. Being an engineer, a surgeon, a lawyer or an electrician, a researcher, an accountant or an architect, requires a great deal of focus in order to perform at our best. Meticulous attention is needed, which if not given may result in the deaths or injury of people, or in the decimation of their hopes and dreams.
The same rule applies to D&D, though as a DM I haven't killed a real person since the 90s (and it was just that one time), and I rarely cause people to surrender their will to go on living. Still, there's a lot of focus involved, especially as I run a rather more complex system than the usual. I hold myself to a high standard. I expect more from myself and from my players.
However ... mistakes get made. I forget rules. However hard I might try, my brain let's me down occasionally. So it was with Friday's game night.
The session went very, very well. For myself, I felt like my old DM self — plenty of energy, easily handling the group of people, experiencing the flow that makes three hours go by in a finger snap — and when it was done, I was pleased to have found that I could still run a game like that. It's been quite a while.
The players continued to search the huge wrought cavern they'd discovered. Hearing a sound in the distance, the fighter/mage Frederick sent his weasel off across the floor to find a wingless gargoyle wandering the floor hundreds of feet away, who then moved away from the party. The weasel followed, and the party itself moved cautiously after the weasel. It was at that point they discovered the purpose of the forges and the strange apparati lying around, in the form of an unreal magical glowing broadsword, not made of mithril or adamantium, but apparently of gemstone. This proved too cold to pick up, even using a leather gauntlet.
There'd also been some kind of a blast that had killed two dozen drow elves, who were laying about in a state of half-decay, yet bound within envelopes of magic. The party deduced in a meta-game fashion that the oxygen and other chemicals in their bodies were able to bring about some decomposition, but when that had been used up, the degradation had stopped. They were puzzling over this, still concerned about the gargoyle that was out there somewhere (but they'd decided to keep the weasel close), when they found the second gemstone weapon.
This was in the hands of a 7th level drow elf fighter, who had gathered together three gargoyles. And that began a fight that finished the rest of the night, which the players very nearly lost.
The weapon turned out to be a prismatic blade, the light of which destroyed the mithril armour of two characters, in the case of Hof, +1 banded armour. The gargoyles came forward to fight; the 10th level thief Ivan made a dead run into the darkness ... and more than half the party did not have the magic weapons needed to fight the gargoyles.
My gargoyles are quite a lot nastier than those of the original Monster Manual. They have nearly twice as many hit points as the old D&D standard, and cause an average of 30 damage if they hit with all four attacks, compared to the MM's 10. When the battle was over, the gargoyles and drow elf had dealt out more than 200 points of damage to the 8 player characters and 3 henchfolk. In return, they dealt 159. One character, the cleric Makar, died.
Through it all, I forgot to account for the gargoyle's incidental damage. Gargoyles are incredibly heavy weighing up to 4800 lbs., and cause 1-4 or 1-5 damage to adjacent character from the sheer amount of mass that's bootling around. These didn't cause that. If I had remembered the rule, I probably would have killed more than one character.
And with Makar, I goofed to. Makar is a 5th level fighter/cleric, and the party also has Widda, a 7th level cleric. Both have the spell death's door, and often use the presence of the spell as a balm to ease the possibility of a party member dying. However, Makar took a lightning blast from the prismatic blade for 29 damage, then unfortunately got caught in the mage Lovi's fireball, for another 21, which reduced the cleric to -8 hit points, another rule I run. Finally, one last blast as the drow self-immolated himself (he had 2 hit points left out of 56) caused 30 damage in a wide area, which also included Makar ... who died.
And the party used Widda's death's door to revive her and I thought nothing of it.
Except that the minimum damage that Makar could have taken was 15, which would have put her at -23 ... out of the reach of death's door to restore. I failed to notice. Not because I realised it and put it aside, but because my brain was tired, it was midnight, and I just overlooked the rule.
Because the brain is not a perfect machine.
As a DM, it's important to be practical in the standard to which we hold ourselves. We can't remember everything, we can't succeed at everything we try, we can't make every situation work out for the players, whether or not we go at things hard. Sometimes, the details slip away.
This is not our fault. We're human. We're dealing with a lot of stuff here. And when it happens, don't try to fix it. Retconning is never a good idea. Talk about it with the players, make sure they understand which rules were forgotten, so they're not shocked when the rule is imposed properly the next time. Make sure they understand that they were "lucky" and that the gods, however fickle they are, shone upon the party this one time by making the DM stupid.
Then get on with running the game as well as it can be. It's just a game, after all. Sometimes it goes against the party, and sometimes the party catches a break.
I'm going to write other posts about my last running, because there are other things worth talking about. It's going to fill up a lot of my week. Each is going to cover a different aspect of DMing, as I found myself thinking in game time about how I needed to write a post about that thing, when I was able.
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