The Rise of Tiamat - Chuth, the Green Dragon

Well, it finally happened. The main reason why I started this blog in the first place has reared it's ugly head. Power Score is mainly about telling you what it is like to run an rpg game in a game store and the many things that can make it so unpleasant and difficult.

I will try to be as polite and diplomatic about this as I can. First I'll run down what happened in tonight's game, and then I'll get to the agony.

Our 4th grade buddy Dark couldn't make it this week. Something happened with a book report involving Erik the Red, apparently.

The Party  

•     (Zhentarim) Elf Rogue: In real life, played by Dark's dad.
•     (Zhentarim) Gnome Rogue: Middle Schooler. We joke that his character lives in a garbage can.
•     (Zhentarim) Elf Rogue: Middle Schooler. Often does "combo moves" with the gnome, throwing him at stuff to get Inspiration.
•     (Order of the Gauntlet) Half-Elf Paladin: Middle Schooler. Oath of the Ancients.
•     (Order of the Gauntlet) Half-Elf Fighter: The player is about 25 years old, knows the rules pretty well.

The Second Council of Waterdeep

The heroes looted Arauthator's lair. I threw in some magic items they'd missed from Hoard of the Dragon Queen, including the wand of winter and a bag of holding (everybody loves bags of holding).

Laeral Silverhand

They returned to Waterdeep and took part in the second council of Waterdeep. I had the factions react to what the PCs had done (some of them were mad that the heroes killed Varra the White). Ontharr Frume was not happy to see Maccath the Crimson, as he does not want to associate with the Arcane Brotherhood.

The adventurers received their next mission: Go to the Misty Forest and investigate a green dragon attacking elf settlements.

The heroes also met Elia, the woman with silver hair (they learned her secret way back in Hoard). She wanted to take the heroes to meet with the leaders of the metallic dragons soon.

Lady Silverhand, the new ruler of Waterdeep and a powerful wizard, teleported the heroes to Daggerford. From there, it was a relatively short trip to the Misty Forest.

Along the way I had the heroes stumble on a destroyed caravan, just to impress upon them the fact that the cult of the dragon is starting to run roughshod all over the Sword Coast.

The Misty Forest

The heroes came to a Misty Forest village called Altand. One of the players wanted this to be where his elf came from, which was cool. The heroes met his mother and cousin (who he came up with names for). The hero decided to leave the dog he'd adopted in Boaresky Bridge with his mom, which is a cool idea.

The deal in the village is that the leader cut a deal with the dragon and the wyrmspeaker - if they spared his village, he'd help them pick out other settlements to raid and destroy.
 
Our heroes figured this out very quickly. The guy has a pet raven. The gnome can talk to birds and small animals. The raven told him what was going on and the leader was exposed.

The leader, Galin, told the heroes where the dragon and wyrmspeaker were based out of. The adventurers headed out.

Along the way, there's this druid. She wants to see if the heroes are worthy of her aid against the dragon. So she has an "awakened tree" (like a treant, I guess) lie on her leg. As the heroes approach, she called out for aid. If the heroes helped her, she'd give them these magic garlands.

Well, our heroes came upon this scene and smartly scoped out the scene with perception, insight, you name it. They saw that the lady was a druid, and that there were some awakened trees about, including the one that was "pinning" her leg. It was very suspicious.

They left her there!

This was quite a development. If they had saved her, she'd give them the garlands, which would protect them from the dragon' spies. Without the garlands, the dragon will know they're coming and will attack them at the entrance of the lair!

The heroes got close to the lair and ended up in a battle with ettercaps and giant spiders. It is hard to hit the paladin, and he has some cool gimmicks to prevent bad guys from hitting his allies. He is a very good player.

The Dragon's Lair

The adventurers came to the lair. There was a waterfall that disguised a tunnel that led inside. Because the heroes didn't have the garlands, the animals of the forest had warned Chuth, the green dragon that they were coming.

Again, the heroes smartly surveyed the scene. It was quiet. They noticed a lot of small animals and birds watching them, nervously. Suddenly, the green dragon exploded out from behind the waterfall and took flight!

It used it's frightening presence, which hit only a single PC thanks to a new power the paladin has. It clawed and bit a rogue, dropping him unconscious. Chuth, the dragon, hovered in the air, breathing poison as the heroes fired arrows at it.

The paladin healed the rogue. Many of the PCs fled to the tunnel on the other side of the waterfall. The tunnel was steep and wet from the mist, so the heroes had to be careful not to fall.

What ended up happening was that the paladin stayed outside... alone... while the heroes popped their heads out of the waterfall and made ranged attacks.

The paladin then used misty step to teleport onto the dragon! He held onto it with his shield hand and legs, and stabbed at it with his sword (making dex checks to stay on it). This allowed the rogues to get their sneak attack damage!

The paladin wanted to cast a spell, but I noted it had somatic components, which meant he'd have to make hand gestures. He could try it, but he'd have to make a dex check or lose his grip on the dragon and fall. He decided not to cast.

In the tunnel, the gnome spotted a guilty-looking squirrel. The gnome can talk to small animals. The squirrel said, "Sorry. I had to tell Chuth you were coming!"

The squirrel explained that Chuth makes the animals spy for him on threat of death.

When Dark's dad found out about this, he impaled the squirrel on his arrow and fired it into the dragon! And he hit! It was awful and utterly hilarious.

The dragon was hurt bad ("bloodied" in 4e terms). The adventure says Chuth runs away when reduced to half of his hit points. It was time for it to flee... with the paladin on it's back!

I had a hard time deciding if the dragon could use it's legendary actions, like the tail attack, to try to knock the paladin off. I decided not to partly due to the torrent of complaints I was enduring at this point (I'll explain below).

Instead, the dragon flew up in the air... 170 feet... then 250. It was so far away from the rest of the party that the archers had disadvantage to hit it. Their shots all missed.

Then, on the dragon's next turn, I had it try to shake off the paladin. I made it an opposed strength check. I rolled a total of 20. The paladin had a +3 to his roll. He failed.

The paladin fell 250 feet, taking 96 points of damage! Amazingly, he did not immediately die. He landed in a tree and rolled death saves... he was unconscious.

The dragon flew away and the heroes tracked down their friend and rested, healing him.

It was awesome, I thought. But here's the part I left out.

"It's Not Fair"

As the dragon fight got underway, the guy who plays the fighter began to seethe. He was mad that the dragon was flying. He has Hazirawn, the sword that does a lot of damage. But because the dragon is up in the air, he has to make weak ranged attacks.

He got angrier and began to rant about it. He said dragons are "broken".

I said, "Well, it has to get adjacent to make claw attacks. You can hold your turn until the dragon comes down, and then run over and hack at it."

He said, "Yeah, but then he's just going to fly back up!".

He means that he's upset that he can't slice into it with Hazirawn every round. It's "unfair" that he can't do massive damage to the dragon every round.

He kept going on about how horrible it was, and everyone was getting uncomfortable. This fight was awesome, but his complaints were souring the mood at the table. The guy who fell 250 feet and took 96 damage wasn't upset. The guy lurking safely in the tunnel was.

I said, "You could lure it into the cramped tunnel and melee it."

He said, "Yeah, but then we're sitting ducks for the breath weapon!"
 
That's where I started to lose it. I have heard this kind of talk over and over and over again since I started running public D&D games in 2008.

I said to him, "Life is not fair. It is just a game."

He did not acknowledge this comment. He said, "I am calling customer service! It seems like in every edition there's some broken thing like this."

He means that he is going to call Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Dungeons & Dragons, to get an explanation as to why dragons fly and use breath weapons rather than land next to you so you can slice them with your cool sword.

We had ten minutes left, but the other players looked at me with pleading eyes and asked if we could end it there. Unbelievable. This guy had ruined my game.
 
This player is very nice. He's fun. He knows the rules well. He has a lot of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, I think that he has a mindset that about 20% of D&D players have:

• They can't handle "unfair" adversity.
• Usually they can't handle rolling low on their dice. 
• They can't control their anger and it ruins things for everyone.

These people should not play D&D, because they do not enjoy it. They need to go do something else.

Steve Winter Speaks

I was reading some comments made by Steve Winter, one of the authors of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Here is what he said, talking about the duel in chapter one of Hoard:

"A mistake (from my perspective) that many people seem to be making is assuming that every situation in D&D should be "fun." If my ambition is to have nonstop "fun," I'd be better off playing Lego Star Wars or Whack-a-Mole. D&D can also be thrilling, frightening, inspiring, maddening, depressing, frustrating, immensely gratifying -- name a reaction on the human emotional scale and there's probably a place for it in D&D. The match against Cyanwrath was never meant to be "fun." It was meant to trigger an emotional response -- anger, even hate, and a desire for revenge against the Cult of the Dragon. I haven't seen much to indicate that it isn't doing that.

Steve Winter"

I read this quote a few days ago. I almost yelled out loud. "Depressing"?! "Frustrating"?! I immediately thought to myself, "He obviously hasn't run any public games lately". I'm not saying he's right or wrong, I'm just saying some players can not handle his style of D&D. To them, each encounter has to be balanced, they have to look awesome, and they sure as hell had better roll well.

I'm going to have to tell this player to either deal with it or join another table, because there's going to be a ton of dragons from here on out and this is only going to get worse.