Dungeons & Dragons and the thrill of nearly losing everything in a game
Dicing with danger.
We came this close to a total party kill in Dungeons & Dragons the other day, which means our whole group was nearly wiped out. And it really rattled me. I think it rattled the whole group. Even the Dungeon Master seemed shaken by it, which I didn't expect. And when he told us that in the 12 years he's been DMing, he's never had an entire group go that close to a total wipeout before, I began to understand why. He was convinced we were done for. I think we all were.
Honestly, I never realised a TPK, as the cool kids call it, was such a big deal. Or so rare. I mean, obviously I knew dying was a bad thing, because when is it not? But I'd never thought about what would happen if it did happen, if that makes sense - what would come next. And I'd never thought about it because I never thought it would happen to us, which probably sounds arrogant but I don't mean it that way. What I mean is I never thought it would happen to us because I always believed our DM would save us before it did - find some way to pull us back from the brink. Remember, the DM plays as all of the enemies in the game so really, it's up to them if they kill you. It's by their hand you will die. And that always made me feel safe - until the other day.
The other day, the safety net I imagined had vanished, and in its place was a very concerned-looking DM frantically cross-checking things we couldn't see. He didn't want to kill us, he was just playing the character in the way it was written, which I admire by the way. And I - we - were suddenly facing the very real possibility of losing many weeks of progress in the Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign, and the characters we'd created for it. My stomach lurched.
It was doubly shocking because of the way it came about. No one expected it. For the first half of the session, things couldn't have gone better. We attacked the boss we planned to attack and everything went our way. The dice landed in our favour and the boss fell with only me - a rabbit fighter/monk/barbarian called Thumper (it's a good name isn't it?) - taking any kind of damage at all. Everyone else was fine.
What we hadn't counted on, though, was the old man downstairs. We knew he was there, and we knew he was probably a powerful enemy, but all he'd done so far was slip over on some oil and lie on the ground. That's the sort of thing I'd normally do. To us, he seemed little more than a distraction.
But then he Fireballed. Or rather, he unleashed a powered-up Fireball. And a Fireball is a heck of a thing to face anyway, but when it's pumped up to 10d6 damage (to a maximum of 60 damage), and it lands on characters who don't in some cases have that much health in total, it's potentially devastating. And it was.
The saving grace in a situation like this is usually, as characters in a relatively low-level campaign, that you're not going to face too many Fireballs in a row. An enemy probably isn't going to be able to produce that many before they need to rest. But not this guy. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Four Fireballs in a row he unleashed, and down we went.
Quick note: when you're downed in D&D, you go into death-saving throw mode. Fail three and you're dead-dead. It's the game's way of injecting some urgency into other players helping you up. But helping allies up takes most of your turn, which means you'll probably be unable to attack too, so you'll be on the back foot in terms of the tide of the battle. And once you're on the back foot, it's hard to come back.
I won't go into all of the complications, but everything that had been going so well for us suddenly turned the other way. The chaos storm our flying characters were hiding in became a deadly hazard, because when you're downed while flying, you immediately plummet to the ground, wherever it is. And the ground in this case was the heart of the storm, and that is not a good place to be.
It was in an effort to dive down into the storm, actually, on a downed ally's flying broomstick - a very cinematic sequence I must say - that I also managed to cause another big problem. I let my severed shadow out of my sight (I have some magical scissors) which meant it turned against us, and the last thing we needed in the precarious situation we were in was another enemy to fight.
We desperately clung on. There were many moments I believed we would all die, but the final Fireball on our already half-downed team was the worst. It's no exaggeration to say that if one miraculous dice roll hadn't landed as it did, and that character hadn't survived with the sliver of health they did, then the whole game would have been over and we would be thinking of something else do with our Friday evenings instead.
I share this partly because I'm still thinking about it - I couldn't sleep for a while afterwards because of all the adrenaline. It's actually one of the only sessions I've played where I didn't notice time passing at all; I looked up and it was nearly midnight.
I also share the story because it's made me think about my experiences in other role-playing games, especially video game ones. Do you know what I thought the moment things started to turn on us? I thought, 'Don't worry Bertie, you can always just reload.' Except, obviously, I couldn't.
But I've been so conditioned by saved games and their availability in the adventures I normally play, that I believe I've missed some of the thrill of disaster. It's that desperation that sets in as you frantically try everything you can think of in order to survive. I've gotten a jolt of it from Roguelike games, and from FromSoftware games, but it's not quite the same thing. I'm talking about weeks of progress being on the line.
I know such things exist in video games. I know there are games with permadeath modes for those who are brave enough - or perhaps bored enough - to take them on. I was fascinated recently to read about the permadeath mode added to World of Warcraft Classic which, to me - someone who spent hundreds of hours on characters in WoW once upon a time - sounds terrifying. But also, perhaps, electrifying.
You see, nearly dying in Dungeons & Dragons the other night made me realise something: that more you risk, the greater the reward seems, and that the thrill of an adventure can be directly proportional to what you also stand to lose in it. Danger heightens the whole experience. And perhaps - perhaps - I ought to seek it out more often. Because that near-death experience in D&D the other night? It's a gaming moment I'll never forget.