Let’s Play EoTB 2 #18: Corridors and Confrontations
203As if beholders and their powerful eye beams weren’t bad enough, Valendra and the party also have to deal with puzzles as well. Granted there isn’t the ‘can’t sleep’ mechanic that was on the lowest floor but there are still a fair few enemies that hit hard or worse, reduce a party member to a pile of dust. Raise dead doesn’t work on people that have been disintegrated and we don’t have ready access to resurrect, trapped as the party is. Even if they weren’t trapped I think we only have one more use of the spell in the altar of resurrection by the entrance, meaning that the party wouldn’t be able to survive multiple disintegrations. The group will need to use all their wits and resources to try and prevent disaster from happening and somehow find a way out of the tower with what they seek from there.
That’s not the worst of the group’s problems however as party conflict has emerged between Sandstar and the others. Even in parties where everyone is the same alignment, disagreements will emerge over a variety of things. Be it the next course of action, what to do with something they’ve found or how to treat a foe who has surrendered, there’ll be differing opinions and sometimes that’ll become an argument or possibly worse. Debate and even arguments are not a problem in themselves, but in a tabletop game they can sometimes bleed past the game and into stuff outside of it, becoming a full-on argument between players rather than between characters.
A good DM will work to stop that from happening and diffuse the situation as best they can so as to prevent the session from falling to anarchy and more importantly, to ensure that people don’t fall out over the game. Sometimes however a player will try to use the session as a thinly veiled excuse to argue and vent against another player using their character as a puppet for their own words and when that happens, your options are limited. If the player/s can’t leave their grievances out of the game isn’t sometimes best to remove them from the game itself, a decision that’s never easy to do. I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had to do it myself as a DM, but I’ve read a lot about people that have and while it often ends badly, it’s still better then letting it rip a group of friends apart for the long and possibly forever.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kikoskia
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kikoskia
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/X2YUmPh