Critical Failure: Insight

So Lair Assault happened last Monday. I had been prepared to continue The Elder Elemental Eye, but for the  first time in a long while new players showed up and they wanted to throw down against the Tyrantclaw, so against my better judgement I caved and decided to try my hand at murdering my players with a horde of orc-mounted dinosaurs.

It sucked.

First, I had not really read the booklet ahead of time. The owner at Knightfall is good at hooking me up with stuff, but I was not on the roster for running Lair Assault. Still it was just one encounter...how hard could it be? (Hint: I forgot to flip the map over on round five and to add an additional dinosaur to each wave.)

Second, a least a few of the players were cheating. A lot. In the spirit of the event I was trying to roll out in the open so that they could see what I was doing, but two were--among other things--using their dice bags and soda cans to conceal attack and damage rolls. I am not sure how a level 6 fighter frequently rolls mid-30's on an attack roll, but after crunching the numbers all I could surmise was that he was using imaginary numbers, a weighted die, or both.

I guess that if there was a highlight, it came about when Kamon asked about the pair of huts on the map, mainly if they could shield him from a theoretical t-rex assault (we had kind of played the scenario before). I flipped the book open to the part on terrain features, and matter-of-factly read the description as follows:

"Characters in the hut gain a +5 power bonus to all defenses and have fast-healing 10. The huts are indestructible and are too small for the t-rex to enter."

Now I have been told that I can muster up a really good dead-pan expression, even while making the most absurd of statements. Thankfully Kamon had known me long enough to pick up when I was making a bullshit statement solely off of what I was saying. He still asked, "Really?" I replied no, and that they conferred no bonuses whatsoever but were pretty darned comfy, what with the firepit and all at the center.

The battle trudged on until eventually the person they were trying to protect turned into a t-rex and started chowing down. The dinosaurs fled, they dropped the last of the orcs, and...then they started booking it for the huts, even at the cost of taking opportunity attacks. I figured that they were hoping to gain some sort of concealment bonus, or perhaps delay it for a bit while it presumably would stop to use an action or two to smash the hut open.

Until they asked me for those "bonuses" again.

On one hand, they had never played with me before. On the other I had assumed that by citing utterly absurd benefits with absolutely no pretense that they would have caught on. That and the fact that I clarified that they did nothing after Kamon asked. Oh well, after two hours of dealing with players who did not know the rules or accurately track their resources, at least I was able to walk away with a story to tell.