Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 lord_sylus Dec 23, 2008 4:15:30	Hi everyone I came here because I had a small dispute with my party at the end of our last session and I doubt my decision and wanted to hear from other people what they thought of the situation. To give a small intro, a 12th level party was on its way to stop a fire elemental from freeing a CR23 dragon, a fact they had discovered and had decided to stop from happening, assuming the worst they thought when they had gotten there that the dragon was already free from his icy prison, but as a matter of fact he was still held captive by the magic there in that only the divine fire from the elemental could destroy. Nut not thinking they entered the cave and planned to ambush the image of the sleeping dragon, a 23rd level dragon isn’t just going to be sitting there sleeping and waiting for a puny party to walk in and destroy it. To keep a long story short they soon discovered that they couldn’t win and decided to flee, the wizard picked up the crispy corps of the priest and headed for the door, thanks to his blink he got through the AO from the dragon and got out, the 13 lvl Archer (near death) decided to launch one last volley of arrows at the dragon and take a potion while the 13th level monk headed for him and they escaped using the monks abundant step, the one flaw in their plan… archers initiative was 23 Monk’s was 7 and the dragon was 20… after receiving damage the dragon had no other choice but to take fiscal action against the strongest of the 2 warriors left (the archer), he then swooped in and attached with his bite (+44 and 6d6+14 dam) and proceeded to grapple the archer (i.a. he started chewing the poor archer) with a +60 grapple check, the monk who had a fly cast upon her by the wizard decided to stick to the plan and swoop in and touch the archer in the mouth of the dragon and zap out of there, me as DM ruled that to do this she would have to make an attack roll with her highest attack modifier (+24) and hit the dragons AC 39 to successfully touch the archer and escape, not an impossible task but in my mind sufficiently challenging to escape from a CR23 dragon. Then the mutiny erupted, the archer thought the number was to high, and so did the monk, they wanted a successful touch attack to be enough (an AC of 6) as 39 was the dragons AC and not the difficulty to touch the Archer, the archer wasn’t dead yet and the monk rolled a 6 hitting an AC of 30 but in my mind that was just to insufficient to get the archer, the next round never happened as the 2 players got very angry thinking I was focusing on the archer to intentionally kill him because he was/is the strongest PC in the party. What do you guys think? if you need more info on the details of the situation just ask but I’m now doubting if what I did was the right thing, in the end it is supposed to be fun, that wasn’t much fun! Thanks for listening and thanks if you comment on the hole thing
#2 etarnon Dec 28, 2008 7:26:31	Hard to say. Personally, I would have let the party escape.
#3 Zyphus Jan 04, 2009 18:17:34	If the monk was more maneuverable than the Dragon and the Dragon didn't have the funky feat to be in a grapple and yet not be in a grapple I would say he needed a touch attack on the archer since that is all you would need to engage in a multi-grapple. Otherwise I would say the Dragon has an object held, so you'd have to do a Disarm like on page 155 of the PH for "Grabbing Items", which is an opposed attack check with an attack of opportunity with some modifiers. A 30 would not beat the +44 even with the penalties the Dragon should get (unless it rolled a 1).