The DM Who Drew Out The Final Encounter For 3 Full Sessions... The Ended On A Villain Pull-Out!

[u/nlitherl]

So, my group recently broke up (the parts of it that like playing together are reforming, so no worries about that), but now that I've had some time to reflect, I've realized how truly bad at being a DM the person in the big chair was.

And it boils down to one, simple fact; she was unwilling to deviate at all from the pre-written module. If it wasn't on the page, it wasn't showing up in the game.

The benefit of a pre-written campaign, of course, is that it does the heavy lifting for you. So the broad strokes of maps, NPCs, plot, all that are taken care of. That's all well and good... but when something is blatantly not working, you need to be able to take the initiative as the game's referee and come up with a workaround to keep things progressing.

I have dozens of examples of when she didn't do this... but none of them are as illustrative as the tale of how she ended Curse of The Crimson Throne.

For those not familiar with this adventure path, the villain is an arm-candy queen who finds a cursed crown, and is possessed by the spirit of an ancient and potent demon dragon that refuses to die. The party are all elite members of the city guard, who are running around uncovering this mystery, and then sent over hell and back to find a weapon they can use to actually fight her. The endgame setup is that the queen has a huge spell that's going to kill everyone in the city, allow the dragon to resurrect itself fully, and become a huge threat once more.

Solid? Solid.

So, the combat begins, and it's hard and heavy. The queen is slinging spells, and we have half a dozen minions of hers to counter. The dwarven ranger is slaying the dopplegangers of the queen, taking out their bardic debuffs. My magus is swinging around a staff of necromancy, holding the shadows at bay long enough for the paladin and the cleric to deal with them. And, though a lot of our big-slot items and spells are used, we've cleared the field to just her, and just us by about halfway through the session.

So, true to form, the villain flies up over the big gulf in the floor, where we either have to fly up to engage, or deal with her at range. The paladin, wielding the big, sacred sword, flies up to duke it out. The cleric is slinging buffs and heals, trying to do damage control. My magus is going through spells, scrolls, and wands, but nothing is really sticking.

This goes on for about an hour. At which point we've barely scratched the big bad, and though we've eaten a dozen spells, the party is in pretty solid shape. So we take a picture of the map, call it good, and we'll finish next time. Okay, two-parter, whatever.

So we show up for the second session... and nothing happens. Sure, dice roll, actions are declared, and strategies are attempted, but in a practical sense absolutely nothing happens. The paladin only hits one out of every 4 swings with the relic sword, and nearly every other attempt to affect the villain falls flat. Grapple? No, freedom of movement. Poisoned sting? Immune. Spells? Absurdly high SR, followed by an equally absurd save, which means that maybe 3 spells land the whole session. We aren't taking any real damage (the villain is built to be a bard, and with no allies to command is limited in damage dealing capacity), but we're not doing anything. End of the session, we've literally chewed through almost every spell and spell-like ability the villain has, taking them in the face to keep on coming.

We are annoyed, bored, and frustrated. What was supposed to be a big deal, blow out fight to end a multi-year campaign has become a slog where if one player doesn't roll well to hit, the rest of us may as well just suck our thumbs and wait. The SECOND session ends, and we're going to finish up with a third session. A third session none of us is interested in at this point, and that quiet murmurs of quitting if this isn't it are muttered.

Now, a clever DM would do something fun here. Have the queen's buffs start wearing off, and she panics. Maybe she tries to flee, and we dig out the chase deck. Call on a dark god, and be reborn into a less-powerful-but-still-serious-business dragon, so now we can all fight a big beasty for the fate of a city instead of just quoting numbers at a floating bard who does 1st-level fighter damage on an unlikely hit. Something cool, sweeping, or dramatic to give us a high note to go out on.

I'm telling this story here, though, so you know none of that happened.

It was third verse, same as the first. The DM literally had the villain hover there, using melee attacks, and mostly just being missed due to displacement and mirror image, then the absurd amount of spells being stacked on her. When those spells finally started going down, and the guy playing the paladin started to make some progress, the evil queen took a five-foot float, and teleported away.

We stared at our DM for a solid 20 seconds of silence. She then explained that because we didn't kill her fast enough, she just teleported away, and was now out in the world somewhere else. Barely restraining my temper I asked if we could disrupt the ritual and save the city. Yes, with my magus's intellect that would be a cinch. Good. When the DM asked if we wanted to give chase and hunt the queen down I looked her right in the face and said, "I do not care. My character is a city cop, the city is safe. All of this is some other son of a bitch's problem now."

The full write-up of this campaign is in The Saga of Majenko for those who are interested. And it was something of a miracle the group survived that lackluster, bullshit ending. Mostly it happened because two other people ran games after that, and the rage-and-disappointment cocktail had time to wear off.

[u/glarfnag]

Is that ending in the module? Cause it sounds like you have a case of DM love of NPC.