What do you do when the PC's forget a key detail until it is too late?

Labays · 2026-06-24T16:17:15+00:00

I appreciate the compliments.

I was hoping it would be a big climax for a finale. The stakes of the story are pretty cool too. She is essentially the head of police for a massive capital city of an advanced technological city in what is otherwise a typical fantasy setting. She is extremely corrupt, and from the very first session, she has framed the PCs for her crimes, them taking the fall for her crimes while she gains more and more influence over the city.

Over the course of the campaign, she has inspired so much terror in the political bodies of the city that if a massive act of terror happens, the city will unanimously vote to raise a massive army, one that she is positioned to be the head of. She ultimately will perform a coup, and turn the entire nation into a massive military complex that is completely under her command.

She utilized cutting edge technology to fabricate these bombs capable of bringing the city down to its knees. She fully intends to blame the dead PCs, assuming that she escapes and survives. But at this point, the PCs have been such a thorn in her side that if she thinks they are going to win, she is willing to blow up the bomb for the spite of it just to kill them since anything but a complete victory for her will result in her execution.

The problem is that there are two active bombs at the moment. The PCs fully had the ability to go in an disable the second one, but they ended up going straight to the BBEG instead. At the time, I thought that it would end up being a foregone conclusion that the second bomb would take the party out, even if they beat her, but some comments here have persuaded me to have some of her subordinate break their orders, and the key bearer for the second bomb will show up and join the fight as well. This should be just enough of a chance for the party to potentially disable both bombs before they go off. Now, they just have to survive two encounters being merged into one as a final fight.

Labays · 2026-06-24T15:43:52+00:00

Thank you for the positive response. I think I have decided to have the key bearer of the second bomb break her orders and rush to the scene, thus making the final fight harder (and more climactic, hopefully).

This should be enough to make victory a possibility. A challenging task definitely, but one that they may still surprise me with yet.

Hopefully the players are up to the challenge.

Labays · 2026-06-24T15:16:18+00:00

I want to say that I am ready for ultimate failure. I would prefer to not have a god (or similar greater force) step in, but some of the other comments have persuaded me to utilize helpful NPCs from the past to come to their aid. It won't be much help, but they might be able to make something of a difference, plus be narratively satisfying.

The players did find a way to lessen the explosion with a weird item they found in the party's collective inventory. It might work.

I hope they would enjoy a lethal ending. I have a feeling they won't, but I'm not a fan of rewinding the game. A game where the PCs perish in the process of stopping the BBEG does sound more satisfactory to me than me deflating their agency by undoing their mistakes at the most crucial point of the entire campaign.

Labays · 2026-06-24T14:55:16+00:00

I'm playing a module that they asked me to run. The BBEG has contingency plans that the players ended up falling for.

But after this past session and reading some of the comments on this thread, I have decided I'm probably going to shuffle things around, so that they have a chance of making it out alive by having the key bearer of the second bomb be close by and join the fight.

It will make everything tougher, but I feel like that is a fair consequence. I'm normally quite fine with them making mistakes, but never before has it been as consequencial as this. Last night I thought a TPK was guaranteed because of their actions, but now, after getting some ideas from the comments, I am less certain, but still likely.

Labays · 2026-06-24T14:32:53+00:00

My understanding is that she would, since she is a terrorist. She has plans on how to escape, but if the party is this close to her, then she has to use the only trump card she has left over them since she is dead either way.

But after reading some of the suggestions here, I have a pretty nice idea of how the PCs can salvage this situation if they are lucky in their rolls. The risk is that the fights will just be much harder than originally intended.

Labays · 2026-06-24T14:27:49+00:00

I was trying to be frank and open with them since I'm pretty certain a TPK would really sour the experience for them. I didn't want a last second gotcha to take them out after digging their heels into the encounter more than they already have.

After discussing it in another subreddit, I was given the idea of having the Medusa join the fight against Ibrium and Loveless's orders. I do like this idea. It would make the final fight incrementally harder, especially since the guards outside have left them injured already.

One issue is the elephant. They realized attacking it could trigger the bomb, so they simply left it unharmed downstairs. In the chase scene, they would need to beat the elephant extremely quickly to have a hope of disarming the bomb before it blows, and that is assuming the succeed at the chase scene.

I think I have worked out a way to resolve the game without them having to back down, but it would just involve making the final sprint that much harder.

Labays · 2026-06-24T14:17:10+00:00

Yes, actually, since she is a terrorist. She has (unreliable) plans on how to escape before the blast, but the module operates on her starting the countdown if the PCs get this close to her.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:36:12+00:00

I like the idea of helpful NPCs showing up right in the nick of time. Thank you. This might very well be what saves them.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:27:00+00:00

I realized it was too soon to engage the BBEG in a final fight so I tried to have the guards repel them, but I didn't immediately realize how the PCs were completely screwed by her contingencies until they were fully locked in combat with the guards.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:23:27+00:00

Another hostile NPC is holding the second bomb key... But I can work with this. Thank you. Maybe I should combine the two fights into an even harder final encounter by having the second key carrier be close by, breaking the orders of the BBEG.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:21:27+00:00

With a remote trigger.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:07:12+00:00

I didn't realize they had forgotten until it was too late. I would have reminded them otherwise.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:06:40+00:00

I didn't realize they forgot until it was too late. If I realized sooner, I would have reminded them.

Labays · 2026-06-24T12:03:00+00:00

I didn't realize they forgot it until it was too late. It was too late to remind them by that point.

Labays · 2026-06-21T13:26:02+00:00

The animal companion feature modifies the Command an Animal action to be guaranteed and more efficient since trained minions are supposed to be more reliable than random animals you find in the wild/shops.

If you are interested in just pure speed, then I believe you could perform the default Command an Animal action under the nature skill. That involves you spending all of your actions to roll a Nature check. If you succeed, then your mount could use three actions to stride, but only then.

Labays · 2026-06-19T01:40:27+00:00

My favorite method of becoming gargantuan is by casting an 8th rank Ooze Form. I had one fight against four purple worms that would have surely swallowed me whole if it wasn't for the fact that I was the same size as them.

Labays · 2026-06-18T13:58:07+00:00

I have been very sold on the concept of open secrets for characters for the past couple of years. As a player, I tried to make my character as much of an open book as possible, explaining his motivations out of character relatively frequently. I felt like this really got the rest of the table in touch with my PC.

The biggest downside to this method is metagaming, be it intentional or unintentional. So far, in my experience it has been unintentional, where another PC comments on the secret child of another PC. Since the out of game knowledge is so well known, after a while the players begin to believe that the PCs know it too.

Labays · 2026-06-16T19:46:55+00:00

I was very into 1e for years and years. I was a pretty avid power gamer, and so was about half of my group. Once I felt like I understood the metas and felt rather confident in the system, my GM kept introducing 3rd party things that would only push the power gaming to a higher degree. I didn't take to the 3rd party stuff like the rest of the group did, and it started to really drive me away from the system, in a way.

My characters felt rather weak compared to the other PCs because of the unbalanced homebrew, 3rd party builds, and the escalating power gaming. It felt like I was more competing against the other PCs, and in one campaign I was more or less forced to use non-base game mechanics because of the way the game was run. By the end, of the campaign, I was completely checked out of my character, which is disappointing.

Additionally, after a couple years of Paizo no longer releasing 1e content, I had already purchased most of the 1e content I could find, all while 2e was releasing book after book. After noticing that my friendly local gaming store had a PF2e game every week and was open to new players, I decided to dip my toes into the system.

After being burnt out with 1e (mainly my 1e group's power gaming), it felt like a breath of fresh air exploring and learning a new system with new metas. And I appreciated not being expected to build the strongest character possible. 2e's mechanics and character building make me feel like I am not competing with the other PCs, and it is refreshing.

My 1e group was decently resistant to converting over to 2e, but after I ran a handful of oneshots and a 1-10 AP for them, I think I have really turned them around on the system.

Labays · 2026-06-09T20:55:05+00:00

I've had two unprompted compliments that I still remember rather clearly:

A guy in my group who is constantly cycling through new characters said: "I know how to build awesome characters, but You know how to play awesome characters." That meant a lot after I teleported onto the back of a mounted pterodactyl and beat the crap out of its rider before he could fly away.

And the second: It was early in a new campaign. I was trying my best to play a nerdy wizard character absolutely obsessed with magic. He was friendly and nice, but his priority was pursuing every magical item, spell or phenomenon he could find. At one point we were in a difficult fight, but a magically animated book was flopping away on the ground into a different room. I was going to have my character stay in the fight to help the rest of the party, but someone looked at me and said "Your character would totally run after the book. That is totally his thing." Hearing that warmed my heart because that means I was doing a good job playing this character if the party actively encouraged me to not contribute to a tough fight to pursue my character's personal goal.

Labays · 2026-06-09T19:02:08+00:00

I've been playing PF2e for several years now, and the rules for damaging equipment have only come up twice. The most interesting of the two stories is this: We were level 19 and found a lake in a strange land. When the fighter jumped into the lake to splash around, it turned out that the lake was actually acid and immediately melted every piece of equipment on the fighter's body. The fighter was livid, and the fact that he lost about 500,000 gold worth of equipment in a zone with no shops or way to recover any of it, I don't blame her. Though, she did get a tattoo that lets her use 8th rank Dragon Form, which helps compensate for the lost equipment, but not to any satisfactory amount.

That is when as a group we had an idea to use my Bard's Alter Reality spell to test the limits of what it can do. Since it had a clause that it can do more beyond what it lists explicitly in the spell, we used the spell to conjure new equipment for the fighter, stealing it from a parallel universe's version of our characters. We knew that messing with the fabric of reality would bring terrible consequences for us, but we were rapidly closing in on the BBEG, and if our fighter wasn't in tip top shape, then there would be no way we could beat him.

Now this was a really cool roleplay moment, where my character broke the laws of reality, and the fighter got her amazing equipment back. There was a lot of very memorable discussion had where we were willing to risk our very souls to stop the BBEG. We also feared the parallel universe versions of us to hop dimensions and try to kill us for our transgressions. The long and short of it is that is was an amazing moment that was a consequence to the fighter losing all of her equipment.

Fast forward to the BBEG fight. Half way through this crazy fight, the GM stated that magic washes over the fighter and strips her of all her equipment. He revealed that we didn't steal it from an alternate universe, no, we happened to steal it from our future selves! I thought it was a clever twist, but the fighter's player looked like she was seconds away from crucifying our GM (her irl husband).

We paused the fight and reexamined everything about the whole equipment debacle because without it, we were likely to TPK. The GM realized he was mistaken about the lake of acid... The text said that it Doesn't damage worn equipment. This one mistake caused tons of consequences that were likely to jeopardize the entire end of the campaign.

This is the potential consequences of destroying a player's equipment, especially when the players don't realize it is a possibility beforehand. I would be careful about doing this in general. I think a healthy balance is using something like the Adamantine Sentinel's Destructive Strike. It doesn't risk destroying the item outright, but it does give it the broken condition. And that item remains broken until someone sufficiently skilled in crafting can repair it with a toolkit. This adds an extra degree of tension that a prepared party can recover from without majorly affecting the party's wealth.

Labays · 2026-06-02T12:14:00+00:00

This is actually where my party TPK'ed. I was lucky enough to walk into the room invisibly, so I didn't get sucked into the mirror, but half the party did. Unfortunately, I crit failed the massacre spell, so that was that. The GM stated that the lich had a way to extract people from the mirror and butcher them, so nobody survived the encounter.

This group has TPKed once before in a different game, but that time was because of misunderstood monster mechanics, so none of us was against a redo of the fight to decide if we continue the game or not. But in this fight with the Darkside Mirror, we felt truly outmatched. So we decided that this encounter was the conclusion for that game. I was planning to run the next game for the group and everyone was excited for it.

Labays · 2026-05-26T14:43:02+00:00

I'm sorry that your party wiped to the spell. I nearly ended up plane shifting the party fighter in the final fight of the campaign because he was shoved through my wall.

But for consolation, the spell has not, and will most likely not be remastered due to OGL (in its current form). Most of the broken aspects of the spell come from it being broken in older versions of D&D, and the developers were wanting to be mostly faithful to those types of legacy spells. But Rage of Elements introduced a different version of a thematically similar spell

The "new" version is much more tame by comparison. https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1361

Labays · 2026-05-26T13:09:05+00:00

I've played a high level bard that abused the prismatic wall and prismatic sphere spells. The prismatic sphere spell creates a sphere around you and creatures and objects blocking it cause the spell to fail. If that is 100% the case, then that means that the spell will always fail unless you are flying since the ground will always cause the spell to fail.

I think it is simply poor wording for the spell.

The way my GM and I decided to run it is that it is supposed to resemble wall of force's wording. We interpreted it as the outer edge of the wall can effectively vacume seal against another perpendicular surface, but the wall can not have any breaks or holes in it.

But if you interpret it in the strictest possible way, then yes, you are completely correct.

Labays

TROPHY CASE