We had a PC death yesterday morning. Long live Alphonse Saperstein III.

I wish to celebrate this particular death not because I wished for the character to die, but because it created a situation that elicited some quality drama from the players, and they played through it very well.

The party had just bribed a group of bandits in the next room in the dungeon to let them pass so the PCs could just go after the bandits’ leader. Not an unreasonable thing to try, but the bandits decided to take the gold with the intention of going back on the agreement. The bandits went off into a couple of side rooms and told the PCs they could pass, closing the doors behind them. The PCs were clever, and used some rope to secure the doors, trapping the bandits in the side rooms, at least temporarily.

But when the party proceeded to the next room and initiated combat with the baddies there, the bandits pretending to have accepted their bribe broke down the doors and attacked the party from the back. Things went south quickly from there, because Joe’s character, Alphonse, was in the back, and he is (or was) pretty squishy. In the same round that two of the bandits busted down the doors, two of the other bandits (using the gladiator NPC stats from the Monster Manual) charged in with their spears. One of them dropped Alphonse in two strikes, and hit him with a third strike to give him two death saving throw failures.

At the same time, the casters in the next room that they had just triggered the encounter with had both cast spirit guardians, and were pressing the front line of the fight, threatening a lot of damage each turn that they maintained concentration on those spells. The two PCs in the front were very worried about their ability to sustain that damage.

The party quickly proposed that they should find a way to escape. Zack’s character, Thelios, had dimension door prepared, which would get him out with one other party member. Erik’s character, Jaycie, had misty step prepared, and had used wall of force to trap the not-bribed bandits, neutralizing that threat for a while, but still requiring teleportation magic to get past it and back out the way they came in. In total, they had enough teleportation magic to get three of them out, but there were four of them in there.

Thelios argued fervently that they use their magic to get out, leaving Alphonse behind to save themselves instead of dying with him. Others were more reluctant to give up on Alphonse, and I let them hash it out for a while, much longer than I normally allow discussion in combat to go on. This was a big decision that could result in one or more party members dying.

The party agreed that escaping with dimension door and misty step was the right thing to do, but when it came back around to Thelios in combat, Zack started suddenly second guessing the decision. By my read, he still felt bad (as a player) for letting Joe’s character die, and even started wondering whether Alphonse was the right party member to save after all, leaving Bryan’s character Cathan behind instead. This deliberation was appropriate and was fueled in part by the conflict that Cathan and Thelios had had in the past, sometimes involving other life or death decisions.

Eventually Zack decided to stick with the original decision to take Cathan, and cast dimension door to escape outside the hideout.

Then it came to Jaycie, and as Alphonse lie bleeding out in front of her, she realized that the responsible thing to do, before leaving, may be to kill Alphonse herself. If he is captured while still alive, he may be tortured physically or mentally, and the enemy may gain valuable information about the party. (This had happened to them before when Erik’s previous character, Bella, was captured, though the party had presumed her dead.) Jaycie was particularly conflicted about this, because she had been hired to protect this group of adventurers, and killing one of them, even with the best interest of the rest of the party at heart, seemed to fly in the face of her job.

But once again, the hard decision was made, and Jaycie cast frostbite on Alphonse before using misty step to escape the bandits and leave her ally’s cold dead body behind.

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Afterword

I have a little side detail and confession to add. One of my players had a level of exhaustion, and should have been making all of his skill checks with disadvantage as a result, including all of his stealth, perception, persuasion, and intimidation checks he had made. We discovered this error just as combat was starting, and he remarked that he should have rolled initiative at disadvantage too, because it was an ability check.

I said that I would find a way to even things out at some point, and knew already that I would give the bandits advantage on their strength checks to break down the doors. Balancing a forgotten disadvantage by granting an advantage to an enemy seemed fair to me. Would they have broken the doors down without disadvantage? It may have taken one extra round, but they would have made it out. Would that have been enough to save Alphonse? We’ll never know. And if that haunts my players a little more, then I’m alright with that.