#we have reached the 'dm railroading' portion of the narrative

[frankensteined]

i really feel like there are several other options before this one, bud

[3d10fire-damage]

i gotta ramble

right now i’m kinda concluding that somehow, imogen going super saiyan here is going to revive her downed party members or otherwise undo the events of this combat

because on one hand, yeah if the players make poor choices or just get unlucky then all is fair, if they die then they die and that’s just how it is, but like i dont think they made bad choices, for the most part? they decided, pretty much as soon as they could, that they needed to run from the encounter. that otohan was too powerful and they should not stay and try to beat her. but then running just didn’t work, because between otohan’s legendary actions and her echoes, she was chasing each one of them down in turn and basically downing them once per round.

and the party didnt even go into the fight hurt or tired, really. they had plenty of spells and HP. so they wasted a bunch of time trying to run, which was futile, and then by the time things got real, they hadn’t dropped her low enough to actually get that close to beating her.

and THEN when laudna reached out to otohan about the moon crown thing, and rolled a really good persuasion, it seemed to convince otohan, but then laudna said something slightly wrong i guess, and otohan went and killed fearne anyway. like that high roll didn’t matter. (also like the fact that she saw imogen’s memories about the device didn’t matter.)

so then i’m like, okay this whole encounter hinged on imogen, from the beginning. fair enough. so otohan spends a big portion of the encounter telling imogen to give in to the storm, and it’s like... ANYONE in that position (unless they were playing an evil character or something) would naturally, instinctively, choose to resist. that’s what imogen has been doing this whole time-- running from the moon shit because it’s scary and possibly evil and she doesn’t want to hurt people. to give in, at this point especially considering otohan has only been hurting the party, would appear to be siding with the enemy. turning on your friends. or like, taking a big risk or sacrifice that might not be worth it. and really i dont think imogen knew what giving in would even mean? she didn’t know otohan’s intentions or what would happen if she gave in.

so obviously she kept fighting it. yeah she was rolling wisdom saves, but there’s always a chance she passes those, so if matt intended for imogen to like, auto-fail them to suit the narrative, he wouldn’t have asked her to make those rolls, or she would’ve had disadvantage on all of them. if you compare this episode to the episode where yasha gets taken over by obann, it feels a lot more... loose. i dont remember if yasha still made a roll to save against obann’s mind control, but either way ashley wasn’t going to be at the table for months. this was a much more winding path to get laura to say the magic words.

and after a while, with actual death occurring twice, it kinda felt like there was only one correct choice? or the bells hells just needed to be going full aggro AND rolling really well AND otohan had to be rolling like shit (did she ever make an attack roll under 20? if she did it wasn’t very often).

because when your choices boil down to: 1) you give in to the storm like the legendary NPC says or 2) you keep fighting a losing battle and watch all your friends die because you won’t comply with the legendary NPC...

you’re not actually forced to choose the former... but you would be really fucking inclined to, right?

but i don’t believe matt would railroad them this hard (certainly not on purpose), and i don’t believe he is the type of DM to punish them for making the “wrong” choice by killing the PCs. so in short lmao i guess i’m assuming (hoping) that somehow this ruidus thing imogen is doing can bring back the dead or rewind time or something because ngl i’m gonna be a bit frustrated if we permanently lose fearne and/or orym because of these shenanigans