However if you read the paladin handbook carefully you notice that there are situations where a paladin can break certain codes without it actually being considered an ethos violation. Under these particular situations the paladin would have been allowed to retreat under the condition that he manage to take at least on downed member of the party with him (presumably the weakest one and most likely female) since doing so would not be an act of cowardice and might even be considered courageous since fighting an equal or even slightly superior adversary would carrying a wounded comrade to safety would be extremely difficult.
In addition to this the act might have provided a great potential for role-playing:
The noble paladin, having be forced to retreat in battle and leave several of his wounded and dying companions would certainly be brought to trial to face charges of acts unbefitting a member of his order. The paladin, feeling guilty at not having been able to save all his friends, would refuse to defend himself at trial, describing his acts blandly and offering no evidence of circumstances the might mitigate the situation, he simply awaits his elders decision and readies himself for the inevitable conclusion of the trial. However at the last possible moment, the single companion he managed to save would come stumbling into the courtroom (again a female character would have more of an effect), limping and cradling her injured arm, the young page assigned to watch over her helping her upright and at the same time pleading for her to return to bed saying that she was only making her injuries worst by walking around, but the young woman, stead fast in her desire to protect the paladin who risked his life, and more importantly his honor, to save her, refuses to listen and pleads the court to listen to her, where upon she delivers a moving speech about the paladin’s great piety and honor, city numerous deeds he has performed and tells them of how he risked his life to save her and how it was only her terrible wounds and the certainty that she would die would immediate help that prevented him from going back in to try and save the others.
That’s just and example of the kind of rp that can happen under these situations. The paladin’s handbook set several specific guidelines, but leaves a lot of gray area in between. In the little scenario I gave above there are three outcomes:
- The judges refuse to consider the woman’s testimony and exact a punishment on the paladin befitting his crime; possibilities include casting him out of the order or even executing him. There are various reasons why the judges might do this, the woman might not be lawful good, something might cause a series problem if she’s neutral or chaotic (paladin’s never associate with evil characters), the paladin might have been courting her which would almost automatically render her testimony suspect (a man who fleas from an enemy is surely capable or getting his lover to lie for him), or it might simply be the fact that she’s a woman, and has no power or say in this society.
- The judges accept her testimony, are still bound by the laws and punishments of their order and are forced to punish him not matter what the circumstances might have been. Possible consequences might be a month in the dungeon, loss of family estates, loss of rank, or he may simply get a slap on the wrist where the judges feel he doesn’t have to be punished, but must do so anyway. Some of these possibilities included chores (perhaps having to attended to him wounded comrade until she recovers) or perhaps having to spend his nights patrolling the city streets for a month.
- The judges accept her testimony and he’s off the hook. The paladin might feel that he still deserves to be punished for his actions (and might seek penance for them in private), but he is too well mannered to show anything but endless gratitude at the woman who risked her life to defend him.
Since I was offline for a few days I didn’t get a chance to post anything about the description of the trip in the dungeon, so I’ll do it now.
It seems obvious to me that your DM wanted to try something different, magic is a serious problem with all DMs; it tends to throw the entire fight balancing equation out of whack. A small number of strong creatures don’t really pose a problem to the fighters in the party since they can usually match them blow for blow or just about. On the other hand a large number of weaker creatures pose a greater challenge since the enemies get more attack against a greater number of targets while the fighters have to spread out their attack. However what do you do when the mage casts a fireball, gets a few lucky rolls and ends up seriously damaging the enemy party or killing a large number of them out right? What are you left with? A small number of weak creatures, which pose no trouble to the players; the problem is that while mages are extreme weak when it comes to physical combat and can usually be killed fairly fast by a monster with a large sharp or pointy object, they tend to do a great deal of damage before they go down, and when you reach higher levels, they just don’t die as fast and end up doing even more damage. Which just makes the balancing even harder since you might get a situation where you factor in the mages spells, and then by some maddening twist of fate he ends up dead on the first round from a stray arrow, now your left with monsters that can easily wipe out the players.
I don’t know if your DM has had problems in the past with your mages taking out large chunks of his monsters so I what he reasons were, but he obviously wanted to get around the problem of magic, even for a little while.
The magic dead zone is one of those strange and wondrous ideas that just calls out to DMs and tempts them to try it out. The problem with magic dead zone, is exactly what it says it is, it’s a magic dead zone, meaning that no magic what so ever will function in there, that includes arcane spells, clerical spells, scrolls, wands, magical weapons, even spell like abilities (e.g. a beholders eyes will not be able to generate magical effects), some DMs even include godlike powers since they’re inherently magical. Under the effect of a magic dead zone, everything acts as a non magical item, a holy avenger +5, is effectively a normal long sword, a wand of barkskin is a short pointy stick, a scroll is a useless piece of paper (however if it is read it is still used and crumbles to dust, the spell cast it simply has no effect.) and a fireball is just a pinch of smelly bat guano. There are however two notable exceptions to the magic dead zone rule, certain psyonics abilities and natural abilities. Since these two types of abilities are fairly rare DMs then to forget them, which seems to be what happened to you. Psyonics, which attack the target’s mind directly, will still function, this makes mind flayers extremely deadly in magic dead zones, however psyonics, which have an effect on the physical world usually don’t work (some DMs make exceptions). The other type, which is the one you faced is the natural ability, the problem is that its hard to tell the difference between a natural ability and a spell like ability, but here’s a few example to give you an idea. A medusa’s gaze will petrify inside a magic dead zone (the medusa’s gaze itself is the petrifying agent), a beholder’s disintegration gaze will not work (the gaze itself is not the disintegrating agent, it’s the beam generated by the gaze). A white dragon’s ice breath will work in a magic dead zone (the breath attack is the result of a chemical reaction inside the dragon’s body), an ice golem’s ice breath will not work (the creature is artificially created and animated by magic and it thus possesses no “natural” abilities, actually the creature itself would become dormant the instant it entered the field and would remain so until it was physically removed from it by an outside agent). I know it’s confusing but you get used to it.
In your case it just so happens that both creature’s abilities fall into the natural ability (although the Bodak is stretching it a little). The gorgon’s breath attack is obviously a natural ability, just like the dragon mentioned above the effect is generated by a chemical reaction inside the creature. Like I said the Bodak is stretching it a little, the death cloud could be considered both a spell like ability and a natural ability, and technically its both. Under normal circumstances it’s usually considered to be a spell like ability, however it the case on undead you can make an exception. Since undead occur naturally in adnd, all be it extremely rarely without the involvement of some form of spell caster, and since they are dead it can be said that toxic gases build up inside their bodies from the interaction of their decaying flesh and their animating forces and that some might have the ability to release this gas without replying on any magical means, the normal rules might not apply to them. That means that the death cloud, annoying as it is, is still in.
So you can see that in theory there’s nothing wrong with the DM’s choice of creature inside the magic dead zone, even if I do think that the Bodak was overkill (no pun intended). However what your DM seems to have problems with is during fights. Creatures with natural abilities won’t necessarily use them under normal circumstances, most if not all natural abilities are limited in how often they can be used, either being available X times her day or being usable once every X rounds, also just because a creature has an ability doesn’t mean it’ll always use it, some creature have absolutely devastating abilities, which should almost never be used (some greater demons can gate another greater demon to their location with 100% success rate, and that demon can gate in another, and then another) and the death cloud certainly seems to be like one of those. That the creature chose to open the battle with it is understandable, it wanted to remove as many targets as possible as fast as possible, its sad when you fail you saving throw, but it happens. However I found it idiotic that the DM would have it use the same ability every round, when the end result was almost obviously the annihilation of the entire party, not only is it unlikely that the creature would have that many uses of an ability so quickly, but a creature would almost never waste all their special attacks on a single party of adventures (with the possible exception of a dragon, and even they would only use it as a last resort). It also seems strange to me that even after he noticed that the party was loosing badly that he continued to use the same ability or even continue combat, battle is a chaotic environment, unexpected things happen, instead of killing the paladin he could have had the Bodak slip on something or accidentally over extend itself, leaving it exposed and allowing the paladin to kill it. He could have then simply given out XP based on the % of life the creature had remaining, or none at all. But destroying the party seems to be like going a bit far.
DMs do accidentally kill their parties occasionally and usually completely unintentionally, sometimes you just over estimate the strength of the party or underestimate the strength of the enemy, or you might simply have a perfectly balance fight which is ruined by a few very lucky rolls. Its happened to me, one time I had my level 6 party fighting 7 gray draws, I rolled four 20s, two 19s, and an 18, worst of all I rolled max damage on all of the 4 critical and each character took at least one critical, I ended up kill the entire party in a single round, and they were all full when the round started. I’m guessing something like this happened in the second fight, the DM simply didn’t take into account the diminished strength of the party, he probably gave you what he expected was an easy fight and was simply dumbfounded when you got yourself creamed. You know what you do in these situations? You gives each other bewildered and confused looks, pick up the dice and says something along the lines of “I didn’t see that.” Or you can jus think back to something that happened a little before, touching a door, stepping though an archway, getting out of bed that morning, and say something like this, “You feel a sudden wave of dizziness overcome you and a terrible sense of dread, you died, you felt the sharp icy chill of steel being driven into your chest, you felt every instant as the life slowly drained from your body, choking on your own life’s blood. It all seemed so real, was it a vision, a dream…?”
Anyway, it seems to me that your DM has more trouble running his battles than DM, that’s not story telling, that’s accounting ;). All he really needs to fix this is to be a little more generous with your during fights, think back to all those classic rpg villains who retreat when they’re just about to finally destroy the heroes one and for all. It may be clichéd but it works.
Yeesh. My GM is sadistic, sure, but he never made us face anything we were almost positive to get killed by. He always just did the ones that would test our 1337 gaming skillz.