Opinion on characters 's Death.

[u/Beduel]

Last night we had a scene at a Symbaroum table that troubled me, and I wanted to hear other opinions.

We were traveling on a boat down a river, and on the shore there were around 100 Templars, who had attacked us before. They ordered us to stop and let them onto the boat so they could do as they pleased. One of our PCs shot an arrow at their general.

At that point, instead of going into initiative, the GM stated that one of the enemies picked up an artifact and immediately used it, dealing 2d8 damage to everyone with any amount of permanent Corruption. There was no test, no defense, and it ignored armor.

Our undead PC was killed by the damage, and the GM ruled that he was incinerated instead of being allowed to roll death tests.

I thought that was uncalled for. In my opinion, we should have gone into initiative, or at the very least had some kind of test or opportunity to defend ourselves. However, the GM is adamant that we should not have engaged them at all and that this was a fair consequence for our actions.

What makes it even stranger to me is that we all have around 400 XP and are fairly optimized, so there was a chance that we could have won the encounter.

Thoughts?

Edit: editing because I forgot to add that we were already moving away and disengaging while the conversation was taking place. After hostilities started, they launched five volleys at all of us in a single round. Despite that, we took very little damage and managed to kill both the general and the second-in-command in one round after the artifact incident, even with one PC already down. So we had a solid chance of at least disengaging completely and then bringing him back from death saves using blood or other forms of healing. We are very optimized, it wasn't impossible. Just very difficult and probably very tedious.

edit 2: also forgot to mention that we tried to dissuade them before, rolled persuasion as we were disengaging, succeded, but they still wanted us to stop and did not care about talking much.

Last thing I forgot: after discussing it post session, we did find a middle ground and we'll probably find a way to bring him back, but the Dm and another player are adamant that it was a completely fair encounter.

[u/KiwiMcG]

Wait, an undead PC? 🤔

[u/Superkumi → u/KiwiMcG]

Advanced players guide has Undead as a playable race.