D&D 5E When it all goes wrong

James Gasik said:

I considered the design of the Duergar sector. It had been set up with roving patrols (random encounter) and there were several more major encounters ahead. But now that the Duergar had the party trapped I realized there was going to be a super encounter that would surely kill them.

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So, I know you aren't looking for advice, but there are some thoughts that go here.

It sounds like you had the Duergar react to a cave in as if the area was clearly going to be entirely stable, and that their biggest concern was going to be a few people with swords. Might I suggest this as a questionable choice on your part?

How did the Duergar know the PCs were even alive? Why are they not concerned with the potential collapse of a larger area? Why are the Duergar set up for battle, instead of set up to work shoring up the damaged tunnels?

There are no rules for how cave or dungeon systems react to cave-ins, so you get to decide that. If you wanted a reason to not have it be a super-combat encounter, you had an excuse to make it a more moderate encounter, with environmental hazards.

James Gasik said:

The party had a rough time with the CR 1 Duergar I'd put in their path, supported by a caster.

Was the second encounter too brutal? Should I have not used one of the monsters the adventure provided (an Umber Hulk, which proved to be way more deadly than I expected).

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The PCs were having trouble with CR 1 creatures? The Umber Hulk is a CR 5. Yes, it was probably too much.

James Gasik said:

Is there a problem with the encounter design? Was the encounter builder lying to me about the fight difficulty?

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We can't really answer that, not having seen the details. However the encounter builder is a guideline. Its assessment must be reviewed with an eye to what the PCs can really do.

James Gasik said:

Should I blame the PC's for not coming up with a better plan (I'd told them they'd need one last session)?

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At what point - you mean a plan for as they came out of being buried? How on Oerth could they make a good plan for that, not knowing what was going on outside?

James Gasik said:

But at the same time, when I only have 5 hours every two weeks, a session like this doesn't feel like it's really advancing the adventure either. Anyways, that was my experience

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Is "advancing the adventure" something you all agree should happen?

Someone had the idea for the roof to cave in - we don't know if that idea came form the players, you, or the published adventure. If the latter most, well, then dealing with the cave-in is advancing the adventure, by definition.

If it was you or your players, that's inserting something that was obviously and surely going to keep you from otherwise advancing the adventure for a while. So, if you find that this detracted from play, maybe be careful about what complications get inserted - maybe make them ones that drive the players towards the other adventure content, rather than keep them from it.

I'm struggling to understand what the problem is.

The party went into a dungeon with duergar, and ended up exploring part of the dungeon and fighting duergar. What other expectation was there that isn't being met?

It may be something you want to discuss in session 0 and how you run the game. I see nothing wrong with what you did, taking an 8 hour rest in enemy territory wouldn't end well in my game either.

At the point where all was lost, the only thing I may have done is have a sidebar. Take a timeout, discuss with people at the table what they want to do next. They could be taken prisoner (they were knocked unconscious, not killed) with a chance to escape if they want to continue with these PCs.

Other than that? It doesn't sound like you stacked the deck against them, it was just a series of poor decisions on their part. Only caveat is that judging difficulty of encounters can take a session or two because it always varies by group. If I've obviously misjudged it's one of the few cases where I'll pull punches a bit by delaying reinforcements or making an easier escape route available.

The big question of course is did the players have fun? Did you? Talk to your players and discuss what happened and why, do adjustments need to be made on either or both sides of the DM screen? Nothing beats having an open discussion to iron these things out.

I think the encounter difficulty is a very loose guide as it is highly situational and dependent on the PC build, the party level of teamwork, the table style/social rules and the players experience, tactical knowledge and mastery of the game.'

These variables can make an "easy" encounter deadly and a "deadly" encounter a piece of cake and that is before you even consider the dice.

Sorcerers Apprentice said:

D&D really needs mechanics to let the PCs be defeated in combat but not all die. Retreating or being taken prisoner allows the story to continue even if the bad guys won this fight, but the system makes a TPK the most likely result if the PCs lose in combat.

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This works with some players, but not others. Some players would rather die and roll up a new character than have their character imprisoned or lose their goods or something like that.

James Gasik said:

I'm going to preface this with the fact that, while there are probably things I can do to prevent these kinds of scenarios, and that certainly I may have made some bad DM choices, I'm not really asking for criticism or advice (though you can certainly provide either at your leisure!). Nor am I asking for sympathy, though I'm sure many of us has been here. I've had a few sessions not go the way I wanted them to lately, and I feel the need to share the experience with anyone who cares about such things.

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I know you said you're not looking for feedback, but I'm glad you posted this. I'm a newer DM, and I really like to try and analyze my sessions as well.. Look for lessons to learn from and what not. So I'm going to reply to some of the stuff you wrote about mostly as an exercise for myself, but perhaps it help you as well. I hope you don't mind.

James Gasik said:

Two weeks ago, my players encountered Duergar in a small dungeon. After a Medium and a Hard encounter back to back, they were trapped by a cave-in. I told them they only had enough air to take a short rest before they would have to unbury themselves, but they came up with an ingenious idea and so were able to take a long rest.

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What did they do that was so ingenious, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious because I've tried to take a very "Go-With the Flow" kind of approach, and I'm often in a position where I'm allowing myself to be pleasantly surprised by my party.

James Gasik said:

So they extricate themselves from the cave-in, fully rested, having recruited three NPC prisoners to join their cause to find that the Duergar had sealed off the immediate escape route to funnel them towards what I hoped would be a hard encounter with either a short rest before the next one, or a chance to negotiate with the leader to avoid it entirely.

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I ran into this recently too.. In "The Sunless Citadel" my party sided with the Kobolds, and recruited a squad of six kobolds. This is fun.. But ultimately something I think I'm going to try and prevent in the future.

James Gasik said:

That's not what happened. The party had a rough time with the CR 1 Duergar I'd put in their path, supported by a caster. During the fight, one player thought it would be a great idea to run past the checkpoint, where they blundered right into the second encounter. Seeing a lone, wounded PC, the leader decided to press the advantage and so the second encounter started with some stragglers from the first and the party on the back foot.

They won, but it was a very close thing, and the whole production took up most of the game session (4.5 hours). Everyone was exhausted afterwards (IRL and in game) and while they earned a ton of xp for their troubles, I've been second guessing myself the whole time since. Should I have just let them retreat rather than force these fights? Did I give the Duergar too much of an advantage to prepare for the party? Should I have used weaker tactics or not put the spellcaster in the first encounter? Should I have held back even when the lone PC ran past the chokepoint?

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See this is tough. You try very hard to make your dungeon seem like a logical, realistic ecosystem. These creatures are living here, and working here. The Duegar want to win.. So it makes sense that they would prepare, knowing there is a band of adventures here to take their stuff.. Especially if they have 8+ hours to do so. I'm currently wrestling with this myself. My last session ended with the party retreating after a winning a tough fight to rest and lick their wounds in the Kobold controlled portion of the dungeon.. So this should mean that the Goblins will notice their guard forces have been murdered, and they will prepare to retaliate, or at the very least bolster their forces right?

As far as doubting the spell caster, I wouldn't.. Having spell casting mobs is a must in a lot of combats for me. It gives the encounters so much more variance, and it really amps up the stakes for the party. They have no idea what spells this enemy has in the tank, so every turn they let the caster survive is a very risky roll of the dice. It's too fun to not include.

James Gasik said:

Was the second encounter too brutal? Should I have not used one of the monsters the adventure provided (an Umber Hulk, which proved to be way more deadly than I expected). Is there a problem with the encounter design? Was the encounter builder lying to me about the fight difficulty? Did the inclusion of NPC allies just make the proceedings take longer?

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Encounter builders are tough, because they can't really factor in the dice. A deadly encounter can end up trivial if the party rolls fire all night while you're stuck throwing single digits, and visa versa.

NPC allies do make proceedings take a lot longer.. Just more bodies in general. Unfortunately with the way the action economy works bodies are more important than HP it seems.

James Gasik said:

Should I blame the PC's for not coming up with a better plan (I'd told them they'd need one last session)? When one player ran late, should I have weakened the encounter? I have the power to adjust things "off-camera" as it were, if the players don't know how many foes lie ahead, I can always swap things around. Whether or not a DM should has always been a hot debate- whether to treat the game as a game or a world that doesn't adjust itself to the players- I try to use a combination of both approaches, and even if the PC's know exactly what lies ahead, Orc #6 could always be sick that day, desert, go to the bathroom, or slip off to hook up with his lady friend, right?

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I have trouble with this as well. The world doesn't revolve around the PCs, or at least I don't think it should. I had an early session where my party was missing a player, and they got into a really tough fight they barely escaped from with their lives. One of the players asked me after the fact if I re-adjusted the fight to accommodate for them being down a player and I truthfully answered no. I actually hadn't even thought of it, and in hindsight I'm glad I didn't.

Maybe Orc #6 could have been sick that day.. But at the same time.. The Orcs don't know that Randy the Wizard is going to be sick that day either right? If they think they should have four bodies guarding the door, they have reasoning for that, and "We expect this party of five players to show up. If one of them doesn't Dave can take a half day" doesn't jive with me.

James Gasik said:

I don't think there is an answer here- no matter how carefully you plan, things can go wrong- you're rolling dice, and in the heat of the moment, both the DM and the players can make wrong decisions. Maybe I should take pride in the fact that the players did succeed, and the game can proceed- certainly, a TPK would have been the worst possible outcome!

But at the same time, when I only have 5 hours every two weeks, a session like this doesn't feel like it's really advancing the adventure either. Anyways, that was my experience

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I agree with this the most.. Ultimately I think the party almost dying but squeaking out with the win is the best case scenario. That's heroic fantasy in my mind.

But yeah.. I'm having a heck of a time right now because we've had two back to back sessions where I feel like we've made zero progress just because of these crazy fights taking up whole sessions. Session three is likely going to be the same.. And I'm hoping we can finish the adventure in the next one. Part of me wants to make the fight easy and quick to move along the story, but that feels like it would be less satisfying, albeit in a different way.

I don't think you did anything wrong. Hopefully in the grand scheme of things this adventure will be memorable for the players because it was challenging and they were successful, and they will forget about it being long and potentially a little tedious.

I don't think anything really bad happened here. That sounds like a blast! The party working together so cohesively that they managed to take a dire situation and turn it to their benefit (the short rest to the long rest) and went at a group at full strength. I think it would have been a lot worse if they had of just taken the short rest and then this happened.

You're right in that you can only plan for so many things to happen as a DM. You can really only plan for: If they follow your story down to the crossed Ts and dotted Is, or if they don't follow your story that closely. Everything that comes after these two is pretty much improve at this point. Sure, you could sit there and try to come up with every scenario that they MIGHT use to solve the situation, but you will never full do that. It's best to plan for what you can rather than what MIGHT happen. Like the cave-in for example. Sure, most of the Duergar might have said: their dead, leave it. Let's go do what we need to do; but there might be those paranoid few that will not believe this and do what they think is necessary for the area as a whole in order to keep it safe. It could be that the leader of this group is the paranoid one and orders them to watch it and set up for anything. Who knows, maybe the leader has had experience with this type of thing and that's why he's in charge, maybe he uses magic himself or deals with people that use magic and knows what they could be capable of, there could be any reason he might order his men to stick around. While it seems like it would have made more sense to just walk away form a cave-in assuming their dead...that's not what actually happens though in real life. Sure a lot of people assume people are dead and walk away from the collapsed building, but they don't all walk away, people are brought in or even the people there start digging, knowing by past proof that there is a chance people survived. Now, I'm not saying that you have to bring real life logic and knowledge all the time into a DnD game, but for some things, like this situation here, it is pretty reasonable to do so. Even if not for the assumption that the party will return, but if anything to have patrols keep the rest of the civilians or people away from a possibly unstable area and causing more loss.

As for the guy running into the other group...that's not something you could have planned for really, at least to me. DMs don't really expect a PC to break off form the group in the middle of an encounter like that and draw another group. Honestly, most time my group sticks to the one fight area and uses the area they have around them, not running off somewhere. This one is on the players at this point, not on you. You played the Duergar as intelligent, not just mindless creatures running around and attacking without reason; they had seen this guy before, they know he was part of a group that killed a group of their fellow men, and here he was injured and running right into their hands. Of course they would have gone after him. Now, I know you said you didn't want opinion or advice, but if you will allow me to offer some. This is where you could have either had that group take him hostage or prisoner, and dragged him off to the cells for interrogation or whatever, of you could have done what you did which is had them try to get rid of him, assuming the others had died and he managed to dig his way out somehow. If the group he ran into hadn't heard the fighting of the rest of the group, then they would have only worried about the straggler in one of those types of aspects and not bothered with the rest of the group. Though, considering that this group seems to be not too far off from the other group fighting, it seems more logical to have that group try to deal with that one guy before getting to the rest of the group, giving themselves the advantage of numbers, even though they already seemed to have it. One less opponent on the battlefield is never a bad thing. Again, you played them smart and not mindless, and really this is the players fault for thinking that running and leaving the group behind would be a good idea; not considering that security might be heightened because of their previous presence.

Honestly, I don't think you did anything wrong, and you planned for what you could plan for. Sure, some of the session didn't go as planned, but what session does really. I have never had a session where it goes 100% as planned, and I known my group for my entire life. (I DM for my uncles and my dad now after they DMed for me as a kid lol) Even now they still do things that I never could have predicted them doing. I don't 100% believe that this is a group and DM out of sync, but possibly just purely choices being made that neither party could predict being made. Overall, seems like the session went like every other session lol. Though after all that typing, there are two questions that should be asked: Have you talked to the players about what they thoguht of the session? Did they and are they finding it fun? If so, keep doing what you're doing, it's obvious they like it then lol.

ECMO3 said:

This works with some players, but not others. Some players would rather die and roll up a new character than have their character imprisoned or lose their goods or something like that.

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So, D&D could use some optional mechanics...

MarkB said:

If the party were trapped in a cave-in with only enough air to last an hour but somehow managed to extend that to eight hours, why did the duergar not assume they'd either died in the cave-in or subsequently suffocated?

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That was actually their plan. They figured they'd wait around until they were pretty sure the party had to be dead, then dig them out and take their stuff, lol. They had guards posted on the off chance they managed to dig themselves out before that happened.

Umbran said:

So, I know you aren't looking for advice, but there are some thoughts that go here.

It sounds like you had the Duergar react to a cave in as if the area was clearly going to be entirely stable, and that their biggest concern was going to be a few people with swords. Might I suggest this as a questionable choice on your part?

How did the Duergar know the PCs were even alive? Why are they not concerned with the potential collapse of a larger area? Why are the Duergar set up for battle, instead of set up to work shoring up the damaged tunnels?

There are no rules for how cave or dungeon systems react to cave-ins, so you get to decide that. If you wanted a reason to not have it be a super-combat encounter, you had an excuse to make it a more moderate encounter, with environmental hazards.



The PCs were having trouble with CR 1 creatures? The Umber Hulk is a CR 5. Yes, it was probably too much.



We can't really answer that, not having seen the details. However the encounter builder is a guideline. Its assessment must be reviewed with an eye to what the PCs can really do.




At what point - you mean a plan for as they came out of being buried? How on Oerth could they make a good plan for that, not knowing what was going on outside?



Is "advancing the adventure" something you all agree should happen?

Someone had the idea for the roof to cave in - we don't know if that idea came form the players, you, or the published adventure. If the latter most, well, then dealing with the cave-in is advancing the adventure, by definition.

If it was you or your players, that's inserting something that was obviously and surely going to keep you from otherwise advancing the adventure for a while. So, if you find that this detracted from play, maybe be careful about what complications get inserted - maybe make them ones that drive the players towards the other adventure content, rather than keep them from it.

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So what happened was, the players entered the Duergar sector, killed a patrol and then fought another group that was guarding prisoners. The Duergar have access to mining explosives and decided to trap the party in the cavern they were in by deliberately caving in the tunnel (there was no other way out). This way they could either A- wait a day or two for the party to die of suffocation and then dig them out and claim their loot or B- if they dug themselves out, have an ambush waiting for them.

As for a plan, given that they had earned a long rest, they could completely tailor their spell lists (I have three prepared casters, a Fighter, and Sorcerer/Warlock) and they knew that they would probably have to fight their way out. What exactly they could have done is up in the air- I came up with a few likely scenarios, but so far this group has surprised me quite a bit with their varied spell use.

I considered that they might try stealth- the Druid could cast Pass Without Trace and the Cleric could cast (EDIT) Wall of Fog as they exited the area. Before the last session even ended, they were talking about which spells they could use to dig themselves out, and one of the NPC prisoners had been a sapper in their nations army, so they had someone with the expertise to help them out.

Whether I should have introduced this complication or not is one of the things I've been second guessing myself about- maybe it was a bridge too far. They had been talking about "ok, so when we get out of here, we'll head out of the dungeon and get back to town to resupply" and I was like "guys, I don't think it'll be quite that easy" and they were kind of ignoring me, so it's quite possible I overcorrected.

EDIT: so about the encounter. The Umber Hulk was a juvenile CR 4 I jerry-rigged by dropping it's Strength down by 2 and giving it less Hit Dice. The party consists of five level 4 characters and they had three NPC's to help them who were designed as CR 1 and 2's but had to be geared up with whatever the party had laying around.

The first encounter was four CR 1 Duergar and a CR 2 caster. I wasn't sure how to calculate the NPC's in my encounter design- I treated them as three level 1 characters, and the encounter builder spit out that 4 CR 1's and 1 CR 2 would be a medium encounter.

The next encounter was the CR 3 Duergar Chief and the CR 4 juvenile Umber Hulk waiting in the tunnel beyond the choke point. My plan would be to have the players defeat encounter 1, then have the chieftain offer to negotiate with the party (offering them free passage out of the area in exchange for a slice of their loot) before unleashing the Umber Hulk upon them- this too was technically a medium encounter- but that was assuming the party would lick their wounds before engaging.

Again, I don't know if I was right to have the chieftain set his Umber Hulk on the guy who ran past the checkpoint or not. In the moment, it made sense to me, but in retrospect, as I said, I'm not sure, given how much more difficult the fight was.