D&D 5E When it all goes wrong

James Gasik said:

It wasn't fun for me, I guess is the issue. Grinding my players into paste wasn't the intent, and I always worry that I'll start hemorrhaging players if things become too grueling. I wanted the session to feature other things besides combat, combat, combat- there are interesting places to see and explore in the caverns, and even if negotiations broke down, interacting with the duergar chieftain could have led to some fun roleplay.

Sure, there should be consequences for being too reckless, but without really thinking about it, I gave my party no option for retreat, because that's what I felt the Duergar would do. Players tend to not think about retreating until it's too late to begin with- here, I knew they wanted out of the dungeon, but instead I made it harder for them.

That's the kind of thing that might reinforce the notion that retreat is impossible, because it's already very difficult in a lot of scenarios.

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Reynard said:

How did the trapped in a cave in come about?

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overgeeked said:

Sorry, but I don't see where the problem is.

Things didn't go as you planned. Okay, that's par for the course with RPGs. This isn't a fail state.

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payn said:

On the flip side its a bit weird if the PCs get defeated and captured a dozen times over a campaign. One still needs to put a lot of thought into adventure design.

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James Gasik said:

It wasn't fun for me, I guess is the issue. Grinding my players into paste wasn't the intent, and I always worry that I'll start hemorrhaging players if things become too grueling. I wanted the session to feature other things besides combat, combat, combat- there are interesting places to see and explore in the caverns, and even if negotiations broke down, interacting with the duergar chieftain could have led to some fun roleplay.

Sure, there should be consequences for being too reckless, but without really thinking about it, I gave my party no option for retreat, because that's what I felt the Duergar would do. Players tend to not think about retreating until it's too late to begin with- here, I knew they wanted out of the dungeon, but instead I made it harder for them.

That's the kind of thing that might reinforce the notion that retreat is impossible, because it's already very difficult in a lot of scenarios.

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James Gasik said:

Yeah, and I think I miss that, lol. 5e is pretty far down the list of the game I want to be running, but it's what everyone agreed on, so here I am.

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overgeeked said:

Exactly. That's what counts, for me. Here's the situation and here's the logical consequences of that. If your game became 100% combat all the time, I could see a cause for concern. But one session? Don't worry about it. Unless your players only think with their weapons, it shouldn't be a problem. This one just happened to be combat heavy.

Of all the things you've posted in the thread, this one is the biggest problem. If you're not enjoying running the game, or you're running a system you don't like, it's going to be incredibly hard to keep the game going.

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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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So I just got back into DMing after several years of just being a player. I tried not to be too ambitious- I took some old adventures I own and updated them for the modern version of D&D and did my best to bring my A game to the table. But things haven't been going quite as smoothly as I'd like- maybe I'm rusty, maybe my group isn't synching with my playstyle (or vice versa). Anyways...

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.

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.

This is my first problem- the classic dungeon design is to go encounter by encounter, but it's all too easy to put the entire place on alert, resulting in a massive deadly encounter that is very likely going to be a TPK. I tried to warn the players about this, but, well, I'll continue.

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.

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?

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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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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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.

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James Gasik said:

I guess that's fair, though they did have the information gleaned by fighting the Duergar previously. Upon reflection, I was really hoping for more teamwork- each turn, each player kind of does their own thing, with the only exception being the Cleric and the Druid who will stop to heal party members once they've fallen down, lol.

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James Gasik said:

Even though they could do things to support the group, sometimes they make these odd decisions, like the Druid casting flaming sphere in a tunnel and refusing to stop concentrating on it even after it did damage to an ally because they had nowhere to go to avoid it, or a similar scenario when someone used darkness.

You know, the little things the players do like not remembering how their abilities or spells work or forgetting "oh yeah, that monster resists poison damage" when casting a poison spell.

I suppose putting them in a dangerous scenario and hoping that would make them strategize better was very wishful thinking.

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James Gasik said:

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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