We have a player who's personal goals are "stay alive and level up" - he's said so early on, his group play to gain levels - and that's a perfectly valid way to play the game. His characters and his play style are strongly optimized to achieve that and he's very good at it. But in the context of this test, they are optimized for the wrong thing. They are not optimized for "save the world at any cost", they are optimized for killing monsters and getting XP. So there is a mis-match.
I wasn't even thinking of this. The goal in this setting was to show how a coordinated, min-maxed group handles encounters. You didn't seem to understand this point and thus made suboptimal characters.
We've already hit the mismatch in the first round of the first encounter. In the context of saving the world, there's no need to kill the giants. They are just getting in the way of leaving the cave and if we can leave the cave without spending resources to kill them, that's optimal play in this context. But it's not optimal play if your goal is to maximize your XP and work towards level up. Hence the difficulty. A player whose personal goals don't match the scenario goals gets unhappy.
Have you fought giants before? I have to ask because it doesn't seem like you've fought many given how you think about them. Running in daylight against giants is an extremely bad idea. They have a 40 foot movement rate and rock throwing of 60 feet. That means given plenty of open ground, no difficult terrain, and utilizing your action for the dash action will take you two rounds to get out of their rock throwing range. That is two rounds of getting possibly pelted by 4d10+6 rocks. Then they have wolves, which also move at 40 feet and have breath weapons. Not to mention if the wolves close the distance and attack, their bites can trip. That means they trip a target, pack tactics rip it up. and the giants hammer that person with rocks. That person has to spend half their move to stand up and then attempt to run avoiding AoOs which can trip them again. If they want to use their Disengage action to avoid AoOs, they can't dash. Which slows them down and opens them to attack. Then what do you do if one or two members of your party drop to rock throwing? What do you do? Leave them to die since you don't have to fight the giants?
Running was a bad idea not because one of the members of the group wants xp. It was because one player wasn't thinking about the capabilities of what they're fighting. That was the difference in the first round. Not only did you choose a bad tactic against enemies with the ability to counter such tactics, but you were woefully unprepared for dealing with such enemies.
Without rewriting any of the encounters (I'm guessing, here, because I haven't seen them), we could change the adventure goals to "get as much XP as you can, and at least reach 14th level" by, for example, backtracking to the intro and having Myrkyn doubting the competence of the PCs and setting them a challenge couched in those terms. "There are some giants occupying the teleport gate. Bring me the heads of the giants, and we'll talk." That would work. It would match the goals of this encounter to the personal goals of the player who has optimized his characters for slaughtering giants (and wolves) efficiently.
XP is useless in this context. What you could do is min-max your character and then play in an optimal fashion showing an understanding of the enemy capabilities and the way
Flamestrike has designed the encounter to make it difficult to avoid fighting them specifically so he can drain your resources.
You did not understand the goal of this test,
Bold Italic. I accept part of the blame for not explaining it to you well enough. You were supposed to construct min-maxed characters or at least partially min-maxed characters and work in a highly coordinated fashion showing a keen understanding of the game mechanics as they are used against the environment.
Players like
CapnZapp,
Zard, and myself don't really care about standard party going against 6 to 8 encounter day. It's about parties like we play with going against the 6-8 encounter day. Perhaps you have not been involved in those discussion is the reason you missed the point of the test. We're getting told by DMs like
Flamestrike and
Iserith that they can consistently (roughly 50% of the time) create encounters using the 6-8 encounter day that challenge a min-maxed party that uses coordinated tactics. the aforementioned people on this forum are not finding that to be true. So
Flamestrike and I decided to give this little test a shot. It was pretty much a no go from the beginning as soon as you made a weak paladin and wizard that would never exist in my groups.
A paladin with a 13 Con at level 13? What min-maxer do you think does that? All his Concentration spells would likely be broken all the time. He would be wasting resources just recasting spells. And an extra 13 hit points for a tank class? The bard had more hit points than your paladin. In 5E hit points are the primary defense you have. You hamstrung yourself right out of the gate with a low Con.
Then a wizard with a garbage spell list and no spell strategy. No
polymorph or
wall of force at 13th level? Who kept that useless guy in the group?
Polymorph is a major offensive, defensive, and utility spell all rolled into one and you don't take it? No min-maxer avoids that spell. No
wall of force? This spell has been a battlefield control spell since it was introduced. It's still great after five editions of D&D. This could have been somewhat overlooked if you made some kind of enchanter type with
suggestion spells, but nope. A diviner trying to be a blaster? No optimizer is going to make a wizard like that. It shows a complete lack of awareness of spell power.
I'm not sure what you're thinking, but I know this game. What you did ruined this test from the beginning. Your character's actions and lack of understanding of the mobility and ranged capabilities of giants should not be excused by attempting to paint me as desirous of experience points. I read the battlefield that
Flamestrike set up and acted accordingly. Part of coordinated group fighting is reading the battlefield. You should looked at the layout, how long it would have taken you and the entire party to make it to the door, and how many rounds of attacks the giants and wolves would have been able take on you including the obvious difficult terrain with the rubble spread near the exit.
Flamestrike put a neon sign over that rubble that said difficult terrain and you didn't seem to care. You just ran for that exit. Then we would have hit half move allowing the giants more attacks on us. Your strategy would have left us low on hit points and still fighting giants without having done much damage to them at all.
I'm going to assume you're not used to the type of encounters
Flamestrike was running. You don't usually take time to assess your parties capabilities or capabilities of opponents. You're a wing it type of player. That's fine the vast majority of the time, But not during a test of this kind.
