As a DM, I prefer to be engaged as well as my players. The dice will always tell their own tale, but I enjoy it when my monsters get to do their thing and put up a fair fight.
Of course, I tailor my monsters to the party and don't use modules, so "meta" doesn't apply as much as an Adventure...
Agreed, but for a different reason. If you are efficiently killing monsters, you are playing the game exactly as intended, and that should almost never make a DM cry.
Making a DM cry is like... doing something unexpected that makes them throw out weeks of prep. And killing monsters intended to...
Yeah, Sided Initiative is the fastest option I've seen specifically for PBP. It just takes a good faith effort to avoid dogpiling any one PC excessively during your turn. And that's pretty easy to handle.
You can also load up on some consumables the party might be able to loot!
Grenades that detonates with Grease or Silence spells upon impact.
Jars of wasps that impose disadvantage on concentration checks in the area.
Something that explodes with strange sparkles, and now every sound the party...
It gets a bit odd, like two Spirit Guardians overlapping not stacking damage, but two simultaneous instant damage spells working fine because they are actions and not effects.
"Complicating" the matter, it is one of the oldest and most basic escape fantasies for players to talk back to authority figures because they cannot do so in real life. It's SO prevalent, SO common, that almost every DM has had to softball NPC reactions to account for it.
How far you softball...
It's usually far too late to come online, but a 14th level Illusionist with Illusory Reality and the feat to take Misty Visions is absolutely brutal. It's not unplayable before that either, with Misty Visions being such a workhorse, and Malleable Illusions coming online at 6th.
Definitely can't be The Weave, since that's a setting specific power station constructed around a populated planet. You might find similar power stations built around other populated planets, but you won't find them just out in space.
...what?