D&D 5E Boy, that escalated quickly...

[Raunalyn]

Poor planning aside, it still sounds a little bit like a DM gotcha to me when they got discovered.

The party has plenty of time to climb over the wall, but it isn't until they're all over and completely committed that POP! you immediately spring a guard patrol turning the corner on them. They just happened to turn the corner at that moment, not any earlier when they're just starting to climb over and maybe realized they missed something, not at a moment when they could attempt to retreat or escape, or one minute later after they've broken into the house. Maybe they didn't scout the patrols well, but that's awfully convenient timing.

If the party was surprised by the guards and thus weren't given a chance to react in order to silence them before the alarm was raised, that would make it even more of a gotcha. Was that the case?

You can blame the players for bad planning and for screwing things up, but there are a lot of things that aren't in their control that make their failures catastrophic. Maybe they didn't scout the patrols as well as they could have, does that mean you should spring a patrol on them the instant they're vulnerable? That might not have been the best choice in terms of maintaining player morale.

No, they weren't surprised. They had the chance to react quickly and throw the silenced rock over to where the enemy was before they could give a shout.

And then they fireballed them....

 

[TwoSix]

No, they weren't surprised. They had the chance to react quickly and throw the silenced rock over to where the enemy was before they could give a shout.

And then they fireballed them....

I can see that. Of course, my dragon sorcerer's flaw is "Explosions are the answer to almost any problem."

 

[thehobb]

And then they fireballed them....

Um... ok.

Maybe I missed that relatively insignificant detail, but I don't recall you mentioning that the players themselves set off an explosion announcing their presence to everyone within probably a mile. Regardless of poor planning, that's just about the worst possible action to take in that situation.

 

[Raunalyn]

Um... ok.

Maybe I missed that relatively insignificant detail, but I don't recall you mentioning that the players themselves set off an explosion announcing their presence to everyone within probably a mile. Regardless of poor planning, that's just about the worst possible action to take in that situation.

To be fair, they had already engaged the enemy when this happened...but my group, whenever they pull out the stops, they go all-in.

He centered the fireball to go off inside the silence spell...so, it was a quiet fireball, at least. However,, they couldn't really do much about the bright flash of light that lit up the night sky, nor the smoldering survivors who ran to get reinforcements...

 

[Jaelommiss]

And then they fireballed them....

This happened in a game I was playing three weeks ago in almost the exact same situation as your party.

Highly modified HotDQ, approaching Castle Naerytar in the swamp. The party of ten or so could clearly see well over 40 bullywugs from a quick glance and knew that there were as many as three hidden in the mud for each one they saw. There were also two dozen lizardfolk visible on the walls. We knew that a high ranking cultist managed the castle, and thanks to my wizard/cleric's ungodly knowledge skills, also knew that there was an adult black dragon in the region that might be working with the cult. To top it all off, there was a large drum visible on one of the towers that was clearly used for signalling.

While some of the party went inside (lizardfolk PC dragging me along as a 'prisoner', with winged tiefling providing aerial recon and a shadow monk shadow teleporting inside for emergency support) to Suggestion the leader into giving us unlimited access to the castle, the others got antsy and decided to try talking their way past the bullywugs whom they knew they didn't share a language with. Needless to say it didn't work out well and the sorcerer outside decided that four bullywugs with sharpened sticks was a good use of a fireball. The drums started, not one, but TWO adult black dragons came along, the bullywugs and lizardfolk went berserk, and almost everyone outside ended up dead.

It actually ended up working quite well for the inside crew, since the guards were too busy chasing the others to stop us breaking into their leader's office, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, gathering all the information we could, and teleporting away through a teleportation circle in the basement.



Thanks to the players' actions, our plan failed horribly. I'll admit that I was disappointed when it failed. Fortunately, we were able to reassess the situation and our objective (capture the castle became get out alive with whatever intel we can grab on the way) and take advantage of the elements (guards chasing rest of party, leaving the castle being mostly empty). As mentioned several times throughout the thread, trusting that the DM had a handle on the situation and was running it fairly made a huge difference in our perspective

 

[Hussar]

No, they weren't surprised. They had the chance to react quickly and throw the silenced rock over to where the enemy was before they could give a shout.

And then they fireballed them....

Hey now, let's not forget that you had BOTH patrols within 20 feet of us when we came over the wall. And we know that they were within 20 feet because they were within range of the silence spell.

And, I guess I never thought to say, "Hey, we're in a enemy city, we're taking basic precautions when moving around". Heck, I assumed we never left the house, except for the one time when they went scouting, which led immediately to a forced encounter with guards - no chance of evasion. I didn't know that we had to spell out every single action we took and make sure that we, as someone else put it, Metal Gear Solid play.

It really does sound like a mismatch in expectations. I expected that a reasonable plan would have a reasonable chance of success. You both are expecting us to be Batman and have every t crossed and every i dotted before any plan isn't going to pretty much auto-fail.

Well, I suppose that 's good to know now. Now I know that if we want to do anything other than kick in the front door and kill everything that moves, we have to stop, go down the checklist of every possible angle to make sure that we're not missing anything, and then proceed. Personally, I think I'm going to join the murder-hobos and just kick in the door. A lot less work for a lot more fun.

 

[S'mon]

I think this is a big part of it - it kind of boils down to trust.

It doesn't matter what the DM does, if a player views the game through the lens of
"the DM is setting us up for failure and looking to screw us over," there's no trust there, and whatever happens will be seen through that lens. There is nothing any DM can do to prove they're not out to screw you over, if you don't simply trust that they're not.

Yes. I just think you guys are lucky that this perspective from one player apparently has not infected the whole group. I've seen that happen, where one player's distrust of the GM is infectious.

 

[S'mon]

This is campaign 1. What is being omitted here is that you were attempting to enter the district as road workers (your plan). The plan to enter the area was shut down for a few reasons. One; there wasn't any roadwork being done in the noble district at the time and two; I don't know about you, but road workers enter mansions all the time so that they can do roadwork... Soon after this, the paladin came up with the plan to enter the noble district because, hey...he's a noble. What happened? You were successful. Before all of that, though...no one thought to disguise themselves, were roaming around the city, not bothering to hide their movements, not pulling their hoods up, not checking to see if anyone was following or watching...all while being in an enemy occupied city.

Do you use minis or some kind of visual representation of what's going on? I ask because this often seems to help put everyone on the same page as to what's going on. Eg my 5e game last session, when the PCs killed a thug leader in a fight and her body was lying on the street, and the city guards were approaching, because we were using minis & a battlemat it was visually obvious what
was happening independent of my description, and smart players realised to drag the
body into the shadows to hide it before the guards arrived.

Without minis or some kind of visual representation it can be harder to keep everyone's mental
picture of events coherent. Some players have trouble processing purely auditory input, and may form a mental picture at odds with that of the GM. I had this problem recently a bit in a game I'm
playing, and I started bringing my own minis (for the PCs) to put on the table to get a visual frame for where we all are, using dice etc for monsters if necessary.

 

[Raunalyn]

Hey now, let's not forget that you had BOTH patrols within 20 feet of us when we came over the wall. And we know that they were within 20 feet because they were within range of the silence spell.

And, I guess I never thought to say, "Hey, we're in a enemy city, we're taking basic precautions when moving around". Heck, I assumed we never left the house, except for the one time when they went scouting, which led immediately to a forced encounter with guards - no chance of evasion. I didn't know that we had to spell out every single action we took and make sure that we, as someone else put it, Metal Gear Solid play.

It really does sound like a mismatch in expectations. I expected that a reasonable plan would have a reasonable chance of success. You both are expecting us to be Batman and have every t crossed and every i dotted before any plan isn't going to pretty much auto-fail.

Well, I suppose that 's good to know now. Now I know that if we want to do anything other than kick in the front door and kill everything that moves, we have to stop, go down the checklist of every possible angle to make sure that we're not missing anything, and then proceed. Personally, I think I'm going to join the murder-hobos and just kick in the door. A lot less work for a lot more fun.

-sigh-

Look, one of the groups was surprised, and you got the jump on them. The second group saw you, but were silenced.

I truly apologize if you think that I'm setting you guys up for failure. Maybe you should address this with the party and not blame the DM for the party's actions.

 

[Shayuri]

I'm one of the players in this scenario; the one who cast the fireball in fact.

I'm a bit surprised at the kerfluffle, honestly...I had no idea there was ill feeling over it. My take on the situation is very different. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that I have different expectations from the scenario?

I mean...we're in a city patrolled by guards who have fairly accurate descriptions of our band. It's not a terrible shock that some guards got suspicious enough to make some ruckus, really. Considering the forces we unleashed on them, we're pretty lucky it ended with just that one encounter.

As for the castle, it was never really my impression that stealth was something we were seriously trying to maintain. I mean, we waited for a decently opportune moment to go over, and used silence to try to give ourselves some breathing room...but the best laid plans... It's a castle full of guards. Only a very few of us are truly skilled at being stealthy. It was always going to come down to the assault...and when it did, it was never going to be anything but us versus the howling mob.

If we'd wanted to be really sneaky, we could have done a lot more scouting...Valen could have expended some spells on distractions at the other end of the castle (or more likely Lutwidge, with his illusions and lightshows). There's things we could have done to facillitate that...but we opted for a more direct approach. Nothing wrong with that, but I think it then behooves us to accept what comes of it.