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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1187309" data-attributes="member: 99">I'm curious about your opinions on a situation from our session last night:This was the first session in the resumption of a previous campaign.  There are now 5 players, 2 of whom participated in the last campaign.  All characters are 8th level.  In particular they are a Druid (with a Dire Mountain Lion animal companion), a Wizard, a Rogue/Royal Explorer, a Fighter/Cleric and a Barbarian.The party started play in a town on the edge of a vast wilderness.  Their goal was to cross this wilderness, pass through a land controlled by barbarians and proceed on to a mountain range that holds the main objective of their quest. It has been established (in the previous campaign) that the wilderness through which they were initially traveling held no known monsters that would pose a serious threat to the party.  But it was still a wild, untamed land.The encounter I had planned was a group (5) of Shambling Mounds that were set upon the party by a group of Druids that oppose the quest the party has undertaken.  In particular, they wished to warn the party Druid away from his present course of action.  The encounter was also designed (from a metagame standpoint) to be a fairly straight forward melee that would test the party's skills in battle and let them "unlimber their sword arms" a bit at the start of the campaign.  Instead what happened was this:The weather had turned quite bad as a moderate-severe thunderstorm was upon them.  They checked their gear and came to the conclusion that nobody had a tent.  Most of them had no desire to spend the night in the rain so the Wizard cast Rope Trick and he, the Rogue/RE and the Fighter/Cleric got inside out of the weather (and also out of any possibility of immediate contact with the other two characters).  The Druid and the Barbarian decided to sleep out in the rain more or less just to show the rest of the party that they weren't wimps (there was also the matter that the Druid didn't want to leave his Dire Lion companion sleeping alone in the rain).  Furthermore, when asked, they flatly stated that they were going to post no guard and were counting on "sleeping lightly" in case something happened in the night.I did not alter the circumstances that I had intended to initiate the encounter.  The Shambling Mounds approached as stealthily as possible and the Druid, Lion and Barbarian all blew their Listen checks (which were hampered anyway by the noise of the storm).  The Shambling Mounds achieved total surprise and got off their attacks during the surprise round as well as winning initiative and getting their full set of attacks on the prone party members.  They easily incapacitated all the party members outside the Rope Trick before they were able to mount any sort of defense or clambor up into the Rope Trick to warn their companions.The enemy Druids swept in and stabilized them and then carried them quite some distance away where they left the party Druid a stern warning to discontinue his present course of action.  The rest of the party slept through the whole thing, safe in the Rope Trick and didn't notice that the others were even gone until close to morning.Now I'm not really concerned about the long-term consequences for the campaign.  I didn't (though I probably could have given the circumstances) do a TPK on the first night of the campaign.  But the session was not as "fun" as I would have liked because half the party didn't get to participate in the only combat of the night and the other half's participation was limited to getting severely beat down in two rounds.  I considered throwing together some other sort of combat to give them something to repair their egos, but it would have felt forced and it was getting late in the evening by that point anyway.My question is this:  Should I have altered the circumstances of the attack by the Shambling Mounds in order to assure that everybody got to participate if by doing so I was removing the consequences of their somewhat foolish behavior (i.e. splitting the party via the Rope Trick and then failing to post any sort of guard)?  Without question my overarching goal is to make sure everyone has "fun" including me.  But do you have more "fun" by making choices and living with the consequences or by having the GM alter things such that everyone gets to have maximum participation and efficacy?</blockquote>

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