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

[Herobizkit]

I like mutually-assured destruction scenarios to keep players in check.

For example, have three (because it's always three) factions of ... whatever ... occupying a limited area and have them all share the only potable water supply for miles. If any faction tries to get stronger, the other two smack them down.

Now, enter the player characters, an unknown force that can tip the scale.

Do they just try and kill everyone? Do they join a faction and take out the other two? How do the players choose to affect the area? Diplomacy is key to find out why or even if they should get involved.

And what happens if they kill all three factions? Why, something even more terrible moves in...

With regards to your specific group, seems like they prefer a beer 'n pretzels game to your war simulation. Maybe give them a free-for-all every once in a while? ^_^

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think it's an issue with DM's more than the system (though it can also be partially the adventure design). I remember when I first started roleplaying that one of our DM's was notorious for not having static dungeons. If we ever left and came back, we'd find new defenses built around what was observed from our first sortie. We quickly learnt that we if ever left and came back, we'd need to be prepared for the worst...

Our DM's have always had reinforcements arriving as a possibility, regardless of what we were playing (be it D&D, Traveller, Dark Heresy, Rolemaster, Runequest...). It's not something intrinsic with the system; it's a DM thing.

My experiences match this, too.

 

[ccs]

I think it's an issue with DM's more than the system (though it can also be partially the adventure design). I remember when I first started roleplaying that one of our DM's was notorious for not having static dungeons. If we ever left and came back, we'd find new defenses built around what was observed from our first sortie. We quickly learnt that we if ever left and came back, we'd need to be prepared for the worst...

Our DM's have always had reinforcements arriving as a possibility, regardless of what we were playing (be it D&D, Traveller, Dark Heresy, Rolemaster, Runequest...). It's not something intrinsic with the system; it's a DM thing.

It's not even a DM thing. It's just common sense.

 

[Rabbitbait]

For me, it all just depends. For instance, my players are currently making their way through the temple of the crushing wave in PoTA. They have been carefully moving through, trying not to attract attention. They killed one troll along the way, with no issues. The sound of battle did not attract anyone else as the sound of the water drowns out other noise. However, then they passed where the bugbears who were watching the passage. When the players did not walk into the ambush the bugbears has set up, they poured out of their room to attack. The players decided to flee instead, grabbing a boat and heading into the water - straight into the path of the octopus and into the sight of the cultists on the other side of the lake.

So now, instead of fighting one encounter, they are fighting three. In a boat. With one character tipped out into the water (by the octopus). Will they live? Maybe. Will they feel that they are in danger and feel like total heroes if they survive. Heck yes.

Incidentally - I only have three characters playing at the moment as the other character in the party got captured by the enemy. So they are feeling overwhelmed and underprepared. That's just how I like to DM.

I didn't force the situation, but I let it happen because that's what would have happened.

 

[Rabbitbait]

Incidentally - if a TPK happens I am OK with that. I'd rather it didn't, but the risk of it is part of the game.

 

[Shiroiken]

Really what it comes down to is the players not understanding the danger of using 3E & 4E mentality. During the playtest, I had a player who'd only ever played 4E comment "I don't have any idea if we can win this." She was amazed at the notion that they faced over two dozen xvarts (similar to goblins) at 3rd level, despite the fact that they just kicked in the door to their lair. When more and more arrived, and they were forced to flee (leaving a PC behind), she didn't know how to react since she'd never "lost" before.

I'd suggest a situation where the party lets reinforcements arrive and they're overwhelmed. Have them be taken hostage, rather than killed, following it up with an escape scenario. This should hammer the point home that letting bad guys get away is a really, really stupid idea.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

One of the things I'm REALLY fond of in 5e is that it has much less of an "encounter" focus than 3e or 4e.

One of the things this makes viable is NPC's running to get reinforcements.

I'm not sure why 4e discouraged this for your group. I've had multiple DMs who had no qualms about pulling in reinforcements and bringing the entire dungeon down on our heads when someone pulled a boneheaded move. One of the most thrilling and challenging fights I've had in 4e was exactly that, and my DM (@Morrus;) made no bones about the fact that he was pleased that we'd triggered all the reinforcements--fighting our way through half a dozen one- to three-man fights, many of them minions, would have been a dull slog rather than a nail-biting challenge. As it was, we blew a lot of our resources, but we carried the day (even though I nearly ate dirt several times during the fight, being the party's meatshield).

One of the things I'm noticing with one of my groups is a tendency to not really stop that.

So there's a lot of this as they contemplate their possible escape routes:

Maybe they're suffering Older-Edition-Itis (each encounter is a self-contained unit), or maybe I'm a little more prone to do this than other DMs, but enemies going to get reinforcements from other areas of the dungeon has wound up putting them in more than one situation where things spiraled out of control. It probably doesn't help that they've also shown a tendency to split the party a bit during the initial foray into the dungeon....and the meat of the party is definitely melee-focused.

I definitely didn't see a lot of this happening in 3e and 4e. In 3e, "one big monster at a time" was pretty much what my groups could handle, so there was no one to run away, and 4e had neatly packaged encounters that didn't really want you to go beyond them. I also don't see as much of this with some of my groups (my newbie group, forex, is pretty alert to the possibilities of sneaky little goblins running away).

Are they aware of how their responses to things may be responsible for the situations they're facing? It may not be so much "older-edition-itis" as not connecting the actions they take with the consequences they face. Alternatively, it could be a difference of expectations: e.g. you are wanting to run a more harsh and brutal world where mercy is a weakness and allowing enemies to retreat is (almost) always going to bite you in the ass, while they are expecting a game where honor and mercy are genuine virtues and ruthlessly slaughtering all your opponents is (almost) always going to bite you in the ass. I, personally, very much favor the latter (if you've read the "Styles of D&D" thing that started on RPG.net, I'm a big 'Paladins & Princesses'), in part because I like to play Paladin/honorable types, and in part because I find it really depressing to play in a ruthless-cutthroat world.

But ultimately, "calling the dungeon down on their heads" is almost getting stale, and I'm interested in ways for them to negotiate or mitigate this that I might be able to actively recommend (useful spells/abilities). So, as you've played 5e, have you noticed this tendency more, as a player or as a DM? If you're a player, what are some ways you're mitigating this possibility? If you're a DM, what are some of the variations you're coming onto?

Unfortunately, I don't really have enough experience with 5e to make any real recommendations on that front. Part of the problem is simply 5e's great emphasis on combat mobility; it's very hard for anyone without spells to 'lock down' an enemy, and because OAs eat your Reaction, it's not possible for anyone to (non-magically) lock down more than a single target at a time--and even that may or may not happen either.

Thorn Whip and Ray of Frost are useful cantrips for slowing enemies down. Grease, Sleep, and Entangle are halfway decent first-level control spells, and Tasha's Hideous Laughter can be alright as well, though it's a one-save-and-it's-over effect unlike Grease or Entangle (and Sleep offers no save at all). Ensnaring Strike is...also alright, though not quite as good as Entangle. For 2nd level spells, Hold Person (only for "humanoid" targets), Spike Growth, Suggestion, and Web (the best of the bunch) are all options, and Phantasmal Force might work for a particularly clever caster. Many of them feel like a waste though--things that are likely to fail the save would probably be more easily just slain outright, and even if they fail the first round, your odds of keeping a creature slowed/immobilized/etc. for more than a couple turns are very low.

5e just isn't a game where locking enemies down is meant to happen, I guess. The price paid for its high mobility, I guess.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Thanks for all the replies, everyone! Good perspectives.

I'm loving it. It has made a big change in tactics. Instead of charging through room by room and just taking things as they come, they now careful creep through, paranoid about being found, and carefully scoping out everything they can before it all turns pear shaped.

They are scared.

That is a healthy attitude to have.

The thing is, I think some of my players, rather than getting creative or careful, are just getting annoyed. They're not really changing tactics, just getting irked when their usual behavior calls down the troops - and KEEPS doing it, over and over again. And I'm kind of annoyed tracking a dozen different enemy groups at once, too. That's part of why I'm looking to be a bit pro-active - I'd like them to consider these things a bit more, but I might need to do some "training" to shift the mindset a bit. I bet it's possible, it's just not something I figured I'd really need to do for a group of D&D veterans.

Pulling a room or two into it is fine, if it feels like the fight is lacking. Other than that I don't want a 2 hour slugfest. Slugfest = Candy crush on my phone now.

I don't think it's quite a slugfest (the outcome is waaaay too uncertain for most of the PC's to disengage), but I am wading through kind-of-absurd quantities of monsters at once.

I think it's an issue with DM's more than the system (though it can also be partially the adventure design).

I'm not sure why 4e discouraged this for your group. I've had multiple DMs who had no qualms about pulling in reinforcements and bringing the entire dungeon down on our heads when someone pulled a boneheaded move.

So to describe it a bit, I'd say that if you wanted to call down the reinforcements in 4e, you had to go a beyond the game's assumptions. You'd have to answer questions like "when do I get my encounter power back?" and you had clear XP totals to adhere to for a "balanced" encounter - even stretched over multiple sites and monsters, something within the XP budget was still "one encounter" (even if it was staggered or something) as far as resource management was concerned. You could use smoke-n-mirrors to take one XP total and stretch it over like 5 locations as the party moves toward the exit and it would be the same difficulty / XP budget as if they moved into the next room and fought a straight-up encounter. In 3e, it was probably worse, because the swinginess meant that going beyond the "one big baddie" model might be a cakewalk or it might be a TPK in the making.

It's not so swingy in 5e IMXP, and the XP budget and resting rules make it clear that (a) you DON'T get your rest and (b) that it's fine to spiral some encounters into each other because the number of encounters between rests is variable, too - if you go with more than one, maybe staggered a bit in time, you know it's not a major disaster that'll leave the party under-powered because they "skipped" a rest.

It may not be so much "older-edition-itis" as not connecting the actions they take with the consequences they face.

Where some of the breakdown is occurring, I think, is in the perception that they "had no choice" when the stuff hits the fan. It's pretty clear to me that they have that choice - it's not like I'm dictating targets for them, and one logical reaction to your friends getting turned into bloody gibblets is to run and get backup. But there's some vagueness in that telegraph, perhaps. They don't all see it as a consequence of their choices, really, and that's a place where this "training" might help.

Alternatively, it could be a difference of expectations: e.g. you are wanting to run a more harsh and brutal world where mercy is a weakness and allowing enemies to retreat is (almost) always going to bite you in the ass, while they are expecting a game where honor and mercy are genuine virtues and ruthlessly slaughtering all your opponents is (almost) always going to bite you in the ass.

Naaaah, "mercy" is probably not in the personal dictionary of half of the PC's in this group. Mercy, I could work with - some of the fleeing critters could just be fleeing (this actually happened with a few groups in the past, though not thanks to the mercy of the party). I'm not really looking to punish the party, just following the motives of the NPC's in this little bit of improv. ("If this group of six just mowed down ten of my buddies and there's just four of us left, I'm gonna go get the big guns before I'm the only one left!").

Part of the problem is simply 5e's great emphasis on combat mobility; it's very hard for anyone without spells to 'lock down' an enemy, and because OAs eat your Reaction, it's not possible for anyone to (non-magically) lock down more than a single target at a time--and even that may or may not happen either.

Very much not my experience. OA's eat your reaction, but in a game where the difference between an alive monster and a dead monster is 3 hits, an OA that hits turns that thing that was going to flee into a stain on the ground either on that hit, or the one that he takes in his bubblegoose as he runs away. And the fighter in our party is probably the stickiest party member thanks to his feats (polearm master + sentinel), beating out the druid with Spike Growth and Thorn Whip and the mage with Slow (all of which are effective, but have some significant limitations) pretty easily.

I definitely know how effective this party can be in a tight funnel or when the big fighter dude is blocking the only exit (handled a bunch of goblins that way circa LV 4 - some of them tried surrender, but it didn't take...).

It's just kind of that, tactically, there's a lot of "move forward until I encounter something I can wail on," and then the monsters just leave via the OTHER entrance to the room. The one that leads deeper into the dungeon, where the BBEG hangs out.

I like that it is easy to follow the thought process of the NPC's like that (getting into character is one of the fun things about D&D for me) and that 5e doesn't break there, but I sympathize with my players' frustrations, and I'd like to maybe teach them in gameplay that limiting "spillage" is how you avoid dead PC's. And also initiative lists that are like 30 monsters long...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It's not even a DM thing. It's just common sense.

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

~Frank Lloyd Wright

 

[Celtavian]

We've always played this way making scouting and coordinated assaults important. You had to be prepared to stop any runners or you might end in a huge fight.