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

[FormerlyHemlock]

If a creature is trying to escape to warn its fellows, then reducing its speed to 0 is exactly what you want to do, to prevent it from sounding the alarm.

Obviously, killing a creature reduces its speed to 0, but sometimes grappling is the way to go if you won't be able to kill the creature fast enough before it gets away.

Also, once you have it grappled you can just Dodge. Between disadvantage and Shield for A.C. 26 you are pretty much (75-90%) immune at that point to anything without +11 to its attacks, which is very rare for a non-Huge monster. Ranged PCs will kill it when they finish with the other monsters.

And it goes without saying that a grappled enemy with speed zero cannot stand up from being prone. The traditional thing for the Paladin to do is grapple the enemy, push it prone if he can with his extra attack, and next round commence beating on it with his shield as an improvised weapon. As soon as he his next level and gets Warcaster that will become "beating on it with melee cantrips," followed shortly thereafter by "Eldritch Blasting it, three bolts at a time."

Obviously I'm simplifying, expecting you to fill in details yourself if the enemy tries to e.g. Push you off it, but that's the first. If you sketch a specific scenario and PC party I can tell you whether grappling is likely to be worthwhile in that scenario. (Or you can figure it out yourself, it's not difficult, but I'm willing to help if needed.)

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm glad you're here for a player perspective, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]!

How often do the player's plans go automatically south. How often do player's plans get shot down as well?

From my perspective, there's a lot of plans that work. Spidery ambushes of buildings in a ruined village? Sneaking around a roadhouse while one character goes in and distracts the enemy? Impersonating new cultist recruits? Pitting lizardfolks against bullywugs and neutralizing most of a castle's fighting force? Just walking around an evil creature's lair messing with their stuff only to then demand MORE when she's ready to form an alliance with you?

That your enemies talk to each other (escaped villain from Place 1 winds up at Place 2, lets folks know that there's a band of nosy adventurers screwing up their plans), that rooms often have windows to let out smoke (I don't run from my apartment complex when I over-cook a pizza and the vent's broke), and that a dragon that lives in a giant's castle also speaks Giant are some of the ways plans have gone awry, but they should hardly be surprising. Some plans don't work.

Of course, if you would've hunted down escapees, lit the house on actual fire room by room, or talked Elven instead of Giant, those plans would've worked, too.

It's good to hear you're feeling shut down, because I can certainly bridge that gap better. I tend to err a bit on "sit and wait" when you're discussing plans to keep that meta-game divide.

But ultimately these don't have a lot to do with the escalation stuff specifically. Those seem from where I'm sitting to live at the level of an individual encounter. Walk in through the front door and trigger a fight in a room with like 3 other exits, and let enemies leave through two of them...what's a fanatical cultist to do?

Disturb a wizard's lair by triggering a trap and are the loyal creations of that wizard supposed to NOT go tell their master what's going on?

PC announces to NPC-of-Questionable-Intent that the group that's been annoying the cult for weeks now is here on the flying castle and the NPC's are supposed to ignore that?

(That one even took a few turns to escalate entirely - there was a whole chain of like three actions where one PC was talking with an NPC, and the other one just hid out and watched it)

Yeah, the group is about as subtle as a kick to the head. But, there's the other side of the coin. Every time we try to do something that isn't direct force, we wind up poncing about for a while, getting frustrated and then combat starts.

It's curious because I'm definitely not looking for ways to shut down ideas, I'm just flowing from where your ideas take me.

Speak giant in front of a dragon living in a giant's castle? Yeah, it knows that.

Try to smoke out someone on the second floor of a mansion with giant windows? Yeah, there's better ideas available to those guys than running out the front door.

Surprise a group of cultists making dinner? Yeah, they're going to just leave through the other entrances to the room.

Part of the issue here though is that there is no lag time. Scenarios react instantly.

...and that just hasn't been the case, really. Multiple rounds pass for the enemy where they are moving between rooms or down coridoors, or telling folks about what's going on (the most recent scenario involved three rounds of NPC's alerting each other before a general "OH NO" went up - spent respectively talking with a dragon, talking with an NPC, and waiting invisibly).

It's interesting that this feels like the case, though. I can probably telegraph this better.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Whenever you start wondering about how the players are behaving, think about the actual results that behavior is getting. If the party has been doing X and it has been working really well for them, why would they stop?

If it hasn't been working so well and they keep doing the same thing- is there anyone home inside Their heads?

XP is story-based in HotDQ, so fighting more monsters isn't getting them leveled any faster. The impression I get is that it's not exactly intentional. Like, "Oh, yeah, you can run and go get reinforcements...huh...well, now we're boned." Mixed maybe with a little bit of "DM, we KEEP GETTING BONED, do you want us to die and fail all the time?"

 

[Hussar]

Hey [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION] I just want to say a big thanks for taking my blathering in the spirit it was intended and not getting defensive. Totally not meant as a attack or anything like that. Very very happy with the game.

But, heh always a but, let's go back to the hunting lodge. On one hand, we have all these gear big windows for letting smoke out but on the other, we can't actually see anything inside the windows. We did actually try.

And we did speak more than one language to the dragon. I dunno what the other one was. I didn't speak it.

No problem with the wizard being alerted. That's fine. But why were all of the encounters triggered at the same time? I can see the stuff in the bedroom fine. But, there were more things triggered all over the house as soon as we triggered one encounter. What could we have done to not trigger all of them?

 

[Rhenny]

This thread reminds me of my play experience with HoDQ

When I played HoDQ we only got to 6th level before our schedules stopped our campaign. During one of our early sessions we were pretty bloodied when we saw a group of about 10 (assorted kobolds, lizards and cultists) moving towards us. One PC actually wanted to fight them, but as the cleric in the group with reasonable wisdom, I shouted for our group to run. My PC nearly had to physically pull that war hawk PC with us. We did escape and lived to continue our adventures.

For the sessions we did run, my PC was knocked down and dying 2 times and the 4 other pcs got knocked down at least 1 or 2 times each. HotDQ is quite a dangerous adventure path. I think it was written that way to train players to be cautious, use stealth, deception and alternate ways to overcome challenges (that and the writers didn't even have access to the final versions of the monster stats). I approve of its deadliness.

 

[Shasarak]

This view has frustrated me since at least the early 3E days. A rule that provides a means of achieving an end does not prohibit all other means of achieving that end.

Power attack is a good example from the 3E days. It was a common complaint that anyone without this feat could not hit something "with all their might", which is obviously stupid. Anything a character can obviously try is something that they can try.... Obviously. Power Attack makes the character particularly good at this approach, so someone without the feat should not gain the same advantage or trade off, but that doesn't mean they can't do it.

It doesn't mean a character not built with the intent of doing something will succeed. But they can try with zero investment.

Just as long as we dont go back to the good old days of doing extra damage because you hit them really hard or because you stab them in the eye.

 

[Hussar]

Just to jump on the other side of the fence and counter myself for a moment.

Part of the issue is in scenario design as well. Since this is a module, I can't fault [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION] here. For the past few scenarios, we've been assaulting lairs. From the castle in the swamp to the hunting lodge to this flying castle now, the scenarios have been pretty similar in setup. Large, fairy well defended position with loads of mooks in pretty close proximity to each other. I'm not sure it's actually reasonably possible to not chain encounters together. When you have dozens of baddies, all within shouting distance of each other, every time a combat encounter starts, it's going to spill over into other encounters. With these particular scenarios, it's been pretty inevitable that numerous encounters would be triggered at the same time. There's just no really reasonable way to keep them discrete.

I wonder if this isn't perhaps a flaw in the design of the module.

 

[CAFRedblade]

While alerting and pulling in reinforcements, I'd do that maybe once, twice quickly, and have possibly one pull back to watch, and inform others to set further ambushes, or fortifications. With potential two man groups of scouts to track the PC's if they decide to go and take a short or long rest. Although this all depends on the brains of the monsters in question, and the locations.

This way it isn't always about more rushing out, but using the combat expertise of these guys to do some loose coordination. They may not be military, but should be smart enough
to realize there is a better chance to take the enemy down in larger or better protected groups... or maybe to just run away ....

 

[Hussar]

Hrm, I was cogitating this a bit more and I think I have found something of a common thread running through the chained scenarios. The last few scenarios in the module have been somewhat similar - travel to the roadside lodge, keep in the swamp, flying keep, investigate and deal with the threat. All three scenarios have featured rather large groups of defenders, all somewhat organised and generally all within pretty close proximity to each other. It would be very easy to chain encounters together. Going way back in the campaign to the Wave Echo cavern, we see a similar issue as well - relatively large group of reasonably organised baddies all in pretty close proximity.

And, we managed to chain those encounters together too.

Now, compare to other scenarios. In the town north of Phandelver (whose name I've forgotten), the encounters were more or less discrete with little or no chance of one encounter running to another for help. Or the scenario in the swamp with the spider critter. Again, fairly discrete encounters where we could deal with things more or less individually. Or the subset of the swamp keep scenario dealing with the bullywugs - again, fairly discrete encounters that could be handled separately.

I wonder if we've just hit something of a bubble where we've had a number of pretty similar set ups and it's not really a problem, just a bit of a run of similar set ups resulting in similar outcomes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It doesn't mean a character not built with the intent of doing something will succeed. But they can try with zero investment.

Do not confuse my (mistaken) belief that that was how 5e did it for me believing that it should be that way.