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