D&D 5E Bragging on my players

[toucanbuzz]

Last session, the players spent some hard earned cash on a bag of holding. They advised, as a player group, that too many puzzles and obstacles in our last campaign were overcome by shoving people into the bag of holding (e.g. one person flies across a chasm). I advised that we were using some A5E rules, which included that the air duration was now randomized, so suffocation was a risk. Even so, my players self-policed and made a house-rule for themselves that there wasn't enough air inside the bag to survive at all, so they wouldn't use it to cheese encounters anymore.

This isn't the first time they've done something like this and it just made me feel warm inside to see them take control of the game with the aim to enjoy having to find new ways to solve new challenges.

 

[rgoodbb]

Whenever I am faced with a problem as a DM that I cannot solve myself, about 30-40% of the time now I am able to open it up to my players, as well as me, to solve. Historically, I wouldn't have done this (control issues). These days I think this is our issue, not just mine.

I still find this is sometimes difficult as a DM, but rarely am I disappointed if I go down that route. And yes, I also feel warm inside. Groovy!

 

[Mad_Jack]

Related to the other thread about anticlimactic boss encounters, back in 2nd Edition I had a party who worked out a complex and cunning plan to go nova on the Big Bad with everything they had at their disposal...
Then, just as they were about to hit him with it, one of the players was like, "Hey, wait a minute...", and started adding up the potential damage.
He figured out that they had about an 80% chance of straight-up wasting the guy in one round.
The party stopped, looked at each other, and said pretty much in unison, " ...Nah. We're not doing that."

They took a snack break for a few minutes while I tossed in a bunch of additional stuff to make the encounter harder, and they ended up having a monster 22-round slugfest that they enjoyed the hell out of.

 

[Lanefan]

Related to the other thread about anticlimactic boss encounters, back in 2nd Edition I had a party who worked out a complex and cunning plan to go nova on the Big Bad with everything they had at their disposal...
Then, just as they were about to hit him with it, one of the players was like, "Hey, wait a minute...", and started adding up the potential damage.
He figured out that they had about an 80% chance of straight-up wasting the guy in one round.

Nice. The next locgical in-character move would be to try to up that percentage.

The party stopped, looked at each other, and said pretty much in unison, " ...Nah. We're not doing that."

They took a snack break for a few minutes while I tossed a bunch of additional stuff to make the encounter harder, and they ended up having a monster 22-round slugfest that they enjoyed the hell out of.

Also nice.

@toucanbuzz - the simple answer to any Bag of Holding shenanigans involving living things is to simply rule that there's no breathable air on "bag-plane" at all, and that the bag has to be fully closed in order for its magic to work (i.e. you have to put the bag down before opening it or else you'll suddenly find yourself carrying the weight of everything in it). Yes this means that the BoH might occasionally be used to kill very small air-breathing creatures, but that's no big deal.

Side effect: this also serves as a nice differentiator with Portable Hole if you rule that the PH does have breathable air inside.

 

[GuyBoy]

We had a similar situation in Odyssey of the Dragonlords and it highlighted the different ideas of player-fun that we have in our game group.
Three of the four player characters had go a bit too powerful for campaign-enjoyment. Encounters were getting too easy. Nobody’s fault really, just a combination of magic items and abilities that produced overkill capabilities in combat.
Not much fun for the DM and we talked. Two players - myself and one other - decided to in-game sacrifice a couple of key items to our gods ( in Thylea, dedications and gifts to temples are very much a thing), which weakened us significantly and made the campaign much more fun all round.
One player chose not do so. Not in a showy way or defiantly. Just didn’t want to weaken his character. It didn’t matter too much because, with only one overpowered character, the encounters were much more challenging anyway but it was an interesting example along the lines of the OP’s case study.

 

[ad_hoc]

Related to the other thread about anticlimactic boss encounters, back in 2nd Edition I had a party who worked out a complex and cunning plan to go nova on the Big Bad with everything they had at their disposal...
Then, just as they were about to hit him with it, one of the players was like, "Hey, wait a minute...", and started adding up the potential damage.
He figured out that they had about an 80% chance of straight-up wasting the guy in one round.
The party stopped, looked at each other, and said pretty much in unison, " ...Nah. We're not doing that."

They took a snack break for a few minutes while I tossed a bunch of additional stuff to make the encounter harder, and they ended up having a monster 22-round slugfest that they enjoyed the hell out of.

To me it just sounds like the challenge was to set up their situation so that they can get the jump on the enemy.

The victory is from the effort to get to that point.

A lot of the difficulty or lack of is the result of how the enemies behave before the encounter.

If it is easy to ambush creatures then it is an easy game. If it is difficult then it is a well earned victory when pulled off.