Forked Thread: What would you have done?

Going somewhere that you have not seen yet during a fight in the hope of escape is exactly the sort of thing that leads to a tpk, because this is D&D and there is a very high chance that there are more monsters behind any door that you haven't opened yet.

In fact, in your ooze thread that was exactly what happened.

Does it surprise you that PCs are unwilling to repeat that mistake?

Angrydad said:
My other penny is simply this: video games may be ruining our players' ability to think realistically about combat situations. How many video games have you played where random encounters or even dungeons in out of the way locations have baddies that you can't deal with?
The funny thing is that in my experience this is more likely to happen in a computer game than in a tabletop game.

The other funny thing is that D&D is a game that makes it very hard to tell whether a given foe will outclass you: there's no obvious correlation between power and any observable characteristic, and there's often not a way to test a foe's power without engaging in direct confrontation. That couples with the fact that most monsters move faster than the slowest member of an adventuring party to make any sort of scouting largely fruitless.
 
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What I would have done

As a DM: Reduced the level of the encounter a bit. It's just excessive for a 2nd level party. Maybe 4 skelletons and 4-8 decrepit minion skelletons, instead of 8 skelleton warroirs. That'd've made the skelletons a large force, but one that'd've been more dynamic to fight. With 8 soldiers taking up space and marking you, a fight is likely to get very static. If there's a story reason for 2 wriaths, fine, two wraiths. Still a very tough encounter.

Second, I probably wouldn't have had the skelletons just happen to pop out of the ground completely surrounding the PCs - that's a situational thing that makes the fight even harder. Rather, I'd have them emerge from the ground in cool-looking ranks, like they were a military unit, or burried in neat rows like a graveyard or whatever. Evoke a little Harryhausen. I might bring the wriath in first, have it taunt the PCs and order the skelletons out of the ground, or, have the skelletons rise, then the wraiths swoop in once the players dust a few minions or turn undead and start to feel less threatened.

Upon hearing the party would be down a PC, I'd cut the enemies apropriatelly, remove one of the wraiths and some of the minions, for instance - ideally, such that the exp/player remained the same. Suddenly, no more/less exp issues, either.


As a player:

I play a warlord in my current party, and he'd have been pretty unhappy with the situation, starting a battle surrounded is bad, and retreating into unexplored buildings isn't a great idea, either (could be more monsters or other hazards in there). I'd have made darn sure the Cleric's Turn Undead worked propperly, though - ignoring the imobilization made a pivotal power into a minor anoyance for the bad guys - the DM and the player should both know thier power, though, so I shouldn't /have/ to (but, in our group as in yours, the player of the cleric doesn't always remember his powers quite perfectly - in our case he's just a little more casual a player than some of the rest of us - it took a while for me to get him to remember that Healing Word was only a minor action, for instance). I've generally found turn undead to be underwhelming, but in this scenario, it'd be pure gold.



From what you said, it seems there were some initiative-related problems. The Cleric and Wizard aparently went right before the undead, who all shared an initiative. So they'd turn or thunderwave, and, the undead would fill thier ranks back in before anyone else could react.

From the player persepctive, that's an easy mistake to make, especially on the first round, when you don't know the enemy's initiative. But, it's something you have to get over, and one of those times to ready or delay to get more use out of the positioning power.

From the DM perspective, that's one of the downsides of running groups of enemies on the same initiative. You have 10 enemies, of only two types, so only one or two initiatives for them, in effect, then, they are perfectly coordinated by default, while the PCs have to work at coordinating thier actions. That's a natural advantage the DM has (just as being able to put more thought into individual actions is a natural PC advangate), but sometimes you need to compensate for it a bit. This'd be another reason to have more than one kind of skelleton - to further split up the enemy initiative. You could also have divided the skelletons arbitrarily (those nearer or further from the well for instance) to ge some different intiatives, and break up the enemy round a bit. Not having all the enemies go at the same time keeps things a little more interesting.
 

Bad tactics on the players part is never the DM's fault especially when the DM gives more than one way to ease the difficulty to players with advantageous terrain.

I think you need to have a come to jesus meeting with your players and go over some basic tactics with them on how to effectively use their powers in difficult situations.

For the six PC's you listed this should have been a hard fight but not something that killed any PC's. I think you just taught them a good lesson.

4E is all about tactics and characters working together none of which your players seem to understand.
 

It seems to me like the greed of the party got the best of them - over XP. In 4e, we began a new tactic : Group XP. Now there is only one xp total and everyone is always the same level. It, like all the other changes in 4e, take a little getting used to.

Perhaps if you considered adopting this idea, your characters would not have so adamantly tried to leave the absent player in the dust, xp-wise.

also - If my party saw this encounter and knew their cleric turned the undead and they did not shatter instantly (letting us know they were minions) we would have known there was definitely something very very wrong. We would have done our best to get out quickly.
 

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