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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1414883" data-attributes="member: 99">Thanks for all the replies, guys.  I'm taking the approach that I just had an off night.  I wish that in the heat of battle that I'd come to the realization that I needed to change my methods to pick up the pace but I didn't.  I'll know better next time and there will almost certainly be a next time.  I wanted to take a couple minutes to reply to some of your specific points:I agree but this campaign is rapidly moving toward its pre-planned conclusion.  Big events are afoot and the PC's will play a major role.  The setting for my campaign is pretty low-magic in general and the PC's are among the more powerful individuals actively making a difference in the conflict I've put before them.  So the upcoming events will be on par or better than this when it comes to excitement and drama.We use minis.  I've discovered something about my personality as a roleplayer (and it applies to me whether I'm GMing or playing):  I'm a Tactician.  I derive enjoyment out of closely considering the resources at my disposal and using them to achieve my goal.  This is why it runs counter to my nature to handwave big parts of a combat or just let the outcome be determined by a couple of general die-rolls.  That is not to say that doing such is not a very good idea but it doesn't come naturally.For this reason, I'm more drawn to the idea of letting the players run some of the other combatants rather than just glossing over the "crunchy bits" of the combat for those besides the PC's.  Again, that may not be the best idea.  Perhaps my players would rather that I did just give a few lines of descriptive text about what was happening around them and skip to the part where their characters are the focus.  That's why I'm going to point blank ask them their preference and do whatever they want next time.  Because clearly doing things "my way" doesn't always result in a lot of fun, even for me.I understand why you would draw this conclusion from my description but it wasn't exactly like this.  Right from the start, the PC's wanted to get out of there asap.  The primary problem was that the NPC's they were rescuing were scattered all over the top of the pyramid and, with the din of battle, continual attacks by Devils and the geyser of god power, it took a few rounds to organize everyone.  This was further complicated by a language barrier between the Orcs and a lot of the party members.This confusion was essentially broken when the party Wizard, the one who was going to be transporting the lot of them out of there, gave a "drill sargeant style" set of orders, full of expletives, to "Get down off this ****ing pyramid, right the **** now or I'll ****ing leave every one of your ****ing ***es here in Hell!!!"  After that, the exfiltration got under way fairly quickly.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> I also complicated the situation by having some of the NPC's attempt to escape through the rift above since they were ignorant about the Forbiddence.  These same NPC's (who are pretty smart) also came up with the idea of tossing a chunk of the anti-magic stone through the rift in order to suppress the Forbiddence.  This was a viable option for escape but would have been tricky to pull off.  In the event, the PC's decided to stick with the plan they already had (probably a good idea) and evacuated the NPC's away from the pyramid's anti-magic zone before escaping.Thanks again for all of your replies and I'll make sure to keep these suggestions in mind in the big battles to come.</blockquote>

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