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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9449417" data-attributes="member: 6877472">It's funny.  When last session ended, with the bandit camp fight in progress, I was sure the battle had reached the tipping point.  I had an NPC ally lined up to appear to help the PC's after a certain number of rounds, and not all the bandits were really inclined to fight to the death.But instead, the battle continued for another four hours, until I finally called it because I was tired of rolling dice.Having many enemies, NPC allies, different types of enemies with different abilities, and four spellcasters was a real pain for me to run.  Which, I knew it would be a big battle, but nothing like this!One of the big mistakes I made, I realize now, was deciding to use the player's tactics against them.  Usually if I launch an attack, it feels like there's a half dozen possible reactions to it to make me wish I hadn't bothered rolling the dice, lol.But when I had NPC's use the very same tricks, suddenly the players were not only unhappy, but they were suddenly really struggling to survive when enemies were living longer than expected!Right before the moment the tide of battle turned, one player was so demoralized I thought they were going to get up and leave!  As it is, some loot was lost as two important enemies managed to escape.  Apparently, PC tactics are simply too good to be used against them, so I'll need to re-evaluate that.  I'd been using a lot of 3rd-party monster design, as a lot of 5e enemies are fairly lackluster...but apparently that was somehow more than the group could handle, despite the fact that in most encounters, they cast a bunch of wacky spells and most of the enemies implode, lol.Especially with forced movement.  One of my players is a Warlock, and they've been very successful at punting enemies into allied spell effects.  I tried doing that one time this session, and immediately got hit with a lot of nonsense about "moves" =/= "enters" when it comes to spells- the whole exercise hurt my head, so never again!I certainly wasn't trying to murder my players- that would be counter-productive (and in fact, no one died at all, despite the overwhelming forces), but there were several turns where a player found themselves unable to do anything, then having to wait half an hour for their next turn, which really wasn't fun for anyone.The players made their desires known however.  They want shorter combats with less moving parts.  And I'm going to have to figure out how to give them just that, without making battles a cakewalk.</blockquote>

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