Player ineptness...

[cmbarona]

Another option to consider is asking one of them to take the DM seat for at least one game, or at least consider it as an intellectual exercise. Monsters' abilities are more readily accessible and readable than players', plus they have the brief "tactics" sections that can clear things up.

 

[On Puget Sound]

Perhaps a back-to-basics primer for each of them?

OK, you're a warlock, which is a striker role. Your function in a fight is to identify the worst threat and take it down, but you can be kind of squishy so you need to do it without getting pinned down and squashed. That said, you can and should take a hit or two every now and then to take some of the presssure off the front line.

You'll want to move around the battlefield for three reasons. First, every round you can curse the nearest enemy, and you want them all cursed so when they die you get something cool. Second, you get a +1 to attack if no ally is closer to the target than you are, and once or twice in every fight that +1 will mean you hit instead of miss. Third, you see that daily power, Armor of Agathys? Well, here's what it's for...

Repeat for each player. Go slowly, use visual aids and examples, then run some out-of-story fights specially designed to highlight the points you've talked about. Treat it as a class, not a gaming session.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

You could run a reverse dungeon, to show them how it's done. Give them each four minions per battle, while you proceed to wipe them out with your PCs.

TS

 

[Kzach]

Are they friends or just acquaintances whom you game with?

If they're friends, then possibly you can have a real conversation with them and explain to them, politely, that they're retards.

If they're just people whom you game with, dump them. Seriously, what a waste of freakin' time.

What astounds me about this sort of behaviour is that it's meant to be a ROLE playing game. You're not meant to be the weiner you are in real life, you're meant to be the cool, sauve, and dangerous rogue with deadly combat manuaevers.

Tell them that it's an adventuring game, not a sit at home and be a coward game. If they don't go out and adventure and take on big, bad, foes, then they should stay at home and play Tetris.

Furthermore, kill them. I mean, kill their characters. Make them bring a bunch of characters every session. Don't fudge rolls, don't weaken encounters, just put them up against whatever you think should be in the area they're walking into and if they can't tackle it, tough bikkies.

They'll learn fast, or die often. Either way, you get to have some fun.

 

[S'mon]

I think personally I'd just scale down the threat level and number of encounters until I got something I was happy with. Maybe the occasional set-piece battle that risked TPK, but not 4e's approach of frequent epic battles. I can still have fun playing weak critters mean and trying to hurt their uber-PCs.

I did have a similar problem with 3e, a very high level group who punched well below their weight because whenever things got tough the Wizard would flee and leave his companions to die. There was no perfect solution, but having 15th level PCs fight goblins & ogres helped a bit.

 

[Oni]

I'm not usually on the killer DM side of things, but seriously just play it straight and if they die so be it maybe they'll benefit from the experience. Just give them a heads up that you intent to run things as intended and there will be danger of characters dieing, but if they work together they'll be fine. Maybe run something a published adventure so they don't just think it's you putting the screws to them.

Alternately if you want to go to a little more trouble you could start designing encounters to showcase particular tactics and just kind of work in the does and don'ts and you go. Start with say combat advantage. Have monsters work in together to gain it, then say something like, "the goblins have flanked bob here, now they have combat advantage and will have an easier time hitting him." Then move onto something else, like an encounter that features, forced movement, then AoE, et c. Try to work in opportunities for them to use the lessons of past encounters.

 

[Felon]

Please, what should I do here?

Hmm. You know, to be honest with you, our typical response to these sort of issues is to blame the DM for everything.

Seriously, have you figured out what interests them? If they like to just blindly hew away at enemies, then let them do that. If they like to run away from fights because they're afraid of taking damage, then let the little darlings run. Start singing "fifteen birds in five fir trees..."

 

[Umbran]

They couldn't handle minions?

I find that... odd. I mean, minions should not really require strategy. Minions go down with one hit. If they are level appropriate, it should not take strategy to score a hit on a minion - the minion's ACs shouldn't be that high, right?

Stupidest question in the world - which I ask only because I have seen it in the real world - are you sure they're rolling d20s? I've had a player go through multiple combats, gripign about how bad they were doing, and at the end of the night discover that they'd been rolling a d12 the whole time....

 

[Jack99]

Stupidest question in the world - which I ask only because I have seen it in the real world - are you sure they're rolling d20s? I've had a player go through multiple combats, gripign about how bad they were doing, and at the end of the night discover that they'd been rolling a d12 the whole time....

*facepalm*

 

[Intrope]

They couldn't handle minions?

I find that... odd. I mean, minions should not really require strategy. Minions go down with one hit. If they are level appropriate, it should not take strategy to score a hit on a minion - the minion's ACs shouldn't be that high, right?

Stupidest question in the world - which I ask only because I have seen it in the real world - are you sure they're rolling d20s? I've had a player go through multiple combats, gripign about how bad they were doing, and at the end of the night discover that they'd been rolling a d12 the whole time....

Ought to check for 20-sided d10s, too! I made that mistake, once...

But on the whole, this group sounds pretty sad. But there are people for whom tactics are an alien, inexplicable concept--if you've ended up with a whole group of such, D&D probably just won't make it.