Splitting the party in combat

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

Best fight I've run: A carriage chase. This was in the 3.5 days. The party was escaping an attack at an inn they were using as a safe house. I cut index cards and drew grids on them to represent the wagons and carriages involved (so they could move independent of each other). The party had to jump between carriages, fight off attackers, and keep control of the VIP carriage holding nobles they were protecting. If you fell off, you were effectively out of the fight (though I gave saving throws to be grab hold of a the side of a wagon/carriage). It was a very fun fight and an excellent climax to the adventure.

 

[KarinsDad]

The way I see it, the party made a reasonable plan to engage a social situation and got a harder fight because of it. I can understand the enemy seeing a perfect time to strike, but I would be hesitant to punish this plan. Next time the players consider splitting up for a well-roleplayed plan, will they think twice because they got ambushed last time? It sounds like your party has some good roleplaying and good teamwork going on. I'd hate to see them feel the need to travel in a tight clump for the rest of the campaign to defend against ambushes.

I find it interesting how often people question the decisions of other DMs here, especially if the DM does something outside the normal D&D box.

Ambushing a split up party is not punishing the player's plan. It's challenging the players in a different way. Why should the players be entitled to have their plan work out exactly as advertised? How boring is that?

If the PCs get out alive, then it is never a punishment. It's XP and it's fun to overcome. And even if some of the PCs do not come out alive, it's still not a punishment. Adventuring should always have an element of serious risk involved (and a good time to sometimes introduce serious risk is when the players are not expecting it), otherwise they wouldn't be called adventurers, they'd be called green grocers.

Coming up with new and interesting encounters is the entire point of playing the game: for everyone at the table to have fun with new and unique different challenges. Not to just grind through encounter after encounter played the same old way most every time.

Nearly every encounter, be it a combat, a skill challenge, or a social encounter, should have some elements of it that are new or unique beyond just the type of NPC encountered. That could be terrain, it could be an unexpected event like NPC reinforcements, a trap, environmental, an old PC ally show up, or whatever.

 

[Riastlin]

Aye, jumping to conclusions is never a great idea which is why I hedged my response (or at least tried to).

His point in general though, is valid I think. Sure, its perfectly acceptable to occasionally "punsih" the party when they split up for good reasons like in the OP. However, you should be careful (in my opinion) about how often you do something like this. Once or twice is fine, but if the party gets jumped every time they split up, they'll quickly learn not to split up, even if it would make logical sense to do so. But you are right, just because the party comes up with what seems like should be a good plan doesn't mean that it should automatically succeed.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Last session I did something that may or may not qualify as "interesting" for this thread.

Basically, it was a puzzle beforehand (which worked really well, actually). Then, after the puzzle, they fought a catastrophy dragon (refluffed as an elemental guardian) which every round spat out either a standard or a minion elemental of the same element - at a ratio of standard/minion based on how many failures they got in the puzzle.

The interesting point was that the battles (I used the same format for mutliple rooms, each with its own puzzle beforehand and its own element) were fought in large square rooms with no terrain. Instead, I had the "dragon" sucking in that element from the rest of the room - so, for the fire guardian, the rest of the room was incredibly cold. So, unless the PCs were in the aura of the "dragon" (which grows by 2 each round for 2 rounds, then shrinks back to its original aura 1), they had to make endurance checks or bad things would happen to them.

It worked really well, both tactically and thematically. Plus, it kept all the PCs close to the "dragon" which is where the interesting stuff was happening.


Another situation that was really fun was where I had assassin characters trying to kill a PC who was a noble (an eladrin warlord). Once the party realised every attack was against the PC, they had a blast working to distract the assassins and/or keep the target upright. For this, though, you want to have it being of lesser challenge rating (I think it was an n+1 and was pre-MM3), and even more so if the party lacks healing (mine has a pacifist cleric, the warlord, a paladin and a wizard - so no shortage).


I've also done the "string of encounters" thing - it was worth a try but wasn't as big of a success, as I found it lead to pretty boring battles where the PCs had to use their at wills all the time.

 

[Nullzone]

Ashes of Athas has a canyon chase scene in it; the parties are both on crodlu-drawn war wagons and are fighting atop them as they speed through the desert. Each wagon requires driving (occupying the driver's move actions, effectively) and every round the scenery changes (causing different things to happen depending on the circumstances).

It's pretty cool