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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ellie_the_Elf" data-source="post: 3434058" data-attributes="member: 17018">*peeps carefully round the corner*Yeah, so, I'm, um, the DM of this group. Hi. How is everyone? Alrighty then...a few points to make which may explain some of the carnage....1. One of the cleric players is completely new to D&D and as such (by no fault of his player) is being played at maybe 50% effectiveness at present. Maybe I should run him through a few one on one fights? I'll see what he says.2. The other cleric is an archer and as such doesn't have anything like the AC he would need to withstand melee. His player has never played a cleric before either- only an artillery sorceror. He's very much still learning what to do when.3. I've had four deaths in as many levels. The first of these was due to a 10HP aasimar cleric trying to hold up the bad guy long enough for the actual melee guys to heal up. Second was  a rogue whose player is fairly notorious for staying in the thick of things for one more round before he retreats. Third was a gnomish paladin who went up against an ogre already wounded then got critted. And last night Xini's character who was hit by a vampire and level drained while already wounded.4. I roll openly. And have extraordinarily good dice rolls most of the time. This does not add up to long-lived PCs, particularly...5. ...when most of them can't roll above a 5 in your average combat6. At least one of the PCs frequently runs around on low HP because 'the cleric didn't ask if I wanted healing'. I am considering some sort of HP indication system to avoid this- we used to do 'red sticker on the forehead if you're at less than half HP' Maybe we'll return to that7. It's rare for either of the clerics or the wizard to buff the party8. Bickering is commonplace. Tactics are not.9. Rolls on healing wands are almost always very low. I can't explain it. In one recent fight one of the clerics was out for about five rounds trying to heal up and kept rolling ones. Wands of faith healing are now being discussed, but wouldn't help all of the party, so they are figuring out how to balance it.10. Expertise and similar feats are used liberally, leading to very drawn out fights and more damage being taken over all than if they'd just walked up and smacked the thing. But what to do? I've offered them an NPC 'healing bitch' - they don't want oneI've offered to start rolling behind a screen but they feel that that would cheapen their victories.I'm taking combatants out of many of the fights, and having some of them use suboptimal attack forms (eg last night's vampire - +8 to hit with his mace, doing d8+5. +2 to hit with slam, doing same damage plus level drain. I went with the latter, knowing they had at least one potion of lesser restoration). I really don't want to be a killer DM- I'm not on a power trip and I don't have an axe to grind against any of my players. I like nothing better than finishing a campaign with the same PCs that started it. I'd really welcome any suggestions on how to get them to function more as a fighting unit. This is turning into a very long post, so I'll shut up soon  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />So just one final note- the DMG PrCs mentioned are fine. I'll take a look at RoS!</blockquote>

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