This Season's D&D Encounters - A Mess?

[Retreater]

So last Wednesday we started the Crystal Cave Encounters. It was a long, tedious mess of gameplay. Granted we had a bit of a larger group than recommended (8 players), but previous seasons' designs did not exacerbate the problem as did this season.

I'm not giving any spoilers to the adventure or setting.

The primary problem came with over half of the players taking themes that allowed them to bring an animal companion. 8 players + 6 animal companions made for 14 targets on the battlemat. Each of the animal companions ended up creating different auras and applying a myriad of effects that we practically needed a spreadsheet to keep up with them.

Even with a normal-sized group of 5 players, having 3 or 4 animal companions becomes unwieldy to DM and time-consuming.

So bad was the experience that the group is discussing jettisoning this season of Encounters to freeplay Gamma World instead.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Can you share a solution?

Thanks in advance.

Retreater

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Disallow more than one person taking this theme...

 

[keterys]

So, you're playing with too many people, who are playing characters that clutter up the place... and the problem is the adventure?

And the solution isn't obvious?

Really?

 

[Joshua Randall]

Disallow all "pets" (animal companions, mounts, summons, etc.).

People will gripe about it, but it eliminates a LOT of pain from the game.

 

[Magil]

Disallow all "pets" (animal companions, mounts, summons, etc.).

People will gripe about it, but it eliminates a LOT of pain from the game.

As someone who loves playing pet classes, I have to strongly advise against this. It seems like a terrible solution to me.

With that said, in the game I'm currently DMing, I took a look at the Fey Beast Tamer theme and informed my players that if next level (when they could retrain themes) there were suddenly 3 fey beast companions their next encounter would consist of six adult red dragons. They're level 6.

 

[Kelvor Ravenstar]

It sounds like two problems to me.
One, you don't have enough Dms, or the right number of players. If you split from 8 players + 1 Dm, you create two tables of 4 and 3 players with two dms.

The other problem is all of the themes that were supposed to be available for this season aren't available under its campaign tab in the character builder. The generic themes from Dragon were supposed to be available (at least according to the character sheets provided in the organizer's kits). Instead we only get the 4 themes from Heroes of the Feywild, two of which can put an extra creature on the board.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I know zero about the adventure, but this sounds like the players and DM need to change few things on their side.

I would suggest allowing only one person to take each theme, and to make the players keep track of things more. Keeping track of conditions and such is the player's job at my table. Frees up a lot of work for the DM.

But yes, 14 different PC controlled creatures is insane.

 

[MerricB]

The #1 problem is that you shouldn't be playing with so many players. Even without the animal companion problem, eight players is too many. Since you don't seem to have a problem with running an non-recommended size table, I would greatly suggest splitting into two tables of four and three - D&D 4E works extremely well with three players, as long as you scale the encounters down appropriately.

The Encounters adventure looks fine to me, but it's likely to be a bit more challenging to manage the players. During our character generation session, we made sure that the groups covered all the bases and were manageable.

 

[delericho]

So last Wednesday we started the Crystal Cave Encounters. It was a long, tedious mess of gameplay. Granted we had a bit of a larger group than recommended (8 players), but previous seasons' designs did not exacerbate the problem as did this season.

The primary problem came with over half of the players taking themes that allowed them to bring an animal companion.

Even with a normal-sized group of 5 players, having 3 or 4 animal companions becomes unwieldy to DM and time-consuming.

Can you share a solution?

Your problem is too many people, and too many animal companions. The solution, then, is simple: split the table to reduce the number of people, and have people (preferably volunteers) swap out their themes for ones that don't give an animal companion. You might consider offering a small incentive: perhaps a single Reroll token that can be used at any time during the next session, or an auto-pass on the next Death Saving Throw, or something.

(If splitting the table is not practical for some reason, I would advise requiring everyone giving up their animal companions. I wouldn't like doing it, but with 8 players, I don't think you can afford to deal with ACs as well. If you can split the group, then asking for volunteers is probably enough.)

Disallow all "pets" (animal companions, mounts, summons, etc.).

As someone who loves playing pet classes, I have to strongly advise against this. It seems like a terrible solution to me.

Normally, I would prefer not to ban ACs, too. However, in this circumstance, it appears to be pretty much necessary. There's just too much clutter at the table. Better to bans 'pets' than abandon the game entirely, no?

 

[Magil]

Normally, I would prefer not to ban ACs, too. However, in this circumstance, it appears to be pretty much necessary. There's just too much clutter at the table. Better to bans 'pets' than abandon the game entirely, no?

I realize this is encounters, but I don't think it's too much to ask the players to get together and trim down the number of animal companions to 1-2 at maximum between them. And especially split the group into smaller ones.