What to do about mass death?

[mirivor]

Hey all! A bummed D.M. looking for advice.

I play at my FLGS. I run a homebrew campaign with 9 players who attend regularly. It is a warrior-heavy group, with a cleric. Last session, I saw 8 deaths...P.C.s that is. They are horrible. They have no sense of team, no sense of tactics, no sense of anything. I threw a grey ooze against them (C.R. 4 creature) against a group of 8, count them.... EIGHT!!!!.... 5th level characters and they got butchered. No one stepped up to help anyone else. I cannot lower the CR on the encounters because the experience earned wouldn't fill one of their cavities, and they seem to get slaughtered by the weakest enemies. What am I suppose to do?

The players are actually older, with two experienced players 50 or older. They don't blame me personally for all of the havoc, but they tease me alot...LOL!

Any suggestions for a beleagured DM?

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Why aren't they working together as a team? When half the group is in melee does the wizard just fireball everything (with out giving a damn that the fighter is down to 12 hit points)? Do your players not the rules of the game? Are some of your players disruptive jerks? Do your players only attack monsters one at a time (ie player A attacks dies now it's player Bs turn he fights for a while and gets killed time for player C to go fight it)?
We need more DETAILS!

 

[F5]

Are they having fun?

You say they don't blame you personally for the havoc, and they're experienced gamers. Could it be that this is just their playing style? They like the light-tactics, kick-in-the-door, shout 'Huzzah!' and make with the hacking kind of game? They may not have a problem with the mortality rate, if they're having fun.

One thing you could do to encourage them to work together is to bring on a few encounters with groups of classed bad guys, who do use good tactics. Show them what you're looking for, and what works, and maybe they'll respond.

 

[scruffygrognard]

I've seen individual player's who lack tactical thinking or who consistently fail to use their character's abilities to the detriment of themselves and the party: it's frustrating to watch. To have a whole party crashing and burning before your eyes must be deheartening.

I suggest having a talk with the group as to what kind of game they want and figure out how to best achieve that. If nearly the entire group wants to be fighters then party balance is right out of the window and most published adventures will be death-traps for them. Maybe shifting to a low-magic campaign might suit them better (when I had a group of guys wanting to play warriors, I switched over to Pendragon). Maybe one player could be persuaded to be a rogue and another could be a wizard. At least the party would then have:
1 rogue
1 wizard
1 cleric
5 fighter-types

Good luck!

 

[JoeGKushner]

NPC Commander who shouts orders to them.

After a few encounters that gets them running well, have the commander get offed.

 

[mirivor]

Thanks for the advice.

We have had multiple talks about strategy, even things as simple as flanking. They seem so.... self-centered... we have had 3 deaths from bleed-out despite my repeated warnings that they had x amount of time left. I confess that it could be my fault because my fights are rather difficult. I play each monster for all that it is worth to the limit of its intelligence. Also, the party has no arcane caster, no divine caster (NOW...) save a ranger, no rogue, no anybody. As I said, they are all warriors... no one is interested in playing the spellcasters. Another issue that may come from my end is a little lacking of gold. The ranger had a suit of +1 chainmail that the Grey Ooze promptly dissolved while the remainder of the party simply stared. The two clerics were toasted last session because all 7 warrior types left them standing to face a pyrohydra.... enter hydra, exit cleric bones.

I cannot see a fix to this. I will continue butchering my players until they start to act as a team... if they do not, I will have to completely alter my DM'ing style, which is something that I do not want to do. Later!

 

[Wombat]

Again, barring Paranoia, I have only have only run one game where there was TPK. I also ran in another one.

In the first case, I was running RuneQuest. Due to the circumstances (the party was exploring some caves in the Land of Shadows), the campaign abruptly ended. No one knew where the party was, what it was doing, etc., so there was no logical reason for the campaign, as set up, to continue. Instead, we rebooted and just began a new campaign in the Plains of Prax.

In the second case, I was playing in Call of Cthulhu with a brand new, never done this kinda thing before GM.

In the fourth session, we met Nyarlathotep in his Herald form. We all went mad.

Grand case of "Game over, man!"

The GM wanted to keep playing; none of the rest of us saw a reason to do so.

 

[Darklone]

Kill them till they're getting sick of it.

Edit: Don't kill them with monsters whose special abilities they don't know.