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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Meech17" data-source="post: 9397425" data-attributes="member: 7044459">I know you said you're not looking for feedback, but I'm glad you posted this. I'm a newer DM, and I really like to try and analyze my sessions as well.. Look for lessons to learn from and what not. So I'm going to reply to some of the stuff you wrote about mostly as an exercise for myself, but perhaps it help you as well. I hope you don't mind.What did they do that was so ingenious, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious because I've tried to take a very "Go-With the Flow" kind of approach, and I'm often in a position where I'm allowing myself to be pleasantly surprised by my party.I ran into this recently too.. In "The Sunless Citadel" my party sided with the Kobolds, and recruited a squad of six kobolds. This is fun.. But ultimately something I think I'm going to try and prevent in the future.See this is tough. You try very hard to make your dungeon seem like a logical, realistic ecosystem. These creatures are living here, and working here. The Duegar want to win.. So it makes sense that they would prepare, knowing there is a band of adventures here to take their stuff.. Especially if they have 8+ hours to do so. I'm currently wrestling with this myself. My last session ended with the party retreating after a winning a tough fight to rest and lick their wounds in the Kobold controlled portion of the dungeon.. So this should mean that the Goblins will notice their guard forces have been murdered, and they will prepare to retaliate, or at the very least bolster their forces right?As far as doubting the spell caster, I wouldn't.. Having spell casting mobs is a must in a lot of combats for me. It gives the encounters so much more variance, and it really amps up the stakes for the party. They have no idea what spells this enemy has in the tank, so every turn they let the caster survive is a very risky roll of the dice. It's too fun to not include.Encounter builders are tough, because they can't really factor in the dice. A deadly encounter can end up trivial if the party rolls fire all night while you're stuck throwing single digits, and visa versa.NPC allies do make proceedings take a lot longer.. Just more bodies in general. Unfortunately with the way the action economy works bodies are more important than HP it seems.I have trouble with this as well. The world doesn't revolve around the PCs, or at least I don't think it should. I had an early session where my party was missing a player, and they got into a really tough fight they barely escaped from with their lives. One of the players asked me after the fact if I re-adjusted the fight to accommodate for them being down a player and I truthfully answered no. I actually hadn't even thought of it, and in hindsight I'm glad I didn't.Maybe Orc #6 could have been sick that day.. But at the same time.. The Orcs don't know that Randy the Wizard is going to be sick that day either right? If they think they should have four bodies guarding the door, they have reasoning for that, and "We expect this party of five players to show up. If one of them doesn't Dave can take a half day" doesn't jive with me.I agree with this the most.. Ultimately I think the party almost dying but squeaking out with the win is the best case scenario. That's heroic fantasy in my mind.But yeah.. I'm having a heck of a time right now because we've had two back to back sessions where I feel like we've made zero progress just because of these crazy fights taking up whole sessions. Session three is likely going to be the same.. And I'm hoping we can finish the adventure in the next one. Part of me wants to make the fight easy and quick to move along the story, but that feels like it would be less satisfying, albeit in a different way.I don't think you did anything wrong. Hopefully in the grand scheme of things this adventure will be memorable for the players because it was challenging and they were successful, and they will forget about it being long and potentially a little tedious.</blockquote>

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