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Message: <blockquote data-quote="O-Castitatis-Lilium" data-source="post: 9397434" data-attributes="member: 7044618">I don't think anything really bad happened here. That sounds like a blast! The party working together so cohesively that they managed to take a dire situation and turn it to their benefit (the short rest to the long rest) and went at a group at full strength. I think it would have been a lot worse if they had of just taken the short rest and then this happened.You're right in that you can only plan for so many things to happen as a DM. You can really only plan for: If they follow your story down to the crossed Ts and dotted Is, or if they don't follow your story that closely. Everything that comes after these two is pretty much improve at this point. Sure, you could sit there and try to come up with every scenario that they MIGHT use to solve the situation, but you will never full do that. It's best to plan for what you can rather than what MIGHT happen. Like the cave-in for example. Sure, most of the Duergar might have said: their dead, leave it. Let's go do what we need to do; but there might be those paranoid few that will not believe this and do what they think is necessary for the area as a whole in order to keep it safe. It could be that the leader of this group is the paranoid one and orders them to watch it and set up for anything. Who knows, maybe the leader has had experience with this type of thing and that's why he's in charge, maybe he uses magic himself or deals with people that use magic and knows what they could be capable of, there could be any reason he might order his men to stick around. While it seems like it would have made more sense to just walk away form a cave-in assuming their dead...that's not what actually happens though in real life. Sure a lot of people assume people are dead and walk away from the collapsed building, but they don't all walk away, people are brought in or even the people there start digging, knowing by past proof that there is a chance people survived. Now, I'm not saying that you have to bring real life logic and knowledge all the time into a DnD game, but for some things, like this situation here, it is pretty reasonable to do so. Even if not for the assumption that the party will return, but if anything to have patrols keep the rest of the civilians or people away from a possibly unstable area and causing more loss.As for the guy running into the other group...that's not something you could have planned for really, at least to me. DMs don't really expect a PC to break off form the group in the middle of an encounter like that and draw another group. Honestly, most time my group sticks to the one fight area and uses the area they have around them, not running off somewhere. This one is on the players at this point, not on you. You played the Duergar as intelligent, not just mindless creatures running around and attacking without reason; they had seen this guy before, they know he was part of a group that killed a group of their fellow men, and here he was injured and running right into their hands. Of course they would have gone after him. Now, I know you said you didn't want opinion or advice, but if you will allow me to offer some. This is where you could have either had that group take him hostage or prisoner, and dragged him off to the cells for interrogation or whatever, of you could have done what you did which is had them try to get rid of him, assuming the others had died and he managed to dig his way out somehow. If the group he ran into hadn't heard the fighting of the rest of the group, then they would have only worried about the straggler in one of those types of aspects and not bothered with the rest of the group. Though, considering that this group seems to be not too far off from the other group fighting, it seems more logical to have that group try to deal with that one guy before getting to the rest of the group, giving themselves the advantage of numbers, even though they already seemed to have it. One less opponent on the battlefield is never a bad thing. Again, you played them smart and not mindless, and really this is the players fault for thinking that running and leaving the group behind would be a good idea; not considering that security might be heightened because of their previous presence. Honestly, I don't think you did anything wrong, and you planned for what you could plan for. Sure, some of the session didn't go as planned, but what session does really. I have never had a session where it goes 100% as planned, and I known my group for my entire life. (I DM for my uncles and my dad now after they DMed for me as a kid lol) Even now they still do things that I never could have predicted them doing. I don't 100% believe that this is a group and DM out of sync, but possibly just purely choices being made that neither party could predict being made. Overall, seems like the session went like every other session lol. Though after all that typing, there are two questions that should be asked: Have you talked to the players about what they thoguht of the session? Did they and are they finding it fun? If so, keep doing what you're doing, it's obvious they like it then lol.</blockquote>

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