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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9397491" data-attributes="member: 6877472">So what happened was, the players entered the Duergar sector, killed a patrol and then fought another group that was guarding prisoners.  The Duergar have access to mining explosives and decided to trap the party in the cavern they were in by deliberately caving in the tunnel (there was no other way out).  This way they could either A- wait a day or two for the party to die of suffocation and then dig them out and claim their loot or B- if they dug themselves out, have an ambush waiting for them.As for a plan, given that they had earned a long rest, they could completely tailor their spell lists (I have three prepared casters, a Fighter, and Sorcerer/Warlock) and they knew that they would probably have to fight their way out.  What exactly they could have done is up in the air- I came up with a few likely scenarios, but so far this group has surprised me quite a bit with their varied spell use.I considered that they might try stealth- the Druid could cast Pass Without Trace and the Cleric could cast (EDIT) Wall of Fog as they exited the area. Before the last session even ended, they were talking about which spells they could use to dig themselves out, and one of the NPC prisoners had been a sapper in their nations army, so they had someone with the expertise to help them out.Whether I should have introduced this complication or not is one of the things I've been second guessing myself about- maybe it was a bridge too far.  They had been talking about "ok, so when we get out of here, we'll head out of the dungeon and get back to town to resupply" and I was like "guys, I don't think it'll be quite that easy" and they were kind of ignoring me, so it's quite possible I overcorrected.EDIT: so about the encounter.  The Umber Hulk was a juvenile CR 4 I jerry-rigged by dropping it's Strength down by 2 and giving it less Hit Dice.  The party consists of five level 4 characters and they had three NPC's to help them who were designed as CR 1 and 2's but had to be geared up with whatever the party had laying around.The first encounter was four CR 1 Duergar and a CR 2 caster.  I wasn't sure how to calculate the NPC's in my encounter design- I treated them as three level 1 characters, and the encounter builder spit out that 4 CR 1's and 1 CR 2 would be a medium encounter.The next encounter was the CR 3 Duergar Chief and the CR 4 juvenile Umber Hulk waiting in the tunnel beyond the choke point. My plan would be to have the players defeat encounter 1, then have the chieftain offer to negotiate with the party (offering them free passage out of the area in exchange for a slice of their loot) before unleashing the Umber Hulk upon them- this too was technically a medium encounter- but that was assuming the party would lick their wounds before engaging.Again, I don't know if I was right to have the chieftain set his Umber Hulk on the guy who ran past the checkpoint or not.  In the moment, it made sense to me, but in retrospect, as I said, I'm not sure, given how much more difficult the fight was.</blockquote>

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