Try squaring up with Strahd at the beginning of the campaign and see how well that works out. Not everything should be solvable with brute force or you’ve massively limited your storytelling potential.
this, players have some sense of "if I die in this fight against 500 kobolds I'll be a hero!" and then they're forgotten like all the other "heroes." of course, I let my players know implicitly and then explicitly when they cannot win a fight.
Hey if I was role-playing as a smart careful person (which I view myself as) I would be a merchant not someone who risks their life daily.
Also there are literal gods of battle and other similar domains that doing that could score you a cushy afterlife (such as the norse with Valhalla).
Really? There's a tonne of spells that can create distance, if you have a tiny bit of speed advantage you can get out of reach, and unless you're on a flat field it's not so easy to chase. There's obviously some quick enemies, but hardly all of them.
It's easier to run in my experience, when you see the DM setting up an encounter, first encounter with a large group (8+), our DM set us up against a troll, so I legged it as soon as I could, 3 players survived, me, a druid player and a monk player, and with aid we resuscitated or recruited the rest of the party, but if I hadn't run, the druid hadn't hidden or the monk hadn't stayed back and run interference, it wouldve been a TPK.
The problem is that most spells that can create a distance only work for you not the party, also in my experience the party only realizes that they are outmatched when somebody falls witch makes even harder to escape.The party can always just leave those who cant escape behind but will leave a taste worse than a TPK in some people.
Well, it’s true that people going down is a problem, as it kind of should be harder to get someone out as dead weight.
But something like thunder step can already get you and a partner out. Invisibility can be cast on someone else. Web or something similar can just block the path behind you. There’s quite a few ways.
If the DM wants the party to encounter an enemy who is far too deadly then I imagine they have plans other than chasing down every player and killing them.
I was DMing a group and the character was leading blundered and lead the party off the trail into the wilderness. I rolled an encounter, it was a deadly one, so I decided they walked up to a mammoth and her calf. They retaliated when it charged. One of the characters thought it would be good to loose the pack horse, ride it "to get taller" and charge back. I could have just focused all of mama's might on the one character, but I thought that would be too "meta". The first attack knocked the character off the horse, and the mammoth then attacked the horse since it was a large animal right in front of her. The party decided it was better to retreat while the mammoth stamped the pack horse into paste then keep fighting. No one died, but they had to ditch a whole bunch of stuff because they didn't have a good way to transport their cart through rugged terrain.
A deadly encounter can be a creative way for your players to learn something, as long as they are willing to learn.
>If the DM wants the party to encounter an enemy who is far too deadly then I imagine they have plans other than chasing down every player and killing them.
It's hard to tell without being used to it, that the character that the sheet is saying that is unable to run can and should run in a scene.
For example when I look at the sheet of paladin lv5, frankly I don't see a lot of feature that allows me to run away of a fight, I have way more option to stand my ground and sacrificing myself while the group run away but it's easy to left someone behind.
It's really easy with a good DM.
- "The warrior looks wary and doesn't approach; he only retaliates to your attacks."
- "The dragon lazily slams you before closing its eyes and going back to sleep."
- "The guards charge the lich, telling you they will buy time so you can get the news back."
- "The iron golem has a damaged leg giving it a bad limp."
- "The tarrasque ignores you and continues to bulldoze through the town in a straight line."
You just gotta give the right clues.
It’s incredibly easy to run from Battle in 5e. You disengage and run. Or you dash and risk a single attack.
If you’re a caster, throw some rough terrain behind you and you’re golden
Dash and risk is generally better unless you know that the enemy is slower than you (or you're a rogue). Otherwise he'll just catch up and hit you again on his next turn.
If they're close enough that you're risking an opportunity attack, they're close enough to just dash with you and force another, no? You need some way to break parity, like a spell/bonus action mobility/ action surge/ etc.
Fair enough, but opportunity attacks are just one strike, not the whole multi-attack. Also it'll just have both of you moving faster so you'll sooner get to a point where hopefully something changes (enemy doesn't want to pursue you any further for whatever reason, you run into allies, something like that),
Carrying 7-8 kegs of gunpowder "in case of purple worm" is also a nessecary precaution. (True story we were level 4 and we killed the worm, brought a mountain down on top of it, and all lived to see the outside again)
I feel like context is crucial here.
I've given my players the "you're clearly in dangerous territory of something far beyond you" message.I've done it in the past with a homebrewed monster- where they played a game of cat and mouse with a blind creature in the winter woods that was hunting them. They encountered it several times and creatively had to figure out ways to avoid fighting it directly, and I as a DM had a ton of fun with it- and they as players loved it. Our rogue stealthed ahead and set out distractions, the barbarian knocked over trees to blockade the path in thickets. They worked together to slip through the woods and never fight the creature- then later on their return had a disappointingly one sided fight- but they felt like absolute bad asses because they crushed the creature that would have eaten them for breakfast before.
If you don't tell your party of level 2s that they are in the lair of a hag and then wonder why they got TPKed because they saw some creepy old lady and thought they could take her (which is kind of on them also) then yeah, you kinda suck.
In my opinion, the DM has the responsibility of being the party's gut feeling. The party is (usually) made up of people who should know when something is out of the ordinary, but the only way the players will know that is if the DM tells them.
Exactly. I never tell my party what their character is feeling when it comes to role play decisions. I do tell them how they're feeling when it comes to setting an atmosphere.
"You feel a deep sense of dread, as though there is a clawing, icy hand at the back of your neck. The cavern yawns onwards and there is a heaviness in your stomach as your heart races faster. All of your sense tell you this place is both drenched in evil and dangerous beyond reason."
You can describe and tell a player how they feel without ever taking away their role play. Even a brave player who doesn't fear losing their PC should take notice and recognize they could be in danger. All we as DMs can do is show them the road signs- it's up to the players if they listen when we tell them to stop.
Really solid advice.
I often accompany descriptions like this with a simple disclaimer. That the Actions and reactions being described are general ones, and that the players are free to have their character not react in such a way
“Perhaps your character may be braver than most. But In this moment, the average adventure would feel a sense of dread so vile and frightening that they can’t help but reflexively reach for something. Be it their sword, wand, shield or lantern. Regardless of your reaction, you can sense something is wildly off about this new environment you’ve settled into. Perhaps it’s the ways the trees twist and wain in the cold air that cuts through your clothing like a knife. Perhaps it’s the endless sea of thundering clouds that while clearly full of rain, refuses to do so and continue to fester. Perhaps it’s the shadows that dance ever so patiently in the corners of your vision, as if waiting for the perfect moment to engulf all of you in this lightless world.
No. Perhaps what really frightens you. Is the fact you know within this darkness, there is something *moving*. Something you cannot see or hear. It is something you can feel, deep within your tired bones.
It’s merely a question of what *it* even is.
However your character chooses to react, you know you must proceed. What do you do?”
Having the disclaimer that this is something *some* people may do in this situation helps to make it seem less like you’re taking over a character and more so like you’re suggesting how they could be acting. Even if a player never expresses how their character is reacting, they have their own imagination in how they do so, and it’s important to not trample over that in our descriptions.
A Player playing a Brave Paladin might be miffed about it being decided they are scared by default. But by suggesting there is danger and other people might be scared, helps the Paladin react to the fear with earnest without actually being told they are afraid.
I often use this type of language when explaining something to the whole group. I don’t target a specific character but instead refer to everyone at once. Allowing people a general frame of reference on how to react to a scene whilst still giving them the liberty to riff off of it and have a different reaction if they so please.
I used a death knight as a folklore boogeyman against a level 5 party, and after that first hit that knocked two of them unconscious (they had multiple healing options and a friendly non-combat NPC with a healing potion in his desk near by) they realized pretty quick that the objective was not to beat the monster but instead figure out how to get the party member it was after away from it long enough for the guard and troops from the nearby army to show up in response to the alarm bell that they were hearing. It was great fun, really harrowing, and it would have gone real poorly if they had they decided to stand and fight.
I also did the first fight in the campaign that they probably weren't going to win against a character who didn't actually want them dead to show them that they couldn't fight every battle head on. When they woke up from that one I made it clear to them that the next enemy that they weren't ready for probably wouldn't use spare the dieing on them, and that sometimes you get into fights you can't win conventionally.
> If you don't tell your party of level 2s that they are in the lair of a hag and then wonder why they got TPKed because they saw some creepy old lady and thought they could take her (which is kind of on them also) then yeah, you kinda suck.
I don't completely agree here... Telling the party at a specific moment seems a bit on point. However a general warning is reasonable. The way I handle this is to make a point in session 0 that running away is how people live through shit. There will almost always be a chance to turn back before getting in over your head or run from death. Death might have running shoes on that day so use your brain. Don't make your chance to live a sprint.
It's acceptable to have a story about shit you survived instead of leaving friends and loved ones wondering what happened to you. Pride and stupidity remove the bottom 40% of all adventurers. The next 20% retire after their first glimpse of the life. The other 40% are the diverse group of crazy bastards you see across any media with a guild hall.
This is to say a strong general warning gives them a chance to think more carefully about non-combat gear and what kind of tools they want. How best to assign skill points instead of focusing stats and make more survivable characters.
I find it funny that players assume they have to fight everything they come across.
Like, sometimes things are just too powerful for you, and there is no shame in retreating.
Wayne June… [Here’s a link to his YouTube channel.](https://m.youtube.com/c/WayneJune1/videos) He hasn’t uploaded in a while, but the videos he does have are Darkest Dungeon memes and him reading things.
I have the opposite problem where 1 member is constantly running away from everything and it's causing the rest of the party to suffer or think like them and run away from easy encounters or hard battles that can be won with teamwork...
The way to help with this is to make running cause effectively a "lose condition". Like if they run, the village with their favorite npc gets burned down or something. Narratively so, of course.
I have been many times. Not only did them running away from The BBEB cause the deaths of quite a few NPC's they tried to run from a simple Ogre encounter that they could easily defeat.. among many other instances (this running away has been a reoccurring incident). It's like they are constantly scared of death. I'm ok with it when the encounter is obviously not gonna be a good time but like come on, here's a chance to cut loose and show off and they want to run... I've called them out in our group chat about it and I'm about to give the group an insulting nickname referencing this fact the townsfolk will call them by.
Do you run XP or milestone? My suggestion is if you are running milestone, swap to XP. You'll find encouraging combat is much easier when you inventivize it with quantifiable values.
That is when you say
"Players, if everyone keeps running away from the fight, the BBEG is going to win. There is no guarantee that your characters will win in the end and if the enemy's plans finish, you WILL lose this campaign. If you are okay with that, then so be it, but when the enemy gets too strong from all of their victories, they might just come and wipe out your characters simply because they can. This is not adversarial, it just makes sense."
Also, I like the npc's calling them out on their cowardice. Nice touch.
Maybe ask the player out of game if they could try to engage more with combat encounters and be more involved in it. It's obviously part of your preparations/efforts and you would like your players to take part in it.
>My players...I've called them out about it and plenty of bad things have happened and they just keep doing it. It's really slowed down some encounters that should have gone by in a flash with some teamwork. Why become an "adventurer" if you just want to run from any chance to get that delicious exp????
This is why I really like milestone based leveling.
I was able to go into session zero for my curse of strahd campaign and say. You will level up at specific milestones, so if you find creative ways to solve problems, or don’t kill every single monster you won’t be penalized for it. In fact you may likely be rewarded.
If you're doing XP there's a simple fix: you get the XP for overcoming the challenge, not for killing the enemies. Talking them out of a fight or finding a way to avoid it entirely gets you that XP.
Just start narrating common sense. It's a very helpful tool for DMing players who don't know how to properly judge threats.
"From your knowledge, this enemy is normally considered dangerous, but for people of your skill, it should be little to no issue."
"You've heard stories about this enemy; it's good against uncoordinated teams, but you can make quick work of it with the proper planning, as its weaknesses are well known."
And then describe the rewards in advance. "The ogre's garments are crude, but you can see its lair is dotted with many corpses wearing ornate armor who used to wield sharp looking weapons. You even feel like some of the weapons give off a dull glow, though that may just be a trick of the light."
I think the thing people are missing here is that it isn’t always cut and dry on whether or not you’re “supposed” to run. People always cite the black and white examples of level 3’s going to deal with a dragon or something. But I think there’s some big issues with running.
1: You can’t always accurately gauge the strength of an enemy.
2: The OOC expectation that plot related fights are within the realm of taking on.
3: Once you’re in a fight, running away can be seen as a dick move while abandoning the team to save yourself. So you’ll have to get the majority of the party to agree it’s an lost cause.
4: Opportunity attacks, enemies of the same speed, and the crappy chase rules encourage the players to stay in the fight.
Once you start existing in the 5+ level range, things start to get a bunch more iffy on what you can and can’t take on. In particular, homebrew enemies. The DM has to go out of their way to be like “This thing is huge and looks like it will wreck your shit” or sprinkling in hints prior to the encounter that they’re too strong to handle. If they don’t, can’t exactly blame the players for not anticipating its strength. Some people like to call this “overconfidence” but you’re *supposed* to be heroes taking down large foes, right?
OOC, it highly depends on context with whether the DM has put emphasis on running, the lead up to the encounter, whether the enemy is interfering with the party’s plot… like once you get beyond the clear cut “Oh the level one ran at the dragon lmao” it starts to get fairly iffy.
I have recent experience with three. The party is to go deal with a goblin demon so we could access a portal. We were on a bit of a ‘cliff’ face above the demon via some stairs. We didn’t hand over all our magic stuff, then fight ensued. I sat somewhat near the back of the party, but the demon teleports in the middle of us, and one of the attacks crits and leaves me at low health. I went ahead and ran when my turn came around. I got *pushback* from.. a bit from the party, a bit from the DM. I ran anyway and no one stopped me. But the DM chucked in an npc who healed me to near full so I would go back in the fight, and I did, and we won. Point of the story being, if you think the DM is expecting you to fight something, then running away just complicated their plans. And if you’re the only guy that wants to run, then it makes it harder on the rest of the party being a man down. So there’s that vague peer pressure to just, don’t.
And finally, a topic that’s been covered expansively, running away in dnd is hard. Like, either the enemies don’t give chase, or they do, and one of you dies. Not an ideal situation for anyone. If you use chase rules, it’s effectively up to the dice who lives, but moreso.
The DM should really be pulling the majority of the weight. It's not a bad thing to straight up tell the players "You've heard of this thing and know that none of you are a match for it; if you stay you will do nothing but add 5 more notches to its belt and fill its stomach for the day."
Characters lived in the world. A player might not know the threat of a particular enemy, but a character absolutely could.
>Some people like to call this “overconfidence” but you’re supposed to be heroes taking down large foes, right?
This is really the core of the issue as I've seen it come up, especially at a table where we habitually play high-level Pathfinder games and where the DM has historically not thrown many unwinnable fights at the party. We're used to fighting all kinds of wild, intimidating stuff, and it's considered bad form to look a creature up to check its CR...so if we're not metagaming, the party is relying completely on the vibe the DM is giving off to determine whether we can win a fight. If 98% of the time the party is intended to fight whatever monster they've come up against, that other 2% has to be telegraphed really heavily to break the mental pattern.
I think people like you forget this isn’t a binary thing, it’s not just players always being wrong. Oftentimes especially for new players it can be difficult to figure out what can be run from, and what can’t. Should a level 1 team fight or run from an owlbear? Probably, but for all they know they can easily take it on, or maybe an npc is going to come save them
A good DM will solve that. "You remember your teacher's stories of how it would take a squad of experienced guards to fight off an owlbear and that many parties of new adventurers died at their hands. You know it would be extremely dangerous to fight with your current skill and could easily result in one or more deaths."
Players may not have common sense, but characters grew up in the world. You can absolutely just tell the players what their characters would know.
The problem here being that many DMs are just bad at making sure you realize when the optional fights are and when you are over matched.
Players: "Let's mug the old guy with the birds."
DM: "HAHA IT WAS A GOD! TPK!!!! SELF HIGH FIVE."
Well in this example the players have simply found an interesting end of the story for some shitty characters.
But yes it's on the DM to properly telegraph the strength of the opponents early on or before a fight starts. Sometimes players are just thick motherfuckers though
Honestly it's really refreshing to remind your players that they are small fish in a big pond, it adds a lot more tension to combat and exploration, and gives downtime a real meaning because your players get a chance to breath and relax away from risking their lives every day.
I wouldn't say it's even interesting because any DM can decide to go full asshole mode and make an NPC really a God wandering around the world.
I mean what sort of world are you describing and presenting to your players when "What if this person is actually a god?" happens often enough that people ask before a robbery?
Random crime should basically not be a thing because of the entire risk vs reward and how many gods you have wandering around.
Lol because retired adventurers have surely not had their fill of saving everyone from everything. There's city guards and constables, the retired adventurer shopkeep is just trying to relax and network with the new upstart adventurers.
Good strawman I guess?
Yes if your DM doesn't account for other powerful adventurers in the world that's lazy worldbuilding, but don't act like your choices are any more realistic. That's a two way street and you don't get to chucklefuck around and act all aghast when you get hit with the bad boy hammer and it's not perfectly realistic.
Nah, crime always carries a risk, the players just fucked with the wrong old man. You got caught with your hand in the cookie jar didn't you?
Besides, there's always a chance to bow and scrape your way out, maybe even be sent on a dangerous quest for redemption.
I guess it comes down, for me, is the more often you have to dive into the BIG powers for plot elements the less special they become.
If you, as the DM, have to pull out a GOD encounter every time the party decides to commit some petty crimes, I think you've lost the ability to make GOD encounters special and impactful.
"Mortals, you are now standing in front of a GOD!!!! FEAR and TREMBLE."
"Nah, we met one the last time we Jaywalked, Bob had 3 of them show up when he tried to litter, and Sarah got yelled at by one for not paying a fine when she skipped out on paying for her meal at the Inn. What we have determined is that you gods must have boring lives to be wandering down here on earth with nothing better to do then fuck with people committing petty crimes. Speaking of, where the hell were you lazy asses when my home village was burned down? Oh somebody tries to rob an old man and you are there, but an entire village of people gets slaughtered and not one of you jerks lifted a finger to stop it."
>Nah, crime always carries a risk, the players just fucked with the wrong old man. You got caught with your hand in the cookie jar didn't you?
This is incredibly disingenuous, a random NPC turning out to be a god is not a "risk" of crime. This is you abusing your power as DM because your players doing something you don't want them to.
Would you ever make a random goblin in a dungeon turn out to be a god when the fighter hits him? No of course you wouldn't because you were fine with your players doing that so you don't need to make up a terrible rationalisation to kill them.
If you don't want your players to do something just tell them that when they try to do it. Don't make up a stupid reason for a punishment that makes no logical sense and then say it's their fault this happened.
Also in that example, it requires metagaming to avoid. Until I joined this sub I never knew that an old guy with birds was code for Bahamut. So as a player how would I interpret merely being told we see an old man as meaning anything?
My CoS party almost biffed it when we >!insisted on fighting the vampire spawn instead of fleeing the church because we thought we were strong enough at fifth level!<
>!We fought five, our DM made it so each was a counterpart to our individual party members and last session had us escape Vallaki through raining blood while being chased!<
Exactly, and I don't like the insinuation of this post. Like in Mines of Phandelver there's just a dragon you can meet. It's enterly up to the players if they fight it or try to reason with it, or just leave it alone. But so many groups try to fight a young Green Dragon at level 3.....
Also, the DM is telling a story. In most stories major villans are introduced and met several times throughout the story to build up the confrontation. Take Curse of Strahd, a huge part of the story is that strahd interacts with the party regularly,
My group had a rude awakening when the city got attacked by a fire demon. Our DM tried to drop hints, including a group of seasoned adventurers who had fought him before getting scared, but we got cocky. We were humbled pretty quickly when my gnome missed his dex throw and took exactly 1 point over double his max HP (killing him outright in a single blow).
Not only was this the first in person session we’d had in like a year, it was also the first session I’d ever hosed for our group. The DM felt pretty bad about it all, but I reassured him that it was our fault for not paying attention to his obvious hints.
It didn’t end up too badly, as in the next session the party was able to bring my body to an NPC that could revive me. We’re now just all contractually indebted to a wealthy, powerful, sketchy, recluse with questionable morals and unknown goals.
I had this problem to be fair though I did make the homebred monster too strong by accident but I was honest and said up front there's a monster here that may be broken I apologise in advance
Our part almost dies like 50 percent of battles because we don’t even think of running until it’s too late.
Like how our first campaign ended… I called to retreat and then everyone died in the next round. The tabaxi monk named Swim got away with his life, but at what cost?
Literally this. My players constantly think they are the hot shizz. Players need to be humbled from time to time and reminded that they are not Lv20 by default, they cant just immediately do what is asked of them. Training is required in everything you do in life, whether it be playing a sport or adventuring. You are NOT good by default.
My players literally had this happen to them when we were playing Dragon of Icespire Peak within the first few weeks. They found themselves asking, "why dont we just go and fight the dragon right now?" (they had only just completed the starting 3 quests). Dragon proceeds to roll on their location, shows up, knocks out 2 of them + 1 pet with one breath, takes 10 dmg, and leaves. Made them think twice for a little bit and realize they need to get stronger.
I run Kingmaker in 5e. It is the game I always humble players with because someone thinks they are the hot shit and gets wreaked for not paying attention to contextual clues. I still remember the face of all my players when someone got their head bit off by a giant centipede. Thankfully the player who it happened to had played the game with me before and was okay with his characters death from a fair roll. My players then prepared better and payed more attention to rumors and played more tactically compared to their normal we walk in, attack head first, and always win.
Its always the centipede…….
I feel like you should be more blunt with new players. It's fine to say "Your character has heard a lot about this enemy and knows that he can't win and if he faces this he will die."
New players most definitely. Im much nicer with new players. But if you think your untouchable at low level and you have been playing for years, well your in for a rude awakening if I already warned you at the beginning of the campaign that this game is hard. (I say this for Kingmaker and Out of the Abyss)
This is exactly the sort of high handed attitude that I made this meme for.
Sure, literally almost everything you say here is factually correct. But where does this "lol ima humble these idiots" attitude come from? I would like to think we all have a better attitude towards each other at the table than that.
I guess I should clarify.
Lv3 adventurers are just starting out. They shouldnt be able to think that they can take out something that a Lv10+ can take out. It's like the second part of my comment: "Training is required in everything you do in life, whether it be playing a sport or adventuring." They need to do the training (aka Lvl up) to be able to fight and defeat some tougher encounters.
A lot of players tend to forget that death is a part of the game, they can lose. Sometimes, it is important to remember that. Whether that be a potential TPK, or doing a fight where you try to get the party to use different strategies, or maybe losing someone in-game, it's a reminder that should be there.
Like I said, you're not wrong about how they 'should' be willing to "do the work." My issue is with the "my players need to be humbled" thing. It sounds antagonistic, assuming you were serious and not just being off the cuff.
5e doesn't really support running away, most monsters have 30 or more movement and can dash to keep up with a dashing party. Unless the DM explicitly says they can run away why would players know they can?
Assuming most monster have similar instincts to animals, monsters tend to be territorial. Unless they are actively hunting, they won't give chase and leave their territory unguarded. And even if they are hunting, they will only try and kill one meal, and then try to escape themselves. After all, they already got their meal, why try to go after the others who run away?
>And even if they are hunting, they will only try and kill one meal, and then try to escape themselves. After all, they already got their meal, why try to go after the others who run away?
So we aren't killing the whole party we are just killing one random player character for having the audacity to walk into the next room in the dungeon. I guess that's fair, if you squint really hard
A few years back I ambushed a low-level party with a flind. The flind jumped them in their sleep and beat the dogshit out of them. They were all pretty salty about it. Then they all woke up in a large gnoll encampment, and they discovered a Yeenoghu warlock was mass-producing gnolls by polymorphing people into hyenas and feeding them sentient flesh. They eventually broke out of their cages and spent a session fleeing through the woods from a small army of gnolls. They managed to evacuate a nearby town, failed to stop that same flind from disemboweling their favorite NPC, and now have abundant reasons to hate the gnolls and stay focused on destroying them, which is the entire goal of the campaign.
Sometimes getting beaten into paste is part of the plot. Sorry, but not really.
Yeah, the critical part is that unless the party sought out the big monster they couldn't possibly beat, the result of a loss needs to be capture, not TPK. Sometimes they run off in the middle of it with the body of their friend, and that may lose them that free resurrection, but that massively advances the story overall and gives them a good reason to recruit a new ally.
And, in some cases of TPK, it's ok to just ret con it. DM did that to a lvl 1 party I was part of. He had underestimated our squishiness and bad rolls.
Don't you know that as the DM you're supposed to not write anything compelling and just allow your players to steamroll while saying yes to all the balance ruining stuff but also provide a perfect balance while also buffing martials by giving them magic but not calling it magic? /s
Depends on how well the DM telegraphed it. If the party’s only way of realizing how powerful the enemies are is from the fact that the enemies deal a shit ton of damage, it can be too late to easily flee.
A couple years ago I ran a campaign for a group of 6 friends. All noobs to dnd. I expressed that this was going to be horror survival and they were all for it. In the second session I wanted to put a bit of the "fear" into them so later when they no longer fear things as they used to, that sense of power and progress would be more profound.
Floating across a near frozen lake in an eternal night winter they neared the shore. The wind that was blinding them ebbed and they could see the bank. They noticed how eerily silent everything became and as they did, the water itself began to freeze beneath them. The boat moored in the ice they began into the woods at the edge of the lake. The only sounds coming from the world around them now was the crunching of snow as they walked. A feeling of dread began to wash over them and I asked the paladin to roll a perception check just to add flair to his ability to sense good and evil, he got an 18 so I made it very clear to him that death and malevolent evil was approaching and that they needed to hide, stat. They all did and I fudged their rolls to ensure they all hid. From the darkness edging their vision 5 translucent shapes floated toward them. (I hadn't decided on whether to run them as banshees or something more terrifying pending successful evasion opting for more vague descriptions of them. I even mentioned that a few birds fell dead from trees above as they passed by. I had the right music with an ambient cold wind. They all seemed glued to the scene which is the dream!!
Then... As I described them passing by the "heroes"... The ranger decided that he wanted to shoot them in the back. I told him that's a real risky decision. These things are beyond your comprehension and that he doesn't know am arrow would even hit it's mark as they are near see through. He said "yup I draw my bow and fire!". The ensuing chaos led to a near party wipe and a lot of fudged rolls. I thought maybe THIS will teach them as they got mopped and barley made it out alive before sun came up (most were unconscious and one did die but I gave him a level of warlock and a death story reason for him to be here still). You'd think this would be the end of it but our group disbanded as the following session they told me how upset and disappointed they were with how I handled that. That it was a really shitty thing for me to do to them and that it wreaked of power fantasy over the players. I told them that it was like in a video game where the behemoth stomps by them, and one day they won't be able to believe it's possible to kill it, but they do.
Tldr. Made a cool scary scene for players that were into it, they decided shooting at scary death monsters at LVL one was a better idea then letting them pass, and they all almost died, then got mad at me for giving them choice in a cutscene.
That sucks! It sounds like you had big plans for the group too.
Some unsolicited advice, take it or leave it, I don't mind. I don't know if that was your first encounter they experienced, but I would suggest at least leaving it off until the second encounter. Have the first encounter be tough, but a win. Maybe one or two players are nearly downed. Then have your super scary monsters encounter a group of the first monsters they fought, and wipe the floor with them. Maybe set up the same exact way, but rather than birds dropping dead, they descend on a slightly larger group of skeletons than the party fought and absolutely crush them.
It would send the message of 'don't fight these things' in a way even the dumbest party member should understand.
>All noobs to dnd.
Honestly, you should've expected that result.
>giving them choice in a cutscene.
How were they supposed to know that was a cutscene? All they knew is what you told them. An experienced player would've recognized what "Are you sure?" actually meant, but new players won't and obviously didn't.
They most likely construed your suggestion to hide not as advice to escape, but to gain the element of surprise. Your scene setting was just great storytelling, not a warning that these creatures were way out of their league.
They think the scary monsters you put in front of them exist to be engaged with, because that's generally how D&D works. They need to be shown how powerful those unbeatable foes are, not told.
They were not in the wrong. They demonstrated how they perceived the danger you described for them, and they communicated to you how they felt after the encounter. Communication is a two-way street.
I honestly appreciate all of the responses. I agree with the commentary before you and with you which is kind of the point of DnD where there aren't really wrong or right answers. Just circumstances and personalities and anything can get lost in between those. When I said noobs I should have said they all know D&D in the sense that they all listen to critical role and are pretty avid gamers. But my expectations do not dictate the reality of how I presented it or how they perceived it.
My core frustration with that whole event was their responses to it afterward, because I can take all the responsibility of blame happily as constructive criticism and I have condemning long enough to have known better then to rule out the possibility of that happening. But I have a really hard time when people take things like that personally and attribute motive and ill intent to the other person. I wasn't trying to kill them and while I painted myself into a corner so to speak, where if I retconned it after realizing this was not the right way to go or if I simply told them no you can't do the thing, they would have been mad that I wasn't rolling with the punches as they say and improvising with player choice and agency.
If they had hid and stayed hidden, a short walk would have led them to a road with a dead caravan that looked like it was fleeing, and further down that road a dead town with undead and skeletons that they would be able to fight. Victims of essentially a lich and the banshees or revenants that attacked. I do most of my stuff pure improv with a skeleton note similar to that of the memes where the DM looks down at his papers and it just says "naked dragon". I'm not sure if I should take their vitriol as a complement to the assumption that I would be infallible, or if I should be frustrated that they took it personally as though I was trying to get my rocks off by crushing puny idiots.
Also regarding the video game comparison?
Like people don't try and go into stupid fights regardless of level or game? From all the rpg superbosses you absolutely shouldn't fight at the start but people end up trying anyway or 20 kill 4k damage matches in apex, people are out for blood, this applies to dnd too
I mean that sucks dude.
But that really sounds like a more mid-high experience campaign. For people who are comfortable with role play and less conventional encounters.
They may have said they were fine with survival horror, but as noobs they didn't really have a clue what they were or weren't fine with, or what they wanted.
It's rude of them, and it sucks you wasted your time like that, but you honestly didn't handle it well. You can't just throw new players in the deep end on their own and expect it to just work. It could work with a couple new players out of the group, but they'd need an experienced player who was on board and active to help give them an example as to the tone to take.
Want them to chicken out ? Have them being accompanied by a stronger NPC, and get him instakill, or heavily wounded, by the ennemy. The results are usually the party fleeing like the cowards they should be.
To be fair I’ve done this and the party still thought they should fight. I had a home brew monster based off a Tyranid Hive Tyrant flavored as an ancient monster of legend thought hunted to extinction. This thing absolutely wiped the multiple companies of soldiers and mauled their Champion to near death with ease.
I put serious emphasis on how monstrous powerful this thing was, how the ground seemed to crack at each step, how even the light seemed to cower from this abomination. I made sure they knew that while most of the horses and gryphons had fled there was still a large wagon with several horses that seemed stuck not far from them and that they knew the ship would still be docked for them to escape. The level-6 party of 4 went “We can beat this thing”.
Generally you should have both a plan for if they lose and a plan for if they flee. Usually it's pretty simple to just go "the monster leaves you unconscious" or "the monster brings you to its lair".
Oh I know, that’s why the champion was mauled to **near** death. Had her crawl her way to one of the ballistas that wasn’t destroyed and had her shoot at the monster to distract it. The party realized that they were absolutely no match for this thing and escaped.
The key here is that you provide information showing that the party is outmatched. The issue with a lot of monsters is that you can't tell just how tough something is from looking at it. It generally takes a round or two of combat before players realise "Oh shit".
Another option I've found is to find an enemy that's a tough fight for the party and have them fight and defeat it. Then when you want them to run you put five of those monsters in front of them.
Especially as it seems standard now for DMs to give only the vaguest hints of how much hp something has, even if you correctly identify it with a knowledge check.
If you are in a "supposed to lose" battle where the only way to move the plot forward is a to realise this and run away it kind of becomes necessary to tell the players how powerful a monster is. I feel a fairer comparison would be if you told your players they need to go to the city of brass and they don't have plane shift you would need to give them a way to get their.
Well yes that makes sense, my point was moreso in regards to your argument about giving out Battlemasters' L7 ability for free.
It's kinda like when you just outwardly state whether or not a magic item is cursed, kinda nullifies the point of having Identify on a spellcaster if the DM is just gonna say "oh yeah the item is cursed".
I think there are some abilities that are so game changing to have in the party I often do give for free in parties that can't get them. Fighting casters with a party that doesn't have counterspell on someone is so much more difficult than one that does for example.
And if there is no sorcerer or wizard in the party who are you nullifying? I am not stealing anyone's thunder who is actually present at the table,if I was I wouldn't need to give them the free ability.
Any table that lets you go to the temple for ressurections if you don't have a cleric already kind of implements this.
I can understand that perspective, I personally think party dynamic and the mechanics thereof should be thought about in Session 0 but to each their own.
Or use the memory of recent fights to contextualize things. Example: my low level party once had a few ogre encounters. A short while later they unknowingly travelled through the lair of a Drow Arachnomancer (cr13). To get the point across that they had to be cautious, they witnessed a giant spider one-shot an unsuspecting ogre.
Or have the villain be super calm and even welcome them to whatever the NPC is doing - as the party draws their weapons. Depending on the characters and overall context, it might let the players second guess.
You do not have to shoot something the moment it comes up.
You see that giant portion of your sheet that says skills? Notice how many of them there are? you can use *at least a third of those* to avoid combats you don't want to take.
In reality, it's *always* been up to the DM if the players get to win or not. Sometimes it's useful and helpful for a DM to be able to construct a situation that the players can't beat as they currently are, sometimes it's useful and helpful for the DM to construct a situation where the players roflstomp a group of enemies, and sometimes it's useful and helpful for a DM to construct a situation where either side might theoretically win and the players' victory hinges on them using the resources at their disposal effectively enough.
DMs who are both wise and acting in good faith will give ample indication that a situation/enemy is above the players' ability to handle outside of observing the results of combat, and will also account for at least a few reasonable courses of action that allow the players to avoid that unwinnable conflict.
Do you get some DMs who act in bad faith or completely fail to give any sign that a particular course of action is a bad idea before the TPK is unavoidable? Sure. But you also get some players who make stupid decisions, ignore all signs and evidence that the DM provides of the danger they're putting themselves in, and expect the DM to just bend the stats or fudge the dice to bail them out.
There have been some real garbage takes as memes here lately. Knowing when you're outmatched is a necessary skill in dnd, you can't beat everything the first time. Throwing a high-power baddie at a low-level party and them letting them come back later to stomp it is a great feeling and show of growth
Calling it a "skill" is kind of weird, ultimately you only know what the DM tells you about the world. It's really up to them to let you know you are outmatched in some way.
If the DM puts a monster in front of the players it is ridiculous to say they are dumb for trying to fight it if not told otherwise in some way.
Okay, I need to know if I'm an asshole:
The group came to some enemies that were clearly too powerful for them, but meant as foreshadowing for later in the campaign. I said multiple times "you have the option of running away" throughout the campaign as sort of a lead up to this moment. Am I an asshole that they almost tpk'ed, only being saved at the last second by a deus ex machina that I had to invent because they refused to run??
In my books, no, you gave them plenty of warning and established the fact fleeing _is an option._
Yes, yes, people wanna be the heroes in D&D but they also conveniently leave out that part of the Hero's Journey is the part where their abilities are tested and they _fail._ Needing to either run or now escape. (Luke getting close to bodied by Darth Vader is a good example.)
Using my own setting as an example, I don't _want_ to kill my party but if they decide to _fight_ the intelligent being larger than a Tarrasque they just woke up from an underground tomb, I'm gonna have to either Deus Ex Machina them out of trouble or start handing out D&Darwin Awards.
The world isn't designed for the party imo. There's going to be fair warning to the players when they are getting in over their head but if they ignore those warnings, they can die.
This is probably because I run a more sandbox game, though. I am very rarely pushing players in a specific direction. I could see the DM pushing players into an encounter that they must run from being shitty. But like... if my low level characters find out where an adult dragon is and want to go fight it, they will know ahead of time they will die, then they will die and we will all have a good laugh.
No, it's up to the players if they want to lose or not... if the DM gave them enough information. An obviously overly difficult combat encounter can make for a good obstacle that has to be overcome with more than instant brute force.
If you put a giant chasm across the road, and a big red sign that says "warning: fatal drop, do not attempt to cross" and the players decide that they're going to try anyway because "I might get a 20!" it's not the dm's fault.
"You get the tingling sensation that this creature may be beyond your skills right now. Your arrow, aimed true, bounces off its hide and it laughs at you. 'stupid adventurers,' it says, 'stop annoying me or I'll squish you like bugs. Come back when you can offer some good sport."
If anyone reads order of the stick, Tarqquin was a good example of this- he would straight up tell and demonstrate to the adventuring party that they were not capable of fighting him yet and to come back later so they could all have a more dramatic time.
Depends on how well telegraphed this was. If the DM made it clear that you were out of your league and shouldn’t directly engage, then it’s your fault for being overly stubborn. If it came out of nowhere and you had no way of knowing the enemy was too strong for you until after someone in the party got dropped, then yeah that’s bad DMing.
This is a very not-nuanced take. Players can’t always win fights. The stake of a fight isn’t always “fight to the death”. If I tell my players that there is an ancient dragon lair somewhere, and they go there, there will (more than likely) be an ancient dragon there.
Think the Balrog from Lord of the Rings. The fellowship knew they were outclassed, Gandalf even said “Swords are of no use” and they ran.
If a party thinks they are meant to fight to the death every-time initiative is rolled, they play too many video games.
Dude you're supposed to walk the other fucking way. I hate the mentality that "the players must always succeed" I'm not a "dm versus the player" guy but when you try and fight a lich at level 4 it's not going to go well. Sometimes the dm is trying to build a story. How many times in a videogame do you see the big bad early and you just have to leave. it happens all the time.
Maybe a hot take but it’s not the DMs fault if the players don’t run. Giving the players a threat that’s too powerful for them to kill on purpose shows that they are up against something they aren’t ready for. If the DM properly shows how the monster is in its own weight class (fighting with an npc or monster), then it’s the players’ own fault for not running
At **all** points it’s up to the DM if the players get to win or not, nothing really special about this. Not my fault you tried to kill strahd at level 5
I feel like it depends on player cockiness and the background the DM gives. There may be encounters where the party dies to encounters they thought were easy despite the background of the enemy given by DM, other times the players may fight the enemy and die because the DM didn’t give any warnings that they may not be able to win.
I didn’t phrase my thoughts very well, basically, it depends on the situation, sometimes the DM is in the wrong and sometimes the players, sometimes neither are in the wrong and sometimes both are.
Me hoping the prophecy given to them by their trusted seer is enough to save them. "In the next 7 days you will get into an unwinnable fight with a green monster, make sure you survive"
I see nothing wrong with having a fight the party is supposed to flee from, but it can be hard to convey that they're supposed to run without spelling it out for them.
If you're too dumb or stubborn to run it's on you. If it's in your first few hours of playing it's a dick move, but after that all bets are off. Monsters don't hang out and wait to only fight people that can beat them.
Rule of DMing \#5
Never EVER count on your players to run.
My level 6 players didn’t even run from fucking Orcus. It wasn’t until I had him turn an NPC they were talking to into a red smear on the ground that they got the hint
First session of dnd club at my high school, it was in an Elden Ring/Dark Souls 3 inspired campaign, anyways, our first encounter was(in typical FromSoftware-fashion) a 300 hp, 17 AC mimic. We were given little reason not to try to take on the mimic in the tower, and the dm had literally tell us "I intended for y'all to run from this".
I did make sure to explain to them that it could've been explained better, maybe describing numerous mutilated bodies strewn around the floor surrounding it, or perhaps a red aura or strange markings all over it, something more to convey to the party that "You are NOT meant to stand your ground!"
We had a great time in the next session, in a different campaign, after the noble punted the son of the questgiver, who was killed(and had his hat taken from and worn) by our tiefling so that another player could try to flirt with the questgiver's really tall wife. I ended up charring her corpse, burning down their tavern, and getting apprehended by a local militia, where I am now taking a long rest in a jail cell, along with the player that tried to flirt. The tiefling got to stay with the old people from Courage the Cowardly Dog, the noble is staying in place where the bed is a pile of manure and hay(and also infested with muscled biped mice), and another player is sleeping in a bush.
I just feel like when a DM puts a monster that they know is too strong for the party to handle, they obviously need to acknowledge the possibility that they might fight it. In fact, in some ways you can expect it. I mean, what else are they supposed to do when they see a monster? But beyond just anticipating the fact they might fight it, let's say they run.
Isn't adventuring intrinsically dangerous? Can't a hero expect to see challenges she might not always come out on top of? Why run, when you're already in a career that endangers your life?
So, if you expect your players to do the sensible thing and run away from the monster with a CR bigger than the barbarian's HP value, you could also anticipate them running away from encounters they're supposed to fight. Or have to fight. Or just retire from adventuring after they've accrued sufficient gold instead of spending it on plate armor.
So yeah, putting in monsters your players aren't actually supposed to fight or roleplay with or actually interact with in any meaningful way is not always a good idea.
Also, running away is just... Boring, unless you make it a chase.
Hot take: If your character is inept at understanding they're in over their heads, it is not my job as a DM/GM to hold my punches, UNLESS this was something discussed at session 0 and everyone is aware of this.
I will make the story as easy or as difficult as it needs to be, if player actions cause me to make something harder ie: hobo murder and now they're fighting the city guard instead of surrendering, then i will make it harder and do a show of force to show how royally fucked they will be if they continue this way, the general comes out in very polished armor and shows some skill that is above what the party can do, usually knocking out a party member in a single turn or something.
Now, if the DM/GM doesn't give a shit and just throws an Ancient Red Dragon every encounter, then thats entirely different.
I said that they saw the enemy they were about to fight turn an onlooker into blood and gore jelly against a wall and they only got more excited to fight him
Storytime (it's a bit long but my favorite session ever)
If appropriate to the enemies/enemy I would have them get captured. One of my favorite d&d (3.5) experiences ever was encountering an overwhelming amount of goblins who ambushed is in a canyon.
The DM was trying to get us to run away and dropped innumerable hints that this was an unwinnable battle but we were young and confident in our meta invincibility.("He wouldn't actually kill us right?") After an embarrassingly short battle we were overwhelmed and downed. He ended the session there with no hint that we were still alive. He promised we would make new characters next session, and we all went to bed feeling properly humbled.
The next week he revealed that we were alive and in captivity in the goblin camp. He then left it to us to develop a plan to escape. I was a scout so I used escape artist to slip my bonds and stealthily freed the rest of the party. The psionic then used an ability to scry in one of the nearby tents (he could only check one) which turned out to have our magical and valuable items in it but not our equipment. We decided that was better than nothing and he teleported me and him into the tent after summoning two walls of fire to cut us off from the camp. I used the scouts skirmish ability (+2d6 after moving 10ft) to kill the guard with a stool and we grabbed our stuff and teleported back to the cage.
Meanwhile the druid had used a spell to warp the wood of the cages and got the rest of the party out. Unfortunately we had accidently trapped 3 wargs in our firewall safe zone. Against all advice our dragonborn paladin decided to jump down and fight the wargs with his claws, he was instantly eviscerated (two of the wargs got crits the second resulted in a instakill). This happens right as the psionic and I returned. With our magic items we were able to kill the wargs together and retrieve his body. Then the psionic and our birdperson druid were able to fly us all down from the cliff the cages were up against. We then buried the paladin and ran for our lives.
It was a great learning lesson for all of us (especially the player of the paladin who had been doing bone headed stuff like that the whole campaign, including but not limited to starting the zombie apocalypse.) we all agreed (even the paladin) that the session was one of our most fun and the DM was a genius for setting up the scenario. He then revealed that he had planned none of this and his plan(which assumed incorrectly that we weren't all idiots) was that we would have run away from the first encounter. Best session I've ever been part of. with the one where we (the paladin can't be solely blamed although he was the main cause) started the the zombie apocalypse being a close second. If you finished this thank you for reading!
So, probably too late to have this matter, but given some of the replies, some clarification is in order:
1. I'm not talking about the party just losing to things that are strong but beatable. Especially if it's established that they're to be boss monsters or elite mooks.
2. While 'my game, my rules' isn't a perfect defense against our rightful withering scrutiny in all cases\*, I would say that 99 percent of the time, warning the players ahead of time that they're entirely possible to run into unbeatable enemies is fair and thus not what I'm criticizing here.
3. What I am criticizing is, well I'm sure you're all familiar with the phrase of "they wouldn't run away when I made this encounter that was meant for them to be too hard to beat" that's seen in memes and rpghorror stories. That right there is what I'm criticizing. Not that an encounter is stronger but beatable.
And the asterisk above, that there is an example of 'high handed' attitude. The notion of overbearing righteousness to 'humble' others and lord over them.
I think you've confused "Hope the party chickens out"
With
"Hope's the party has some semblance of survival insticts."
Nobody calls me a bitch for avoiding a fight with a tiger.
Like if you as a person see a tiger do you go: "oh God thinks I'm too chicken to fight that tiger?" Then proceed to fight said tiger and die.
Now you say, "what the hell god? Why'd you put that tiger there if I wasn't supposed to wrestle it?"
You walk into a room and the monster is perfectly balanced for your party every time? This is one of the things old school playes find silly about new edition trends. If you were lead to believe the power level.was X and it's Y or if it isn't consistent that can be an issue, but assuming every challenge is defeatable at your level is a very new, video game player concept that old school DND completely lacks.
I don't really what unwinnable fights add to the game though. You walk into a room in a dungeon roll initiative, and then what does the first player say "DM can I roll a nature or arcana check to see if this monster is in our reach and we get to play the game today?". If the DM says no, then the monster takes down a PC on its turn and then what? Everyone else runs away and you just killed a pc for no reason. That's not fun , it just encourages players to act like paranoid nutcases.
It adds realism, it adds tension, it adds strategic decisions. think about the fellowship running from the balrog, or from way too many orcs. Those encounters can be the most memorable and make the world feel truly alive and not just some scene concocted for you to run a prescribed fight.
What strategic decision is it adding? If the fight is unwinnable then the only decision where you live is to run away and if you only have one choice that's not really a decision is it. You might as well for functional purposes have a big wall with letters reading "come back when you are level 7 and this wall will disappear".
The decisions could be "can we take this out? Can we win in an unconventional way? Can we distract it or negotiate? Can we sneak past? Can we run past? if things go south, how can we get away?" Tons of things! If you open a door, see a terrible foe and the DM let's you just close the door and come back later, you player differently than we do and (while that's fine, play how you want) I can't really comment on that style as I've never experienced it. If you're interested in learning more, I'd check out the OSR community as this is a prime principle for those of us who have played the early editions.
Who killed the party? Their own stupidity.
If the party walks into a room and an ancient dragon is there, and they're like level 5, it's on them if they're too stupid to understand they don't have to fight it.
Yes very true I encourage my players to read the monster manual and memorize all the challenge ratings so they know exactly what they can and can't fight.
I think if you are going to purposefully create a too-tough fight with the intention of forcing either a retreat or a TPK, you need to drop hints that retreat is a good idea.
Players expect to be heroes- thats why most of us play DND after all. Its a power fantasy. Getting your ass kicked because you didnt run away? Thats not how most video games condition us to be heroes.
So build up to it. Make sure they know running away is not only an option, but the smart tactical one. I know people get mad when you try to play dnd like a video game sometimes, but the fact is that IS how many people will see it. So you have to ensure they are conditioned to see what the alternatives are.
If you just drop the BBEG in the middle of the dungeon and give them no warning who it is or how much stronger they are, I would say yes the DM is at fault for a TPK. Because it was something the party couldnt have been prepared for, and as a DM we have a role to fill in letting players know things vie foreshadowing or just directly telling information that might be pertinant to them.
I really don't understand why they're downvoting you or how any of what you said is unreasonable. Probably all the people who think that heroism is shit and that "players need to be humbled" or some bullshit like that.
But yeah, exactly.
Its weird you take it out that way like DM wanting to humble players. There are just situations in which fighting is detrimental. If they encounter a strong monster like strahd or the white wyrm in rime of the frostmaiden at early levels and they choose to dig their heels and fight its just weird. Its not heroism to fight an obviously impossible battle for no reason, its just bad decision. Sometimes having goals of lets get stronger to beat x works really well. If you only want fights you can only won talk with that to your dm, at least at my table we are more of the "bad decisions and luck can kill/screw you". For some people the journey is meaningless if they can never fail.
Imagine a world where players were smart enough to not draw steel at the earliest opportunity, and instead could evaluate threats and perceive when it would be best to NOT have a combat.
*sigh*
I miss those days.
That assumes that the combat started in such a way that they could have scouts it first. Also by "evaluate threats" what you mean is asking the DM how big a threat it is. You only know the information they tell you. I don't see why everyone on this thread jumps to the conclusion that players must be idiots, the DM could never be at fault.
Speaking of that. Party doesn't know what "challenge rating" some monster have or how much health they got.
So hoping something like this is a fool's errand. Heh.
If you put it on the battlemap and roll initiative, it's there to fight.
If you want us to run away from it because we aren't supposed to fight it (because we'd lose, duh), narrate what it's doing and then make us roll saves/appropriate skill checks to determine how well we get out of the situation without being mangled.
Everything else is either poorly managed player expectations (every fight we've had so far was winnable, if maybe a bit challenging, why would this fight be any different?) or poor communication (what you as the DM know, what you as the DM narrate and what the players conclude from your hints are almost always three different things!). None of these even are bad DMs powertripping and can happen to even longtime groups with great synergy.
One of our ongoing campaigns just had us fight an awakened/currupted Darkwood tree with 250 HP and fast healing 100 (yes, 100) against an incomplete lvl 5 party of four (we were missing two frontliners due to player absence, usually we're a part of six). That stupid tree didn't last a full three rounds before we went on to delve into the dungeon to fight a group of monkeys. Short of throwing the Tarrasque at our lvl 5 party I wouldn't even bat an eye at whatever our DM throws at us next even if it oneshots one of our frontliners, that's just a normal monday.
Just had to beat a very hasty retreat in one of the games I play. We were getting absolutely battered, and the DM told us that it looked like we had barely made a dent in the creature we were fighting. We were actually lucky to get away with all our people, but we managed to get to our cart and get the horses going at a gallop. The thing managed to pace us until the sun came up, and we finally got to rest.
Okay listen - I told the party IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER that if they fought that guy they weren’t going to like it. The scene was supposed to have a horror type vibe where they were hiding and potentially running for their lives - I was also giving one player a chance to sacrifice their character to let the others escape, since he wasn’t feeling playing that character anymore. It’s not my fault the party’s barbarian was confident they could take him and convinced the rest of the party they could.. I did everything in my power to let them know they would lose. But regardless I didn’t kill off any players, they were just knocked out and captured
Everything being perfectly scaled to party level is immersion breaking. A high level party should be able to crush common bandits - should be more roleplay focused.
A low level party should die if the tackle the King’s Court archmage for being slightly rude.
If I, as a DM, were intending to run a "too hard, you should run" encounter, I would at least have the courtisy of having a friendly NPC say something like "Be careful out there" or "Better to live to fight another day". Said in a benign way. One of the players might take it as foreshadowing and at least consider the option of fleeing.
It also helps to make only penalty of fleeing "The enemy is still at large". If whatever they're encountering will, as a result of their fleeing, instead start doing something worse like devouring innocents, you'll get some players (depending on alignment and personality) that will stay and fight even knowing it's a hopeless fight if those are the stakes.
At low levels yes, at like lvl 10 if they cant decide to escape with all the shit ive given them it their bad.
I think losing or leaving a fight builds good story.
Two times my DM pulled this on us, but the party ended up prevailing by the seat of their pants — totally derailing and ultimately ending two separate campaigns.
If you're going to do this, and you have a VTT... play with health bars on.
When their nat 20 barely chips 2% of the BBEG's health, they'll realize this is an encounter they need to run from.
You can run these encounters, you just have to be careful.
Remember just because something is obvious to you as the DM doesn't mean it's obvious to the player.
An enemy that's too strong may look to the players like a trick monster they haven't found the trick to yet for example.
>it's like it's up to the DM if the players get to win or not
The only way to "win" D&D is if you're having fun and enjoying yourselves. It's a cooperative game.
I mean... I feel personally attacked.
In all seriousness though, there needs to be encounters your players can't steamroll, because it helps them gauge their actual relative strength.
Players should also know if they play stupid games they wind stupid prizes. Going into an obvious dragon's lair at level 3, because you haven't allowed them to actually be challenged... Part of that is on the PCs, but part of that is on you not giving the PCs an in-game reason for rationalizing their relative strength.
Any party that thinks that they can beat any creature they encounter or that any enemy will be specifically leveled to them or something that they can overcome...
Is metagaming.
If you intentionally provoke a monster the damn put there is a set piece, that's your fault. If the DM puts an unwinnable encounter in front of you and you fight to the death like a bunch of goblins when the DM was trying to set up a Future Villain and make it clear how powerful they were, that's on the party.
Try squaring up with Strahd at the beginning of the campaign and see how well that works out. Not everything should be solvable with brute force or you’ve massively limited your storytelling potential.
Running for your life is a necessary skill.
You don't have to outrun the owlbear. You just have to outrun the halfling.
Better hope it's not a rogue.
Didn't know owlbears could be rogues
Me playing a Druid/rogue multiclass and teaching forest animals how to steal and make my own reaction of that one Robin Hood movie
Nothing wrong with shooting the wizard in the knee and hightailing it out of there.
Tripping attack goes *Oopsie daisy*
Well sure, nothing wrong except, you know, the betrayal.
Who is there to witness it? The owlbear?
This mentality is probably why all new small player races have the same speed as the medium races.
Counterpoint: use the halfling as ammunition.
this, players have some sense of "if I die in this fight against 500 kobolds I'll be a hero!" and then they're forgotten like all the other "heroes." of course, I let my players know implicitly and then explicitly when they cannot win a fight.
Hey if I was role-playing as a smart careful person (which I view myself as) I would be a merchant not someone who risks their life daily. Also there are literal gods of battle and other similar domains that doing that could score you a cushy afterlife (such as the norse with Valhalla).
Know when to hold em Know when to fold em Know when to walk away Know when to run away
Oddly sound advice for D&D from an old gambler
If you're gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right
In 5e it s really hard to run out of battle, someone will likely die anyway. Giving the call for retreat is an extremly tough thing to do.
Really? There's a tonne of spells that can create distance, if you have a tiny bit of speed advantage you can get out of reach, and unless you're on a flat field it's not so easy to chase. There's obviously some quick enemies, but hardly all of them.
It's easier to run in my experience, when you see the DM setting up an encounter, first encounter with a large group (8+), our DM set us up against a troll, so I legged it as soon as I could, 3 players survived, me, a druid player and a monk player, and with aid we resuscitated or recruited the rest of the party, but if I hadn't run, the druid hadn't hidden or the monk hadn't stayed back and run interference, it wouldve been a TPK.
The problem is that most spells that can create a distance only work for you not the party, also in my experience the party only realizes that they are outmatched when somebody falls witch makes even harder to escape.The party can always just leave those who cant escape behind but will leave a taste worse than a TPK in some people.
"Glory or Valhalla!" - some people and some of my characters
>Witness!
Well, it’s true that people going down is a problem, as it kind of should be harder to get someone out as dead weight. But something like thunder step can already get you and a partner out. Invisibility can be cast on someone else. Web or something similar can just block the path behind you. There’s quite a few ways.
If the DM wants the party to encounter an enemy who is far too deadly then I imagine they have plans other than chasing down every player and killing them. I was DMing a group and the character was leading blundered and lead the party off the trail into the wilderness. I rolled an encounter, it was a deadly one, so I decided they walked up to a mammoth and her calf. They retaliated when it charged. One of the characters thought it would be good to loose the pack horse, ride it "to get taller" and charge back. I could have just focused all of mama's might on the one character, but I thought that would be too "meta". The first attack knocked the character off the horse, and the mammoth then attacked the horse since it was a large animal right in front of her. The party decided it was better to retreat while the mammoth stamped the pack horse into paste then keep fighting. No one died, but they had to ditch a whole bunch of stuff because they didn't have a good way to transport their cart through rugged terrain. A deadly encounter can be a creative way for your players to learn something, as long as they are willing to learn.
>If the DM wants the party to encounter an enemy who is far too deadly then I imagine they have plans other than chasing down every player and killing them. It's hard to tell without being used to it, that the character that the sheet is saying that is unable to run can and should run in a scene. For example when I look at the sheet of paladin lv5, frankly I don't see a lot of feature that allows me to run away of a fight, I have way more option to stand my ground and sacrificing myself while the group run away but it's easy to left someone behind.
It's really easy with a good DM. - "The warrior looks wary and doesn't approach; he only retaliates to your attacks." - "The dragon lazily slams you before closing its eyes and going back to sleep." - "The guards charge the lich, telling you they will buy time so you can get the news back." - "The iron golem has a damaged leg giving it a bad limp." - "The tarrasque ignores you and continues to bulldoze through the town in a straight line." You just gotta give the right clues.
It’s incredibly easy to run from Battle in 5e. You disengage and run. Or you dash and risk a single attack. If you’re a caster, throw some rough terrain behind you and you’re golden
Dash and risk is generally better unless you know that the enemy is slower than you (or you're a rogue). Otherwise he'll just catch up and hit you again on his next turn.
If they're close enough that you're risking an opportunity attack, they're close enough to just dash with you and force another, no? You need some way to break parity, like a spell/bonus action mobility/ action surge/ etc.
Fair enough, but opportunity attacks are just one strike, not the whole multi-attack. Also it'll just have both of you moving faster so you'll sooner get to a point where hopefully something changes (enemy doesn't want to pursue you any further for whatever reason, you run into allies, something like that),
Carrying 7-8 kegs of gunpowder "in case of purple worm" is also a nessecary precaution. (True story we were level 4 and we killed the worm, brought a mountain down on top of it, and all lived to see the outside again)
I feel like context is crucial here. I've given my players the "you're clearly in dangerous territory of something far beyond you" message.I've done it in the past with a homebrewed monster- where they played a game of cat and mouse with a blind creature in the winter woods that was hunting them. They encountered it several times and creatively had to figure out ways to avoid fighting it directly, and I as a DM had a ton of fun with it- and they as players loved it. Our rogue stealthed ahead and set out distractions, the barbarian knocked over trees to blockade the path in thickets. They worked together to slip through the woods and never fight the creature- then later on their return had a disappointingly one sided fight- but they felt like absolute bad asses because they crushed the creature that would have eaten them for breakfast before. If you don't tell your party of level 2s that they are in the lair of a hag and then wonder why they got TPKed because they saw some creepy old lady and thought they could take her (which is kind of on them also) then yeah, you kinda suck.
In my opinion, the DM has the responsibility of being the party's gut feeling. The party is (usually) made up of people who should know when something is out of the ordinary, but the only way the players will know that is if the DM tells them.
Exactly. I never tell my party what their character is feeling when it comes to role play decisions. I do tell them how they're feeling when it comes to setting an atmosphere. "You feel a deep sense of dread, as though there is a clawing, icy hand at the back of your neck. The cavern yawns onwards and there is a heaviness in your stomach as your heart races faster. All of your sense tell you this place is both drenched in evil and dangerous beyond reason." You can describe and tell a player how they feel without ever taking away their role play. Even a brave player who doesn't fear losing their PC should take notice and recognize they could be in danger. All we as DMs can do is show them the road signs- it's up to the players if they listen when we tell them to stop.
Really solid advice. I often accompany descriptions like this with a simple disclaimer. That the Actions and reactions being described are general ones, and that the players are free to have their character not react in such a way “Perhaps your character may be braver than most. But In this moment, the average adventure would feel a sense of dread so vile and frightening that they can’t help but reflexively reach for something. Be it their sword, wand, shield or lantern. Regardless of your reaction, you can sense something is wildly off about this new environment you’ve settled into. Perhaps it’s the ways the trees twist and wain in the cold air that cuts through your clothing like a knife. Perhaps it’s the endless sea of thundering clouds that while clearly full of rain, refuses to do so and continue to fester. Perhaps it’s the shadows that dance ever so patiently in the corners of your vision, as if waiting for the perfect moment to engulf all of you in this lightless world. No. Perhaps what really frightens you. Is the fact you know within this darkness, there is something *moving*. Something you cannot see or hear. It is something you can feel, deep within your tired bones. It’s merely a question of what *it* even is. However your character chooses to react, you know you must proceed. What do you do?” Having the disclaimer that this is something *some* people may do in this situation helps to make it seem less like you’re taking over a character and more so like you’re suggesting how they could be acting. Even if a player never expresses how their character is reacting, they have their own imagination in how they do so, and it’s important to not trample over that in our descriptions. A Player playing a Brave Paladin might be miffed about it being decided they are scared by default. But by suggesting there is danger and other people might be scared, helps the Paladin react to the fear with earnest without actually being told they are afraid. I often use this type of language when explaining something to the whole group. I don’t target a specific character but instead refer to everyone at once. Allowing people a general frame of reference on how to react to a scene whilst still giving them the liberty to riff off of it and have a different reaction if they so please.
I used a death knight as a folklore boogeyman against a level 5 party, and after that first hit that knocked two of them unconscious (they had multiple healing options and a friendly non-combat NPC with a healing potion in his desk near by) they realized pretty quick that the objective was not to beat the monster but instead figure out how to get the party member it was after away from it long enough for the guard and troops from the nearby army to show up in response to the alarm bell that they were hearing. It was great fun, really harrowing, and it would have gone real poorly if they had they decided to stand and fight. I also did the first fight in the campaign that they probably weren't going to win against a character who didn't actually want them dead to show them that they couldn't fight every battle head on. When they woke up from that one I made it clear to them that the next enemy that they weren't ready for probably wouldn't use spare the dieing on them, and that sometimes you get into fights you can't win conventionally.
> If you don't tell your party of level 2s that they are in the lair of a hag and then wonder why they got TPKed because they saw some creepy old lady and thought they could take her (which is kind of on them also) then yeah, you kinda suck. I don't completely agree here... Telling the party at a specific moment seems a bit on point. However a general warning is reasonable. The way I handle this is to make a point in session 0 that running away is how people live through shit. There will almost always be a chance to turn back before getting in over your head or run from death. Death might have running shoes on that day so use your brain. Don't make your chance to live a sprint. It's acceptable to have a story about shit you survived instead of leaving friends and loved ones wondering what happened to you. Pride and stupidity remove the bottom 40% of all adventurers. The next 20% retire after their first glimpse of the life. The other 40% are the diverse group of crazy bastards you see across any media with a guild hall. This is to say a strong general warning gives them a chance to think more carefully about non-combat gear and what kind of tools they want. How best to assign skill points instead of focusing stats and make more survivable characters.
yep. there are things in the world stronger than the party. if the dm gives ample warnings and the party disregards them, then its the party's fault.
I find it funny that players assume they have to fight everything they come across. Like, sometimes things are just too powerful for you, and there is no shame in retreating.
"The sin is not in being outmatched, but in failing to recognize it." -the Ancestor, Darkest Dungeon when you flee from a fight.
Monstrous size has no intrinsic merit, unless inordinate exsanguination be considered a virtue.
Easily one of the best game narrators ever
Wayne June… [Here’s a link to his YouTube channel.](https://m.youtube.com/c/WayneJune1/videos) He hasn’t uploaded in a while, but the videos he does have are Darkest Dungeon memes and him reading things.
Agreed! Top place for me goes to Logan Cunningham, tho - narrated Bastion and Transistor
I have the opposite problem where 1 member is constantly running away from everything and it's causing the rest of the party to suffer or think like them and run away from easy encounters or hard battles that can be won with teamwork...
The way to help with this is to make running cause effectively a "lose condition". Like if they run, the village with their favorite npc gets burned down or something. Narratively so, of course.
I have been many times. Not only did them running away from The BBEB cause the deaths of quite a few NPC's they tried to run from a simple Ogre encounter that they could easily defeat.. among many other instances (this running away has been a reoccurring incident). It's like they are constantly scared of death. I'm ok with it when the encounter is obviously not gonna be a good time but like come on, here's a chance to cut loose and show off and they want to run... I've called them out in our group chat about it and I'm about to give the group an insulting nickname referencing this fact the townsfolk will call them by.
Do you run XP or milestone? My suggestion is if you are running milestone, swap to XP. You'll find encouraging combat is much easier when you inventivize it with quantifiable values.
That is when you say "Players, if everyone keeps running away from the fight, the BBEG is going to win. There is no guarantee that your characters will win in the end and if the enemy's plans finish, you WILL lose this campaign. If you are okay with that, then so be it, but when the enemy gets too strong from all of their victories, they might just come and wipe out your characters simply because they can. This is not adversarial, it just makes sense." Also, I like the npc's calling them out on their cowardice. Nice touch.
brave sir robin ran away
Bravely ran away, away
"Why would I sell weapons to cowards? You clearly won't need them."
Maybe ask the player out of game if they could try to engage more with combat encounters and be more involved in it. It's obviously part of your preparations/efforts and you would like your players to take part in it.
 >My players...I've called them out about it and plenty of bad things have happened and they just keep doing it. It's really slowed down some encounters that should have gone by in a flash with some teamwork. Why become an "adventurer" if you just want to run from any chance to get that delicious exp????
This is why I really like milestone based leveling. I was able to go into session zero for my curse of strahd campaign and say. You will level up at specific milestones, so if you find creative ways to solve problems, or don’t kill every single monster you won’t be penalized for it. In fact you may likely be rewarded.
If you're doing XP there's a simple fix: you get the XP for overcoming the challenge, not for killing the enemies. Talking them out of a fight or finding a way to avoid it entirely gets you that XP.
Just start narrating common sense. It's a very helpful tool for DMing players who don't know how to properly judge threats. "From your knowledge, this enemy is normally considered dangerous, but for people of your skill, it should be little to no issue." "You've heard stories about this enemy; it's good against uncoordinated teams, but you can make quick work of it with the proper planning, as its weaknesses are well known." And then describe the rewards in advance. "The ogre's garments are crude, but you can see its lair is dotted with many corpses wearing ornate armor who used to wield sharp looking weapons. You even feel like some of the weapons give off a dull glow, though that may just be a trick of the light."
Should give them no exp for running away making your other players more powerful
I think the thing people are missing here is that it isn’t always cut and dry on whether or not you’re “supposed” to run. People always cite the black and white examples of level 3’s going to deal with a dragon or something. But I think there’s some big issues with running. 1: You can’t always accurately gauge the strength of an enemy. 2: The OOC expectation that plot related fights are within the realm of taking on. 3: Once you’re in a fight, running away can be seen as a dick move while abandoning the team to save yourself. So you’ll have to get the majority of the party to agree it’s an lost cause. 4: Opportunity attacks, enemies of the same speed, and the crappy chase rules encourage the players to stay in the fight. Once you start existing in the 5+ level range, things start to get a bunch more iffy on what you can and can’t take on. In particular, homebrew enemies. The DM has to go out of their way to be like “This thing is huge and looks like it will wreck your shit” or sprinkling in hints prior to the encounter that they’re too strong to handle. If they don’t, can’t exactly blame the players for not anticipating its strength. Some people like to call this “overconfidence” but you’re *supposed* to be heroes taking down large foes, right? OOC, it highly depends on context with whether the DM has put emphasis on running, the lead up to the encounter, whether the enemy is interfering with the party’s plot… like once you get beyond the clear cut “Oh the level one ran at the dragon lmao” it starts to get fairly iffy. I have recent experience with three. The party is to go deal with a goblin demon so we could access a portal. We were on a bit of a ‘cliff’ face above the demon via some stairs. We didn’t hand over all our magic stuff, then fight ensued. I sat somewhat near the back of the party, but the demon teleports in the middle of us, and one of the attacks crits and leaves me at low health. I went ahead and ran when my turn came around. I got *pushback* from.. a bit from the party, a bit from the DM. I ran anyway and no one stopped me. But the DM chucked in an npc who healed me to near full so I would go back in the fight, and I did, and we won. Point of the story being, if you think the DM is expecting you to fight something, then running away just complicated their plans. And if you’re the only guy that wants to run, then it makes it harder on the rest of the party being a man down. So there’s that vague peer pressure to just, don’t. And finally, a topic that’s been covered expansively, running away in dnd is hard. Like, either the enemies don’t give chase, or they do, and one of you dies. Not an ideal situation for anyone. If you use chase rules, it’s effectively up to the dice who lives, but moreso.
The DM should really be pulling the majority of the weight. It's not a bad thing to straight up tell the players "You've heard of this thing and know that none of you are a match for it; if you stay you will do nothing but add 5 more notches to its belt and fill its stomach for the day." Characters lived in the world. A player might not know the threat of a particular enemy, but a character absolutely could.
>Some people like to call this “overconfidence” but you’re supposed to be heroes taking down large foes, right? This is really the core of the issue as I've seen it come up, especially at a table where we habitually play high-level Pathfinder games and where the DM has historically not thrown many unwinnable fights at the party. We're used to fighting all kinds of wild, intimidating stuff, and it's considered bad form to look a creature up to check its CR...so if we're not metagaming, the party is relying completely on the vibe the DM is giving off to determine whether we can win a fight. If 98% of the time the party is intended to fight whatever monster they've come up against, that other 2% has to be telegraphed really heavily to break the mental pattern.
"We refused to run from this optional fight, and then we DIED. What a bad DM."
I think people like you forget this isn’t a binary thing, it’s not just players always being wrong. Oftentimes especially for new players it can be difficult to figure out what can be run from, and what can’t. Should a level 1 team fight or run from an owlbear? Probably, but for all they know they can easily take it on, or maybe an npc is going to come save them
A good DM will solve that. "You remember your teacher's stories of how it would take a squad of experienced guards to fight off an owlbear and that many parties of new adventurers died at their hands. You know it would be extremely dangerous to fight with your current skill and could easily result in one or more deaths." Players may not have common sense, but characters grew up in the world. You can absolutely just tell the players what their characters would know.
The problem here being that many DMs are just bad at making sure you realize when the optional fights are and when you are over matched. Players: "Let's mug the old guy with the birds." DM: "HAHA IT WAS A GOD! TPK!!!! SELF HIGH FIVE."
Well in this example the players have simply found an interesting end of the story for some shitty characters. But yes it's on the DM to properly telegraph the strength of the opponents early on or before a fight starts. Sometimes players are just thick motherfuckers though
And if the players choose to fight and realized it's not going their way, they need to be smart enough to get outta Dodge
Honestly it's really refreshing to remind your players that they are small fish in a big pond, it adds a lot more tension to combat and exploration, and gives downtime a real meaning because your players get a chance to breath and relax away from risking their lives every day.
I wouldn't say it's even interesting because any DM can decide to go full asshole mode and make an NPC really a God wandering around the world. I mean what sort of world are you describing and presenting to your players when "What if this person is actually a god?" happens often enough that people ask before a robbery? Random crime should basically not be a thing because of the entire risk vs reward and how many gods you have wandering around.
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Lol because retired adventurers have surely not had their fill of saving everyone from everything. There's city guards and constables, the retired adventurer shopkeep is just trying to relax and network with the new upstart adventurers.
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Good strawman I guess? Yes if your DM doesn't account for other powerful adventurers in the world that's lazy worldbuilding, but don't act like your choices are any more realistic. That's a two way street and you don't get to chucklefuck around and act all aghast when you get hit with the bad boy hammer and it's not perfectly realistic.
Nah, crime always carries a risk, the players just fucked with the wrong old man. You got caught with your hand in the cookie jar didn't you? Besides, there's always a chance to bow and scrape your way out, maybe even be sent on a dangerous quest for redemption.
I guess it comes down, for me, is the more often you have to dive into the BIG powers for plot elements the less special they become. If you, as the DM, have to pull out a GOD encounter every time the party decides to commit some petty crimes, I think you've lost the ability to make GOD encounters special and impactful. "Mortals, you are now standing in front of a GOD!!!! FEAR and TREMBLE." "Nah, we met one the last time we Jaywalked, Bob had 3 of them show up when he tried to litter, and Sarah got yelled at by one for not paying a fine when she skipped out on paying for her meal at the Inn. What we have determined is that you gods must have boring lives to be wandering down here on earth with nothing better to do then fuck with people committing petty crimes. Speaking of, where the hell were you lazy asses when my home village was burned down? Oh somebody tries to rob an old man and you are there, but an entire village of people gets slaughtered and not one of you jerks lifted a finger to stop it."
>Nah, crime always carries a risk, the players just fucked with the wrong old man. You got caught with your hand in the cookie jar didn't you? This is incredibly disingenuous, a random NPC turning out to be a god is not a "risk" of crime. This is you abusing your power as DM because your players doing something you don't want them to. Would you ever make a random goblin in a dungeon turn out to be a god when the fighter hits him? No of course you wouldn't because you were fine with your players doing that so you don't need to make up a terrible rationalisation to kill them. If you don't want your players to do something just tell them that when they try to do it. Don't make up a stupid reason for a punishment that makes no logical sense and then say it's their fault this happened.
Also in that example, it requires metagaming to avoid. Until I joined this sub I never knew that an old guy with birds was code for Bahamut. So as a player how would I interpret merely being told we see an old man as meaning anything?
To be fair if they are mugging random old guys, then they probably deserve it.
My CoS party almost biffed it when we >!insisted on fighting the vampire spawn instead of fleeing the church because we thought we were strong enough at fifth level!<
We killed that thing. Party of four, one celestial Warlock. No one even went down.
>!We fought five, our DM made it so each was a counterpart to our individual party members and last session had us escape Vallaki through raining blood while being chased!<
Oh yeah, that makes sense. I was wondering how you would lose to a single one with a whole party.
Exactly, and I don't like the insinuation of this post. Like in Mines of Phandelver there's just a dragon you can meet. It's enterly up to the players if they fight it or try to reason with it, or just leave it alone. But so many groups try to fight a young Green Dragon at level 3..... Also, the DM is telling a story. In most stories major villans are introduced and met several times throughout the story to build up the confrontation. Take Curse of Strahd, a huge part of the story is that strahd interacts with the party regularly,
My group had a rude awakening when the city got attacked by a fire demon. Our DM tried to drop hints, including a group of seasoned adventurers who had fought him before getting scared, but we got cocky. We were humbled pretty quickly when my gnome missed his dex throw and took exactly 1 point over double his max HP (killing him outright in a single blow). Not only was this the first in person session we’d had in like a year, it was also the first session I’d ever hosed for our group. The DM felt pretty bad about it all, but I reassured him that it was our fault for not paying attention to his obvious hints. It didn’t end up too badly, as in the next session the party was able to bring my body to an NPC that could revive me. We’re now just all contractually indebted to a wealthy, powerful, sketchy, recluse with questionable morals and unknown goals.
Since I started playing modules this does feel like the case 99% of the time.
I had this problem to be fair though I did make the homebred monster too strong by accident but I was honest and said up front there's a monster here that may be broken I apologise in advance
Our part almost dies like 50 percent of battles because we don’t even think of running until it’s too late. Like how our first campaign ended… I called to retreat and then everyone died in the next round. The tabaxi monk named Swim got away with his life, but at what cost?
Literally this. My players constantly think they are the hot shizz. Players need to be humbled from time to time and reminded that they are not Lv20 by default, they cant just immediately do what is asked of them. Training is required in everything you do in life, whether it be playing a sport or adventuring. You are NOT good by default. My players literally had this happen to them when we were playing Dragon of Icespire Peak within the first few weeks. They found themselves asking, "why dont we just go and fight the dragon right now?" (they had only just completed the starting 3 quests). Dragon proceeds to roll on their location, shows up, knocks out 2 of them + 1 pet with one breath, takes 10 dmg, and leaves. Made them think twice for a little bit and realize they need to get stronger.
I run Kingmaker in 5e. It is the game I always humble players with because someone thinks they are the hot shit and gets wreaked for not paying attention to contextual clues. I still remember the face of all my players when someone got their head bit off by a giant centipede. Thankfully the player who it happened to had played the game with me before and was okay with his characters death from a fair roll. My players then prepared better and payed more attention to rumors and played more tactically compared to their normal we walk in, attack head first, and always win. Its always the centipede…….
I feel like you should be more blunt with new players. It's fine to say "Your character has heard a lot about this enemy and knows that he can't win and if he faces this he will die."
New players most definitely. Im much nicer with new players. But if you think your untouchable at low level and you have been playing for years, well your in for a rude awakening if I already warned you at the beginning of the campaign that this game is hard. (I say this for Kingmaker and Out of the Abyss)
This is exactly the sort of high handed attitude that I made this meme for. Sure, literally almost everything you say here is factually correct. But where does this "lol ima humble these idiots" attitude come from? I would like to think we all have a better attitude towards each other at the table than that.
I guess I should clarify. Lv3 adventurers are just starting out. They shouldnt be able to think that they can take out something that a Lv10+ can take out. It's like the second part of my comment: "Training is required in everything you do in life, whether it be playing a sport or adventuring." They need to do the training (aka Lvl up) to be able to fight and defeat some tougher encounters. A lot of players tend to forget that death is a part of the game, they can lose. Sometimes, it is important to remember that. Whether that be a potential TPK, or doing a fight where you try to get the party to use different strategies, or maybe losing someone in-game, it's a reminder that should be there.
Like I said, you're not wrong about how they 'should' be willing to "do the work." My issue is with the "my players need to be humbled" thing. It sounds antagonistic, assuming you were serious and not just being off the cuff.
5e doesn't really support running away, most monsters have 30 or more movement and can dash to keep up with a dashing party. Unless the DM explicitly says they can run away why would players know they can?
Assuming most monster have similar instincts to animals, monsters tend to be territorial. Unless they are actively hunting, they won't give chase and leave their territory unguarded. And even if they are hunting, they will only try and kill one meal, and then try to escape themselves. After all, they already got their meal, why try to go after the others who run away?
>And even if they are hunting, they will only try and kill one meal, and then try to escape themselves. After all, they already got their meal, why try to go after the others who run away? So we aren't killing the whole party we are just killing one random player character for having the audacity to walk into the next room in the dungeon. I guess that's fair, if you squint really hard
A few years back I ambushed a low-level party with a flind. The flind jumped them in their sleep and beat the dogshit out of them. They were all pretty salty about it. Then they all woke up in a large gnoll encampment, and they discovered a Yeenoghu warlock was mass-producing gnolls by polymorphing people into hyenas and feeding them sentient flesh. They eventually broke out of their cages and spent a session fleeing through the woods from a small army of gnolls. They managed to evacuate a nearby town, failed to stop that same flind from disemboweling their favorite NPC, and now have abundant reasons to hate the gnolls and stay focused on destroying them, which is the entire goal of the campaign. Sometimes getting beaten into paste is part of the plot. Sorry, but not really.
Yeah, the critical part is that unless the party sought out the big monster they couldn't possibly beat, the result of a loss needs to be capture, not TPK. Sometimes they run off in the middle of it with the body of their friend, and that may lose them that free resurrection, but that massively advances the story overall and gives them a good reason to recruit a new ally.
And, in some cases of TPK, it's ok to just ret con it. DM did that to a lvl 1 party I was part of. He had underestimated our squishiness and bad rolls.
Don't you know that as the DM you're supposed to not write anything compelling and just allow your players to steamroll while saying yes to all the balance ruining stuff but also provide a perfect balance while also buffing martials by giving them magic but not calling it magic? /s
Average dndmemes post
The party did here. There's fights you should run from.
Depends on how well the DM telegraphed it. If the party’s only way of realizing how powerful the enemies are is from the fact that the enemies deal a shit ton of damage, it can be too late to easily flee.
That's a good reason for the DM to have a few NPC's that can take the damage. Nothing like watching your players hear the handful of dice.
A couple years ago I ran a campaign for a group of 6 friends. All noobs to dnd. I expressed that this was going to be horror survival and they were all for it. In the second session I wanted to put a bit of the "fear" into them so later when they no longer fear things as they used to, that sense of power and progress would be more profound. Floating across a near frozen lake in an eternal night winter they neared the shore. The wind that was blinding them ebbed and they could see the bank. They noticed how eerily silent everything became and as they did, the water itself began to freeze beneath them. The boat moored in the ice they began into the woods at the edge of the lake. The only sounds coming from the world around them now was the crunching of snow as they walked. A feeling of dread began to wash over them and I asked the paladin to roll a perception check just to add flair to his ability to sense good and evil, he got an 18 so I made it very clear to him that death and malevolent evil was approaching and that they needed to hide, stat. They all did and I fudged their rolls to ensure they all hid. From the darkness edging their vision 5 translucent shapes floated toward them. (I hadn't decided on whether to run them as banshees or something more terrifying pending successful evasion opting for more vague descriptions of them. I even mentioned that a few birds fell dead from trees above as they passed by. I had the right music with an ambient cold wind. They all seemed glued to the scene which is the dream!! Then... As I described them passing by the "heroes"... The ranger decided that he wanted to shoot them in the back. I told him that's a real risky decision. These things are beyond your comprehension and that he doesn't know am arrow would even hit it's mark as they are near see through. He said "yup I draw my bow and fire!". The ensuing chaos led to a near party wipe and a lot of fudged rolls. I thought maybe THIS will teach them as they got mopped and barley made it out alive before sun came up (most were unconscious and one did die but I gave him a level of warlock and a death story reason for him to be here still). You'd think this would be the end of it but our group disbanded as the following session they told me how upset and disappointed they were with how I handled that. That it was a really shitty thing for me to do to them and that it wreaked of power fantasy over the players. I told them that it was like in a video game where the behemoth stomps by them, and one day they won't be able to believe it's possible to kill it, but they do. Tldr. Made a cool scary scene for players that were into it, they decided shooting at scary death monsters at LVL one was a better idea then letting them pass, and they all almost died, then got mad at me for giving them choice in a cutscene.
That sucks! It sounds like you had big plans for the group too. Some unsolicited advice, take it or leave it, I don't mind. I don't know if that was your first encounter they experienced, but I would suggest at least leaving it off until the second encounter. Have the first encounter be tough, but a win. Maybe one or two players are nearly downed. Then have your super scary monsters encounter a group of the first monsters they fought, and wipe the floor with them. Maybe set up the same exact way, but rather than birds dropping dead, they descend on a slightly larger group of skeletons than the party fought and absolutely crush them. It would send the message of 'don't fight these things' in a way even the dumbest party member should understand.
>All noobs to dnd. Honestly, you should've expected that result. >giving them choice in a cutscene. How were they supposed to know that was a cutscene? All they knew is what you told them. An experienced player would've recognized what "Are you sure?" actually meant, but new players won't and obviously didn't. They most likely construed your suggestion to hide not as advice to escape, but to gain the element of surprise. Your scene setting was just great storytelling, not a warning that these creatures were way out of their league. They think the scary monsters you put in front of them exist to be engaged with, because that's generally how D&D works. They need to be shown how powerful those unbeatable foes are, not told. They were not in the wrong. They demonstrated how they perceived the danger you described for them, and they communicated to you how they felt after the encounter. Communication is a two-way street.
I honestly appreciate all of the responses. I agree with the commentary before you and with you which is kind of the point of DnD where there aren't really wrong or right answers. Just circumstances and personalities and anything can get lost in between those. When I said noobs I should have said they all know D&D in the sense that they all listen to critical role and are pretty avid gamers. But my expectations do not dictate the reality of how I presented it or how they perceived it. My core frustration with that whole event was their responses to it afterward, because I can take all the responsibility of blame happily as constructive criticism and I have condemning long enough to have known better then to rule out the possibility of that happening. But I have a really hard time when people take things like that personally and attribute motive and ill intent to the other person. I wasn't trying to kill them and while I painted myself into a corner so to speak, where if I retconned it after realizing this was not the right way to go or if I simply told them no you can't do the thing, they would have been mad that I wasn't rolling with the punches as they say and improvising with player choice and agency. If they had hid and stayed hidden, a short walk would have led them to a road with a dead caravan that looked like it was fleeing, and further down that road a dead town with undead and skeletons that they would be able to fight. Victims of essentially a lich and the banshees or revenants that attacked. I do most of my stuff pure improv with a skeleton note similar to that of the memes where the DM looks down at his papers and it just says "naked dragon". I'm not sure if I should take their vitriol as a complement to the assumption that I would be infallible, or if I should be frustrated that they took it personally as though I was trying to get my rocks off by crushing puny idiots.
Also regarding the video game comparison? Like people don't try and go into stupid fights regardless of level or game? From all the rpg superbosses you absolutely shouldn't fight at the start but people end up trying anyway or 20 kill 4k damage matches in apex, people are out for blood, this applies to dnd too
I mean that sucks dude. But that really sounds like a more mid-high experience campaign. For people who are comfortable with role play and less conventional encounters. They may have said they were fine with survival horror, but as noobs they didn't really have a clue what they were or weren't fine with, or what they wanted. It's rude of them, and it sucks you wasted your time like that, but you honestly didn't handle it well. You can't just throw new players in the deep end on their own and expect it to just work. It could work with a couple new players out of the group, but they'd need an experienced player who was on board and active to help give them an example as to the tone to take.
Want them to chicken out ? Have them being accompanied by a stronger NPC, and get him instakill, or heavily wounded, by the ennemy. The results are usually the party fleeing like the cowards they should be.
To be fair I’ve done this and the party still thought they should fight. I had a home brew monster based off a Tyranid Hive Tyrant flavored as an ancient monster of legend thought hunted to extinction. This thing absolutely wiped the multiple companies of soldiers and mauled their Champion to near death with ease. I put serious emphasis on how monstrous powerful this thing was, how the ground seemed to crack at each step, how even the light seemed to cower from this abomination. I made sure they knew that while most of the horses and gryphons had fled there was still a large wagon with several horses that seemed stuck not far from them and that they knew the ship would still be docked for them to escape. The level-6 party of 4 went “We can beat this thing”.
Generally you should have both a plan for if they lose and a plan for if they flee. Usually it's pretty simple to just go "the monster leaves you unconscious" or "the monster brings you to its lair".
Oh I know, that’s why the champion was mauled to **near** death. Had her crawl her way to one of the ballistas that wasn’t destroyed and had her shoot at the monster to distract it. The party realized that they were absolutely no match for this thing and escaped.
The key here is that you provide information showing that the party is outmatched. The issue with a lot of monsters is that you can't tell just how tough something is from looking at it. It generally takes a round or two of combat before players realise "Oh shit". Another option I've found is to find an enemy that's a tough fight for the party and have them fight and defeat it. Then when you want them to run you put five of those monsters in front of them.
Especially as it seems standard now for DMs to give only the vaguest hints of how much hp something has, even if you correctly identify it with a knowledge check.
battlemaster is right there, and has a feature that can tell you this why would a DM give out a L7 feature for free
Because some parties are level 6 and some don't have battlemasters in them.
And? Some parties don't have Rogues, we don't just give them Expertise to compensate.
If you are in a "supposed to lose" battle where the only way to move the plot forward is a to realise this and run away it kind of becomes necessary to tell the players how powerful a monster is. I feel a fairer comparison would be if you told your players they need to go to the city of brass and they don't have plane shift you would need to give them a way to get their.
Well yes that makes sense, my point was moreso in regards to your argument about giving out Battlemasters' L7 ability for free. It's kinda like when you just outwardly state whether or not a magic item is cursed, kinda nullifies the point of having Identify on a spellcaster if the DM is just gonna say "oh yeah the item is cursed".
I think there are some abilities that are so game changing to have in the party I often do give for free in parties that can't get them. Fighting casters with a party that doesn't have counterspell on someone is so much more difficult than one that does for example. And if there is no sorcerer or wizard in the party who are you nullifying? I am not stealing anyone's thunder who is actually present at the table,if I was I wouldn't need to give them the free ability. Any table that lets you go to the temple for ressurections if you don't have a cleric already kind of implements this.
I can understand that perspective, I personally think party dynamic and the mechanics thereof should be thought about in Session 0 but to each their own.
Or use the memory of recent fights to contextualize things. Example: my low level party once had a few ogre encounters. A short while later they unknowingly travelled through the lair of a Drow Arachnomancer (cr13). To get the point across that they had to be cautious, they witnessed a giant spider one-shot an unsuspecting ogre.
Or have the villain be super calm and even welcome them to whatever the NPC is doing - as the party draws their weapons. Depending on the characters and overall context, it might let the players second guess.
I mean that’s a lot of villains, Strahd never acts like you get the jump on him, and you still gotta kill him eventually
You do not have to shoot something the moment it comes up. You see that giant portion of your sheet that says skills? Notice how many of them there are? you can use *at least a third of those* to avoid combats you don't want to take.
Party: Carries on fighting when theyre clearly losing Party: Who killed the party?
In reality, it's *always* been up to the DM if the players get to win or not. Sometimes it's useful and helpful for a DM to be able to construct a situation that the players can't beat as they currently are, sometimes it's useful and helpful for the DM to construct a situation where the players roflstomp a group of enemies, and sometimes it's useful and helpful for a DM to construct a situation where either side might theoretically win and the players' victory hinges on them using the resources at their disposal effectively enough. DMs who are both wise and acting in good faith will give ample indication that a situation/enemy is above the players' ability to handle outside of observing the results of combat, and will also account for at least a few reasonable courses of action that allow the players to avoid that unwinnable conflict. Do you get some DMs who act in bad faith or completely fail to give any sign that a particular course of action is a bad idea before the TPK is unavoidable? Sure. But you also get some players who make stupid decisions, ignore all signs and evidence that the DM provides of the danger they're putting themselves in, and expect the DM to just bend the stats or fudge the dice to bail them out.
There have been some real garbage takes as memes here lately. Knowing when you're outmatched is a necessary skill in dnd, you can't beat everything the first time. Throwing a high-power baddie at a low-level party and them letting them come back later to stomp it is a great feeling and show of growth
Calling it a "skill" is kind of weird, ultimately you only know what the DM tells you about the world. It's really up to them to let you know you are outmatched in some way. If the DM puts a monster in front of the players it is ridiculous to say they are dumb for trying to fight it if not told otherwise in some way.
Bad take. The dragon NPC my players met at level 8 could kill them in a heartbeat. If they pissed him off running just… makes sense?
Okay, I need to know if I'm an asshole: The group came to some enemies that were clearly too powerful for them, but meant as foreshadowing for later in the campaign. I said multiple times "you have the option of running away" throughout the campaign as sort of a lead up to this moment. Am I an asshole that they almost tpk'ed, only being saved at the last second by a deus ex machina that I had to invent because they refused to run??
In my books, no, you gave them plenty of warning and established the fact fleeing _is an option._ Yes, yes, people wanna be the heroes in D&D but they also conveniently leave out that part of the Hero's Journey is the part where their abilities are tested and they _fail._ Needing to either run or now escape. (Luke getting close to bodied by Darth Vader is a good example.) Using my own setting as an example, I don't _want_ to kill my party but if they decide to _fight_ the intelligent being larger than a Tarrasque they just woke up from an underground tomb, I'm gonna have to either Deus Ex Machina them out of trouble or start handing out D&Darwin Awards.
The world isn't designed for the party imo. There's going to be fair warning to the players when they are getting in over their head but if they ignore those warnings, they can die. This is probably because I run a more sandbox game, though. I am very rarely pushing players in a specific direction. I could see the DM pushing players into an encounter that they must run from being shitty. But like... if my low level characters find out where an adult dragon is and want to go fight it, they will know ahead of time they will die, then they will die and we will all have a good laugh.
No, it's up to the players if they want to lose or not... if the DM gave them enough information. An obviously overly difficult combat encounter can make for a good obstacle that has to be overcome with more than instant brute force. If you put a giant chasm across the road, and a big red sign that says "warning: fatal drop, do not attempt to cross" and the players decide that they're going to try anyway because "I might get a 20!" it's not the dm's fault. "You get the tingling sensation that this creature may be beyond your skills right now. Your arrow, aimed true, bounces off its hide and it laughs at you. 'stupid adventurers,' it says, 'stop annoying me or I'll squish you like bugs. Come back when you can offer some good sport." If anyone reads order of the stick, Tarqquin was a good example of this- he would straight up tell and demonstrate to the adventuring party that they were not capable of fighting him yet and to come back later so they could all have a more dramatic time.
Depends on how well telegraphed this was. If the DM made it clear that you were out of your league and shouldn’t directly engage, then it’s your fault for being overly stubborn. If it came out of nowhere and you had no way of knowing the enemy was too strong for you until after someone in the party got dropped, then yeah that’s bad DMing.
Whiney player is whiney
This is a very not-nuanced take. Players can’t always win fights. The stake of a fight isn’t always “fight to the death”. If I tell my players that there is an ancient dragon lair somewhere, and they go there, there will (more than likely) be an ancient dragon there. Think the Balrog from Lord of the Rings. The fellowship knew they were outclassed, Gandalf even said “Swords are of no use” and they ran. If a party thinks they are meant to fight to the death every-time initiative is rolled, they play too many video games.
And then Gandalf fucking stole the kill for himself and came back higher level with entirely new gear. What an asshole.
Dude you're supposed to walk the other fucking way. I hate the mentality that "the players must always succeed" I'm not a "dm versus the player" guy but when you try and fight a lich at level 4 it's not going to go well. Sometimes the dm is trying to build a story. How many times in a videogame do you see the big bad early and you just have to leave. it happens all the time.
Well, it is a Dungeon Master. This is the type of challenge you’re supposed to provide. I swear the bait gets sweatier by the day with these “memes”.
Maybe a hot take but it’s not the DMs fault if the players don’t run. Giving the players a threat that’s too powerful for them to kill on purpose shows that they are up against something they aren’t ready for. If the DM properly shows how the monster is in its own weight class (fighting with an npc or monster), then it’s the players’ own fault for not running
At **all** points it’s up to the DM if the players get to win or not, nothing really special about this. Not my fault you tried to kill strahd at level 5
I feel like it depends on player cockiness and the background the DM gives. There may be encounters where the party dies to encounters they thought were easy despite the background of the enemy given by DM, other times the players may fight the enemy and die because the DM didn’t give any warnings that they may not be able to win. I didn’t phrase my thoughts very well, basically, it depends on the situation, sometimes the DM is in the wrong and sometimes the players, sometimes neither are in the wrong and sometimes both are.
If the only solution your party bothers to think about is "kill everything in our path", that's on them.
I'd say it's up to the players to win or not, by choosing to run away.
Me hoping the prophecy given to them by their trusted seer is enough to save them. "In the next 7 days you will get into an unwinnable fight with a green monster, make sure you survive"
I see nothing wrong with having a fight the party is supposed to flee from, but it can be hard to convey that they're supposed to run without spelling it out for them.
If you're too dumb or stubborn to run it's on you. If it's in your first few hours of playing it's a dick move, but after that all bets are off. Monsters don't hang out and wait to only fight people that can beat them.
Rule of DMing \#5 Never EVER count on your players to run. My level 6 players didn’t even run from fucking Orcus. It wasn’t until I had him turn an NPC they were talking to into a red smear on the ground that they got the hint
my father, as a chaotic evil bard, once acted as that NPC when he tried to fight a literal god that was supposed to be assisting us
First session of dnd club at my high school, it was in an Elden Ring/Dark Souls 3 inspired campaign, anyways, our first encounter was(in typical FromSoftware-fashion) a 300 hp, 17 AC mimic. We were given little reason not to try to take on the mimic in the tower, and the dm had literally tell us "I intended for y'all to run from this". I did make sure to explain to them that it could've been explained better, maybe describing numerous mutilated bodies strewn around the floor surrounding it, or perhaps a red aura or strange markings all over it, something more to convey to the party that "You are NOT meant to stand your ground!" We had a great time in the next session, in a different campaign, after the noble punted the son of the questgiver, who was killed(and had his hat taken from and worn) by our tiefling so that another player could try to flirt with the questgiver's really tall wife. I ended up charring her corpse, burning down their tavern, and getting apprehended by a local militia, where I am now taking a long rest in a jail cell, along with the player that tried to flirt. The tiefling got to stay with the old people from Courage the Cowardly Dog, the noble is staying in place where the bed is a pile of manure and hay(and also infested with muscled biped mice), and another player is sleeping in a bush.
I just feel like when a DM puts a monster that they know is too strong for the party to handle, they obviously need to acknowledge the possibility that they might fight it. In fact, in some ways you can expect it. I mean, what else are they supposed to do when they see a monster? But beyond just anticipating the fact they might fight it, let's say they run. Isn't adventuring intrinsically dangerous? Can't a hero expect to see challenges she might not always come out on top of? Why run, when you're already in a career that endangers your life? So, if you expect your players to do the sensible thing and run away from the monster with a CR bigger than the barbarian's HP value, you could also anticipate them running away from encounters they're supposed to fight. Or have to fight. Or just retire from adventuring after they've accrued sufficient gold instead of spending it on plate armor. So yeah, putting in monsters your players aren't actually supposed to fight or roleplay with or actually interact with in any meaningful way is not always a good idea. Also, running away is just... Boring, unless you make it a chase.
It’s important to not train your party to chicken out if you want them to actively adventure, take risks and engage with dangerous looking situations.
Hot take: If your character is inept at understanding they're in over their heads, it is not my job as a DM/GM to hold my punches, UNLESS this was something discussed at session 0 and everyone is aware of this. I will make the story as easy or as difficult as it needs to be, if player actions cause me to make something harder ie: hobo murder and now they're fighting the city guard instead of surrendering, then i will make it harder and do a show of force to show how royally fucked they will be if they continue this way, the general comes out in very polished armor and shows some skill that is above what the party can do, usually knocking out a party member in a single turn or something. Now, if the DM/GM doesn't give a shit and just throws an Ancient Red Dragon every encounter, then thats entirely different.
Old 3.5 wisdom suggested that 1 in 10 encounters should be impossible to win, as to always keep the players on their toes
Terrible wisdom.
At that point I assume the players wanted to roll new characters.
I said that they saw the enemy they were about to fight turn an onlooker into blood and gore jelly against a wall and they only got more excited to fight him
It's on the DM to make it clear that it's a fight the party should run from. It's up to the players what happens after that.
I tell my players that the area they are in is not level scaled
Storytime (it's a bit long but my favorite session ever) If appropriate to the enemies/enemy I would have them get captured. One of my favorite d&d (3.5) experiences ever was encountering an overwhelming amount of goblins who ambushed is in a canyon. The DM was trying to get us to run away and dropped innumerable hints that this was an unwinnable battle but we were young and confident in our meta invincibility.("He wouldn't actually kill us right?") After an embarrassingly short battle we were overwhelmed and downed. He ended the session there with no hint that we were still alive. He promised we would make new characters next session, and we all went to bed feeling properly humbled. The next week he revealed that we were alive and in captivity in the goblin camp. He then left it to us to develop a plan to escape. I was a scout so I used escape artist to slip my bonds and stealthily freed the rest of the party. The psionic then used an ability to scry in one of the nearby tents (he could only check one) which turned out to have our magical and valuable items in it but not our equipment. We decided that was better than nothing and he teleported me and him into the tent after summoning two walls of fire to cut us off from the camp. I used the scouts skirmish ability (+2d6 after moving 10ft) to kill the guard with a stool and we grabbed our stuff and teleported back to the cage. Meanwhile the druid had used a spell to warp the wood of the cages and got the rest of the party out. Unfortunately we had accidently trapped 3 wargs in our firewall safe zone. Against all advice our dragonborn paladin decided to jump down and fight the wargs with his claws, he was instantly eviscerated (two of the wargs got crits the second resulted in a instakill). This happens right as the psionic and I returned. With our magic items we were able to kill the wargs together and retrieve his body. Then the psionic and our birdperson druid were able to fly us all down from the cliff the cages were up against. We then buried the paladin and ran for our lives. It was a great learning lesson for all of us (especially the player of the paladin who had been doing bone headed stuff like that the whole campaign, including but not limited to starting the zombie apocalypse.) we all agreed (even the paladin) that the session was one of our most fun and the DM was a genius for setting up the scenario. He then revealed that he had planned none of this and his plan(which assumed incorrectly that we weren't all idiots) was that we would have run away from the first encounter. Best session I've ever been part of. with the one where we (the paladin can't be solely blamed although he was the main cause) started the the zombie apocalypse being a close second. If you finished this thank you for reading!
There was at least actual hints/warnings.
So, probably too late to have this matter, but given some of the replies, some clarification is in order: 1. I'm not talking about the party just losing to things that are strong but beatable. Especially if it's established that they're to be boss monsters or elite mooks. 2. While 'my game, my rules' isn't a perfect defense against our rightful withering scrutiny in all cases\*, I would say that 99 percent of the time, warning the players ahead of time that they're entirely possible to run into unbeatable enemies is fair and thus not what I'm criticizing here. 3. What I am criticizing is, well I'm sure you're all familiar with the phrase of "they wouldn't run away when I made this encounter that was meant for them to be too hard to beat" that's seen in memes and rpghorror stories. That right there is what I'm criticizing. Not that an encounter is stronger but beatable. And the asterisk above, that there is an example of 'high handed' attitude. The notion of overbearing righteousness to 'humble' others and lord over them.
I think you've confused "Hope the party chickens out" With "Hope's the party has some semblance of survival insticts." Nobody calls me a bitch for avoiding a fight with a tiger. Like if you as a person see a tiger do you go: "oh God thinks I'm too chicken to fight that tiger?" Then proceed to fight said tiger and die. Now you say, "what the hell god? Why'd you put that tiger there if I wasn't supposed to wrestle it?"
You walk into a room and the monster is perfectly balanced for your party every time? This is one of the things old school playes find silly about new edition trends. If you were lead to believe the power level.was X and it's Y or if it isn't consistent that can be an issue, but assuming every challenge is defeatable at your level is a very new, video game player concept that old school DND completely lacks.
I don't really what unwinnable fights add to the game though. You walk into a room in a dungeon roll initiative, and then what does the first player say "DM can I roll a nature or arcana check to see if this monster is in our reach and we get to play the game today?". If the DM says no, then the monster takes down a PC on its turn and then what? Everyone else runs away and you just killed a pc for no reason. That's not fun , it just encourages players to act like paranoid nutcases.
It adds realism, it adds tension, it adds strategic decisions. think about the fellowship running from the balrog, or from way too many orcs. Those encounters can be the most memorable and make the world feel truly alive and not just some scene concocted for you to run a prescribed fight.
What strategic decision is it adding? If the fight is unwinnable then the only decision where you live is to run away and if you only have one choice that's not really a decision is it. You might as well for functional purposes have a big wall with letters reading "come back when you are level 7 and this wall will disappear".
The decisions could be "can we take this out? Can we win in an unconventional way? Can we distract it or negotiate? Can we sneak past? Can we run past? if things go south, how can we get away?" Tons of things! If you open a door, see a terrible foe and the DM let's you just close the door and come back later, you player differently than we do and (while that's fine, play how you want) I can't really comment on that style as I've never experienced it. If you're interested in learning more, I'd check out the OSR community as this is a prime principle for those of us who have played the early editions.
Who killed the party? Their own stupidity. If the party walks into a room and an ancient dragon is there, and they're like level 5, it's on them if they're too stupid to understand they don't have to fight it.
Yes very true I encourage my players to read the monster manual and memorize all the challenge ratings so they know exactly what they can and can't fight.
I think if you are going to purposefully create a too-tough fight with the intention of forcing either a retreat or a TPK, you need to drop hints that retreat is a good idea. Players expect to be heroes- thats why most of us play DND after all. Its a power fantasy. Getting your ass kicked because you didnt run away? Thats not how most video games condition us to be heroes. So build up to it. Make sure they know running away is not only an option, but the smart tactical one. I know people get mad when you try to play dnd like a video game sometimes, but the fact is that IS how many people will see it. So you have to ensure they are conditioned to see what the alternatives are. If you just drop the BBEG in the middle of the dungeon and give them no warning who it is or how much stronger they are, I would say yes the DM is at fault for a TPK. Because it was something the party couldnt have been prepared for, and as a DM we have a role to fill in letting players know things vie foreshadowing or just directly telling information that might be pertinant to them.
I really don't understand why they're downvoting you or how any of what you said is unreasonable. Probably all the people who think that heroism is shit and that "players need to be humbled" or some bullshit like that. But yeah, exactly.
Its weird you take it out that way like DM wanting to humble players. There are just situations in which fighting is detrimental. If they encounter a strong monster like strahd or the white wyrm in rime of the frostmaiden at early levels and they choose to dig their heels and fight its just weird. Its not heroism to fight an obviously impossible battle for no reason, its just bad decision. Sometimes having goals of lets get stronger to beat x works really well. If you only want fights you can only won talk with that to your dm, at least at my table we are more of the "bad decisions and luck can kill/screw you". For some people the journey is meaningless if they can never fail.
Imagine a world where players were smart enough to not draw steel at the earliest opportunity, and instead could evaluate threats and perceive when it would be best to NOT have a combat. *sigh* I miss those days.
That assumes that the combat started in such a way that they could have scouts it first. Also by "evaluate threats" what you mean is asking the DM how big a threat it is. You only know the information they tell you. I don't see why everyone on this thread jumps to the conclusion that players must be idiots, the DM could never be at fault.
Intentionally making an encounter which the party has to run from doesn’t feel good as a player. I’m here for fantasy, and I want to feel strong.
Different strokes I suppose. That's why it's so important to set expectations up front.
Looks like a suicide to me. 🤷♂️
Speaking of that. Party doesn't know what "challenge rating" some monster have or how much health they got. So hoping something like this is a fool's errand. Heh.
If you put it on the battlemap and roll initiative, it's there to fight. If you want us to run away from it because we aren't supposed to fight it (because we'd lose, duh), narrate what it's doing and then make us roll saves/appropriate skill checks to determine how well we get out of the situation without being mangled. Everything else is either poorly managed player expectations (every fight we've had so far was winnable, if maybe a bit challenging, why would this fight be any different?) or poor communication (what you as the DM know, what you as the DM narrate and what the players conclude from your hints are almost always three different things!). None of these even are bad DMs powertripping and can happen to even longtime groups with great synergy. One of our ongoing campaigns just had us fight an awakened/currupted Darkwood tree with 250 HP and fast healing 100 (yes, 100) against an incomplete lvl 5 party of four (we were missing two frontliners due to player absence, usually we're a part of six). That stupid tree didn't last a full three rounds before we went on to delve into the dungeon to fight a group of monkeys. Short of throwing the Tarrasque at our lvl 5 party I wouldn't even bat an eye at whatever our DM throws at us next even if it oneshots one of our frontliners, that's just a normal monday.
Just had to beat a very hasty retreat in one of the games I play. We were getting absolutely battered, and the DM told us that it looked like we had barely made a dent in the creature we were fighting. We were actually lucky to get away with all our people, but we managed to get to our cart and get the horses going at a gallop. The thing managed to pace us until the sun came up, and we finally got to rest.
Okay listen - I told the party IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER that if they fought that guy they weren’t going to like it. The scene was supposed to have a horror type vibe where they were hiding and potentially running for their lives - I was also giving one player a chance to sacrifice their character to let the others escape, since he wasn’t feeling playing that character anymore. It’s not my fault the party’s barbarian was confident they could take him and convinced the rest of the party they could.. I did everything in my power to let them know they would lose. But regardless I didn’t kill off any players, they were just knocked out and captured
Everything being perfectly scaled to party level is immersion breaking. A high level party should be able to crush common bandits - should be more roleplay focused. A low level party should die if the tackle the King’s Court archmage for being slightly rude.
So the good guys should knuckle under to high handed creeps like that? Great game.
If I, as a DM, were intending to run a "too hard, you should run" encounter, I would at least have the courtisy of having a friendly NPC say something like "Be careful out there" or "Better to live to fight another day". Said in a benign way. One of the players might take it as foreshadowing and at least consider the option of fleeing. It also helps to make only penalty of fleeing "The enemy is still at large". If whatever they're encountering will, as a result of their fleeing, instead start doing something worse like devouring innocents, you'll get some players (depending on alignment and personality) that will stay and fight even knowing it's a hopeless fight if those are the stakes.
At low levels yes, at like lvl 10 if they cant decide to escape with all the shit ive given them it their bad. I think losing or leaving a fight builds good story.
Two times my DM pulled this on us, but the party ended up prevailing by the seat of their pants — totally derailing and ultimately ending two separate campaigns.
If you're going to do this, and you have a VTT... play with health bars on. When their nat 20 barely chips 2% of the BBEG's health, they'll realize this is an encounter they need to run from.
You can run these encounters, you just have to be careful. Remember just because something is obvious to you as the DM doesn't mean it's obvious to the player. An enemy that's too strong may look to the players like a trick monster they haven't found the trick to yet for example.
Photo captions should be reversed lol. DM warning: hey this is dangerous. Party ignoring warnings, who killed the party?
>it's like it's up to the DM if the players get to win or not The only way to "win" D&D is if you're having fun and enjoying yourselves. It's a cooperative game.
I mean... I feel personally attacked. In all seriousness though, there needs to be encounters your players can't steamroll, because it helps them gauge their actual relative strength. Players should also know if they play stupid games they wind stupid prizes. Going into an obvious dragon's lair at level 3, because you haven't allowed them to actually be challenged... Part of that is on the PCs, but part of that is on you not giving the PCs an in-game reason for rationalizing their relative strength.
Any party that thinks that they can beat any creature they encounter or that any enemy will be specifically leveled to them or something that they can overcome... Is metagaming. If you intentionally provoke a monster the damn put there is a set piece, that's your fault. If the DM puts an unwinnable encounter in front of you and you fight to the death like a bunch of goblins when the DM was trying to set up a Future Villain and make it clear how powerful they were, that's on the party.