All Good Things…Break, Part V

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

…the story continues from Part IV: The Aftermath and the Post-Mortems

Conclusion

So… what’s my take away here?

I certainly made several mistakes.

The biggest one: during our Session 0, I didn’t make it clear what I wanted out of the game. I listened to everyone else, but I didn’t make my own needs clear. I have a hard time self-advocating, so I’d told myself that how I run games would come out naturally over the course of the campaign without me having to explicitly state such. I thought several of my oldest players already knew what I wanted. And I thought the times I’d compromised on my own approach to gaming would be seen as rare exceptions, not the rule. After everything else, I realized I’d compromised the quality of my games so much that it was no longer obvious how much I treasured my gaming ethics.

Because of criticism of the factors that made my games some of the best people had ever played, I’d let go of the very things that made my games good. In an effort to please my players, I’d sacrificed quality. And it backfired spectacularly.

During this period, and old gaming buddy and roommate of mine from college came to visit. He’d continued with TTRPGs as well, creating a community of gamers practically whole-cloth in the city he moved to and even getting involved with organizing and running games at GenCon. During his visit, he said something that struck me. He made mention of how I’d been called the Evil GM back in college. I’d always thought it was meant in jest… certainly I was the opposite of evil? I always let the dice roll where they would and was vigilantly as unbiased and fair as possible. He continued to explain that I was the ‘Evil GM’ precisely BECAUSE I wouldn’t cheat on behalf of the players. Because I followed the rules clearly and consistently and didn’t coddle my players or lie about rolls when an encounter was going poorly, I was seen as ‘Evil’. It took 30 years for me to finally understand that.

So next campaign? The Evil GM is back. I’ll clearly state what I expect out the players and how I’ll run things. I won’t compromise quality for comfort. I won’t pretend characters are better designed than they actually are. I want the fun to be drawn from the immersiveness and verisimilitude of the game, not from smoke and mirrors.

And, most importantly, I’ll communicate more. Both during session 0 and after each session. I want to put more thought into my games, like I used to, and expect more out of my players, like I once did. I want to tell stories again.

And in the stories, sometimes, legends do die after all.

All Good Things…Break, Part IV

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

…the story continues from Part III: The Tactical Fight

The Aftermath

The tension was palpable.

“And good game,” one of the players declared with resignation.

“I assume she’s going to kill all of us now,” another said.  Though implied, it wasn’t a question.

One of the players apologized to everyone else.

One of the players was crying quietly as they packed up their stuff. Another was red in the face.

I tried to calm the room. I realize now it was way too late, but I had dropped out of the focus I was maintaining to run the combat and could see how upset folks were. I tried to assure them that they weren’t aware of the reinforcements. They weren’t aware of the giant spiders. I didn’t feel like it was time for a post mortem on how those things could’ve been mitigated or avoided.

“Can I ask for a clarification on something,” one player began to ask carefully. “When we are down people, you have not been scaling down the combat encounters in light of how many people we currently have?”

“Mmhmm,” I replied and nodded, probably too glibly…trying to keep things light and airy sometimes comes across as glib. I knew where this was going, we’d already touched on it a bit earlier in the night as tensions rose. I was as devastated as they were but I felt this wasn’t the time to indulge in my own emotions.

“If that is the case…what is the point of us doing a game where we are missing people, because we’re knowingly putting ourselves where we could be at a significant handicap and get killed?”

I explained that I didn’t think that was the problem with the encounter. I walked through how I just increased the number of bugbears to try to balance the encounter for 7 characters. The debate continued and my ability to keep my own emotions under check faltered as well.

“You’re saying that the number of monsters are sitting in a room only exist when you open up a door,” I said to another player.

“Considering they’re only existing in your head…until we open the door, yes.” The volume in the room was increasing to uncomfortable levels.

“That’s not how I’ve ever run a game,” I replied quietly. I was exasperated, flustered and feeling more than a bit defeated. I was trying to regain my calm.

”In that case, if anybodys’ ever missing a game, so am I. I can’t do that. I highly disagree with that idea, very much so.”

There were some more heated, angry words, but that was the gist of the post-game disagreement. The implication was that because I’d planned out the encounter for seven players who were in my game and didn’t decrease the number of bugbears in the room to accommodate the six players who were actually at the table, the disastrous conclusion to the campaign was my fault.

A few players stayed behind afterwards and we chatted for some time. I don’t remember much of it, other than they had both been through TPKs before and weren’t all that upset. They were disappointed that the game had concluded as it had, but they weren’t upset with me. Over the next few days, my internal turmoil deepened. At one point, I was fairly convinced I’d lost the entirety of my gaming group. This was my primary artistic outlet and the ethics I’d long stood by were being blamed for an unfair ending. It was more than a little soul-crushing.

The Post-Mortem

I wasn’t sure what to do next. The following Monday, though, I got a text from one of the players who’d been blaming the end of the game on me not weakening the encounters at the table. He was asking to run the next game in my stead.

All that hurt turned to rage. I kinda blew up on him.

I told him I wasn’t interested in playing in the sort of game he wanted to run. Where encounters were modified at any time based on out-of-game factors, like number of players physically at the table. I wasn’t interested in playing in a world that didn’t have any semblance of verisimilitude. I wanted to play in a game like what I ran, with the same aversion to metagaming and adherence to some consistent ethical standard.

I also pointed out that the encounter design rules in D&D5e, though very math intensive, aren’t even remotely an exact science. One less PC isn’t going to make much of a difference at the table and no system can truly determine a Deadly encounter vs an Easy one. This group had absolutely sailed through several Deadly encounters with barely a scratch. Some Easy encounters had become deadly when mistakes were made and multiple encounters were pulled at once.

The conversation, of course, went nowhere. We both were still pretty upset. Both that night and during this conversation, I said repeatedly that we needed to simmer down, but I let myself be drawn into an emotional conversation twice. I regret it still.

It was relatively soon after this disastrous conversation that I decided I was going to continue the tradition I’d done at the end of previous campaigns and do a post-mortem. Usually, I did it with the whole group over a meal, but this time, I decided to talk to each person one-on-one.
Some were done that night, in retrospect, with the folks who remained behind afterwards. Some I did over Messenger. Some I did in person.

All of the points raised were valid, though some more than others.

One important point that was made to me was the order in which I was having monsters of the same type take move and attack actions, specifically my bugbears. The bugbears were all moving on the same initiative beat, so I’d stand up, move them as necessary to a new position, then return to my desk and start rolling to hit. This meant they got more flanking bonuses than they really should have. I don’t think it would’ve made that drastic of a difference to the conclusion of the fight, but maybe it would’ve. Either way, it’s a lesson I’ll certainly carry with me into future games.

Some of the other points were more painful to hear. I was told my attempts at levity during the fight were cruel. That I should have just ended the battle early and prolonging a fight I knew would end the campaign was unnecessary. Mention was made that some thought I’d promised the PCs ‘plot armor’ for the course of the first module and felt betrayed when that wasn’t the case. The stance on changing encounters in the moment also came up again and I pointed out that I’d run the numbers… the encounter was already weaker than it should’ve been for 7 players. I also pointed out that we’d had a situation earlier in the game where a player who was thinking about not coming to game was asked to show up because they were in that fight with Venomfang and I asked should I have increased that encounter in the middle of it because they added another PC? That seemed to help, at least some, with finally calming the opposition to me not metagaming encounters at the table.

Though these conversations, I did realize something though: because GMs so often fudge dice and lie about what goes on behind their screen, players feel betrayed when they’re allowed to fail. You can find scores of what we used to call ‘powergamers’ on YouTube telling you which build is so powerful it’ll break your game and how to stack the system in your favor. And people believe them, because the math seems to add up. What they don’t tell you is that, because most GMs cheat, no one really thinks through how these builds might take away from the game or harm a game. Because most GMs pretend to have their encounters fail, players think they’re actually overcoming encounters without having to think. Because GMs are advised to fudge, players think the encounter builder system is a science… not the absolute guesswork and guideline it’s intended to be. Players don’t think failure is an option because in most games, the possibility of failure isn’t real. It’s faked. They’ve been lied to.

There was another factor that I’d failed to realize until well after the dust had settled. I was struck how, in this one campaign, in twelve sessions, the group had TPK’d twice and almost TPK’d a third time (during that assault on Cragmaw Castle). I hadn’t had a true TPK end a campaign in probably 20 years, since an Earthdawn campaign that ended with a Horror ripping through the party. Once I realized that, I realized one thing was missing… our group planner. One player had always been the one to take the brunt of the grumbling and whining when the group was determining how to handle the challenges before them. She was the planner of the group, the one person at the table who knew me best and knew that I’d let the party fail if that’s what the dice determined. So she knew planning was necessary… you had to think in my games. You had to play smart. And she helped everyone else at the table play smart too.

She died in April of 2022: my wife, Chelle, who’d been a player in every campaign I’d run since 1991. She wasn’t there to push folks to think and play smart and take time to plan. And so they didn’t. Everyone felt her absence, but I don’t think anyone, myself included, really perceived how her absence would affect us as players.

Other points were certainly reassuring, but they were hard to really take in. We tend to focus on the negative and I’m no exception.

…the story concludes in Part V: The Conclusion!

All Good Things…Break, Part III

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

…the story continues from Part II: Fighting According to their Abilities

The Tactical Fight

So, let’s take a look at how things could’ve gone differently. Yes, I know I’m looking at this with the clarity of hindsight and knowledge the players didn’t have at the table (like Vhalak and those reinforcements on round three). But I’m also looking at this through the lens of someone who’s played and GMed for three and a half decades… this is what I saw missing:

1. Legwork

“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”

Sun Tzu, the Art of War

Legwork is defined as “work that involves much traveling to collect information, especially when such work is difficult but boring.” Its an old term from the Victorian press to describe an assignment that’s more walking around gathering information than actually writing copy. And to many players, its absolutely boring.

Recognizing this, several modern games ‘gamify’ legwork by making it a single roll or incorporate it into play through ‘flashback’ mechanics. There are copious articles out there warning GMs about making it too hard to find information the players need to succeed in their action scenes without much considering that information-gathering is absolutely a part of the story… far more roleplaying happens when players are conducting legwork than when they’re swinging swords or burning people alive with their spells.

In this specific case, doing legwork while in Wave Echo Cave would have given the party some valuable information they missed. The most obvious is the presence of Vhalak and his bugbears in the Collapsed Cavern nearby… if they’d had someone scouting, they would’ve known they were there and maybe taken them out first… or at least figured out a way to make sure they weren’t there to support the Black Spider. It might have also lead them to discover a side entrance into the Temple of Dumathoin and the door to the Priest’s Chamber, where the last surviving member of the Rockseeker family was being held prisoner…moving quietly enough, they might’ve been able to rescue him without even fighting the Black Spider! And, as mentioned before, listening at the door to the Temple of Dumathoin likely would’ve gleaned them some information on what was going on inside.

As Sun Tzu pointed out, knowing your enemy is absolutely essential. The more info the players have, even in a role playing game, the more the deck is stacked in their favor.

2. Proximity

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

Edward Everett Hale

In the real world, military units are taught to fight together. Good role playing game rules tend to reflect this and D&D5e is no different. Controlling physical proximity, both of the enemy and of the PCs in the battle, is essential. A combatant cannot (generally) pass through a space occupied by an opponent. So when PCs are shoulder-to-shoulder, occupying space next to one another, the bad guys are limited as to who they can reach and attack without resorting to ranged weapons (more on that later). And, perhaps more importantly, PCs can physically touch one another. This is absolutely essential for some support spells and abilities, but for even non-casters, it’s essential for helping to keep your allies from dying when death saving throws go poorly.

If players allow a five-foot square between them, an enemy can squeeze in between them, but it puts that enemy at a disadvantage because he is now flanked… or, more correctly, it puts our heroes at Advantage. Not only can the monster be attacked by both PCs now, they have an easier time of it and, if one of them is a rogue, they can make use of their sneak attack ability to really ramp up the single-target damage.

Once players allow for a 10-foot distance, however, they’ve lost any advantage they might have had from proximity. This is particularly deadly when dealing with foes who might be individually weaker, but more numerous (as in this case). If enemies can surround a PC, each getting advantage on attacks and, critically, preventing other PCs from reaching them.
The more a group is spread out, the harder it is for them to aid one another should a problem arise for one. In this case, the group was spread all the way across the 60’ room. Bugbears and spiders alike were able to get in between PCs, at one point completely surrounding the druid/barbarian and firing off eight attacks with advantage!

Maintain proximity in combat. That’s the basis of the Roman Testudo formation, the Greek phalanx, the medieval pike square and the modern squad tactics.

3. Contingency Planning

“No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.”

Helmuth von Moltke, Militarische Werke

Contingency planning is, of course, creating a plan for when the first plan goes awry. It’s a basic concept of everything from military tactics to project planning, but it often gets overlooked in TTRPGs… or, worse yet, it’s done to such an extreme as to cause executive dysfunction and prevents the players from actually getting to what they’re planning for.
If the plan is ‘rush the enemy’ what’s the plan should that fail to get results? What happens if the cleric drops? Or if the group is attacked from the rear? What if the enemy has area attacks, like a fireball? Most contingency plans can be worked out ahead of time and used for every fight. Some need to be designed based on information you should’ve gotten through legwork. It’s an “arrogance check”… no matter how badass you think your character is, there should be some idea of what to do if they fail.

In this case, there wasn’t much of an initial plan, so a contingency plan likely wouldn’t have helped much, but it might’ve had the PCs in a better position to achieve victory in the first place. By securing an escape route should the battle go poorly, they would have checked out or blocked off access from Vhalak and his reinforcements. By having a plan for what to do should any one person go down, they might not have wasted action economy by rushing about the room to save one another.

In the end, contingency planning may not have brought the PCs victory, but it likely would’ve at least allowed them to survive contact with the Black Spider and his minions.

4. Using the Terrain

Bernard was right. The germ is nothing, the terrain is everything.

Louis Pasteur

This is a big one.

Too often when we talk about “terrain” we’re talking about outdoor features, like trees or large boulders or ravines or maybe a crumbling wall of a ruin. Terrain is just as important in a dungeon environment, perhaps moreso. Most encounters are keyed to a particular chamber or room and hallways are often relatively safe (it’s notable that the tunnels in Area 2 of Wave Echo Cave are certainly an exception). That tends to drive PCs to think of the room itself as the encounter location and the passageways around it as merely the means to access these encounters. Players, Dungeon Masters and even game designers often think of a dungeon in terms of a flow chart… important information is in the circles, the lines between them are just how they’re connected.

Terrain is about how to use the environment to control your opponent’s ability to access and attack you. That applies to dungeons and, in particular, to the passageways that often comprise a dungeon.

When dealing with a more numerous foe, as our PCs were in this encounter, hallways, stairs and doors are your best defenses. Wave Echo Cave has ten-foot wide corridors, meaning that two melee characters can stand abreast and block melee access to their ranged allies behind them. Using corners in passageways blocks line of sight, limiting the number of enemies that can themselves attack from range. This is particularly useful against casters.

The Black Spider was in a large chamber (room 19 in the diagram below) and, with his superior numbers and giant spider allies, would be best served fighting in that chamber. Our heroes, unfortunately, gave him a terrain advantage by rushing into the room. If, instead, they had positioned themselves in the hallway outside the chamber and sent a single PC, say their rogue to check the door, listen at the door, then throw the door open to draw the Black Spider and his bugbears into the hallway, they would’ve had a much easier time dealing with them.

If the PCs had chosen to take up position in the hallway between the Temple of Dumathoin (Area 19) and the Collapsed Cavern (Area 18) even just 10’ back from the entryway into the Temple, they could’ve forced the bugbears to round the corner to fight them. The giant spiders would’ve been mitigated entirely or forced to take position on the ceiling above the PCs. Now… there still would’ve been issues when Vhalak and her bugbears came rushing in from Area 18, but it would’ve been easier to shift our Wizard into the middle of the group and try to fight off foes from two directions. It might’ve still resulted in a TPK, but the chances of success would’ve been much higher.

And even better position would be just south of those stairs at the southern edge of our map. Bugbears would have to descend the staircase to get to the PCs, limited their ability to use range attacks and Vhalak’s reinforcing maneuver would’ve bottlenecked in the hallway, unable to advance until the Black Spider’s guards had been dealt with.

More importantly, though, if the hallway was considered as an option for bottlenecking the enemy, they likely would’ve checked down those stairs to the right and found Vhalak in Area 18 first, dealing with him before they fought the Black Spider, splitting these encounters into two separate and much more manageable fights.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t really an option for our heroes. Well, it was, but it wasn’t an option anyone was going to push for. Because our Circle of the Moon druid/barbarian wildshaped into large animals, he took up 10’ of space by himself. That means the other melee-focused character in the group, our monk/bard, wouldn’t have been able to use their abilities effectively with the druid taking up the whole width of the hallway. In a dungeon with standard, 5’ corridors, the ability of the group is even further hampered by this factor. In order for the monk to be effective, the druid/barbarian had to charge into the room, surrendering the terrain advantage to the Black Spider, Vhalak and the bugbears.

5. Spotlighting the Group

The cosmic spotlight isn’t pointed at you; it radiates from within you.

Marianne Williamson

“Spotlighting” is a somewhat toxic concept in TTRPGs originally intended as advice to Dungeon Masters struggling to keep their players engaged at the table. It has since spread into a concept so strong that players are told they should expect a right to the spotlight regardless of what they do at the table. While there is certainly some merit in advice to the DM to make sure they’re not being biased with their time towards any one player at the expense of the others, its resulted in a sort of selfish concept of players too often competing with one another for attention and that moment to do the thing their character was designed to do in every encounter.

To be clear, that desire for an individual spotlight wasn’t really a core issue with this group. But what they failed to do was spotlight the group.

Spotlighting the group is the inverse of spotlighting the individual. Spotlighting the group is using your character’s abilities, proximity, planning and terrain to allow for the group as a whole to shine. This isn’t just the purview of support characters, though they certainly are at their best when spotlighting the group. This is when your character remains close to the other characters on the battlefield, so they’re not using action economy to use touch abilities on you. Its ensuring you’re in a good position for the rogue to get a backstab on a flanked enemy or to give the fighter advantage on his attack. Its using terrain to make sure you don’t get surrounded by the enemy and have the cleric waste precious spell spells healing you. It’s doing the legwork to ensure your party isn’t caught in a trap or unaware of enemy reinforcements nearby. It’s changing your tactics and approach so the group has the greatest possible advantage in every encounter.

Spotlighting the group is having your characters operate as a squad. And, ironically, it means that individual spotlight DM’s are admonished to grant and players are encouraged to demand will naturally fall on the player’s characters as their abilities come to the fore when it most benefits the group, rather than the individual character.

The story continues in Part IV: The Aftermath and Post-Mortems

All Good Things…Break, Part II

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

…the story continues from Part I: So What Happened? and The Black Spider’s Victory.

Fighting According to their Abilities

Alright, so let’s take a moment to look at what went wrong at the table.

The players weren’t acting as a team. They had a Rogue/Fighter at the table with a Stealth of +7 and Investigation of +2, yet they weren’t sending him to scout open tunnels. They had a school of enchatment wizard with an Investigation of +6 and Perception of +4, but weren’t using her to listen at doors. No one was checking for traps. I can’t speak entirely to their motivations here because, in the end, none of this was discussed at the table. It was like they had an expectation that there was nothing they could be doing between encounters other than deciding whether to go left or go right. Maybe its a video game mentality, where your choices are limited to how many buttons the player has access to? Was it a lack of immersion in the world? Maybe it was D&D’s focus on listing actions available in combat made players feel they were restricted to just those actions?

Scouting down that side passage would have made them aware of Vhalak and the bugbears. Even if nothing else had changed, if they’d taken out that encounter first, they would’ve won against the Black Spider. Listening at the door to the Temple of Dumathoin would’ve let them know the Black Spider was in that room and they might’ve taken a moment to prepare.

Checking for traps wouldn’t have helped because there were no traps here, but its still always a wise approach. I suspect they were trying to rely on passive perception and the druid/barbarian’s ability to soak damage to deal with traps.

As an aside, never, ever use your hit point economy to defeat traps. Just because you’re able to soak the damage of a trap doesn’t mean you should. Use your rogues, people. They have a role outside of combat. All of the classes do.

Alright, so let’s move to the fight itself.

The school of enchantment wizard hung way back in rear of the fight. That’s what she was designed to do… she had Spell Sniper as a feat and a mix of defensive spells, damage dealing spells and a few enchantments. By staying in the hallway well away from the fight, she was playing as the character was designed to do: deal damage from a distance and stay protected behind Mage Armor and Shield should someone try to throw a javelin or shoot an arrow at her.

The monk stepped onto the battlefield and started taking out foes. Weirdly, she ended up being somewhat at the rear of the fight, between the wizard in the rear and the druid/barbarian as he got surrounded (more on that in a bit). She was doing what she was designed to do… attacking enemies and whittling down their numbers. When the party’s surrender was betrayed, she chose to fight… her weapons, after all, were her fists and feet and those hadn’t been taken away…

The assassin/fighter rushed the Black Spider. Taking out a single enemy quickly was what he was best at. The Black Spider had already cast web on the group, so our assassin/fighter identified him as the primary threat. And, maybe, if the leader was taken out, the bugbears might surrender themselves. But in doing so, he took himself well away from the rest of the party and left everyone else with space to be flanked. But he was doing what he was designed to… murder the bad guy.

The druid/barbarian rushed the room. To be fair, he had to if anyone else was going to get into the fight. As a Circle of the Moon druid, he could wildshape into CR 1 forms and he was choosing to wildshape into large animals… that means he took up four times as much space on the map as anyone else, so in order to allow other melee characters into a fight, he had to move out of the 10′ wide hallway they were in when the encounter started (a weakness of the wildshape not pointed out very clearly). The character was designed to be an obnoxiously powerful tank: between three forms (each with their own hit point total) and resistance to bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage when raging, they effectively had six times as many hit points as anyone else. They couldn’t quite deal out the damage other barbarians could (their Dire Wolf form, for example, could only deal 2d6+3 damage on a hit) and had none of the spellcasting diversity that a druid could bring to the table… all they could do was absorb damage and that, they did extremely well. The character was designed to rush into a battle and get surrounded. And that’s what happened.

The grave domain cleric also rushed the bad guy, but tended to float around the battle a bit, mostly trying to keep other party members from falling down and getting them back up when they did go down. There’s a few points worth mentioning here. First, the player behind this character was the only one to lose a character during the first TPK… rolling a 1 on a death saving throw is brutal. Second, she was the only character with obvious tools to support the other PCs. Third… she was the only character NOT to take damage in the first half of the combat. When the surrender was betrayed by Vhalak, the grave domain cleric was the only one at full hit points. This character was designed to support other characters on the battlefield and to tank… with an AC of 18, they had the highest armor class in the group. Yet, they didn’t tank. I suspect it was because it was perceived that was the druid/barbarian’s role and the player didn’t want to step on their toes… even though their cleric was a much more effective tank because the character didn’t rely on hit point economy to survive.

The one wild card in the group was a dwarven sorcerer. We were two players down this session, so she was added in as a ‘guest star’ to the party. This wasn’t the first time she was at our table in such a role, but I mention this to make it clear that she hadn’t had time to integrate into the group’s tactical profile (which didn’t exist anyways). She was artillery, pure and simple. Fire Bolt, Toll the Dead, Word of Radiance, Chaos Bolt, Guiding Bolt, Inflict Wounds, Scorching Ray, Spiritual Weapon, Distant Spell, Twinned Spell… she was a monster at churning out damage… and barely got to use any of them in the fight. Because she went down pretty early on… and when the grave cleric used an action to bring her back up, she tried to rely on her AC 16 and backed away from some opponents, allowing them an attack of opportunity which… put her back down. It was her barrage of magic missiles that put down the Black Spider… but she wasn’t able to do much else because she got overwhelmed by the other enemies in the room.

So if everyone was doing what they were designed to do, why did they fail? Because, in the end, they weren’t working as a group. They weren’t using many of the abilities on their character sheets that weren’t necessarily a design focus. They weren’t contingency planning. They weren’t immersed in the world. They weren’t thinking.

“Above all a player must think. The game is designed to challenge the minds and imaginations of the players.”

E. Gary Gygax, B2 Keep on the Borderlands, 1979

The story continues in Part III: The Tactical Fight

All Good Things…Break, Part I

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

Here’s that story.

So What Happened?

I had two folks at the table who were relatively new to TTRPGs in general and this was a return to D&D for me after about maybe 15 years or so. I’d been playing TTRPGs through that time, but I moved from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder and spent time with several other systems in between. D&D 4e was the first D&D game I’d skipped entirely. So it was a fairly momentous thing for me to get back to D&D after all this time. I decided to run the Lost Mine of Phandelver, Session 0 happened, characters were created, basic backstories designed and off we went!

Early on, we had a full party wipe. The whole of Cragmaw Hideout ended up attacking them in one overwhelming encounter. It could’ve been a Total Party Kill (TPK), but we talked it over and the players decided they wanted to try for a prison break scenario. It made sense… the goblins that captured them were established to take prisoners; the dwarf they were trying to rescue had originally been captured by them. So, narratively, it was feasible. The prison-break scenario was a success, revenge was taken on Yeemik for multilating the Artificer, the party escaped the Cragmaw Hideout and moved forward with the module.

In retrospect, I should’ve picked up then something was amiss.

Later on, we had another near TPK. The party’s assault on Cragmaw Castle didn’t go well either. Essentially, they ended up storming the keep from two different directions, gave up the element of surprise and brought the whole dungeon down on their heads. To their credit, they held their own for quite a bit, but there were just too many goblinoids and the party remained divided and split across the map: two were stuck outside the Castle, two just inside the front entrance and three were storming through the side entrance to try to reach the other two. The hour got later and later and, finally, I decided that King Grol would use his hostage, Gundren, to “invite” the PCs to flee. They did, though I think it was more because of how late the session ran than anything else.

This was my second red flag. I should’ve paid more attention to it and spent some time talking over what happened with the players. It didn’t even cross my mind to do so. In retrospect, I think I expected they would analyze for themselves what went wrong and use it as a lesson to work together better in future encounters. But that wasn’t how it was taken… it was more looked at as a mistake of one character than a bigger problem with how the players were interacting with one another and the world around them.

And, to be clear, the party was pretty much rolling through every other encounter in the module with very little difficulty. Stand-alone encounters, like dealing with the orcs of Wyvern Tor or even the encounter with Venomfang, they pretty much sailed through. The Redbrand Hideout went well, in part because they did some legwork around town in Phandalin and discovered the secret entrance to the dungeon, so they were able to slip in the side door and get straight to the meat of the dungeon. Even then, though, they were noisy enough to bring a couple of encounters together to fight and gave the wicked Glasstaff an opportunity to escape.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the reason they were sailing through stand-alone encounters was at least one character was built to overwhelm even a ‘deadly’ encounter designed according to the encounter builder “rules” (I use this term lightly). So when they had an isolated encounter to deal with, it wasn’t really even a challenge. The problem came when multiple encounters were close enough together to support one another should the party allow that to happen. Defeating a single dragon was easy… fighting a castle full of several separate goblinoid encounters coming together as one was difficult, if not impossible.

The obnoxious power of that one character is one of the things that made the rest of the group complacent. The fact that two of the near-wipes was because of a plan not being executed as planned is one of the other things that made the group complacent. Occam’s Razor isn’t always right, particularly when a complex and overlapping mishmash of issues lie at the root cause of a problem. In the end, the problem wasn’t so much the power level of one character or the plans failing, it was the lack of contingency planning in the first place. It was a lack of understanding of what each player and character brought to the table. And it was a complacency built upon a bedrock of assumption that D&D 5e was gaming on “easy mode.” There was an assumption, by myself included, that it was HARD to lose a character in this iteration of D&D. It was a lack of leadership at the table.

The Black Spider’s Victory

So when the characters finally found the location of Wave Echo Cave, they were mentally unprepared. They went into the dungeon as they had in the previous encounters… they might listen and might smell for things, but no one was checking for traps. No one was scouting ahead. They’d try looking for footprints, but on a stone floor most of what you’re going to get is either ‘things have traveled here’ or ‘things have not traveled here’. When given a choice between ‘left’ or ‘right’, they used the left-hand rule for traversing a maze. They did alright for the first couple of encounters… they fought some bugbears in the North Barracks. They took out a flameskull and some zombies. And then they went straight to the Temple of Dumathoin, where the BBEG of the whole module, the Black Spider himself, Nezznar awaited them with his giant spiders and bugbears. As with their previous encounters, they rushed into the room and into the fray.

Each character was fighting according to their abilities, but they weren’t fighting according to each others’ abilities. After briefly stumbling over a web spell, the group was quickly spread across the battlefield. The Circle of the Moon Druid/Barbarian rushed into the room, relying on his shapeshifting and resistance to most attacks to keep him alive (from a statistical standpoint, he had SIX TIMES as many hit points as anyone else at the table). The fighter/assassin and grave domain cleric rushed in to take out the Black Spider himself. The bard/monk and guest-starring sorcerer stayed near the door and the school of enchantment wizard was well behind everyone else in the hallway. Everyone was where they wanted to be, but no one was really where they needed to be.

To their credit, the encounter was going pretty okay, despite their lack of tactics. The Black Spider was unconscious pretty quickly. A few bugbears went down. It was a hard fight, but it seemed feasible. I knew things weren’t as rosy as they appeared, but I tend not to overly invest in guessing how an encounter is going to go… players have surprised me, even when I think they’re not thinking things through.

Then Vhalak, the doppelganger, showed up with reinforcements from their very unprotected rear.

See, when you first approach the massive stone doors that serve as the entrance to the Temple of Dumathoin, there’s also a passageway to the east. That passageway went unscouted. The group just wasn’t in that mindset. I don’t think scouting was even considered… on reviewing the recordings of the adventure, it certainly wasn’t voiced as an option. The module itself accounts for this… under Developments for the Temple of Dumathoin encounter, it states:

The creatures in area 18 can hear sounds of combat in this room. If they haven’t already been dealt with, they arrive after 3 rounds and act immediately after Nezznar’s giant spiders in the initiative count.

Lost Mine of Phandelver p. 50

That was Vhalak the doppleganger and his bugbear pals. An encounter that, by itself, was Deadly for 4th level characters.

Upon Vhalak’s arrival, the party was trapped and on the defensive. The wizard was able to flee them rushing up the hall at her, but it robbed her of valuable actions to get into the room and to the relative safety of being behind her companions. And even when she was out of range of the reinforcements, no one was in a position to support one another. The sorcerer fell, rose again with the help of the Cleric and fell again. The fighter/assassin went down. The druid/barbarian was overwhelmed by the spiders and bugbears surrounding him on all sides. Each bugbear was attacking with advantage and each was dealing out 2d8+2 points of damage each successful hit (their Brute ability is terrifying). One of the players ran the numbers after the fight and found that, statistically speaking, my rolling that night was not all that great… I was missing more than I should have. Even so, some very unfortunate critical hits landed and took characters down.

So Vhalak, appearing as a drow female, demanded surrender. The cleric, wizard and monk were the only ones standing, so they dropped their weapons. The spiders bound up those who were unconscious on the battlefield. To drive home just how serious she was, Vhalak murdered the bound sorcerer in front of the surviving PCs… that was a violation of their surrender in the eyes of the monk and they couldn’t let that stand. Combat was resumed as the cleric and wizard backed their friend.

I thought all was lost. But there was a moment, just then, I thought they might just steal victory from the hands of defeat. The bugbears and spider were gone, carting off the unconscious NPCs. They were in the next room, but far enough away that Vhalak was theoretically vulnerable. The enchantment school wizard, on her turn, chose to cast Hold Person on Vhalak. If it worked, the PCs would have two valuable prisoners of their own and no leadership among the goblinoids. They might just pull this off after all…

And Vhalak made her saving throw. By one point.

The characters fought valiantly, but they were overwhelmed. They were able to get Vhalak down to zero hit points, but being a doppelganger, they just reverted to their natural form with full hit points, per the polymorph spell. The remaining characters fell.

This time, there was no reason for the villains to spare the characters. The heroes had proven too troublesome and almost defeated them. The heroes were killed. The campaign was over.

The story continues in Part II: Fighting According to their Abilities