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