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