Encounters that didn't work

[Biggus]

Last night I put my players up against a pack of displacer beasts and it was...really boring. None of them had any special detection powers, so it just meant the combat dragged on for twice as long as normal. And since the displacer beasts don't have any other special abilities to make the combat interesting, they performed basically like a pack of ordinary animals with double hit points.

Not long before that I put an epic party up against eight different monsters, and it also became glacially slow but for the opposite reason: there were so many full attack routines with four or more attacks, plus swift actions and long lists of special abilities that it took over an hour to play a single round of combat.

What encounters have you tried that didn't work?

[Beni-Kujaku]

In a printed module, there was an encounter that the PCs were supposed to lose, either by running away or getting captured (them winning would undercut basically the whole second part of the module). Way too many enemies, and one or two above their level. The problem is, my party was a tad too optimized for the module. I had accounted for that, and added the final boss of the module to the encounter to be sure that they would still lose, but they still thought they'd play it out, resulting in a slugfest with more than a dozen NPCs with different statblocks getting their turn each round, and the PCs slowly realizing that they were getting railroaded and losing interest in the fight. Not the best session.

[Tzardok]

During the first time I was the DM, I had two encounters that didn't work. First, I had the group encounter a gang of troglodytes that were attacking a traveller. I thought it was a level appropriate encounter because I had calculated the encounter level according to the rules in the DMG, but fact was that even two dozen baseline troglodytes are simply not a threat to a level 5 group.

Second, I had the same group encounter a hieracosphinx ... that they killed in a single round.

During that session I learned a bit of stuff about making encounters too weak. I managed to apply that during my second time when the boss I created had been a bit too weak and I stealthily boosted him up during the fight to make it more exciting.

[Biggus]

First, I had the group encounter a gang of troglodytes that were attacking a traveller. I thought it was a level appropriate encounter because I had calculated the encounter level according to the rules in the DMG, but fact was that even two dozen baseline troglodytes are simply not a threat to a level 5 group.

Yeah, I've had that problem. If the PCs have decent AC for their level sometimes mooks even just a few levels below them find it almost impossible to hit them.

[Kurald Galain]

In a printed module, there was an encounter that the PCs were supposed to lose,

Oh, I had one of those. Well, I was a player in that campaign, but it still didn't work. In my case, it ended up with a long dragged-out battle that ended up being a waste of time because the DM fiat'ed us into losing in the end.

Then there was one where my character had been possessed for a long time and the party finally found out, so this ended up in a boss fight with me against the rest of the party, and me getting a generous buff from the possessing entity. Problem is, I was the party's main damage dealer. So I won initiative, pulled an alpha strike on the first turn, and took down the others in a surprisingly quick battle; and the DM had to bring in a DMPC deus ex machina to prevent TPK.

And then there was an encounter where we had to fight our way into a heavily defended cave system, rescue an NPC held there, and fight our way back out. However, we also had two casters capable of Dimension Door, so we resolved that issue in half a round and with zero attack rolls. At least the DM had a good laugh with us about that one.

[Quertus]

I miss the days when the fun of a Displacer Beast encounter was the tension between the joy and effectiveness of throwing a Fireball vs the value of not burning the hide to make Cloaks of Displacement.

[Eurus]

I made a big scary sphinx monster as a boss, and it got the worst rolls I've ever seen in an encounter. It was hilarious, but also felt like a bunch of wasted effort. All these cool abilities and attacks I designed for it, and the thing just could not roll above a 5. A humbling reminder of the chaos of existence, and also the value of a good DM screen to roll behind.

[RexDart]

As a player, a fight with a Will-o-Wisp that nobody in the party could hit without rolling a 20. (Maybe the fighter could hit on a 19 or 20.) It was hitting us too, but not doing enough damage to actually be dangerous, so the whole thing was just incredibly tedious.

It was extremely uncharacteristic for our DM - likely an encounter inherited from the underlying module that he didn't catch and remove or modify as he usually does. It also was basically acting as a guard for a plot-important device, and didn't have the "usually avoids combat" behavior described in the Monster Manual, so there was no apparent solution other than standing around taking endless potshots at the thing until eventually it took enough to be defeated.

[ShurikVch]

During the first time I was the DM, I had two encounters that didn't work. First, I had the group encounter a gang of troglodytes that were attacking a traveller. I thought it was a level appropriate encounter because I had calculated the encounter level according to the rules in the DMG, but fact was that even two dozen baseline troglodytes are simply not a threat to a level 5 group.

As a player, a fight with a Will-o-Wisp that nobody in the party could hit without rolling a 20. (Maybe the fighter could hit on a 19 or 20.)

Did anybody tried to use Aid Another?

[JNAProductions]

Not exactly "didn't work" but similar to Eurus' example.

I made a CR 10 boss baddie with grapples, teleports, and lots of mobility. Then the party's Paladin//Monk started jiggling, Entrancing the boss, and making them unable to move away from said PC. So there went... 90% of their fun abilities.

However! The party befriended this NPC, they joined up for a lot of the game, and on a later encounter, I got to use this peep's abilities. Eliciting a "Whoa what the heck, they just hulked the hell out!" to which I let the party know that that's what WOULD'VE happened to them, had she not jiggled.

[glass]

Not so much "didn't work" as "isn't working", since the encounter is technically ongoing, due to last having failed to conclude the combat despite going half an hour past our usual finish time. Anyway, at last night's sessions I accidentally included a couple of extra monsters in an already-tricky encounter (and this is PF2, which tends to be...unforgiving).

Nobody is dead yet, but two PCs have been knocked unconscious (one still is) and another two are Confused, out of five. Although the enemy are also somewhat depleted, it was looking like a potential TPK. Fortunately, I realised the error and have taken steps to rectify it.

If anyone is curious, the fight is....

Spoiler: Spoilers for Abomination Vaults AP

Show

Four flickerwisps (level 2)
Four crawling hands (level 0)
Two grave wights (level 4)

Against a fourth-level party. The grave wights were the mistake, I didn't realise they were supposed to be tucked up in sarcophagi until triggered.

[Remuko]

Not exactly "didn't work" but similar to Eurus' example.

I made a CR 10 boss baddie with grapples, teleports, and lots of mobility. Then the party's Paladin//Monk started jiggling, Entrancing the boss, and making them unable to move away from said PC. So there went... 90% of their fun abilities.

However! The party befriended this NPC, they joined up for a lot of the game, and on a later encounter, I got to use this peep's abilities. Eliciting a "Whoa what the heck, they just hulked the hell out!" to which I let the party know that that's what WOULD'VE happened to them, had she not jiggled.

What do you mean by jiggling? I'm very confused at what was actually done here, it sounds so interesting.

[JNAProductions]

What do you mean by jiggling? I'm very confused at what was actually done here, it sounds so interesting.

Was a gestalt game.

PC was a Paladin//Way Of The Mother's Bounty Monk.

[Biggus]

Did anybody tried to use Aid Another?

Good point, 20 mooks averaging nearly 2 hits per round still isn't much but it's better than averaging 1 hit per round.

[RexDart]

Did anybody tried to use Aid Another?

I think so, now that you mention it - IIRC that's what made it possible to hit on a 19 or 18.

[vasilidor]

Both as a player and a DM I cannot stand scenarios in which the players are supposed to lose for the plot to go on.

[Harrow]

Both as a player and a DM I cannot stand scenarios in which the players are supposed to lose for the plot to go on.

There was a module I ran once that ran afoul that like half a dozen times. Against the same opponent. The whole thing was about chasing a dude, and you're supposed to keep running into him only for him to narrowly escape. It would have helped (a little) if the person who wrote the module actually knew how the escape abilities of the antagonist had worked. Or didn't work, as the case may be. What didn't help was the one part of the adventure where you were trying to catch up to him on horseback, spending like a week or two rolling on a random encounter table for every hour of travel and 8 hours of rest. The thing is, you couldn't skip the random encounters, because then you wouldn't have the gold and XP that the following modules expected of you. Having run it, I would consider running that series of modules again, but only after homebrewing something entirely new in place of this section. The big bad didn't even have anything to do with the ongoing plot...

[Bonzai]

As a player we were running through the published Eberron mods. My character was an extremely patriotic Karnathi Necromancer. He grew up being fed war propaganda and when he came of age, he was excited to serve in the military. He got posted in a border fort, and his job was to repair any damage to their skeletal steeds. He never saw any action, and the war ended, much to his disappointment. He had a very unfavorable view of Kaius the 3rd, and felt he was a pale shadow of Kaius the 1st.

I go through all that, to say that my character had a perspective that was vastly different from the norm. This impacted the campaign in some funny ways. First off, the Emerald Claw are supposed to be pretty standard villains that players should have no qualms about indiscriminately murdering. To my character, they were glorious war heroes. The fact that they were banished was just more proof of Kaius's unsuitability to rule. So my starting position with them was always respectful and friendly. The campaign did not really allow for that. Then there was another example where the party had to track down a vampire. As Necromancer I had no biases against undead, so we tried diplomacy. One successful charm undead spell later, and the whole campaign was cut short.

As a DM I will always remember an encounter I had planned for. I had recently watched "A Fist Full of Dollars", and was inspired. Instead of a town with two gang bosses, I thought why not a dungeon with two dragons? So I set up a scenario. A white dragon had a dungeon lair. She died, and her two daughters are now fighting to claim it and her treasure hord. Each claimed half the dungeon. One had a tribe of goblins serving her, the other a tribe of Kobalds. Their war was a stalemate, and enter the player's. Both dragons tried to recruit them to their cause and the party had free reign to deal with them. Once both were slain, they would be able to unseal the mother's inner lair. The twist was that the Mother had reanimated as a dracolich. The plan was that once they defeated her, there were two fresh dragon corpses nearby that she could come back in as a proto dracolich. So they would have to defeat her three times. That was the plan anyways. But the player's ended up turning one into a monkey, which one of the players made into a familiar. We would roll play that it had an odd habit of always sleeping on treasure. Lol.

[Remuko]

Was a gestalt game.

PC was a Paladin//Way Of The Mother's Bounty Monk.

Oh, that...that is a thing. Yeah I was definitely not familiar with this "subclass". The jiggling makes sense now.

[vasilidor]

One encounter that did not work was when I built a Grave Knight in Pathfinder and gave it undead followers. the party just noped out of trying to track it down.

[smetzger]

Both as a player and a DM I cannot stand scenarios in which the players are supposed to lose for the plot to go on.

A good way to deal with this is to just say "You lose, your captured whatever, maybe narrate it a little". Then give everyone some sort of boon/action point to make up for it.

[RexDart]

A good way to deal with this is to just say "You lose, your captured whatever, maybe narrate it a little". Then give everyone some sort of boon/action point to make up for it.

I think "caught in an inescapable trap" is somewhat more satisfying in a D&D narrative than "unwinnable fight" if you must have this sort of setup. Especially because the characters likely will fight and defeat the "unbeatable" foes at some point.

We're ultimately talking about a form of railroading, which is usually a necessary evil in any D&D campaign to some extent. The key is getting buy-in from the players that the railroad trip will be a fun one, so they're not constantly scheming to derail the train.

[Aegis013]

There are two encounters that stand out to me as not working as intended that I recall in D&D specifically (one or two others in other systems).

The first was the first time I DM'd, at the ripe old age of around ~6 years old. My two players' level 1 PCs were unable to dispatch 6 orcs and were very very quickly defeated and TPK'd. It was a good lesson for me, but not what I expected at the time. Being so young I had anticipated it as heroes triumphing despite overwhelming odds, rather than having those odds simply overwhelm them.

The second was for someone who was DM'ing for their first time while we were in college. It was meant to be a somewhat grand combat as a tribe of about 40 kobolds with about 6 dire badgers as half beast-of-burden half war-beasts attacked our party of 5 in the night. The issue was that the players' turns would be completed in about 5 minutes all together as we were very low level and the opponents' turn, with each making their own separate attacks and the like, took about 15 minutes each. The combat took an entire session, as the game quickly felt like it was the DM playing a game without the players. The players won the engagement without any real issue, effectively mitigating any risk of loss with clever use of magic and cover. The problem was just IRL time management.

Honorable mentions:
Playing solo as a level 1 Wizard and dying because I elected to open a treasure chest which contained a dart trap that immediately brought me below 0 HP as it was literally impossible for my Wizard to notice and identify the trap. My HP and Reflex saves were too low to manage that simple obstacle. My character just bled out and died. I think the DM in that case wasn't concerned about game-aspects like balance and was more concerned about verisimilitude, so I can't say it was an encounter that didn't work, but I have a strong memory of it.

Playing a different system (Deadlands), I did everything that it was possible to do to engage my enemy intelligently and effectively but was knocked unconscious by a telegraphed attack which, due to sheer luck, was completely unavoidable. In that system you roll your Quickness stat to determine the number of cards you draw which represent the action order in the round. While my character was normally fast enough to get the max 5 actions as a gunslinger and I had held a card up my sleeve (carried over from last round to be used like an interrupt), I drew the black joker which forced me to lose my sleeved card and the enemy's actions were all perfectly clustered together, so it performed two telegraph actions and a super attack before I could do anything and knocked my character unconscious and into the water, causing him to drown. The encounter concept wasn't bad, it was just extremely poor luck and an unfavorable environment that caused something my character who could've easily riddled the foe with holes in another few actions to instead get instantly killed.

[atemu1234]

TBH I've had some slogs of encounters, mostly from incorporeal creatures. It can be fun once in a while, but half the time, the martials just wind up sitting out the fight and feeling bummed, and I play with some very ADHD people, so keeping focus is hard when that happens.

[glass]

I had an encounter which did not work as well as it might have just last session: I am running a slightly old-school-ish adventure from the 3.0 era, "Night Below".

Spoiler: Minor Spoilers for "Night Below"

Show

It begins with a fairly long journey into the Underdark, and a bunch of rolls for random encounters. There is a table in the adventure with creatures specific to it in the lower numbers while higher numbers refer you to the DMG (although I am using the tables in Underdark instead).

Anyway, the PCs encountered two beholders and in the very first round one of the players cast holy word and blinded them both. I mistakenly believed that prevented them from using their magic eyes - you cannot target what you cannot see, but I missed that the beholders abilities are rays so can be used blind (albeit with a 50% miss chance). Which left the beholders turning their anti-magic eye on the PCs and then trying to bite them - an attack that is ludicrously ineffective for their CR, even before the 50% miss chance.

Turn the fight into a rather slow cakewalk.

[Curse]

I had a module some years back where the players decided to go into a direction that was supposed to be much later in the story. As I wanted to have them being able to decide for themselves I put a lot of thought (actual days of planning) into how that would play out and still keep the main points of the story intact. There was a good reason for the BBEG to keep up his facade and gather some information about the PCs and what they are up to. It seemed to work quite well and we were not far from a thrilling revelation ...
... while one player kept complaining how boring he found all the railroading to be ...
Probably there was some miscommunication on my part but I got so frustrated (also for more reasons e.g. the same player twiddling with his smart phone during the game, hardly paying attention) that I ended up quitting the campaign and any games with this particular player.

[Metastachydium]

I had an encounter which did not work as well as it might have just last session: I am running a slightly old-school-ish adventure from the 3.0 era, "Night Below".

Spoiler: Minor Spoilers for "Night Below"

Show

It begins with a fairly long journey into the Underdark, and a bunch of rolls for random encounters. There is a table in the adventure with creatures specific to it in the lower numbers while higher numbers refer you to the DMG (although I am using the tables in Underdark instead).

Anyway, the PCs encountered two beholders and in the very first round one of the players cast holy word and blinded them both. I mistakenly believed that prevented them from using their magic eyes - you cannot target what you cannot see, but I missed that the beholders abilities are rays so can be used blind (albeit with a 50% miss chance). Which left the beholders turning their anti-magic eye on the PCs and then trying to bite them - an attack that is ludicrously ineffective for their CR, even before the 50% miss chance.

Turn the fight into a rather slow cakewalk.

I can understand how that could've outstayed its welcome after a couple of rounds, but man, that mental image is gold.