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Shatteredtower
2011-02-15, 11:19 PM
If, for some reason, you don't want spoilers for last week's Encounters session, do not read this.

The party lost all four horses and three of four settlers to the stirges. At the start of the encounter and the end of the first two rounds, I told them the wagons were bogged down and they couldn't get themselves free. No one ever tried to help move the wagons.

At the end of the fight, someone said, "You should have told us what to do."

I've seen this in earlier editions, too. Why? What makes some players think the only assistance they can offer, no matter the situation, is to kill things and take their stuff?

Coidzor
2011-02-15, 11:26 PM
Playstyle, history, the way the game is generally set up....

Katana_Geldar
2011-02-15, 11:33 PM
You can lead a player to a game...

Though if a game is stuck, I will give them suggestions...about five of them so they make their own choice. But my players are never stuck on what to do, and if they are they just do something crazy.

randomhero00
2011-02-15, 11:37 PM
Well instead of fighting they could all have committed suicide :P

But ya, I agree with the above. To many people are used to having things handed to them so they can "grind" experience. I blame video games mostly.

edit: altho there's an opposite side to this spectrum. My players are so hung up on little "clues" they try all sorts of ridiculous stuff. Which can drastically slow the game down.

Or they try to talk to the boss for 30 minutes (real time) thinking they can get by without fighting, only to realize the boss has been slowly maneuvering them into a trap. (I mean seriously, its a giant, highly intellectual serpent that wants to bring about the end of part of the world. do you really think you can *talk* him out of it?!)

Katana_Geldar
2011-02-15, 11:42 PM
Sometimes you have to tell them "this is flavour, the real plot is thataway". Though I did spend ten minutes with a cloak once when I forgot the DM mentioned the bodied lying around.

*pokes cloak with stick*
*picks cloak up with magehand*
*poke cloak with stick again*
*very gently touches cloak*
*burns cloak and then realises it was a magic item* :smallmad:

Gamer Girl
2011-02-15, 11:46 PM
The basic D&D game is all about combat. The basic game is to kill monsters.


And, killing is easy. When people sit down to have fun, they want it to be easy. And easy is killing.

And you can see the huge swings in D&D.

{{scrubbed}}

Katana_Geldar
2011-02-15, 11:49 PM
You're speaking to a DM who ran a game last week with one encounter in four hours, and that encounter lasted 30mins. The rest was roleplaying.

KillianHawkeye
2011-02-16, 01:01 AM
At the start of the encounter and the end of the first two rounds, I told them the wagons were bogged down and they couldn't get themselves free. No one ever tried to help move the wagons.

Some people will take a statement like "you can't get the wagons free" at face value, and not even try to move them.

Toptomcat
2011-02-16, 01:07 AM
Were the horses dead at the start of the encounter, or did they die during the combat because of the players' bad decisions? Because I can easily see not bothering to try to get the wagons moving if you don't have the horses to pull them...

The Rabbler
2011-02-16, 01:10 AM
Some people will take a statement like "you can't get the wagons free" at face value, and not even try to move them.

There's a difference between "they can't get themselves free" and "you can't get the wagons free." Especially when dealing with average humans.

Coidzor
2011-02-16, 01:20 AM
Sometimes you have to tell them "this is flavour, the real plot is thataway". Though I did spend ten minutes with a cloak once when I forgot the DM mentioned the bodied lying around.

*pokes cloak with stick*
*picks cloak up with magehand*
*poke cloak with stick again*
*very gently touches cloak*
*burns cloak and then realises it was a magic item* :smallmad:

....Why would you set fire to a cloak before using detect magic? :smallconfused:

Loot then burn! Loot then burn!


There's a difference between "they can't get themselves free" and "you can't get the wagons free." Especially when dealing with average humans.

Eh. I read it as the DM telling them that they couldn't get the wagons free and to do something else.

Because if my group can't get the wagons free, then how can I alone get the wagons free? It's not like wagons are normally self-propelled, and if these ones were that'd be a critical piece of information which would change the meaning of the statement such that themselves referred to the wagons rather than the group.

But without beasts of burden (or a wizard capable of creating/summoning a bunch of 'em) to pull the wagons out of the mud... Well, they'd just been told by the DM that they couldn't get them out of the mud.

Pentachoron
2011-02-16, 02:40 AM
And you can see the huge swings in D&D. {{scrubbed}}

I think it's more indicative of WotC trying to give D&D it's niche or at the least to identify it clearly. Even back when 3e came around there just weren't that many other game systems around (at least nothing like there is today) and many of those systems have since covered the niches that I think there was a lot of pressure on TSR and then WotC to have at least rules for, so when 4e came out they were able to decide what niche D&D was going to cover.

Vangor
2011-02-16, 02:45 AM
I've seen this in earlier editions, too. Why? What makes some players think the only assistance they can offer, no matter the situation, is to kill things and take their stuff?

Usually, this does work for combat encounters. Few combat encounters make use of the concept of not fighting the direct threat but providing assistance via other means. Things beyond combat encounters do this, but when you roll for initiative you are used to browsing your spell list, having your attack sheet, etc., ready to destroy something.

NichG
2011-02-16, 03:11 AM
(I mean seriously, its a giant, highly intellectual serpent that wants to bring about the end of part of the world. do you really think you can *talk* him out of it?!)

(Emphasis mine)

That suggests to me that yes, it should be possible to talk him out of it if you have a sufficiently clever argument thats actually rational and speaks to the serpent's interests. Of course, it depends on sufficiently clever PCs...

Kurald Galain
2011-02-16, 03:39 AM
I've seen this in earlier editions, too. Why? What makes some players think the only assistance they can offer, no matter the situation, is to kill things and take their stuff?
I suppose it's fairly easy to come to the conclusion that D&D is all about combat and that the way to deal with any obstacle is to hit it until it breaks. Even though this conclusion is not usually true with a good DM, it is true in most of WOTC's printed adventures (including RPGA).

Also, 99% of the rules in the game are about combat, and combat is very safe option in D&D considering the lack of wound penalties, the easiness of healing, and the open availability of resurrection. In most other RPGs, combat has a high likelihood of getting your character killed permanently, but in D&D injury and death are, by RAW, minor and inconsequential.

Eldan
2011-02-16, 03:43 AM
Yeah. I mean, just look at the rules. I only really know the 3.5 rules well, but the class descriptions are 75% combat rules. The feats are basically all for combat, with maybe three, four exceptions (Track, Leadership, maybe, Skill Focus if you want to be silly about it). The skills are a bit better, they are usually more useful out of combat than in. Then come the combat rules, pages and pages of them. And then the spells.
Basically, the book tells you in detail about how to fight. I've talked to knew players after they read only the PHB. Usually the first thing I had to explain to them? "You don't have to fight everything."

Many people tell you that you don't need rules for the RP part of the game, and that is mostly true. However, if the books don't really mention that part, it never even occurs to some people that it's there.

MeeposFire
2011-02-16, 03:48 AM
The basic D&D game is all about combat. The basic game is to kill monsters.


And, killing is easy. When people sit down to have fun, they want it to be easy. And easy is killing.

And you can see the huge swings in D&D. {{scrubbed}}

{{scrubbed}}

aboyd
2011-02-16, 03:49 AM
I told them the wagons were bogged down and they couldn't get themselves free. No one ever tried to help move the wagons.

At the end of the fight, someone said, "You should have told us what to do."
I actually agree with the players. I mean, I wouldn't go quite as far as they suggest, but I do believe in the three clue rule (http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/three-clue-rule.html). So if they don't get the first hint, there should be another hint, or two, or three. Even for something as short as Encounters, I'd want to approach my descriptions and advisory observations about the situation from multiple standpoints.

DM: "The wagons are bogged down! They can't get free!"

Players: swing swords for a round or two.

DM: "Someone screams out, 'he's dying, help!' They frantically try to flee, but can't quite pull it off."

Players: swing swords for a round or two.

DM: "The two remaining people are in a panic to unhook the last living horse; looks like they just want to get out alive, even if all they do is ride off, abandoning their carts."

Players: swing swords, kill everything, exclaim, "Yay!"

DM: "All the innocents died except one, who is now in the distance just sprinting away as if his life depended upon it, which it did."

Players: "You should have told us what to do!"

DM: "Uh, three clear descriptions of the trouble they were in didn't do it for you? When they screamed for help that didn't make you consider helping? When they were in so much trouble that they attempted to abandon the carts, that didn't give you a clue to how dire their situation was?"

That would be more in line with my thinking of a fair handling of the encounter, and how I might change the normal setup (they want the carts moving) to something adapted to help the players understand the issue (they abandon the carts). And so if they complained at that point, I'd obviously shrug it off as their own bumbling. But I'd want to be sure that I did indeed give them multiple different hints and perhaps modify the circumstances on the fly to help them evaluate how seriously messed up it was getting.

Skaven
2011-02-16, 05:52 AM
We haven't had a fight in 3 weeks in my IRL game i'm playing in.

Sometimes, I wonder if some folk miss the RP before the G.

Granted,, people play for different reasons, lots of people like to roll dice and hit things.

Eldan
2011-02-16, 06:02 AM
{{scrubbed}}

I have not played 4E, so I can not entirely comment on how good it's roleplaying is outside of combat, and how many utility powers it has, however, I can say a few words on 3E and on roleplaying in general, as I say it.
A character without a single rank in dance is not unable to dance. He is, most likely, an average dancer (mod around +0), who has never trained in dancing. Someone with 4 ranks in dancing is not your average dancer anymore, he's a great dancer already.
However, I don't think having every character be able to succeed at ever skill check is good for roleplaying. In my experience, failures can advance the atmosphere and quality of a game as much, if not more, than successes. Magicus McRobenstaff is seventy years old and has spent the last sixty of them in dusty labs. He just can't climb a wall without assistance of some kind, magical or mundane. Similarly, Gargscream Limbchop's approach to a locked door is not "insert tools here", but "swing axe at". No matter how good he becomes at axe-swinging, if he never cared about opening doors in a subtle way, how can he learn about it? Deficiencies are defining for a character.

Edit: and agreed with the Skaven above me: I don't even remember off-hand what the last fight in our Skype game was. Must be two or three sessions back, actually.

_Zoot_
2011-02-16, 06:04 AM
Wow, thanks for that link about the Three clues Rule, that is an awesome site! :smallbiggrin: (If only it would work :smallmad: )

Eldan
2011-02-16, 06:08 AM
Wow, thanks for that link about the Three clues Rule, that is an awesome site! :smallbiggrin: (If only it would work :smallmad: )

I'll have to remember that. I've had one or the other adventure where I had to make up more clues on the spot to get my players along, and they got a bit silly sometimes.

kamikasei
2011-02-16, 06:11 AM
I find myself imagining a parallel reality where a DM complains that he had his players ambushed while their wagons were stuck in the mud and the damned fools wasted all their combat actions trying to get the wagons moving instead of actually fighting off the creatures trying to kill them.

_Zoot_
2011-02-16, 06:20 AM
I'll have to remember that. I've had one or the other adventure where I had to make up more clues on the spot to get my players along, and they got a bit silly sometimes.

I must say, I've done that to, it is easy to get carried away with making up clues to allow the adventure to continue, to the extent that some of the clues don't really make sense if looked at objectively.

Also, just to clarify, I was referring to the fact that the site is not working for me, the rule seems like it would in deed work.

Coidzor
2011-02-16, 06:37 AM
I find myself imagining a parallel reality where a DM complains that he had his players ambushed while their wagons were stuck in the mud and the damned fools wasted all their combat actions trying to get the wagons moving instead of actually fighting off the creatures trying to kill them.

...I'm almost sure I've heard of something like that before...

Eldan
2011-02-16, 06:47 AM
I must say, I've done that to, it is easy to get carried away with making up clues to allow the adventure to continue, to the extent that some of the clues don't really make sense if looked at objectively.

Also, just to clarify, I was referring to the fact that the site is not working for me, the rule seems like it would in deed work.

Well, it doesn't really do more than say that you should plant several clues for each plot point in a mystery adventure, since a single clue can easily be missed or misinterpreted by the players, therefore stopping the adventure before it really starts. He also backs it up with examples from Sherlock Holmes, where the great detective solves a mystery by combining several clues.

Yora
2011-02-16, 07:25 AM
"When everything you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail."
And D&D, in all it's editions, is a game all about hammers.

Almost all published adventures are straight dungeon crawls that require you to enter each room, which will be filled with creatures that attack the PCs on sight. So what else are you going to do when you come upon a threat that you can swing your sword against? How is one supposed to get the idea that a different solution is expected from you?
The XP system doesn't help either, since it awards XP for creatures defeated in combat.

I had the great fortune of starting my current campaign with one heavy roleplayer and two total noobs, who just followed in the formers footsteps. Now they always try to avoid any combat.
But something that would help older players to change their mindsets would be to start with encounters that simply don't offer the option of swinging at it with your sword. Which means puzzles. First start with simple problems like "the bridge is broken". So the players have to come up with a plan to cross the river, and since they don't have any creature to kill, they have to find different solutions. Do that often enough and then you can start adding creatures to such problems and the players will hopefully get the idea that this is still a puzzle encounter that is not solved by shoting someone dead with an arrow.

Kurald Galain
2011-02-16, 07:34 AM
I have not played 4E, so I can not entirely comment on how good it's roleplaying is outside of combat, and how many utility powers it has,
It has a serious lack of out-of-combat powers, and the developers have gone out of their way to add rules to make standard out-of-combat tricks ineffective, such as illusion, divination, and most other things on 3E's list of low-level wizard spells. That includes rituals, too; a common complaint about 4E is how badly written they are.

So if you look at a character sheet, pretty much everything on there is about combat and has no use outside of combat, except for the standard skill list. While this by no means mandates roleplaying in a certain way, it obviously influences it. After all, characters tend to try the things they're good at.


a DM complains that he had his players ambushed while their wagons were stuck in the mud and the damned fools wasted all their combat actions trying to get the wagons moving instead of actually fighting off the creatures trying to kill them.
Well, that's also a point. In many (WOTC-written) scenarios I've been in where you're fighting in a trap or other adverse condition, the best approach clearly is to ignore this trap or condition until the monsters are dead. For example, if it requires three succesful skill checks to remove a trap, and each is a standard action, then trying that is a waste of actions and a good way to get your character killed.


"When everything you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail."
And D&D, in all it's editions, is a game all about hammers.
This, too.

JaronK
2011-02-16, 07:39 AM
If, for some reason, you don't want spoilers for last week's Encounters session, do not read this.

The party lost all four horses and three of four settlers to the stirges. At the start of the encounter and the end of the first two rounds, I told them the wagons were bogged down and they couldn't get themselves free. No one ever tried to help move the wagons.

At the end of the fight, someone said, "You should have told us what to do."

I've seen this in earlier editions, too. Why? What makes some players think the only assistance they can offer, no matter the situation, is to kill things and take their stuff?

In this case, I agree with your players. Combat in D&D usually lasts maybe 5 rounds... about 30 seconds. Those wagons aren't getting free in 5 rounds unless you specifically have a spell to do it. Otherwise, finishing the combat first is the right thing to do. Then you can take the 10 minutes or so to free these wagons.

JaronK

Eldan
2011-02-16, 07:42 AM
[QUOTE=Yora;10385977]"When everything you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail."
And D&D, in all it's editions, is a game all about hammers./QUOTE]

Some players, however, do very creative things with hammers :smalltongue:
You can juggle them, as an example.

tcrudisi
2011-02-16, 07:46 AM
Well, that's also a point. In many (WOTC-written) scenarios I've been in where you're fighting in a trap or other adverse condition, the best approach clearly is to ignore this trap or condition until the monsters are dead.

And then there's the rare encounter where if you don't take care of that trap first, you absolutely, positively, 100% definitely will die. There aren't many (as you are correct in that most are traps secondary), but by god, there are just enough in LFR to make me wonder about it every time I'm in a combat with a trap involved.

Kurald Galain
2011-02-16, 08:13 AM
And then there's the rare encounter where if you don't take care of that trap first, you absolutely, positively, 100% definitely will die. There aren't many (as you are correct in that most are traps secondary), but by god, there are just enough in LFR to make me wonder about it every time I'm in a combat with a trap involved.

That would be problematic. There are some scenarios where tackling the trap first will cause you to die. There are other scenarios where not tackling the trap first will cause you to die. And I'm not sure how you can tell the difference, except with the kind of DM that starts with explaining in detail that "you can take action <X> and roll skill <Y> to disable trap <Z>".

manyslayer
2011-02-16, 08:33 AM
Is this your regular group? A lot of these kind of things come down to their previous experiences in roleplaying groups.

As someone else said, another DM might complain that their PCs spent the whole time trying to free teh wagons rather than fighting the bad guys.

My group often mixes RP and combat (our last session my crusader talked 3 jsuticars out of attacking us by convincing them the man whom they were working for was lying to them and their actions were actually adding to the chaos of the situation - this let us go and deal with the big bad ourselves, who got away, darn it:smallfurious:).

Another group I have played with occasionally always ends up geting in trouble when my friend runs games for them. This is because he has their actions have consequences. They can't just kill the bartender for talking down to them and not expect to get thrown in jail for it. With their regular DM, this is standard operating procedure.

hewhosaysfish
2011-02-16, 08:47 AM
I find myself imagining a parallel reality where a DM complains that he had his players ambushed while their wagons were stuck in the mud and the damned fools wasted all their combat actions trying to get the wagons moving instead of actually fighting off the creatures trying to kill them.

Thanks, kamikasei. I was reading this thread and starting to feel like "the only sane man".

@ everyone else
Have you ever tryed changing a spare tyre while being attacked by wolves? I haven't but it doesn't sound like my idea of fun.

The players were attacked by enemies that:
1) are literally thirsty for their blood.
2) are literally thirsty for the blood of the non-combatants you they were travelling with.
3) cannot be reasoned with because it has animal intelligence and speaks no languages.
4) can fly faster than a human being can move (even if the human is on stable footing)


The thread title says "There ARE Alternatives to Fighting" but really, what were you expecting the PCs to do?
Sheathe their weapons, turn their backs on the so-called enemy, temporarily fasten horses from one wagon to another to double the pulling power, maybe search around for some stout branches to chock the wheels with WHILE IGNORING THE BLOOD-SUCKING CREATURE THE SIZE OF A CAT CLAMPED TO YOUR ASS?

[sarcasm and bile]
Gee, I can't imagine what was going through those players' heads.

The OP really should have done like ***** said, describing how the settlers were screaming for help and desperately fleeing for their lives.
That would have totally focused their minds on the finer points of managing a team of horses instead of getting hung up on this clearly-video-game-inspired "defending ourselves from deadly predators" nonsense.
[/sarcam and bile]:smallyuk:

Kurald Galain
2011-02-16, 09:06 AM
The thread title says "There ARE Alternatives to Fighting" but really, what were you expecting the PCs to do?
Well...

Actually this happens a lot in 4E. It's quite possible that the DM had planned that as a minor action, a PC could make an easy skill check (on athletics, nature, or whatever else they come up with), and that two or three such checks get the wagon going again.

And again the players have no way of realizing that this will work, unless the DM explains it all beforehand. It is not at all unreasonable for the players to assume that you really can't fix a wagon during combat.

The conflict, then, is that the DM is reasoning from mechanics when designing the encounter, and the players are reasoning from verisimilitude.

Comet
2011-02-16, 09:10 AM
As said, why should they try to move the wagons in the middle of a battle? Surely there's time to dispatch the beasts before getting onto the lifting and grunting and such?

I'm not seeing anything wrong here. Could the settlers have escaped if the players had freed their wagons? It all seems pretty unlikely, to me.

Just a miscommunication. The players had no reason to suspect that using their combat turns to move wagons was the optimal choice. Either spell these things out to them very clearly or just live with their decisions.

Kurald Galain
2011-02-16, 09:31 AM
As said, why should they try to move the wagons in the middle of a battle? Surely there's time to dispatch the beasts before getting onto the lifting and grunting and such?

I'm not seeing anything wrong here :smallconfused:
What's wrong is different expectations between the DM and the players. It all starts when the DM believes that something is an obvious fact, when in practice it either it isn't obvious (i.e. the players haven't heard of it) or it isn't fact (i.e. it's wrong).

For example, the DM knows how to know your direction at night by finding the Polar Star. The players either don't know this (many people don't) or assume that just because it works on Earth doesn't mean it works on Faerun. Or perhaps the DM assumes that you can digg your way out of prison with a spoon and a few athletics checks, but the players believe this is a ridiculous plan that would take years.

Clue checks probably don't work if they violate verisimilitude.

DeltaEmil
2011-02-16, 01:02 PM
Fighting the deadly stirges looked a lot more like the right decision than whatever the gm envisioned.

Also, there shouldn't only be one way to success. Not doing combat in an encounter situation should be a reward in itself, not mandatory and enforced.

Comet
2011-02-16, 01:08 PM
What's wrong is different expectations between the DM and the players. It all starts when the DM believes that something is an obvious fact, when in practice it either it isn't obvious (i.e. the players haven't heard of it) or it isn't fact (i.e. it's wrong).


Yeah, I edited a bit for clarity. I was trying to get across the notion that the players did nothing wrong.

I agree on all your points. The players don't need to read the GM's mind, they just take what they hear and act on it as best as they can. If they do something that doesn't seem to make sense, it's the GM's 'fault' for giving them a flawed picture of the situation.

Kerrin
2011-02-16, 01:31 PM
From the description of the encounter, the decision many of my characters would have made would have been to get between the attackers and the civilians and so as to protect the civilians and to kill or drive off the attackers.

If it was going to look like a total overrun by the attackers from the start, I would have been tempted to have my party jump on the wagons and race out of danger - except in the described encounter the wagons were seriously mired in the mud, so that probably wasn't an option. With the wagons in this situation and if a complete overrun was immiment I'd be tempted to tell the civilians to stick together and flee THAT WAY --> and have the party form a rear guard to drive off the attackers as the retreat was in progress.

Any way it's sliced it sounds like there was going to be at least *some* combat in the described encounter.

Percival
2011-02-16, 01:38 PM
You're speaking to a DM who ran a game last week with one encounter in four hours, and that encounter lasted 30mins. The rest was roleplaying.

With our group, it generally goes like that... in cities. When we're in the countryside, we'll have our random encounters as well as the few big ones that really matter.

But when we're in a city, particularly if one or more of us has a goal in the city, we'll often have an 8 hour session with no combat at all.

Weimann
2011-02-16, 01:46 PM
This discussion reminds me of one I had with my brother when he was in the military. I asked how the kind of soldier he was operated in battle, and he told me the general idea: they were supposed to land by chopper, run to the battle field, solve the battle task, take care of any wounded and march back to base.

"Take care of any wounded only afterwards?" I asked. "What about if there are wounded from a previous troop before you get there?"

"Then you still solve the battle task first," he replied. "If you do, it's a risk that the wounded die in the mean time. If you don't, it's a certainty that you both will die right away. Always fight first. Always."

So apparently, this group employed sound military tactics by real world standards. Of course, in D&D you will have a butt load of hit points to work through before you are dead, so it's possible that they could have saved the civilians first. It's also possible that a few of them could have handled the enemies while others helped the civilians. But in a real situation like this, they proceeded by the book; crassly, it's better that some die than that all die.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'd be all for trying to help the civilians before engaging the enemy. After all, D&D isn't real life; people have much more room to be Big Damn Heroes there. Just saying that it's hard to criticize their judgement in the matter.

Choco
2011-02-16, 01:53 PM
Huh, I wasn't aware that there was more to P&P RP than killing things and taking their stuff...

But seriously, most of the time the PC's are specifically hired to kill things, and assume that any NPC's in the area will take care of non-combat tasks. An idea that might have made your current situation better would be if some NPC guards were doing the fighting and you were sure to point out that they seem to be holding their own for now, and the wagons are in more dire need of help. Or if the NPC leader were to point that out, and BEG them to help with the wagons, because no one else is strong enough.

NMBLNG
2011-02-16, 02:13 PM
+1 for the players attacking the stirges first.

Had the players stopped to help the NPCs, how would that have stopped the stirges? It's not like the stirges can't just chase after them.

KillianHawkeye
2011-02-16, 02:17 PM
It's quite possible that the DM had planned that as a minor action, a PC could make an easy skill check (on athletics, nature, or whatever else they come up with), and that two or three such checks get the wagon going again.

And if it really was that easy, why couldn't the NPCs have done it themselves?



Personally, I don't see how freeing the wagons would even be helpful in this situation. Do you expect me to believe that a horse-drawn wagon would be capable of outrunning a swarm of giant flying mosquitos? To me, the only mistake the PCs made was not defending the soft targets.

Starbuck_II
2011-02-16, 02:37 PM
Wait, how many stirges are we talking here?
You have usually 10 con, 8 if elf, so unless multiple stirges are attacking each noncombatant, they should have last a couple rounds minimum.

I think issue might have been the number of stirges was over CR'd encounter, but it didn't appear so like DMG warns.

KillianHawkeye
2011-02-16, 02:41 PM
Wait, how many stirges are we talking here?
You have usually 10 con, 8 if elf, so unless multiple stirges are attacking each noncombatant, they should have last a couple rounds minimum.

I think issue might have been the number of stirges was over CR'd encounter, but it didn't appear so like DMG warns.

Ability score damage doesn't exist in 4e. Neither do racial ability score penalties.

Still, that's a good question. How many stirges are we talking here? How many PCs? How many NPCs?

Kurald Galain
2011-02-16, 02:46 PM
And if it really was that easy, why couldn't the NPCs have done it themselves?
Again, that depends on if you're working on the same assumptions as the DM is. Perhaps the DM has decided that the NPCs can't make skill checks.


Wait, how many stirges are we talking here?
You have usually 10 con, 8 if elf, so unless multiple stirges are attacking each noncombatant, they should have last a couple rounds minimum.
And this, too. Perhaps the DM has decided that the NPCs die in one hit.

MST3K mantra, people.

Volthawk
2011-02-16, 02:57 PM
We haven't had a fight in 3 weeks in my IRL game i'm playing in.

Sometimes, I wonder if some folk miss the RP before the G.

Granted,, people play for different reasons, lots of people like to roll dice and hit things.

Agreed. I'm in the game Eldan mentioned, and our process is usually this:

1) Talk to it
2) Work out whether to be nice, lie our butts off, or try to scare it (Diplomacy/Bluff/Intimidate. We use Bluff quite often, since it fits and one of our guys is pretty damn good at lying.)
3) See how that works.

If we can't reach a diplomatic solution, we go:

Question: Can we take it down (usually use Sense Motive to assess the enemy) and if so, should we take it down?

If both are yes, then we go fighting.
If we can't take it, we leave. Either walking or running, depending on how things went earlier.


And we have only 3 or so kills and 2 KOs to our names. So yeah, not everyone works on a kill first, ask questions later basis.

The_Jackal
2011-02-16, 02:57 PM
Your players fight because they WANT to fight. If you want them to run, you need to drop hints like anvils. Even then, you'll find some players would rather die than run. Oblige them.

KillianHawkeye
2011-02-16, 03:01 PM
Again, that depends on if you're working on the same assumptions as the DM is. Perhaps the DM has decided that the NPCs can't make skill checks.

That's kinda my point, though. The situation relied too heavily on assumptions. And there's clearly several different ways to react to such an encounter that you (in this case, the adventure writers I suppose) shouldn't be assuming that the players will react in a certain way.



Personally, I'm okay with allowing my PCs to fail. Failure usually just makes the story more interesting and allows the characters to grow. So if all the NPCs are killed and the horses run away, that just makes things more challenging for the PCs.

Tyndmyr
2011-02-16, 03:05 PM
You're speaking to a DM who ran a game last week with one encounter in four hours, and that encounter lasted 30mins. The rest was roleplaying.

The horror, the horror!

In seriousness, I've had sessions in which combat has never come up. One of those sessions had four hours of OOC time spent at a ball. Did not expect the players to go nearly that long, but yeah.

There is usually some combat, though, and sometimes it's fun to run a game with nothing but hacking and slashing.

This ain't really an alternative, though. Like others have said, there's little reason to believe shoving on a cart is an effective alternative to combat. Unless the number of stirges is > number I think we can kill, fighting is my first choice. In case of running, I would almost certainly be taking the horses and leaving the wagons, for obvious reasons.

Choco
2011-02-16, 03:13 PM
Your players fight because they WANT to fight. If you want them to run, you need to drop hints like anvils. Even then, you'll find some players would rather die than run. Oblige them.

+1

If you let them live once, they will expect it every time :smallamused:. Besides, it aint cool to rob PC's of their "heroic" deaths, no matter how stupid they are...

Shatteredtower
2011-02-18, 08:12 AM
*****, good advice. Thanks. Weimann, sometimes the battle task is to get someone else off the field. When you are charged with escort duty, engaging an enemy is not your priority.

Look, a lot of bad luck was a factor here. Being outnumbered 9 to 6 normally wouldn't make much of a difference against creatures this weak. Maybe they'd have lost one of the four horses anyway, and possibly a settler or two of the four that didn't run.

The point isn't that they fought. The point is that not one of them even looked for an alternative, even after each horse died over a few rounds of draining. Temporary hit points were a nice try, but shown to be not enough.

The party druid has asserted a talent for animal handling, but never sought to use it here, with horses that were screaming. In the middle of winter here, no one playing a heavily muscled individual gave a thought to what you can do for a stuck car?

Maybe a horse can't outrun mosquitoes, but they can outrun stirges, which I'd shown moving at human rates.

Weimann
2011-02-18, 08:33 AM
Weimann, sometimes the battle task is to get someone else off the field. When you are charged with escort duty, engaging an enemy is not your priority.Ah, maybe I expressed myself unclearly. When he said "battle task" (which is a free translation, I admit), he meant it to mean any confrontation that might be happening, not the overall mission. So a "battle task" is any situation when you are under direct attack, and is solved by adressing the source of fire.

Of course, in my earlier example, if you're not under fire you can tend to the wounded without all of the enemies having been eradicated. However, as I understood the situation, they were currently under direct attack, and in such cases you fight the enemy.

Again, this is RL logic. D&D people might be able to take sledgehammers to the face, and if so, then hell yeah, they should have helped the civilians. No question there.

Erom
2011-02-18, 08:56 AM
I've actually had the opposite problem come up - one of my players kept trying to talk her way out of a situation even after her teamates had resorted to blow, despite the fact that I said, point blank, that these were "trained professions with an excellent reason to want you, specifically, dead. I'll let you try diplomacy but it will be a very difficult roll."

She tried anyway. Over and over, refusing to defend herself. So obviously she got gutted, and without her contribution the rest of the party had a much harder time completing the encounter.

So hey, it DOES happen.

But yeah, if you told them "you can't move the wagons" and then expected them to move the wagons? That does seem like too much obfuscation to me.

hewhosaysfish
2011-02-18, 09:27 AM
In the middle of winter here, no one playing a heavily muscled individual gave a thought to what you can do for a stuck car?

But you'd already established that the carts were so heavily bogged down that four grown men and a team of horses couldn't free it.

The PCs would have to put away their weapons, plant their feet, brace themselves against the cart and shove as hard as they can while the horses pull.
This would leave them totally defenceless against the stirges, for 3 rounds minimum. For each cart.

These striges that are apparently so dangerous that fleeing immediately is the only sensible option.

As far as I understand the situation, your players had to realistic options:
A) Fight the stirges and try to kill them before they can inflict too much damage on the settlers.
B) Abandon the carts and immediately flee (away from flying creatures, over apparently boggy terrain).

They chose A. If you were suggesting that they should have chosen B instead then I would still be inclined to argue against you.
But you're not suggesting option B, you're suggesting option C.

C) Labouring to move a large and heavy object while being mercilessly savaged by wild animals.

That's not a viable combat option! That's a punishment the Greek gods inflicted on people they wanted to make an example of!

Tyndmyr
2011-02-18, 10:21 AM
With four horses and the term "wagons", I'm going to assume that there were a total of two wagons. If there were four wagons, that only makes it worse.

It would take a minimum of one round to free a wagon, assuming it can be done, and that the strength checks all come out great. The mud would obviously be difficult terrain, so movement between the wagons would be troublesome. Any wagon after the first is going to require more rounds to shove out as a result.

In addition, you can assume that since the civvies trying to move the wagon can't do it, it will be at least fairly difficult for the PCs to move them without the civilians. In short, the assumption would be that for a reasonable chance of success, everyone would have to work together on a wagon.

Therefore, you would need to shove out a wagon, plod to the next wagon, shove it however far it needs to go, then get everyone on to the wagons and start moving...yeah, even with two wagons, Im seeing a minimum of five rounds if everything works perfectly. There is no reason to take that path instead of combat. Five rounds of being hit by stirges is likely to leave a lot of dead bodies anyway, and leave you dead if anything goes wrong. On the other hand, with combat, at least you start reducing the # of attackers quickly. Even if the combat goes to about seven rounds(a pretty lengthy fight), you're essentially guaranteed to lose less people.

Techsmart
2011-02-18, 11:10 AM
Its a common issue, stemming from multiple sources.
One being simplicity - many DMs find it easier to just throw a random encounter at the party rather than make a battle with multiple options and outs, dialogue, and other things. I have occasionally done this for quickies. Players get used to that mindset and assume all encounters are like this.
Another problem is video games - if its moving, its either a shopkeeper/questgiver, or it is gonna die, and the first part can lead into the second part. DND is still a game, so the mindset follows.
Many players also really enjoy the combat section. They enjoy the act of rolling dice and seeing how many X they kill in one round, or how much damage they deal to one. They don't like the roleplay part as much, since it requires them to constantly think about the situation (like what you are making them do), and make decisions accordingly.
In my experience, I love the roleplay as much as the combat, but I also build characters with social skills. Reguardless of my class (fighter being included in this statement), I tend to be the face of the party, and build accordingly. As an additional consequence, I tend to be the arcane caster/rogue, giving me plenty of time to work it all out.

Kylarra
2011-02-18, 11:38 AM
While there are definitely times you should seek alternatives, I'm not seeing this situation as one of those times.

BarroomBard
2011-02-18, 01:40 PM
An important consideration in this situation, however, is that the Encounters program is built of one self-contained encounter every week. It lacks the more story-based continuity of a regular gaming session, so it creates a certain set of assumptions and a certain feel of how to go about things.

Shatteredtower
2011-02-19, 10:55 AM
With four horses and the term "wagons", I'm going to assume that there were a total of two wagons. If there were four wagons, that only makes it worse.

Worse than losing all four carts and their drivers because you tried the exact same thing every single round, even after horses started dying.

Didn't George Santayana define insanity as something like that?

It doesn't matter if the DC is 12 or 19 if you never try. Having one player invest a standard action to determine the difficulty wasn't going to kill the party, especially not with a card in play that would treat a skill check as a roll of 10, and not while facing off against stirges that focused on the biggest targets (the horses) first. Never mind that the presence of a settler would give them a +2 bonus on the check, since they were unaware of that as well.


In addition, you can assume that since the civvies trying to move the wagon can't do it, it will be at least fairly difficult for the PCs to move them without the civilians.

No, you can't. PCs know they're in an entirely separate category from settlers, and the players were aware of the fact that skill checks can be made (and aided) in combat. They couldn't have lost anything more from trying than they did from sticking to the exact same plan round after round.

One successful check was all they needed to get one wagon off the map. They couldn't have known that without the attempt, sure, but it's false to claim the evidence showed it wasn't worth trying.


Even if the combat goes to about seven rounds(a pretty lengthy fight), you're essentially guaranteed to lose less people.

It's interesting, then, that the situation turned out the opposite of what you claim. The party beat the stirges with only a few scratches on themselves, but they lost 87% of the force they were supposed to protect.

Over it's last season, Encounters has provided several opportunities to make use of skills, terrain, and interaction in the encounter. These tend to get ignored in favour of hammering-nails resolution, often by people who've told me the system provides no such opportunities to them. I have mentioned actions they could have tried after the game on those occasions, only to receive a shrug and an attitude of, "Why bother with that when fighting always works eventually?"

Well, that question finally got addressed two sessions past. Last week was also close, but they were more annoyed that the wizard they were guarding kept "kill stealing" on them. (Five times, including one minion.)

balistafreak
2011-02-19, 04:28 PM
I'm baffled as to why this module seems to assume that moving a wagon off the map would save it. Stirges = huge flying mosquitoes or something, right? They're faster than wagons, surely. Letting them escape just means that they leave the watchful eye of the PCs and now have a 100% casualty rate as the stirges pick off stragglers, not the 80% or so they might have with the players.

Convoys are made for a reason. Trying to break away when the main convoy is under attack is never, ever a good idea. (In real life, at any rate.)


Worse than losing all four carts and their drivers because you tried the exact same thing every single round, even after horses started dying.

Didn't George Santayana define insanity as something like that?

No, because really they only tried one strategy once. It's enactment took many rounds, but they chose their own strategy (fight off the stirges) and stuck to it exclusively in an attempt to accomplish it as quickly as possible. More inefficient would have been to try helping the wagons at all after you said "you can't get the wagons free", because that does not help them with their plan.

Now, if they ran the entire encounter multiple times over, and always tried to defend the carts, failing again and again, that would be insanity.

While you may think:


It doesn't matter if the DC is 12 or 19 if you never try. Having one player invest a standard action to determine the difficulty wasn't going to kill the party *snip*

To them, one standard action spent freeing a cart is one standard action not enacting their plan of "kill all stirges". This is bad. They might not have picked "the right plan", but they did their best on it. I would have been far more disappointed if they tried to split their resources between combat and noncombat, unless some of them were specifically not suited to the first task (and then why are they PCs again?).


They couldn't have lost anything more from trying than they did from sticking to the exact same plan round after round.

Other than their precious standard actions that go towards their original decision. That's a huge loss to the plan; unacceptable.


One successful check was all they needed to get one wagon off the map. They couldn't have known that without the attempt, sure, but it's false to claim the evidence showed it wasn't worth trying.

See above. No, your players made the right decision.


It's interesting, then, that the situation turned out the opposite of what you claim. The party beat the stirges with only a few scratches on themselves, but they lost 87% of the force they were supposed to protect.

This is more a problem with the concept of an escort mission. In a huge break from reality, in gaming it is far more common for the escortee to be lost long before the escorter, because the latter can actually take attacks and survive. Without a good mechanical way of "blocking" attacks on the escortee, the only good way to protect it is to end the threat as quickly as possible.

Shatteredtower
2011-02-19, 06:55 PM
I'm baffled as to why this module seems to assume that moving a wagon off the map would save it. Stirges = huge flying mosquitoes or something, right? They're faster than wagons, surely.

Stirges fly at the same rate a human walks. I made that clear when I moved them around the map.


Letting them escape just means that they leave the watchful eye of the PCs and now have a 100% casualty rate as the stirges pick off stragglers, not the 80% or so they might have with the players.

Your statistics do not match with what happened. They aren't even close.


Convoys are made for a reason. Trying to break away when the main convoy is under attack is never, ever a good idea. (In real life, at any rate.)

In real life, predators don't go chasing after a moving target when there's still one close at hand.


No, because really they only tried one strategy once.

So, if you fight a fire resistant creature with fire, and it doesn't work, you may as well do it again, because there's no way you could try something different, and it wouldn't make sense.

Same argument, no less crazy.


It's enactment took many rounds, but they chose their own strategy (fight off the stirges) and stuck to it exclusively in an attempt to accomplish it as quickly as possible.

And, as usually happens in the real world, they failed for failing to adapt to the needs of the situation. Zim the Irkin would be proud.


More inefficient would have been to try helping the wagons at all after you said "you can't get the wagons free", because that does not help them with their plan.

I have already said that the players didn't try to move the carts. Arguing that I said they couldn't get them free is, to put it generously, inconsistent with the facts.


I would have been far more disappointed if they tried to split their resources between combat and noncombat...

That's just crazy talk. You may as well be arguing that they should all have used the exact same weapon too, regardless of circumstances.


Other than their precious standard actions that go towards their original decision. That's a huge loss to the plan; unacceptable.

As unacceptable as what happened? No, that's just more crazy talk.


This is more a problem with the concept of an escort mission. In a huge break from reality, in gaming it is far more common for the escortee to be lost long before the escorter, because the latter can actually take attacks and survive. Without a good mechanical way of "blocking" attacks on the escortee, the only good way to protect it is to end the threat as quickly as possible.

"Only" way? Reality and the game are both more flexible than you credit them.

kamikasei
2011-02-19, 06:59 PM
I'm curious as to what the stirges were actually doing. Were they just ignoring the party in favour of attacking the horses and NPCs? How come that didn't make them easy pickings for the party?

DeltaEmil
2011-02-19, 07:49 PM
Almost all forum members think that according to Shatteredtower's description of the scene, fighting the stirges would have made more sense than somehow trying to pull out a bunch of wagons out of the mud while being assailed by giant mosquitos, which a bunch of NPCs are incapable to do it by themselves, appearently.

His players thought the same way.

So yeah, the gm failed in this case to make it clear that the alternative of just making one skill check is actually a better way to succeed in this encounter than good ol' scrapping and fighting.

And most people would still think that this wouldn't make sense, and then dispute this point with him.

balistafreak
2011-02-19, 08:11 PM
Stirges fly at the same rate a human walks. I made that clear when I moved them around the map.

Wagons go slower than humans, last time I checked. If I recall the Oregon Trail correctly (ehehehe) a heavily loaded wagon moved at approximately 2-4 mph.

Now, these are horse drawn carts, so they'd move faster, but they're also in mire (right?), so they'd move more slowly. In any case, to believe that the wagons would still be vulnerable to attack even after beginning to roll would not be overly unintelligent.


Your statistics do not match with what happened. They aren't even close.

:smallconfused: You said that 87% of the force they were trying to protect died?

And in their heads, clearly they thought the other strategy of freeing the wagons (for the reasons above) would result in 100% casualties. So they did damage control, and their best. Laudable.


In real life, predators don't go chasing after a moving target when there's still one close at hand.

In real life, predators go for the sick, the elderly, and stragglers. Again, see the top point. Your players probably believed the wagons to move as fast as/slower than the stirges. The wagons leaving the convoy would therefore serve no purpose, except to make them a straggler and even more vulnerable. Not an option. They stand and fight.


So, if you fight a fire resistant creature with fire, and it doesn't work, you may as well do it again, because there's no way you could try something different, and it wouldn't make sense.

Same argument, no less crazy.


That's just crazy talk. You may as well be arguing that they should all have used the exact same weapon too, regardless of circumstances.

Not the same argument. An attack (whether fire versus fire resistance, or using a specific kind of weapon) has an instantaneous outcome, instantly recognizable as success/failure. The strategy is a gradual outcome, only recognizable as success/failure by the time it's too late.

I would think less of your players for "switching horses midrace", as the statement stands. Switching attack types/weapons? Sure. Deciding to turn their backs on the enemy after already deciding to engage? Not so much.


And, as usually happens in the real world, they failed for failing to adapt to the needs of the situation. Zim the Irkin would be proud.

Needs that were not clear to them, and perhaps even (in this case, incorrectly) regarded as liabilities. There's a reason lack of intel kills in the military - but while your players might have done better, you can't blame them.


I have already said that the players didn't try to move the carts. Arguing that I said they couldn't get them free is, to put it generously, inconsistent with the facts.

Was it someone else who said "you can't get the carts free" earlier in this thread? I may have erroneously recalled that little fact. My apologies.


As unacceptable as what happened? No, that's just more crazy talk.

Unacceptable to their original plan. It's called discipline. You don't waste time exploring the beginning of another plan in the middle of enacting your original one - unless you're literally so inundated with spare bodies that you have the manpower to spare. (See: most thinktanks, the government.) The PCs are few in number, the enemy large in number. You may think that this is grounds for "hey, this is a pretty bad situation, why not try something new, like a skill check". They're probably thinking, "dang, this is a pretty bad situation, we need to stay 100% focused on defeating them as fast as possible".


"Only" way? Reality and the game are both more flexible than you credit them.

Reality does escort missions because in reality you attack whoever's attacking you, because in reality most things prioritize survival first. This bit often doesn't happen in games. The game might be flexible, but if the stirges are played as suicidally focused towards the horses and settlers even as the PCs attempt to beat them off... the only thing you can realistically expect the PCs to do is beat them off harder.

Kurald Galain
2011-02-19, 08:45 PM
To them, one standard action spent freeing a cart is one standard action not enacting their plan of "kill all stirges". This is bad.
This. Using a standard action for anything other than making an attack is pretty much always a poor strategy.

This is a stated design philosophy for 4E. For example, the reason that clerics can heal as a minor action is precisely so that they can heal while still having their standard action left for an actual attack.

This is why most reasonably rules-knowledgeable players, ime, will immediately ignore any skill checks in combat that would require a standard action.

DeltaEmil
2011-02-19, 08:53 PM
Unless that skill check would bring victory or another way of decisive advantage (or is part of an page 42-attack maneuver).
But for a specific scenario about helping heavy carts stuck in mud that are assailed by dire mosquitos, most people don't really think that using a skill check here would have really made sense.

aboyd
2011-02-19, 08:58 PM
PCs know they're in an entirely separate category from settlers, and the players were aware of the fact that skill checks can be made (and aided) in combat. They couldn't have lost anything more from trying than they did from sticking to the exact same plan round after round.
The fact that this thread exists is pretty much proof that the PCs (and a few people here) did not find it as self-evident as you did. So, maybe rather than defending something that isn't as clear-cut as hoped, it might be good to go back to the drawing board and add refinements. Good luck.

Erom
2011-02-19, 08:59 PM
I feel like the fact that ~3/4 of the people in the thread have said they too would stand and fight given the scene description is pretty indicative that logically that was the best decision given the info available to the players.

aboyd
2011-02-19, 09:59 PM
I have already said that the players didn't try to move the carts. Arguing that I said they couldn't get them free is, to put it generously, inconsistent with the facts.
Was it someone else who said "you can't get the carts free" earlier in this thread?
As part of the original post, he wrote:


At the start of the encounter and the end of the first two rounds, I told them the wagons were bogged down and they couldn't get themselves free.
This was later followed up by other people here in the forum asking why a player would think it possible to move the carts if cart drivers & horses could not budge them. I think it's a valid question, and probably one that entered the thoughts of the players, and influenced their decisions.

One of the things I enjoy as a DM is handing out secret notes on 3" x 5" cards. Something that would have been fun for me in this situation would have been to note the passive perception scores of all the PCs and after a round of combat, hand every player with a decent perception a card. On the card would either be "Your character notes that these poor commoners are probably a lost cause" or "Your character notes that the carts are almost about to budge. Given your impressive strength, you might turn the tide."

It's a hint based on the character's abilities, and since the hints are not all acting in unison, it's fun to watch as some PCs run to help while other PCs shout, "It's a lost cause! What are you doing?!?!"

Anyway, whatever. Things weren't perfect. Better luck next time.

Now I'm off to run the first of my 2 D&D sessions here at DunDraCon. Wish me luck! :)

Coidzor
2011-02-20, 01:04 AM
An important consideration in this situation, however, is that the Encounters program is built of one self-contained encounter every week. It lacks the more story-based continuity of a regular gaming session, so it creates a certain set of assumptions and a certain feel of how to go about things.

...So the certain assumptions we need to take are to act in exactly the opposite way that makes sense for how a character should act normally? That seems like bad writing, or intentionally setting up situations to screw with players, depending upon whether they know this or not.

Edit: ...Also, why were the stirges not swarming the party, which was not running away, and instead chasing after fleeing peasants? Because that behavior combined with your reaction to the critique of your handling of the situation and your presentation of the situation to us in the first place just makes it sound like you were playing the stirges against their natural behavior to punish the players for not following adventure game designer logic.

Chen
2011-02-21, 09:16 AM
Edit: ...Also, why were the stirges not swarming the party, which was not running away, and instead chasing after fleeing peasants? Because that behavior combined with your reaction to the critique of your handling of the situation and your presentation of the situation to us in the first place just makes it sound like you were playing the stirges against their natural behavior to punish the players for not following adventure game designer logic.

Yeah this. Was there an abnormal number of stirges or something? I mean how do you lose all the horses and a ton of civilians when there are at least 4 (maybe it was 6 I don't recall) PCs actively killing the creatures. Were the PCs not actually attacking the ones that were attacking the horses and such? I don't remember stirge mechanics exactly, but I'd think it would take a good while to actually drain a horse's con unless there were a lot of stirges attacking each one.

Tyndmyr
2011-02-21, 09:48 AM
Worse than losing all four carts and their drivers because you tried the exact same thing every single round, even after horses started dying.

Didn't George Santayana define insanity as something like that?

Stirge Fly speed: 40. At least in 3.5. I don't know what version you're playing, but Stirges are not normally considered slow. Furthermore, they fly. They take the most direct route. Outrunning them is not practical.

The horses were in difficult terrain and encumbered. Outrunning is not possible.


It doesn't matter if the DC is 12 or 19 if you never try. Having one player invest a standard action to determine the difficulty wasn't going to kill the party, especially not with a card in play that would treat a skill check as a roll of 10, and not while facing off against stirges that focused on the biggest targets (the horses) first. Never mind that the presence of a settler would give them a +2 bonus on the check, since they were unaware of that as well.

Investing a round(since a move action is fairly useless against the stirges) in an attempt to determine the DC of an unhelpful action is a waste. Always.

Also, once the horses are grappled by the stirges, how would pushing the wagons free have helped at all? Wagon with no horse = fail.

The fact that a check is easy does not make it useful.


No, you can't. PCs know they're in an entirely separate category from settlers, and the players were aware of the fact that skill checks can be made (and aided) in combat. They couldn't have lost anything more from trying than they did from sticking to the exact same plan round after round.

Incorrect. They survived. Some(albeit not many) of those they were protecting survived. Therefore, they could have lost worse.


One successful check was all they needed to get one wagon off the map. They couldn't have known that without the attempt, sure, but it's false to claim the evidence showed it wasn't worth trying.

That's a ridiculous goal, and one that without knowing, is not at all evident from the actual rules of the game. The end of the map is not obviously a magic safe zone, and the movement of grappled, encumbered horses in difficult ground is not expected to be high.


It's interesting, then, that the situation turned out the opposite of what you claim. The party beat the stirges with only a few scratches on themselves, but they lost 87% of the force they were supposed to protect.

They don't control the targetting. If played by the rules, helping the wagons out would have guaranteed a fatality rate at least that high. A lose/lose situation doesn't prove your point.


Over it's last season, Encounters has provided several opportunities to make use of skills, terrain, and interaction in the encounter. These tend to get ignored in favour of hammering-nails resolution, often by people who've told me the system provides no such opportunities to them. I have mentioned actions they could have tried after the game on those occasions, only to receive a shrug and an attitude of, "Why bother with that when fighting always works eventually?"

D&D is a system that encourages this philosophy, frankly, because fighting is often the best answer. When it's not the best answer, it's almost always a good answer. Tactically, if a problem looks like it can be solved with violence, it's usually best to do so.

The easiest way to avoid this is to use a less combat-driven system. An alternative method would be to provide fairly clear situations in which combat is not terribly attractive. Social situations are the most obvious of them, but a great many possibilities exist. Another alternative is to provide direct bonuses for creative thinking, utilizing a drama die or action die like system.

The Big Dice
2011-02-21, 10:02 AM
D&D is a system that encourages this philosophy, frankly, because fighting is often the best answer. When it's not the best answer, it's almost always a good answer. Tactically, if a problem looks like it can be solved with violence, it's usually best to do so.

The easiest way to avoid this is to use a less combat-driven system. An alternative method would be to provide fairly clear situations in which combat is not terribly attractive. Social situations are the most obvious of them, but a great many possibilities exist. Another alternative is to provide direct bonuses for creative thinking, utilizing a drama die or action die like system.
The problem isn't the game system per se. D&D does have mechanisms for influencing people by use of skills, as well as various types of physical action and so on.

The problem is the reward system inherent to the game. Which frankly, was a step back in terms of RPG design.

D&D exclusively gives experience for overcoming rated challenges. Yes, there are breif discussions of other ways to handle things, but the default assumption is, a challenge has a difficulty rating and that rating gives a set amount of experience to a character of a particular level.

The two most obvious things in the game that have these challenge ratings are things that you can kill and traps. This leads to a cycle where people attempt to kill things and overcome traps, as this is how their characters grow and advance.

Personally, I have come to prefer the True20 methid of determining experience. Which is easy, there are no experience points. Instead, the GM decides when characters level up, with a suggestion of every two adventures being the normal rate.

Then again, the more I read over True20, the more I come to realise it appears to be streets ahead of the "official" D&D games in almost every area.

Kurald Galain
2011-02-21, 10:10 AM
The problem isn't the game system per se. D&D does have mechanisms for influencing people by use of skills, as well as various types of physical action and so on.
Actually, yes it is. It is a matter of opinion whether this is actually a "problem", but it is certainly caused by the game system.

The most important reason why 4E encourages combat is because combat is safe. Wounds are easy to heal, resources are easy to recover, nasty conditions end in a few minutes, even death is highly unlikely and also easy to undo.

The second most important reason why 4E encourages combat is that its guidelines on adventure design encourage the DM to place monsters in discrete groups, each of which is a level-appropriate challenge for the PCs.

Both of these are intentional design features. To some, they're a problem; to others, they're a desirable part of the game.

Erom
2011-02-21, 10:10 AM
Personally, I have come to prefer the True20 methid of determining experience. Which is easy, there are no experience points. Instead, the GM decides when characters level up, with a suggestion of every two adventures being the normal rate..

QFT, I've done it this way in every edition of DnD I've actually played. It actually works a bit better in 4e than it did in 3.5e

It's useless advice for the OP's situation though - he's DMing encounters, so he doesn't have the normal freedom to houserule. He HAS to use the normal advancement rules.

Just one of the many reasons I stopped going to encounters.

Tyndmyr
2011-02-21, 10:17 AM
Oh, I don't mind the D&D system....if I'm in the mood for a hack and slash, dungeon crawling game, it's the first thing to come to mind. I don't actually dislike it as a system...but it does have certain pronounced tendencies, and it's certainly not the best system for accomplishing everything.

Seventh Sea tends to award xp by story arc, with indirect bonuses possible for acting with style, flair, creativity, etc. I've seen players that hack and slash everything in D&D get dropped into that system, and within a coupla sessions, literally go for an entire six hour session without attempting violence once, even when it was a realistic probability.

Sure, you *can* do any style of game in any system, but for some choices, you'll constantly be fighting the built-in assumptions of it's designers. Even in D&D, while it does have social resolution rules, they're frankly not that great(*cough* diplomancy), and not a great deal of time or attention is devoted to them in comparison to combat. When the vast majority of what you write about is combat, it does tend to induce a certain focus.

I'm currently playing in a D&D campaign that uses that style of leveling up. Works well enough, but it's about to get a bit more complex as other players and I want to use xp-burning things, and nobody is terribly satisfied with a "well, you'll just level up slower then". If you rework it to tear out those bits, then it'll work well enough, but otherwise it can be an issue.

Kylarra
2011-02-21, 12:13 PM
Stirges have a fly speed of 6.

Horse has a speed of 10, 6 while hooked up to a wagon, in apparently difficult terrain.

Therefore, while theoretically they could outpace the stirges on flat-ground given a head start, the circumstances would prevent them from doing so here.

Stirges are also fairly squishy with relatively low defenses, a decent pair of hits would take each one out. So giving up a standard action to try to move the wagons is half a stirge that could've been killed (per character).

Kurald Galain
2011-02-21, 12:17 PM
Horse has a speed of 10, 6 while hooked up to a wagon, in apparently difficult terrain.
Furthermore, a horse with both a rider and a wagon, or one with two PCs on its back, would probably exceed its carrying capacity and end up slowed.

Kylarra
2011-02-21, 12:21 PM
Yeah the wagon does assume 4 horses, if 4 horses can't pull it out, well the PCs are pretty SOL.

Horse has a strength of 19, normal load of 190 lbs, so yeah, 2 riders would overweight it.

Necrus Philius
2011-02-21, 01:37 PM
To get players off the kill them all let god sort out the rest approach, you need to spoon feed them a couple and help them think outside of the box.

Some players won't have experienced that yet as very few RPGs allow more than one or two methods to solve a situation and usually lay them out for you. So if they only played Computer RPGs, and not even older ones like the original fallout series that you could beat without killing anyone, then you're not wired to view it that way.

Take for example my first experience with a DM. This guy liked to railroad us and Mary sue us. I liked to roleplay and sandbox. Before a dungeon, I was going out to interrogate a tree and had convinced the paladin to come along. I was hoping to make the paladin fall by healing the tree I was going to torture for information (it made some sense in game as my guy was disturbed and we found the latest plot element in a forest).

The DM then just summoned a wall of force to keep me from going in the forest and forced us to sleep then to continue the journey. He even went so far as to make some mindless undead immune to command undead when I was only a level 4 wizard and even pretended to roll. He informed me afterwards.

So you shouldn't give them the options before hand, but the players should know before you start the campaign that you'll allow other options to avoid combat and that you'll still get xp for completing the encounter.

Squark
2011-02-21, 03:15 PM
If the PCs ignored any indication that the NPCs and horses where endangered, then there might be a problem. But if they did make an effort to protect the horses and drivers (By, for example, the defender keeping the Striges marked and restricting their movement with the controllers help, and the leader sent a heal or two the way of the NPCs), then they didn't do anything wrong. You told them that the wagon was stuck in the mud, and most people assume that would take a sizeable amount of effort (Effort made much harder when one is attacked by housecat sized misquitos)