In my game yesterday, I ran an encounter that got mixed reviews from my players. In retrospect, it wasn't perfect, and now I'm trying to analyze the situation to see how it could have been improved. Any thoughts/suggestions/questions/feedback is welcome.
The party was investigating an abandoned manor that was in the middle of a swamp and mostly under water. They had little boats that they used to paddle their way in. There were two PCs per boat and another in the water swimming (a druid shapeshifted into an octopus). I decided that each PC in a boat could use their move action to paddle the boat half their normal speed, so that working together their movement speed in the water was about equal to what they could do on land.
The location was guarded by lizardfolk, some of which were in a boat with their shaman, while others, archers, were guarding the walls, which protruded about 5 feet above the surface. There was also a will-o'-wisp there to cause trouble. The first thing the shaman did was summon a bunch of crockodiles.
Here is basically what things looked like at the beginning of the encounter. I put halos around the monsters so they would be easier to see with it so zoomed out (the four black haloed creatures on the wall are lizardfolk archers, the yellow = will-o-wisp, the light blue = lizardfolk warriors, and the lime = a lizardfolk shaman). Please excuse the poor artistry-- I had a cool black and white drawing that I wanted to quickly make into a map, and I suppose this got the job done:
The problem: The encounter was really fun for some of the players, and not so fun for some of the players. The players of the druid/octopus and fireball lobbing warlock really enjoyed the encounter, and the players of the axe-wielding barbarian and full plated paladin, not so much. The player of the half-orc monk enjoyed the encounter even though he was kind of limited in what he could do for a while until he could jump up on the ramparts and execute some maneuvers. But the players of the barbarian and paladin felt like they spent much of the battle just double moving to get into range to do something, as neither of them have great ranged attacks.
So, how could I have made this better? The players who didn't enjoy the encounter thought the problem was that I only let them move the boat half their movement speed (they could take the dash action to move their full speed). I thought that if they could move the boat their full speed, it would be sort of implausible for a bunch of heavily armed and armored guys who don't have much/any boating experience (if both PCs in either boat spent their moves and dashs moving the boat forward, and they could move their full speed, that would be 140 feet in six seconds, which seems a bit fast). I'm thinking that maybe the encounter would have been better if some of the lizardfolk had swum out to where they were so that they'd have something to fight (in an earlier encounter, they dealt with swimming lizardfolk who were trying to capsize the boats), but then it would have taken them even longer to make their way to the archers who were raining arrows down on them. But then again, overall challenge wasn't the problem, since by the XP the battle was halfway between an 'easy' and 'medium' encounter.
What do you guys think?
Distance is an impediment and there's a sweet spot.
Generally, any obstacles or distances that separate a player from a meaningful contribution shouldnt be more than 1 round. It's frankly asking a lot. Unless being kept out of the action over at A leads to action at B. Otherwise you just have some people who aren't playing - and that's rough. Especially in a set piece encounter. Especially if turns take a while.
Re-think your encounters to account for participation, starting distance, and try to limit "shut down" stuff to 1 round.