I'm working with a group of experienced players and we just started running through Wave Echo Cave. Based on Red Brand Hideout, Cragmaw Castle, Old Owl Well encounter, and Wyvern Tor encounter, the group is performing at about 1 level higher than anticipated in the adventure. Therefore, I up scaled the dungeon to lvl 5 and adjusted for 6 players. The result is a hoard of bugbears that drove the characters to zero resources. More specifically, the sorcerer was out of sorc points. The monk was out of ki. The warlock was out of spell slots. Finally the paladin was out of healing, channel divinity, and any other resources. On the plus side the group defeated the bugbears but they made enough commotion that neighboring rooms would have come to investigate and slaughtered the party if I didn't intervene as GM. I would prefer not having to hold monsters back to keep the party alive and I've read that dungeons at higher level are more aware of their surroundings (i.e. enemies from other rooms may be on guard and listening for trouble). I feel the characters would need some way to recover their fuel (sorc points, ki, spell slots, channel divinity, etc.) to some extent during combat to help keep the game fun. Have you run into the same problem? If so, did you add any way for characters to recover fuel during combat?
No, I have not seen this problem. Resource management is a player skill. They should work to improve this if they're running out of resources prematurely. ("Prematurely" is, of course, quite relative. If there's no time constraints, then there is really no issue as they can rest and come back replenished.) I don't recommend "holding back" as DM. If you have telegraphed that reinforcements are possible under particular conditions (loud noises, escaping monsters, etc.), then it's fair game to bring it on if the players do not account for these complications. After all, they can always retreat or try to solve the conflict by some means other than expending their limited resources.
That said, I see no issue with providing objectives players can try to achieve in a given location or scene that will allow them to regain resources. Perhaps there is a desecrated altar to a benevolent deity that will grant them a boon of healing or restored powers if they reconsecrate it. Or if they get a kiss after rescuing Princess Lilac, her innate fey magic will give them a boost in some fashion. Make them earn it though!
How many of the player characters were knocked unconscious?
THEMNGMNT wrote:
Cooperjera wrote:
It's up to you to determine if monsters in dungeons are responsive to player actions. It just depends on the fiction. If players are assaulting the headquarters of a powerful military force, like they are at the climax of Red Hand of Doom, then obviously there's going to be an escalating threat as players progress. They need to get crafty to survive those sorts of situations. In some dungeons, such as Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, players could play various factions off of each other. In a dungeon such as Tomb of Horrors, players are basically free to take on one room at a time. Of course, each room is a death trap. Point is, there's no hard and fast rule for how responsive dungeons are to player action.
I asked about whether or not players were unconscious to get a sense of how severly they were threatened. In 5E, it seems common for characters to be knocked out, even when they have expendable resources available. In the case of your players, it seems like they were under threat, but not guaranteed to die in the next encounter. Maybe I'm mistaken. But players that are out of expendable resources can continue adventuring and in fact are often expected to. That's why spellcasters have at-will cantrips and all players have hit dice, etc.
In any case, if you are running very challenging combats and your players need their expendable resources to survive, consider changing the length of the short rest. Default, a short rest is one hour. You can change it to 15 minutes, or 5 minutes, or 1 minute, or whatever you think appropriate. If you set it at 5 minutes, you are basically allowing your players to recharge after every fight. Which is perfectly fine. It just means you are building your adventures around each "encounter" rather than around a "day" of mulitple encounters.
Alternately, you could simply play Wave Echo Cave as written. There's nothing wrong with dialing up the difficulty, but there's nothing wrong with dialing down the difficulty, either.
teach your player ressource management.
teach your player stealth (I know the heavy armor fighter and cleric cannot stealth, that why they stay a litlte bit behind giving the rogue/monk/sorcerer the opportunity for an surprise round.
CAsting silence might spend a 2nd level spell slot, but if the surprise attack is successfull, you might save a lot of healing spell
Give them a chance for short rest (I know short rest do not help the sorcerer) if they are smart about it
fifth edition rely on the 3 DnD pillar: Exploration, Combat and role play. a lot of situation cna be solve with a good role play and qick thinkiing. i am currently playing in HotDQ and I skip some chapter because I manage to convince the ennemy that I was a cult member, being able to infiltrate the dungeon easyly and teh rogue assassin, crit nova the target we had to kill, then I sound the alarm telling to one group of NPC that the other group of NPC kill the target and now I can leave the dungeon, and let the monster kill each other (I love the diviner wizard in my group that make sure I get 15+ roll on my deception roll to convince the Cultist that the Bullywag kill Grayborn lol. We cleared that chapter by using very few ressources.
Cooperjera wrote:
Per the data on Enworld from guy who picked his DMG in Roma, Italy, it's recomended to revise the duration of a short rest and/or long rest. This is an interesting concept. The sorcerer could get full recovery of spell points in a 4 hour period or less. I'll check with the players this weekend to find out what direction they would like to go. I suspect telling them to suck it up and manage their resources better will not work well. I may have to use more tact.
You may have thrown too much at them. If I recall correctly, the area with the bugbears has only 3 there, plus a doppleganger. How many did you toss at them? If you just add three Bugbears to that room, that will make the encounter "hard." Knowing that the Mages and spiders are nearby, that may have been a bad decision on your part to up this tertiary fight like you did.
Did you indicate to the players that it sounds like more monsters are coming? And give them a chance to retreat?
I mean really if the other monsters are going to come the instant the first battle is done, why don't they just come during the battle instead?
So did you say more forces were coming, giving the players a chance to decide to run for it?
Or just decide the other forces wouldn't come at all?
Therefore, I up scaled the dungeon to lvl 5