Maybe the ambushing group has scrolls of dispel magic / antimagic field that they use to stop the party. This trick will get old if used repeatedly, but a nemesis could set up an ambush.
If people are asking them for help, do they stop for that? Remember what happened to spider-man when he skipped out on helping out. Uncle Ben died.
What's to stop a combat group from having the same spells?
Take a regular monster and give it a (terrifying!) speed 100
Just let them fast-travel. Move your encounters to destinations. Including NPCs that say "Wait, you missed that on the way here? How?"
It sounds like a bit of a disconnect between you and the players in where the "game" actually is. This happens sometimes: Urban campaign with a druid PC who never wants to be there, intrigue campaign with a plate-clad fighter PC with no stealth or charisma to speak of, dungeon crawl campaign with a non-combat focused caster PC.
In this case, you're making the "adventure" entirely around things the players are actively avoiding. The players are being pursued, and you made the game about what happens when they get caught; the players seem to have focused their tool kit around not being caught.
So there's a few choices here. You can tell the players, "The entire game is about going through the wilderness and dealing with your pursuers, so all you're doing is running away from the actual content of the game." This will solve the problem on your end, but the players will be stuck in the meta-analysis of following your cues and having to ignore what look like "obvious" solutions to their problems. They may not enjoy that.
Your players are using spells with specific short-comings to circumvent their issues. You could use mechanical issues to force their hands. This can get convoluted and contrived if used too much, and escalation between players and the GM never ends well.
I think your best bet is to re-evaluate the motivations of the players and the PCs. They clearly have no problems evading pursuers. What goals do they have? If you want them to explore their environments, what will make it worthwhile to do so? If you want them to engage with your dungeons rather than sneak past everything, it helps to have a reason beyond, "Because it's there." Do they want treasure? Put your monsters on piles of gold and magic items. Do they want to be heroes? Turn your monsters into slavers. Give them a reason to care about the details you're pouring into the world.
Is there some particular reason to have significant encounters while traveling? Most critters don't have any particular incentive to go after a party of adventurers, unless traveling through enemy territory, in which case you can just kill the steeds during round 1, they have 13 hp and AC 10.
The idea of multiple encounters per day, while something D&D has assumed as a balancing factor in every edition, has trouble actually making plot sense in many adventures. Short of a major rework of multiple classes, it's hard to do much about it.
THIS! If your adventurers travel into unknown territory a lot, they're going to be bumping into wild stuff every so often, even if it doesn't immediately stop them or prevent their travel. What's that over a horizon? A burning farmhouse with dancing silhouettes inside? Two ogres arguing with each other over something? A mystical tower belching multicolored smoke from its peak? All of these may not pique a character's interest right away, but the more mystical and alive the world seems, the more your players are going to want to interact with it.
You may find it useful to just have house rules that delete or modify certain spells; both Rope Trick and Tiny Hut are sort of egregious. For using a familiar to scout, note that you can only see through your familiar's eyes within 100' and there may not be a safe spot to sit doing recon within 100'; for Phantom Steed remember that the steed has the statistics of a riding horse, including ac and hp.
If your wizards are the point men, they're going to walk into ambushes or take a wrong turn into a box canyon or over a cliff. That neutralizes their speed. Humans would have died a long time ago if we couldn't catch things that ran faster than us. Tap into your inner caveman.
And if they try the same trick in the same territory twice, the bad guys get smarter. Stacking a ton of rocks on top of the Tiny Hut and waiting for the clock to run out; digging under the hut (Crawford has stated that it's a dome, not a sphere), stuff like that.
You need to study these spells. Most of the time spells only seem OP because we don't know them well enough. Tiny hut is an opaque dome. That you can see. Whats to prevent something nasty from tunneling under and into it while everyone's asleep? Phantom Steed lasts an hour. So they're casting that 8 times? That's a lot of spell slots.
Also: SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS! Not everything has to be about kill or be killed. They pass a wagon with an interesting farmer/merchant who has a tale to tell. Instant side quest. They pass a group of refugees who have had to flee their small village. They hear a cry for help in the woods. They find an injured dragon. What could have hurt something so dangerous?!?! Should they help it, or kill it for the XP? Make your encounters interesting enough that the party doesn't WANT to outrun it.
You need to study these spells. Most of the time spells only seem OP because we don't know them well enough. Tiny hut is an opaque dome. That you can see. Whats to prevent something nasty from tunneling under and into it while everyone's asleep? Phantom Steed lasts an hour. So they're casting that 8 times? That's a lot of spell slots.
Phantom steed is a ritual, you just spend 10 minutes per hour on it. Tiny hut is transparent from within, which means you can't just wait outside and ambush them when they come out (there are other annoying things that can happen, but the problem you run into is that most enemies that are able to deal with the hut will also tend to TPK the party).
If they're asleep, it doesn't really matter if they can see through it or not. if I'm a curious Bulette, I'm going to check out this weird opaque dome and then burrow under it to get at whatever tasty morsel is inside.
If they're asleep, it doesn't really matter if they can see through it or not. if I'm a curious Bulette, I'm going to check out this weird opaque dome and then burrow under it to get at whatever tasty morsel is inside.
Assuming you don't put your dome on a rock surface... other than random Xorns there isn't a whole lot that would be both inclined and able to conveniently get in.
You'd be surprised at what a band of ordinary bandits can tunnel through in 8 hours, when they're figments of an angry DM's imagination.
A lot easier to just give the bandits a priest. The problem is that there's a thin line between an interesting challenge and a TPK.
Perhaps the Lizardman Clan of PC Cookery. Using XGtE for 6 PCs I get 2xLizardfolk Shaman and 16x Lizardfolk; do some replacement on spells for Dispel Magic and Pass without Trace so the monsters don't have to worry about waking up the PCs. Then just prep, dispel the hut, and pounce, making sure to capture the PCs alive because you don't get the proper flavor unless they're alive when you toss them in the pot.
I've encountered the same thing with the players in my campaign - by the time they're mid-level spellcasters, "Travel" stops being something dangerous. At level 1 I had them go down the road, encounter bandits, have a choice of how to scale cliffs and get around obstacles... ...at level 10, they've got ways of just flying to where they want to go. I never had them track rations/food, but if I did, after a few spell levels that would have stopped mattering too.
In addition, players being "goal-driven" is also common. If the players decide their Goal is to Get To The Dungeon, they are going to aim for that goal - do their best not to get encounters along the way, avoid sidequests, etc. As far as they can tell, they're doing their best - you've given them a challenge (getting somewhere) and they're doing their best to use their character abilities to succeed.
So I'd say the key is to make the encounters obstacles that the players themselves will want to overcome to get to the goal, so that the players run towards them instead of away from them. This is easiest to set up inside an actual physical dungeon - you can have there be just one preset entrance to the mine, then several rooms off of there (each of which has, say, pieces of a magic key the players need to collect), etc. Put a large enough number of closed doors throughout the dungeon so that the familiar can't just scout the whole thing. Then your players will go towards your encounters rather than running away from them.
As part of planning each encounter, ask yourself - what's the reason the players will engage with it? Do they need to get some loot from someone that's guarding it, do they need to pass through an area, do they need to get information from some person in the encounter?
(For example, you mentioned the redcap cook with stirges. The players looked in, saw the stirges, said "nope" and left. But presumably, they were looking in that room for some actual reason, right? That redcap cook has a key, or a scroll, or a macguffin that helps the players advance? If he didn't, then closing the door and not walking in there is, as far as the players can tell, the best approach to dealing with that encounter! There needed to be some reason the player characters actually want to go in there and deal with th guy.)
I also found this to be initially frustrating because, having never played before, it was a mis-match between how I assumed we would play the game and how it actually played out. By level 3 or 4 the idea of the wilds being threatening at all was kind of a joke.
I agree with what has been previously said about trying to figure out player motivation — I assume these players are otherwise engaged, look forward to playing and care about their characters? Have you presented some longer-term goal or villain that the players are trying to rush towards because they see it as the real objective? I could see them going "crazy cook encounter? Nah we saw that Lich capture the prince in the first session, we gotta grind levels and get him as soon as we can!" Maybe even just straight-up asking them what they're trying to get out of playing is in order if you feel like the disconnect is that large?
As for the combat avoidance, I think you have some options:
• If the players are on another plane, there can be all kinds of hostile terrain, magical effects and disorientation that makes speedy travel impossible.
• If they're ambushed and one of them is taken by surprise – say a Roc swoops down and plucks one off their mount – then they can either fight or let their companion die
• Burden them with NPCs to travel with. They can speed away from the merchant caravan, but the traders will die and they won't be paid.
I do sympathize with your frustration though. I assumed going in to my campaign there would be a lot more "we kick in the door and start blasting" and that's not how my group likes to roll and so it's made me change the adventure a bunch to suit what they're looking for.
You need to study these spells. Most of the time spells only seem OP because we don't know them well enough. Tiny hut is an opaque dome. That you can see. Whats to prevent something nasty from tunneling under and into it while everyone's asleep? Phantom Steed lasts an hour. So they're casting that 8 times? That's a lot of spell slots.
Phantom steed is a ritual, you just spend 10 minutes per hour on it. Tiny hut is transparent from within, which means you can't just wait outside and ambush them when they come out (there are other annoying things that can happen, but the problem you run into is that most enemies that are able to deal with the hut will also tend to TPK the party).
My thoughts are this; if it takes 10 minutes of ritual every hour to cast phantom steed then they are in one place waiting and ripe for ambush during that 10 minutes. Second, why can't baddies just stand outside the hut and wait? The party can choose to wait the spell's duration to fight or drop the hut and fight right away, either way just because they can see danger waiting for them doesn't diminish the danger. Also if they're blowing past things like burning farmhouses and the like then make some consequences to their apathetic adventuring. Make towns and cities unfriendly because they didn't help town folks families and have them deal with the bad reputation. Just a couple thoughts.
So it’s an elaborate solution but one I found more rewarding to use than random encounters.
backstory flashback encounters.
the party is sat round the fire with an npc who asks for someone to tell a story about something that happened pre meeting the party.
you tell them they aren’t expected to have a story on the spot but who would like the Volunteer.
You ask them to whisper to you a number between 1-10 of how truthful the story is. 1 outright lie - 10 revealing truth
then regardless of number have them roll a public deception check.
the dc is 22 - whatever number they gave you * 2
so the truth DC is 2 but outright lie is 20 - don’t tell the party how successful the roll was but use this if anyone asks if they believe them.
then you start to tell the story that the character would tell but try not to let on just yet it’s an encounter, describe the people that were in the party with them and then when you get to the combat encounter part of the story you ask everyone to roll initiative.
now you have 3 options depending on the work you want to do
1) the party in the story coincidentally had the sane skill set of the current party and people just play their characters
2) you come up with your player count -1 proxy characters that have different names but the same skill sets in each story (they can be different than current party class/race)
3) you come up with unique characters and stories for each of your player characters and have them all prepared and ready so no matter who volunteers as story teller
so based on initiative roll you let players pick the new character in that order (except story teller who plays as themselves). I didn’t de level the characters just had them play with basic equipment because memory is fleeting and weren’t we always as awesome as we think we are now. As a bonus for not getting to pick a character and being the only one that has to survive story teller gets advantage on rolls because who would tell a story they were rubbish in.
okay so like I said it’s a bit labour intensive (i did version 3 for 5 characters so required 5 encounters and 20 extra characters) but here are some good reasons why you should
you can come up with a far more interesting one off monster fight you don’t need to explain or set up
you can feed into player backstory
you give players a chance to let loose with characters with skills and play styles for 45 mins
the characters are throw away so you don’t have to worry about spell slots and short rests or player death
you can let your player characters bend the rules a little under the pretence that the story teller is exaggerating - my players fought and animated tree and one was a monk with the strike that moves the enemy back 15 ft but you know it’s a tree - so I had the storyteller roll a performance check to decide wether I would allow the monk to attempt it (story teller passed the roll, monk did not)
you potentially get an NPC players are partially invested in to pop up later
players can get a bunch of XP but you don’t have to worry about loot.
if you are prepared to do the work I would recommend it, all my players loved it, especially the surprise of it
So it’s an elaborate solution but one I found more rewarding to use than random encounters.
backstory flashback encounters.
the party is sat round the fire with an npc who asks for someone to tell a story about something that happened pre meeting the party.
you tell them they aren’t expected to have a story on the spot but who would like the Volunteer.
You ask them to whisper to you a number between 1-10 of how truthful the story is. 1 outright lie - 10 revealing truth
then regardless of number have them roll a public deception check.
the dc is 22 - whatever number they gave you * 2
so the truth DC is 2 but outright lie is 20 - don’t tell the party how successful the roll was but use this if anyone asks if they believe them.
then you start to tell the story that the character would tell but try not to let on just yet it’s an encounter, describe the people that were in the party with them and then when you get to the combat encounter part of the story you ask everyone to roll initiative.
now you have 3 options depending on the work you want to do
1) the party in the story coincidentally had the sane skill set of the current party and people just play their characters
2) you come up with your player count -1 proxy characters that have different names but the same skill sets in each story (they can be different than current party class/race)
3) you come up with unique characters and stories for each of your player characters and have them all prepared and ready so no matter who volunteers as story teller
so based on initiative roll you let players pick the new character in that order (except story teller who plays as themselves). I didn’t de level the characters just had them play with basic equipment because memory is fleeting and weren’t we always as awesome as we think we are now. As a bonus for not getting to pick a character and being the only one that has to survive story teller gets advantage on rolls because who would tell a story they were rubbish in.
okay so like I said it’s a bit labour intensive (i did version 3 for 5 characters so required 5 encounters and 20 extra characters) but here are some good reasons why you should
you can come up with a far more interesting one off monster fight you don’t need to explain or set up
you can feed into player backstory
you give players a chance to let loose with characters with skills and play styles for 45 mins
the characters are throw away so you don’t have to worry about spell slots and short rests or player death
you can let your player characters bend the rules a little under the pretence that the story teller is exaggerating - my players fought and animated tree and one was a monk with the strike that moves the enemy back 15 ft but you know it’s a tree - so I had the storyteller roll a performance check to decide wether I would allow the monk to attempt it (story teller passed the roll, monk did not)
you potentially get an NPC players are partially invested in to pop up later
players can get a bunch of XP but you don’t have to worry about loot.
if you are prepared to do the work I would recommend it, all my players loved it, especially the surprise of it
Whoa, that's an awesome idea. There are plenty of sources of pre-generated PCs to make that part easier.
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You've got a few options:
It sounds like a bit of a disconnect between you and the players in where the "game" actually is. This happens sometimes: Urban campaign with a druid PC who never wants to be there, intrigue campaign with a plate-clad fighter PC with no stealth or charisma to speak of, dungeon crawl campaign with a non-combat focused caster PC.
In this case, you're making the "adventure" entirely around things the players are actively avoiding. The players are being pursued, and you made the game about what happens when they get caught; the players seem to have focused their tool kit around not being caught.
So there's a few choices here. You can tell the players, "The entire game is about going through the wilderness and dealing with your pursuers, so all you're doing is running away from the actual content of the game." This will solve the problem on your end, but the players will be stuck in the meta-analysis of following your cues and having to ignore what look like "obvious" solutions to their problems. They may not enjoy that.
Your players are using spells with specific short-comings to circumvent their issues. You could use mechanical issues to force their hands. This can get convoluted and contrived if used too much, and escalation between players and the GM never ends well.
I think your best bet is to re-evaluate the motivations of the players and the PCs. They clearly have no problems evading pursuers. What goals do they have? If you want them to explore their environments, what will make it worthwhile to do so? If you want them to engage with your dungeons rather than sneak past everything, it helps to have a reason beyond, "Because it's there." Do they want treasure? Put your monsters on piles of gold and magic items. Do they want to be heroes? Turn your monsters into slavers. Give them a reason to care about the details you're pouring into the world.
Is there some particular reason to have significant encounters while traveling? Most critters don't have any particular incentive to go after a party of adventurers, unless traveling through enemy territory, in which case you can just kill the steeds during round 1, they have 13 hp and AC 10.
The idea of multiple encounters per day, while something D&D has assumed as a balancing factor in every edition, has trouble actually making plot sense in many adventures. Short of a major rework of multiple classes, it's hard to do much about it.
You may find it useful to just have house rules that delete or modify certain spells; both Rope Trick and Tiny Hut are sort of egregious. For using a familiar to scout, note that you can only see through your familiar's eyes within 100' and there may not be a safe spot to sit doing recon within 100'; for Phantom Steed remember that the steed has the statistics of a riding horse, including ac and hp.
If your wizards are the point men, they're going to walk into ambushes or take a wrong turn into a box canyon or over a cliff. That neutralizes their speed. Humans would have died a long time ago if we couldn't catch things that ran faster than us. Tap into your inner caveman.
And if they try the same trick in the same territory twice, the bad guys get smarter. Stacking a ton of rocks on top of the Tiny Hut and waiting for the clock to run out; digging under the hut (Crawford has stated that it's a dome, not a sphere), stuff like that.
You need to study these spells. Most of the time spells only seem OP because we don't know them well enough.
Tiny hut is an opaque dome. That you can see. Whats to prevent something nasty from tunneling under and into it while everyone's asleep?
Phantom Steed lasts an hour. So they're casting that 8 times? That's a lot of spell slots.
Also: SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS! Not everything has to be about kill or be killed. They pass a wagon with an interesting farmer/merchant who has a tale to tell. Instant side quest. They pass a group of refugees who have had to flee their small village. They hear a cry for help in the woods. They find an injured dragon. What could have hurt something so dangerous?!?! Should they help it, or kill it for the XP? Make your encounters interesting enough that the party doesn't WANT to outrun it.
Phantom steed is a ritual, you just spend 10 minutes per hour on it. Tiny hut is transparent from within, which means you can't just wait outside and ambush them when they come out (there are other annoying things that can happen, but the problem you run into is that most enemies that are able to deal with the hut will also tend to TPK the party).
If they're asleep, it doesn't really matter if they can see through it or not. if I'm a curious Bulette, I'm going to check out this weird opaque dome and then burrow under it to get at whatever tasty morsel is inside.
Assuming you don't put your dome on a rock surface... other than random Xorns there isn't a whole lot that would be both inclined and able to conveniently get in.
You'd be surprised at what a band of ordinary bandits can tunnel through in 8 hours, when they're figments of an angry DM's imagination.
A lot easier to just give the bandits a priest. The problem is that there's a thin line between an interesting challenge and a TPK.
Perhaps the Lizardman Clan of PC Cookery. Using XGtE for 6 PCs I get 2xLizardfolk Shaman and 16x Lizardfolk; do some replacement on spells for Dispel Magic and Pass without Trace so the monsters don't have to worry about waking up the PCs. Then just prep, dispel the hut, and pounce, making sure to capture the PCs alive because you don't get the proper flavor unless they're alive when you toss them in the pot.
I've encountered the same thing with the players in my campaign - by the time they're mid-level spellcasters, "Travel" stops being something dangerous. At level 1 I had them go down the road, encounter bandits, have a choice of how to scale cliffs and get around obstacles... ...at level 10, they've got ways of just flying to where they want to go. I never had them track rations/food, but if I did, after a few spell levels that would have stopped mattering too.
In addition, players being "goal-driven" is also common. If the players decide their Goal is to Get To The Dungeon, they are going to aim for that goal - do their best not to get encounters along the way, avoid sidequests, etc. As far as they can tell, they're doing their best - you've given them a challenge (getting somewhere) and they're doing their best to use their character abilities to succeed.
So I'd say the key is to make the encounters obstacles that the players themselves will want to overcome to get to the goal, so that the players run towards them instead of away from them. This is easiest to set up inside an actual physical dungeon - you can have there be just one preset entrance to the mine, then several rooms off of there (each of which has, say, pieces of a magic key the players need to collect), etc. Put a large enough number of closed doors throughout the dungeon so that the familiar can't just scout the whole thing. Then your players will go towards your encounters rather than running away from them.
As part of planning each encounter, ask yourself - what's the reason the players will engage with it? Do they need to get some loot from someone that's guarding it, do they need to pass through an area, do they need to get information from some person in the encounter?
(For example, you mentioned the redcap cook with stirges. The players looked in, saw the stirges, said "nope" and left. But presumably, they were looking in that room for some actual reason, right? That redcap cook has a key, or a scroll, or a macguffin that helps the players advance? If he didn't, then closing the door and not walking in there is, as far as the players can tell, the best approach to dealing with that encounter! There needed to be some reason the player characters actually want to go in there and deal with th guy.)
I also found this to be initially frustrating because, having never played before, it was a mis-match between how I assumed we would play the game and how it actually played out. By level 3 or 4 the idea of the wilds being threatening at all was kind of a joke.
I agree with what has been previously said about trying to figure out player motivation — I assume these players are otherwise engaged, look forward to playing and care about their characters? Have you presented some longer-term goal or villain that the players are trying to rush towards because they see it as the real objective? I could see them going "crazy cook encounter? Nah we saw that Lich capture the prince in the first session, we gotta grind levels and get him as soon as we can!" Maybe even just straight-up asking them what they're trying to get out of playing is in order if you feel like the disconnect is that large?
As for the combat avoidance, I think you have some options:
• If the players are on another plane, there can be all kinds of hostile terrain, magical effects and disorientation that makes speedy travel impossible.
• If they're ambushed and one of them is taken by surprise – say a Roc swoops down and plucks one off their mount – then they can either fight or let their companion die
• Burden them with NPCs to travel with. They can speed away from the merchant caravan, but the traders will die and they won't be paid.
I do sympathize with your frustration though. I assumed going in to my campaign there would be a lot more "we kick in the door and start blasting" and that's not how my group likes to roll and so it's made me change the adventure a bunch to suit what they're looking for.
For the phantom steed and floating disk, have a ambush waiting with an invisible rope at neck level. This knocks casters off and loses concentration.
My thoughts are this; if it takes 10 minutes of ritual every hour to cast phantom steed then they are in one place waiting and ripe for ambush during that 10 minutes. Second, why can't baddies just stand outside the hut and wait? The party can choose to wait the spell's duration to fight or drop the hut and fight right away, either way just because they can see danger waiting for them doesn't diminish the danger. Also if they're blowing past things like burning farmhouses and the like then make some consequences to their apathetic adventuring. Make towns and cities unfriendly because they didn't help town folks families and have them deal with the bad reputation. Just a couple thoughts.
So it’s an elaborate solution but one I found more rewarding to use than random encounters.
backstory flashback encounters.
the party is sat round the fire with an npc who asks for someone to tell a story about something that happened pre meeting the party.
you tell them they aren’t expected to have a story on the spot but who would like the Volunteer.
You ask them to whisper to you a number between 1-10 of how truthful the story is. 1 outright lie - 10 revealing truth
then regardless of number have them roll a public deception check.
the dc is 22 - whatever number they gave you * 2
so the truth DC is 2 but outright lie is 20 - don’t tell the party how successful the roll was but use this if anyone asks if they believe them.
then you start to tell the story that the character would tell but try not to let on just yet it’s an encounter, describe the people that were in the party with them and then when you get to the combat encounter part of the story you ask everyone to roll initiative.
now you have 3 options depending on the work you want to do
1) the party in the story coincidentally had the sane skill set of the current party and people just play their characters
2) you come up with your player count -1 proxy characters that have different names but the same skill sets in each story (they can be different than current party class/race)
3) you come up with unique characters and stories for each of your player characters and have them all prepared and ready so no matter who volunteers as story teller
so based on initiative roll you let players pick the new character in that order (except story teller who plays as themselves). I didn’t de level the characters just had them play with basic equipment because memory is fleeting and weren’t we always as awesome as we think we are now. As a bonus for not getting to pick a character and being the only one that has to survive story teller gets advantage on rolls because who would tell a story they were rubbish in.
okay so like I said it’s a bit labour intensive (i did version 3 for 5 characters so required 5 encounters and 20 extra characters) but here are some good reasons why you should
you can come up with a far more interesting one off monster fight you don’t need to explain or set up
you can feed into player backstory
you give players a chance to let loose with characters with skills and play styles for 45 mins
the characters are throw away so you don’t have to worry about spell slots and short rests or player death
you can let your player characters bend the rules a little under the pretence that the story teller is exaggerating - my players fought and animated tree and one was a monk with the strike that moves the enemy back 15 ft but you know it’s a tree - so I had the storyteller roll a performance check to decide wether I would allow the monk to attempt it (story teller passed the roll, monk did not)
you potentially get an NPC players are partially invested in to pop up later
players can get a bunch of XP but you don’t have to worry about loot.
if you are prepared to do the work I would recommend it, all my players loved it, especially the surprise of it
Whoa, that's an awesome idea. There are plenty of sources of pre-generated PCs to make that part easier.