So I'm running into an issue that I have struggled with many times before; When you have an area with small groups of bad guys spread all around, how do you organize the encounters? Do the sounds of battle alert everyone and cause just one massive slug fest in some random hallway? Do you run 6-7 small 2 round combats where everyone stops and rolls initiative every time, or do you just roll initiative on the first combat and then keep that for the whole area? How do you handle it without it becoming super tedious or trivial?
Hey, new DM here so this may not be the best advice, but I run each room as a separate encounter. I have a homebrew dungeon with a maximum of 6 encounters in 7 rooms. The reason behind my decision to have each room be its own, is because you never know what the party will do. Are they going to spend all session investigating this room? Are they going to short rest? Are they just banging open the doors or stealthily creeping in? By keeping each room separate it allows the party to approach the dungeon how they see fit. If I did a single roll for the whole dungeon, then they would never have the opportunity to short rest half-way through. That being said, it does add some lag per room but I have the dungeon set up so that encounters are only triggered under certain circumstances. For instance, one room's encounter can be avoid by not stepping on the spiders webs or disturbing the egg sacs. Additionally with each room at the start of the session I roll a d6 for each room. Odd number has an encounter, even don't so long as there are between 2-5 encounters (not including dungeon boss).
How I handle the storytelling aspect of why a battle would not alert the next room is built into the dungeon. No two rooms have encounters have would warrant a big fight. For instance, one room's encounter is a guard on a door that only attacks (triggers encounter) if the party gets a riddle wrong. The guard wouldn't abandon its post just because it heard some noise. Again this is just how I handle the issue. Your mileage may vary, and more experienced DMs may have better insights.
D&D generally uses pretty short perception ranges, so you can certainly justify not chain-aggroing the entire dungeon, but really, you can handle it either way, just understand how your decision changes difficulty and tactics -- if alerting everyone is an issue, PCs will gravitate towards effects that can prevent this (e.g. Silence) or that will slow or stop reinforcements (wall spells are designed for this, but damaging zones such as Spike Growth work nicely too).
I'd play the bad guys intelligently, especially if you're on their home turf in a dungeon or hideout. Look at the area layouts and ask yourself:
If they hear fighting in the next room, how do they react? Join the fight, or prepare to ambush?
During a fight, does someone run to raise the alarm? Figure out where they go so you know how long that will take.
Once the alarm is raised, what is the defence plan.
What is their objective? Drive away? Kill? Capture and ransom?
A lot of the old D&D modules had monsters or bad guys react in a coordinated fashion to intruders. If the players were not careful, it could become deadly very quickly.
As for how to actually run it, unless there is a definite break in the fighting, I'd keep the same initiative roll and new arrivals join the other bad guys' initiative turn.
So I'm running into an issue that I have struggled with many times before; When you have an area with small groups of bad guys spread all around, how do you organize the encounters? Do the sounds of battle alert everyone and cause just one massive slug fest in some random hallway? Do you run 6-7 small 2 round combats where everyone stops and rolls initiative every time, or do you just roll initiative on the first combat and then keep that for the whole area? How do you handle it without it becoming super tedious or trivial?
Hey, new DM here so this may not be the best advice, but I run each room as a separate encounter. I have a homebrew dungeon with a maximum of 6 encounters in 7 rooms. The reason behind my decision to have each room be its own, is because you never know what the party will do. Are they going to spend all session investigating this room? Are they going to short rest? Are they just banging open the doors or stealthily creeping in? By keeping each room separate it allows the party to approach the dungeon how they see fit. If I did a single roll for the whole dungeon, then they would never have the opportunity to short rest half-way through. That being said, it does add some lag per room but I have the dungeon set up so that encounters are only triggered under certain circumstances. For instance, one room's encounter can be avoid by not stepping on the spiders webs or disturbing the egg sacs. Additionally with each room at the start of the session I roll a d6 for each room. Odd number has an encounter, even don't so long as there are between 2-5 encounters (not including dungeon boss).
How I handle the storytelling aspect of why a battle would not alert the next room is built into the dungeon. No two rooms have encounters have would warrant a big fight. For instance, one room's encounter is a guard on a door that only attacks (triggers encounter) if the party gets a riddle wrong. The guard wouldn't abandon its post just because it heard some noise. Again this is just how I handle the issue. Your mileage may vary, and more experienced DMs may have better insights.
D&D generally uses pretty short perception ranges, so you can certainly justify not chain-aggroing the entire dungeon, but really, you can handle it either way, just understand how your decision changes difficulty and tactics -- if alerting everyone is an issue, PCs will gravitate towards effects that can prevent this (e.g. Silence) or that will slow or stop reinforcements (wall spells are designed for this, but damaging zones such as Spike Growth work nicely too).
I'd play the bad guys intelligently, especially if you're on their home turf in a dungeon or hideout. Look at the area layouts and ask yourself:
A lot of the old D&D modules had monsters or bad guys react in a coordinated fashion to intruders. If the players were not careful, it could become deadly very quickly.
As for how to actually run it, unless there is a definite break in the fighting, I'd keep the same initiative roll and new arrivals join the other bad guys' initiative turn.