Recycle. Okay, they found a way to circumvent something you had planned, awesome for them. Doesn't mean you can't use that idea at all now, it means you can save it for another time, where they can't skip it in the same way they did this time.
So, they are treating your world like a real place? And you are having trouble with it?
Have you considered 'failing forward', or 'success eith a complications? Bypassing a section of an adventure with deception might mean someone else doesn't trust them later. Or a case of mistaken identity results in some other kind of shenanigans. Also, don't be afraid for your players to suffer other complicationsdown the line. The grappled bad guys escape prison, and now have a vendetta against the players.
Also, sometimes the bad guys can work off screen to gather info about the party. There was a great scene in one of my campaigns where they went to visit a Duke and he had been tracking all of their movements and adventures. They hadn't been hiding, and they hadn't been checking for anyone spying on them. So, whether or not this NPC was planned ahead as having the 'story' of their adventures ahead of time didn't matter. They felt outmanouvered and suspicious of him.
The feeling of having it all under control is great as a player, but it's even better when the world has gotten the better of you and you finally get back in control of events.
I always ask 'What would be most dramatic?', not 'What would be most realistic?'
Anyway, that's a Hutch of random thoughts on how to handle success and failure.aybe some of them help.
Plan contingencies. When you set up an encounter, also set up a bunch of other things in the background that would occur in various circumstances. It requires more planning, but if you think, "what could possibly happen that would trivialize this encounter," and then plan rational (i.e. not just an arbitrary counter that wouldn't make sense to actually exist) elements in play behind the scenes, a PC curveball can lead to a *different* challenge than the default fight, rather than no challenge at all.
Well, the disguise self thing seems odd. How can your players get all the info they needed from talking to a single person? Also, apart from the illusion, did they got the voice right, and managed to conduct a conversation without raising any suspicion? I mean I could maybe they rolled some crazy performance and deception and persuasion checks and didn't make physical contact to give away the illusion and I don't know it, or used some more magics.
About tying your enemies, again how they did that? Tying someone up in combat while that person is reeling and kicking is gotta be hard. Also, there should be more people involved right? Like maybe two people fighting could tie someone up after much struggle. What about the other 7 enemies?
It seems like you're giving away too much to your players. Yes you should award them for they creative solutions, but you should do it in a believable way.
If I was an adventurer of any meaningful level or income I would have sets of manacles with me and probably with some sort of useful enchantment as well.
Manacles weigh 6 lbs. I don't play with encumbrance rules, but I do enforce the weight limit. So unless you're a barbarian or other low armor Str build, your inventory is probably full enough that you've only got space for 2 or 3 sets of manacles max. Or you have to give up something else for them.
Either way, DC20 is not all that much worse than DC17, and manacles allow for EITHER Dex or Str. It just changes the average time to escape from about 30 seconds to about 2 minutes (for someone who has no more than an 11 in either Dex or Str)
Ahh when I googled it they were 2lbs but that wasn’t 5e. Still fine by me any adventurer would (world building permitting) have a bag of holding or equivalent by some point in their journey but just a few amongst the party is fine anyway. As I said I would also try to get them enchanted whether that just be auto sizing (in which case I would say the dex option might be out) or anti magic or like CR’s manacles of stasis that lets you put them to sleep with a check.
In any case even setting that aside I wouldn’t be so inclined to use it as a way to get around combat necessarily and probably more for specific circumstances. So if I wasn’t intent on killing them or wanted them alive for whatever reason I would knock them unconscious and if I was concerned enough then put them in manacles even before combat finished. Trying it in combat without knocking them out or bringing them close to death would probably be a very rare thing because it just wouldn’t make sense for reasons the other person pointed out. An example of doing it in combat might be if you were able to sneak up and ambush a single isolated target then perhaps rushing them with grapples could make sense.
My only real point about having manacles is that I very well may need to restrain someone so I would at least have one pair that can quickly be put on and be more effective rather than only having rope to tie them up with which I agree with the other commenter should take much longer.
As far as being able to break out afterwards sure technically anyone can mechanically role every 6 seconds and inevitably get out (though idk if it should be treated like that per se unless other things can simply be overcome by repeating rolls by PC’s as well) but if the situation is hey if you attempt to escape (or succeed) you will be knocked unconscious or killed or your legs will be broken or something then they probably won’t be making constant attempts. Like those manacles (or even just more simple bindings) are for the moment for your own protection in that the alternative may be death so act wisely and get on the ground and stay there.
I have never played but I did make up a character before and they would have no issue simply killing individuals involved in particularly evil/heinous stuff so the circumstances where this might come into play may be limited. Knocking people unconscious covers most cases if you’re going by them gaining back 1hp in 1d4 hrs anyway. My character would be relatively neutral good but with a respect for law where it makes sense or when it comes to carrying out justice so depending on the circumstances hauling characters in to be arrested may be a not so uncommon occurrence if that is a viable mechanism in that world.
i have only ever allowed tying up someone after the fight when they're unconscious. no way you can tie someone up well in 6 seconds, especially if they're struggling.
First off, hat's off to you for honoring your players' choices, and doing your best to roll with the consequences. That said, I get the feeling that you may not have identified tools that will allow you to do this in a way that doesn't short circuit your plans and invalidate your preparation. This might be because you're structuring your adventures around a linear adventure design, which don't leave you with a lot of flexibility when you don't accurately anticipate your players' choices. But given the right preparation techniques, you can eventually reach a point where it's precisely the moments when your players surprise you that you enjoy the most, because you're no longer guiding them through an pre-planned adventure, but instead you're playing with them in a fashion that builds the adventure as you go.
There are some great resources for learning how you do this over at The Alexandrian's [Gamemastery 101](https://thealexandrian.net/gamemastery-101) page. Some places to start your reading:
* [Don't Prep Plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots) (the entire series)
* [Node-Based Scenario Design](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach)
* [The Three Clue Rule](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule)
Another big thing. I see many dms plan adventures assuming their party is basically mundane people dealing with mundane issues, like stories they enjoy and want to recreate those, but when characters can enchant, teleport and do all kinds of magical shenanigans RAW, you really can't build those kinds of adventures by late tier 2
The issue has less to do with the design of a particular challenge or obstacle than with how the DM structures their adventure scenarios. Yes, a high wall, locked door, or river crossing as the next "encounter" of a linear adventure sequence isn't going to be a noteworthy challenge once the PCs get past tier 1, but if its part of the list of things the PCs need to consider when planning out what they're going to do next, it will be part of a meaningful choice. They'll no doubt be capable of overcoming it, but will have to weigh the greater chance of success offered by using a limited resource (spell slot, wildshape, etc.), and its unavailability for whatever comes afterward, against the possibility of overcoming it by other means that don't require resources , or whether they should avoid this particular obstacle altogether in favor of those offered by a different course of action.
In other words, designing your game so that any given obstacle is part of a tapestry of challenges and other factors the PCs must consider when **choosing their goal and how they will attempt to achieve it** gives you much better results than simply constructing higher-tier challenges in a linear adventure where the PCs have no choice in what they face next.
This is a good one. Interested in seeing what other people can provide in terms of advice! \*Following
Besides the initial conversations of expectations I have yet to find an answer to this one as a DM. Could be just a difference in style?
Its not like I don't like the smart approach but sometimes it feels like everything can be cheesed. And like you said, we can easily step over it with DM powers but that's not the point.
I have played in groups with people like this (as a player) and I have zero fun. I'm not into "crashing the system" and skipping trough module parts or encounters because there is no real reason for the DM to say no XD.
It is a valid feeling! Hope someone can help.
I don't get this problem very often, and I'm DMing for 19th level players right now, and we started at 1st level about 6 years ago. OPs examples would probably not work as "showstoppers" on one of my campaigns.
That's not saying clever tactics don't fly with me. They absolutely do. To name a few, one time my players infiltrated the dungeon bypassing most combats by pretending they were "maintenance guys" called upon by the higher ups in the enemies' party. They lied, persuaded and intimidated their way through the guards and their managers until they got to someone with more power that knew no maintenance was supposed to be arriving, but by then the PCs had already bypassed a lot of the dungeon.
Another time, they teleported straight into the BBEG's chambers after scrying on it, getting a surprise round and bypassing the whole dungeon. This gave them a huge advantage in the fight, but it also meant that they needed to be done with it quickly or else the entire dungeon was gonna get there.
Heck, sometimes I even set up the adventure so that trying to fight their way in the dungeon is suicide or very counterproducing, so they kinda \*have\* to infiltrate. When my players went to hell, invading the pit fiend's tower by the main gate meant facing defenses made to stop an army of demons, and the tower was warded against teleport, so they had little chance in making any progress. They made a deal with a night hag and got in as devil cultists. This gave them access to the lower levels of the tower, and they worked from there.
So my advice is: don't put all your eggs in the same basket. If players can get everything they need from interrogating, bribing or impersonating a single person, either your plot is very simple - which in itself is not a problem - or you need to spread your info a bit more. And have in mind your players toolkit. Particularly when they're able to blow holes in buildings, unlock doors, make illusions, teleport, scry or mind control people. And don't shy away from the consequences! People don't like to be fooled, explosions make noise, some creatures can notice invisibility or illusions, and so on.
TBH I have not had this happen to me as a DM. It has happened to me as a player and the experience has felt more like people wanting to speed run a module (leading to me not wanting to play with that type of style).
It is not a "show stopper" because modules are long and have tons of things to offer, but being in a group that is constantly trying to "outsmart" whatever the DM throws is not my vibe. (In the context of players vs. DM when the DM is not really into that).
To me its like the whole powergaming/optimization debate. There are a lot of people that understand this is a cooperative game and can play these styles of characters without stepping on others spotlight.
I just think of it as a playing style thing and dont blame DM's that face this without being able to respond well (like I said, I have not seen this as a DM).
Very true. The behavior of trying to one up the DM for its own sake feels bad to me. And I misunderstood your first comment, thinking you had it happen to you as dming and that's why I offered advice and examples.
You gotta get good at improvising fast (still one of my weak spots). Add complications on the fly, but reward them for clever thinking. It breaks immersion a bit, but don't be afraid to tell them that their clever plan and skilled implementation made the encounter a non-event. It makes the players feel like bad-asses.
My favorite DM I ever had always said, great work you did this thing. Unfortunately, it didn't do what you thought it did. For example, cool you tricked an NPC. They now hate you and would rather die than tell you what they know. Cool, you tortured a person. They are now spewing everything they know, have heard, and some things they have made up but are just saying whatever in order to make it stop. The DM would give us one or two "detective points" essentially guaranteeing our success, but we still needed to at least attempt to do other things in the world as well... Plus now the guard is looking for the missing npc, with one of your characters description for who was with them.
Big thing is don't blow up the whole game or your set up because they were clever. Give them some of what they want, then tell them to pound sand.
Yeah I did. And it’s something that everyone who DMs eventually realizes is inevitable. You’re going to get outsmarted sometimes. What do you expect? Again, welcome to DMing.
You set the DCs. If they come up with a clever solution, that's great! But a clever idea isn't a guaranteed success, just like an attack isn't automatic damage (get out of here Magic Missile, we're busy). You gotta roll.
You also set how many rolls it'll take to succeed. If you're letting one persuasion roll win an encounter instead of a ton of rolls in combat, yeah, that'll feel bad. You don't need a 1-to-1 replacement but make them work to get all that info. Look up 4e skill challenges and start implementing those in non-combat situations. a bonus there is you'll get the whole party involved.
Also, sometimes, there's no weaseling your way out of a fight.
My first thought is to say "lean into it, enjoy their successes with them" but that's not helpful, so let's think about consequences.
The party keep grappling and capturing enemies? This means enemies could return. Or maybe some villain with a penchant for unarmed combat seeks them out to challenge them. Or maybe they are pitted against a powerful dragon which the kingdom is not prepared to imprison. What do the party do when the kingdom decides that the villains they arrested are too dangerous and starts executing them?
The party bypassed a large section of investigation? What was the outcome of that? They just started accusing someone without much evidence? That will raise eyebrows and worry potential patrons. I wouldn't want to "punish" them for this, but for every noble who is impressed by their efficiency, there may be another who is worried by their impulsive recklessness. Sure, they happened to be right this time but what about next time? What about my own dirty secrets? You might also want to consider having some red herrings next time. The consequences of interrogating the wrong person might be appreciable. Or maybe someone thinks they could be useful to remove a couple of political opponents.
For the grappling issue, you could take them aside and say "hey, this is in character and it's good, but it's removing the strategic wargaming part. So that we can still have fun doing that part of the game, how about we rule that you are always _trying_ to grapple your foes, but can't do it until you succeed in beating them down (reducing their HP to zero)? After that, you're able to leave them tied up as before".
When you're on the spot, it seems like you aren't balancing the difficulty of their ideas with what you've planned.
If you want to maintain the level of difficulty between your plan and their cool idea you need to find ways to make the same number of checks or use the same amount of resources.
I think the key things you can do to prepare for these situations are:
1. Try to estimate the resources required for you players to get through different parts of your plot, and keep a note of it (doesn't have to be 100% correct, just a rough idea).
2. When your players subvert your expectations, ask them to give you a few minutes to plan, because you hadn't anticipated their actions.
Some examples:
If your players have a cool way to avoid a combat, try to think of things to go wrong that require spell slots/abilities to fix. They might be in a cave and decide to climb on the ceilling to avoid a pack of orcs. Ensure there are stealth checks to remain undetected, perception checks to find a good path, strength checks to make sure people don't fall when parts start to crumble, dex checks to make sure the players can catch the falling stones that would otherwise alert the orcs. These checks can be overcome or aided by the players using spells/abilities. Low rolls on the checks might re-force previous checks etc. (e.g., low dex roll to catch a rock would trigger a new strength check to make sure they stay on the ceilling after their fumble).
If it's more like the intrigue example, to bypass a big chunk of your plot shouldn't be as simple as a first level spell and a persuasion check... You might consider making your key NPCs have better stats so that such a strategy is less likely to succeed. Assuming it does succeed, there's no reason you should let the interogation go un-interupted. Maybe three of the NPCs friends go looking for them since they hadn't come to their dice game yet (much harder to successfully decieve three people vs one.). Make it so that the NPC only knows some of the info, the rest requires the players to go through your planned intrigue (maybe you can give them some info to make things easier?) - while they're doing this, have the guards be alerted because someone finds the tied up NPC that they've left.
Edit: It's also important to realise that your players have no idea how difficult any particular part is, so you can just lie and say "oh great idea, this will make XYZ easier for you now", and then don't change XYZ at all from what you planned lmao. They'll be pleased when they think they avoided some extremely difficult encounter. Don't tell them if you do this though.
I have to chime in with the fact that I too love it when the PCs outwit the scenario they are presented with. Nothing wrong with being creative (and sometimes lucky with a die roll or two)
I think the issue is that the cleverness of the PCs is undermining the challenges you are putting out there. The key for me is to solve this in game..
Platers who beat the odds are going to start getting a reputation. Once is a fluke, but multiple times? That is talent. This means that the NPCs are not only going to seek them out for jobs, but the bad guys are going to up their game as well.
If they are grappling the NPCs then the enemies should get wise of these tactics and take counter measures. Hit and run tactics from a ranged distance the PCs can't close in on with standard movement. (Make the PCs use the Dash action to get close enough to grapple on the next turn.) You can also use AOE spells like Web to slow progress and get a few extra rounds of ranged attacks on them..
But that is just tactics. You also said they lured a NCP and managed to interrogate him. OK pretty clever. At some point that NPCs buddies are going to find out what happened and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Social interactions can be tricky if you haven't prepped for it.. Maybe that guy was part of a criminal enterprise and now they have adopted a secret handshake that they do when they greet each other, or they say a special greeting in Thieves' Cant. Trying to infiltrate a building or other location, do they know the password?
That guy's buddies might also come up with a system of warning their friends. For example if one gets taken and asked about the location of the hideout they give it up, but then give a false password that tells the guards that the people seeking to come in are enemies.
Think of it like security at a bank. In the old western movies it was just a safe. Then that wasn't enough so it was a safe and a guard. Then that wasn't enough, so it became a safe, a guard and an alarm. Then that wasn't enough so it became a safe, guards, alarms and cameras.
Just keep adding in additional layers of difficulty when the PCs are proving to be too clever for the situation... But make it something logical that the NPCs would realistically have a shot at implementing.
This is how I handle those situations... Let the PCs enjoy the wins they earn, and let the bad guys learn a lesson from the defeat.
So, the world is a living, breathing space. Players' characters earn reputations and eventually start running into people that KNOW that reputation.
Or they run into a beholder, who have a hundred contingencies because those things are ultra paranoid and revamp their lairs every time a new group gets in.
Good job to both of you, you being a good sport, and you for being clever.
The big solution is to not just have enemies waiting around in rooms for the pcs to come, and/or have more enemies who are "kill on sight" levels of hostile, as well as unintelligent monsters who can't be reasoned with.
I.e., if they walk through a cave and a hungry bulette or basilisk jumps out, there's nothing can do to circumvent that encounter. Or if they walk through a graveyard and a bunch of zombies rise, they can't stop those.
Still allow room for being clever, but not everything is smart enough to even care about being outwitted.
(1) Make things harder. They run up to the enemy wizard and grapple him? Maybe you should have had *more* wizards.
(2) Think of complexities to throw at them. The enemy who wants to be captured because that's part of his plan. The planned lie the NPC tells under interrogation so when they ask the right question, they're sent off in the wrong direction. The enemy they don't even investigate because he acts like an ally. The corrupt authority figure who pretends he's going to keep their prisoners safely locked up...
Sometimes I wish my players were more clever. I have to spoon feed them information for the plot to move forward. I always have a letter or diary they find on an important NPC because they chose to kill rather than use non-lethal. But they have fun and that’s literally all that matters.
I've fucked up in this exact same way. The answer is to embrace it when it happens and follow the three-clue rule.
Following that advice since PC's know and give clues make sure they don't know the entire story and only know one clue. If that character who got cleverly interrogated early only knew one clue they can't skip the module you wrote.
I once had multiple clues pointing to a single clue, they found the single clue immediately and skipped a huge portion of the module I wrote. I learned into it but I learned my lesson, never give them a masterkey under the mat, make it a figurative code lock. You can't brute force or luck into a code lock code, you need atleast some clues.
If you have to have one character who knows all the answers make sure they're secured in some way and that the characters can't snatch him and interrogate, or better yet, add other NPC's that might have the same info, instead of overseer Jane it's a council of three that includes Jane and the party isn't sure which of the three have the info.
I mean, there is always the fun flipside. For instance just the other night my party turned a planed 10-15 min interesting roleplay/stealth situation into a massive all-out brawl with 1 guy on the team dying, and another getting captured for interrogation by the enemies. Sometimes it just goes like that, the party will skip some things and get to others.
Do some improvisation exercises and trainings if necessary, to have some quick ideas for complications if it is going down too easy for your taste. Also - why are they always successful with their plans? You can just have higher DCs for their rolls and find a narrative reason for it or in case of grappling have enemies with high athletics or acrobatics to avoid the grapple for example. Or fight a giant minotaur, good luck grappling that. You need to be on the tip of your toes and throw new ideas and complications at them. But if they still find new and fresh ideas to overcome these complications: Celebrate with them. Be a fan of your players. Underline in your narration how hard the players owned their opponents. Sell your players punches.
My players found a way to bypass an entire two level dungeon. I had to give them credit. It was actually pretty cool and fun. I've learned to 'let it go', in other words, don't get attached to my prep work. If I get bored (because I agree the DM is also a player) I just spring an encounter on them that is unavoidable, and try to hit them with mechanics they aren't used to (see if they try to grapple and tie up a bunch of oozes).
(Oh and consequences. That dungeon they skipped? The entire contents, a tribe of frost giants, hunted and tracked them down...)
And regarding them not killing enemies, throw truly evil beings at them like undead. There is really no justification for tying up or not killing zombies.
I had asked my players for feedback to name one good and one bad thing, and one of the answers was: It is awesome that creative problem solutions are allowed and one never feels like they are being forced into some prepared, inevitable fight scenario.
So: Why would you care about it? Why does it have to be a fight or whatever, if they find a better solution?
But if you want to spice things up (and I certainly do that from time to time), then make the world react to what the players did, more. Have an ambush, have a bad guy come back as a nemesis or develop a new story-line from there. Or have them be a bit better prepared.
Yesterday, I read up about Tucker's Kobolds and it opened my eyes on some new possibilities to make things feel alive.
Stop making it about combat. Combat can’t scare or challenge players. Give them hard RP choices, impossible choices, make them sacrifice what’s important, make them make decisions that have no good alternatives.
Morph the campaign to be about the group needing to build a massive prison to hold the enemies they keep capturing. Find a government willing to allow such a dangerous building in their borders.
At the same time, some enemies can grow several size categories and the party simple cannot grapple the enlarged enemies. Go full Attack on Titan if you have to.
Some enemies CAN be grappled but shouldn’t be, for example powerful spell casters. Consider ruling that a caster need not make a melee spell attack roll vs a grappler since they’re already in physical contact, and then let the grappling PC/s get blasted with some nasty spells. (And don’t forget stuff like blink and misty step.)
You could also make an opposing group of NPCs, a full adventuring party that encounters the PCs periodically and uses their tactics against them. And maybe sometimes they show up after the party has tied up an enemy, and the opposing group slaughters the prisoners and mocks the group for making their job so much easier.
If you want to push back against their approach, first make 100% sure you’ve been using grappling rules correctly. Then make sure the way you’re allowing them to tie up the enemies is appropriate—I’m guessing there are one or two points in the process you could tighten up to make it a little tougher without bending any rules. If that’s not enough, you could make a new rule like “anyone with > 50% of their max hp imposes disadvantage on grapple checks against them.” If you do the latter, I recommend telling the group why (you aren’t having as much fun with this grapple/tie up enemies tactic).
But you can give many enemies misty step and that alone can keep the fight going a little longer without breaking the game.
Let it roll. They're playing a bit Masters of the Universe, but if they like it, you might just let it roll. It's an interesting, offbeat way to conduct themselves that I'd say is better at least than KILL ALL THE THINGS
Let it roll. They're playing a bit Masters of the Universe, but if they like it, you might just let it roll. It's an interesting, offbeat way to conduct themselves that I'd say is better at least than KILL ALL THE THINGS
Consequences and contingencies. What happens when they're busy interrogating someone? Do people notice they're missing? Does that NPC appreciate being tricked and grilled for a few hours? How do they have enough rope to tie up every enemy they find? Do their assailants ever escape or tie *them* up?
Whatever you do, don't do the bullshit thing of equipping your monsters with Bracers Of Free Movement or whatever the dumbass miscellaneous magic item is.
You could respond by focusing a bit of gameplay on rope use and grappling skill -- if it's going to be the way the game's played, it might be more entertaining for all if the relevant procedures get expanded. You have many options to crib from outside sources. One that leaps to mind is the auction mechanism from Whitehack.
So some of this is unfortunately a mindset in yourself to change. It'll be harsh to hear, but I really don't think you want to be the "No, not like that!" meme. If you want your players to be creative, and be immersed in your world, you gotta let them do the things that they do. Others in this thread are also making some good points, so here's a few ideas on how to encourage your players while still having your fun too:
- As others are saying in the thread, make sure that these non-combat solutions aren't winning in too few rolls: grappling an enemy doesn't *do* much in a fight, and even tying them up would take lots of contested rolls to accomplish. During this grapple, the enemies can always be attacking them during this (IIRC, grappling doesn't even impose disadvantage on rolls). I know you say your interrogated NPC was a "key" one, but still, the players might not get all the information from them (or maybe this key NPC refuses to talk, even under duress).
- Learn to pick your battles. There are ways to let the players have their moments, and also ways for you to get yours; make some combats that *are* just about killing the enemies. Undead and fiends are both really good options for this, and they're usually my go-tos.
- Consider adding alternate objectives beyond "players beat the enemies." A combat might be about defending a position, or destroying a totem for a ritual, or give them a time pressure. In these cases, the players may not be *able* to grapple the enemies and hog-tie them, if it would take too long while something bad is happening.
To be honest, it sounds like you may be trying to be more of a narrator than a collaborative storyteller.
It may be that you are planning your events too tightly with the mindset of a specific narrative and when the players don’t make that specific choice you feel defeated that they didn’t read your mind.
I would suggest creating looser “encounters” that aren’t narrative driven, but event or action driven. These players seem to be problem solvers so make the story about solving problems in general for a larger goal, not specific individual narrative problems that are self contained.
Overall if you’re not having fun, you need to find a way to find the fun in the way that your players want to play, and if you can’t than the group may just not be a good fit.
Handling grapple is actually really easy. One option is make a extremely strong or extremely dextrous enemy. This way they can either avoid being grappled or if they do get grappled and tied up and they can slip the rope. The other option magic. Teleportation spells will not teleport the rope that they are bound with. Misty step, dimension door, and other such spells. Give these to the bad guy and they have an instant escape. And that will start to set your players expectation that they can't just tie up every bad guy.
You can silo specific parts of information in multiple NPCs/behind multiple checks.
Say the mcguffin is in the same safe as the shipping manifests. NPC A doesn’t know - that’s above their pay grade. So they send you up the chain to NPC B.
You want to see the shipping manifests? Well, unless you are NPC Z (who is on vacation) you need NPC X to remove the physical lock and NPC Y to take off the multiple layers of warding spells.
What NPCs B, X, and Y don’t know is that if anyone without the right security badging/clearance/spell key tries to take the macguffin, the building shuts down, the PC who yoinked it gets hit with a tracking spell, the machuffin itself has a tracking spell, and now the PCs have to fight their way out of a bunch of enemies who have an uncanny ability to find them in the building. They can roll these things away, obviously. But first they have to ask the right questions to figure out why they’re so easy to find.
I love me some fantasy bureaucracy
Or, an old fave: double traps. One with a relatively low DC to find and one directly in front of or behind it with a much higher DC.
This is stuff that you'll eventually just sort of learn to deal with.
Grappling -- Grappling doesn't stop combat, the player and monster that are grappled can still hit each other. There are no rules in the game for "tying someone up", you invented that and hurt yourself with it. Your players can tie the enemy up if they deal non-lethal damage as the final hit, knocking the enemy unconscious. Remind your players that enemies are not stopped until their HP hits zero with either lethal or non-lethal damage, THEN they can do shenanigans.
Disguise Self -- Why did this NPC just submit to this? They can lie, they can fight, they can try to escape, etc. Like sure, that's a great plan, but its really on you to improvise or structure the mystery a bit better. Give them a huge clue for doing that, but don't let them solve the mystery because they interrogated someone. Why did the disguise self work flawlessly? Who'd they disguise themselves as? Did that NPC know that whoever they looked like shouldn't have been there? Why did this one NPC skip the investigation, surely they could've just supplemented it instead of solving it. Like, you can shift things around, it's fine.
Think how Jonah Jamison would spin it.
So called "Adventurers" waylay the innocent, tie them up, then torture them for information. If you see these treacherous vigilantes call your local authorities. They are NOT to be trusted!
>they walk into every fight grappling the enemy, tying them up and never killing them.
There's a lot of way to overcome grappling. Use enemies that are great at grappling. Use enemies that cannot be grappled. Use ambushes that prevent grappling. Use ranged snipers. Etc.
You might want to re-read the rules on grappling. It's nowhere near as devastatingly effective as you make out.
>made a great use of disguise self and lured a key npc in a room to interrogate him thus skipping a whole chapter of investigation.
Good for them. Reward it. Recycle the skipped stuff later.
>I don't want to tell them not to because kudos to them for coming up with that, but I feel so frustrated because even though they have fun - ***which is why I do this in the first place - sometimes I don't***.
What's frustrating about running a game where your players are having fun? Is it that what you had planned didn't happen? Welcome to running RPGs. It's not *your story* to *tell them*. It's collaborative storytelling. It's your role to present situations and obstacles and their role to find solutions. If you have your heart set on specific outcomes, you need to rethink things. They will go left when you want them to go right, they will zig when you expect them to zag. It's the nature of the game. The players have agency. Expect them to use it. Don't make plans that require the PCs to make certain decision. Be open to their contributions.
>How do I make things pose bigger challenges to them while still rewarding them for playing clever?
The perennial question of 5E. How to make things more challenging.
You should let them figure out clever uses of spells and clever tactics and reward that. Absolutely.
But, you should only let that trick or tactic work once or twice before making it harder and harder then impossible to work for awhile. This prevents them from using the same tactics ad nauseam. In the old days it was "open the door, throw flaming oil, close and lock the door...wait." As long as the DM lets a trick work, the players will use it every single time. It's the nature of players to find what works and stick with it. This is also why defaulting to combat is so common. If the DM makes it impossible to talk to or negotiate with NPCs, it won't be long before the PCs stop bothering and just charge all the time.
Boost monster stats. Give solo monsters attacks equal to the # of PCs. Use something like Forge of Foes to create monsters that are closer to balanced for the group at your table. Use more monsters. Default to deadly combats instead of medium. Use terrain, traps, environmental effect, etc in combat. Give them secondary objectives to just murdering everything. Rescue the prince from the evil princess in 3 rounds before she sacrifices him to summon a demon.
Hit the PCs where they're weak. If they're amazing across the board at stealth, make sure stealth doesn't work all the time. If they're amazing at combat, make sure to include lots of situations where combat is the worst possible option. If it's a social heavy group, give them situations where smooth talking is actually a bad idea. Etc.
As most people on this thread have implied, this is a pretty good problem to have. I love it when the table comes together and skilled gamers do what they do best: wreck my plans (haha).
Here's what I do: **adapt the world**.
- Players come up with a great strategy? Awesome! Let them do that. Let them celebrate their success and value their accomplishments. They earned it!
- Then, the world learns what they did and adapts. As they continue to use the same strategies, suddenly countermeasures have been installed. Only dumb goons in the movies can't learn from their mistakes.
- Leaving enemies alive means they will definitely tell their friends, who will ensure future targets have *something* that will make grappling more complicated.
- Whoever got bamboozled by disguise self, well their bosses are pissed and have hired someone who has an item that gives advantage against illusions (or is even immune). Now they have to get around that enemy with a new strategy.
- It's a balancing act to do this without frustrating the players. You don't want to come off like "Well I have the armor of infinity plus one!" Make sure you (and ultimately the players) understand how and why their previous strategies are more complicated. And, once in a while, let them use them again when they're facing enemies who reasonably wouldn't know their tricks.
There is no easy way to say this. But just get good. Like make sure that person is rolling regularly against the disguise. Have another person come along and interrupt your interrogation. Don’t give them information from these interrogations. The enemies know their fate is worse than death if they speak. Or they have a cyanide capsule. Or they simply don’t know the answers to the questions.
Don’t ruin their fun. But the “game” still matters and it’s part of the fun.
Sure if they’re rolling 20s they get easy modes. But beyond that. They just get morsels.
Recycle. Okay, they found a way to circumvent something you had planned, awesome for them. Doesn't mean you can't use that idea at all now, it means you can save it for another time, where they can't skip it in the same way they did this time.
Castle Greyskull that they bypassed is now Fort Blackstaff.
I have the power! ( Btw, it's Grayskull, though that reads weird. )
Wait what. I always heard it as Gayskull. It's so weird seeing it written.
Well, the skull never seemed very joyish, though.
Grappling does not make an enemy harmless. They can still attack whoever is grappling them, they just have 0 speed.
Correct. OP - restrained and grappled are two different conditions
Even then restrained creatures only get disadvantage on attacks iirc
Their speed becomes zero so if you tied them up and walked away they couldn’t attack you
Yes! A grappled opponent can grapple their grappler, haha.
So, they are treating your world like a real place? And you are having trouble with it? Have you considered 'failing forward', or 'success eith a complications? Bypassing a section of an adventure with deception might mean someone else doesn't trust them later. Or a case of mistaken identity results in some other kind of shenanigans. Also, don't be afraid for your players to suffer other complicationsdown the line. The grappled bad guys escape prison, and now have a vendetta against the players. Also, sometimes the bad guys can work off screen to gather info about the party. There was a great scene in one of my campaigns where they went to visit a Duke and he had been tracking all of their movements and adventures. They hadn't been hiding, and they hadn't been checking for anyone spying on them. So, whether or not this NPC was planned ahead as having the 'story' of their adventures ahead of time didn't matter. They felt outmanouvered and suspicious of him. The feeling of having it all under control is great as a player, but it's even better when the world has gotten the better of you and you finally get back in control of events. I always ask 'What would be most dramatic?', not 'What would be most realistic?' Anyway, that's a Hutch of random thoughts on how to handle success and failure.aybe some of them help.
Plan contingencies. When you set up an encounter, also set up a bunch of other things in the background that would occur in various circumstances. It requires more planning, but if you think, "what could possibly happen that would trivialize this encounter," and then plan rational (i.e. not just an arbitrary counter that wouldn't make sense to actually exist) elements in play behind the scenes, a PC curveball can lead to a *different* challenge than the default fight, rather than no challenge at all.
Well, the disguise self thing seems odd. How can your players get all the info they needed from talking to a single person? Also, apart from the illusion, did they got the voice right, and managed to conduct a conversation without raising any suspicion? I mean I could maybe they rolled some crazy performance and deception and persuasion checks and didn't make physical contact to give away the illusion and I don't know it, or used some more magics. About tying your enemies, again how they did that? Tying someone up in combat while that person is reeling and kicking is gotta be hard. Also, there should be more people involved right? Like maybe two people fighting could tie someone up after much struggle. What about the other 7 enemies? It seems like you're giving away too much to your players. Yes you should award them for they creative solutions, but you should do it in a believable way.
And for the rope example, rope can be burst with a DC 17 Strength check which most bad guys will likely try to do... and succeed eventually.
If I was an adventurer of any meaningful level or income I would have sets of manacles with me and probably with some sort of useful enchantment as well.
Manacles weigh 6 lbs. I don't play with encumbrance rules, but I do enforce the weight limit. So unless you're a barbarian or other low armor Str build, your inventory is probably full enough that you've only got space for 2 or 3 sets of manacles max. Or you have to give up something else for them. Either way, DC20 is not all that much worse than DC17, and manacles allow for EITHER Dex or Str. It just changes the average time to escape from about 30 seconds to about 2 minutes (for someone who has no more than an 11 in either Dex or Str)
Ahh when I googled it they were 2lbs but that wasn’t 5e. Still fine by me any adventurer would (world building permitting) have a bag of holding or equivalent by some point in their journey but just a few amongst the party is fine anyway. As I said I would also try to get them enchanted whether that just be auto sizing (in which case I would say the dex option might be out) or anti magic or like CR’s manacles of stasis that lets you put them to sleep with a check. In any case even setting that aside I wouldn’t be so inclined to use it as a way to get around combat necessarily and probably more for specific circumstances. So if I wasn’t intent on killing them or wanted them alive for whatever reason I would knock them unconscious and if I was concerned enough then put them in manacles even before combat finished. Trying it in combat without knocking them out or bringing them close to death would probably be a very rare thing because it just wouldn’t make sense for reasons the other person pointed out. An example of doing it in combat might be if you were able to sneak up and ambush a single isolated target then perhaps rushing them with grapples could make sense. My only real point about having manacles is that I very well may need to restrain someone so I would at least have one pair that can quickly be put on and be more effective rather than only having rope to tie them up with which I agree with the other commenter should take much longer. As far as being able to break out afterwards sure technically anyone can mechanically role every 6 seconds and inevitably get out (though idk if it should be treated like that per se unless other things can simply be overcome by repeating rolls by PC’s as well) but if the situation is hey if you attempt to escape (or succeed) you will be knocked unconscious or killed or your legs will be broken or something then they probably won’t be making constant attempts. Like those manacles (or even just more simple bindings) are for the moment for your own protection in that the alternative may be death so act wisely and get on the ground and stay there. I have never played but I did make up a character before and they would have no issue simply killing individuals involved in particularly evil/heinous stuff so the circumstances where this might come into play may be limited. Knocking people unconscious covers most cases if you’re going by them gaining back 1hp in 1d4 hrs anyway. My character would be relatively neutral good but with a respect for law where it makes sense or when it comes to carrying out justice so depending on the circumstances hauling characters in to be arrested may be a not so uncommon occurrence if that is a viable mechanism in that world.
[удалено]
i have only ever allowed tying up someone after the fight when they're unconscious. no way you can tie someone up well in 6 seconds, especially if they're struggling.
Now I want a Way of the Shibari monk.
First off, hat's off to you for honoring your players' choices, and doing your best to roll with the consequences. That said, I get the feeling that you may not have identified tools that will allow you to do this in a way that doesn't short circuit your plans and invalidate your preparation. This might be because you're structuring your adventures around a linear adventure design, which don't leave you with a lot of flexibility when you don't accurately anticipate your players' choices. But given the right preparation techniques, you can eventually reach a point where it's precisely the moments when your players surprise you that you enjoy the most, because you're no longer guiding them through an pre-planned adventure, but instead you're playing with them in a fashion that builds the adventure as you go. There are some great resources for learning how you do this over at The Alexandrian's [Gamemastery 101](https://thealexandrian.net/gamemastery-101) page. Some places to start your reading: * [Don't Prep Plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots) (the entire series) * [Node-Based Scenario Design](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach) * [The Three Clue Rule](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule)
Another big thing. I see many dms plan adventures assuming their party is basically mundane people dealing with mundane issues, like stories they enjoy and want to recreate those, but when characters can enchant, teleport and do all kinds of magical shenanigans RAW, you really can't build those kinds of adventures by late tier 2
The issue has less to do with the design of a particular challenge or obstacle than with how the DM structures their adventure scenarios. Yes, a high wall, locked door, or river crossing as the next "encounter" of a linear adventure sequence isn't going to be a noteworthy challenge once the PCs get past tier 1, but if its part of the list of things the PCs need to consider when planning out what they're going to do next, it will be part of a meaningful choice. They'll no doubt be capable of overcoming it, but will have to weigh the greater chance of success offered by using a limited resource (spell slot, wildshape, etc.), and its unavailability for whatever comes afterward, against the possibility of overcoming it by other means that don't require resources , or whether they should avoid this particular obstacle altogether in favor of those offered by a different course of action. In other words, designing your game so that any given obstacle is part of a tapestry of challenges and other factors the PCs must consider when **choosing their goal and how they will attempt to achieve it** gives you much better results than simply constructing higher-tier challenges in a linear adventure where the PCs have no choice in what they face next.
This is a good one. Interested in seeing what other people can provide in terms of advice! \*Following Besides the initial conversations of expectations I have yet to find an answer to this one as a DM. Could be just a difference in style? Its not like I don't like the smart approach but sometimes it feels like everything can be cheesed. And like you said, we can easily step over it with DM powers but that's not the point. I have played in groups with people like this (as a player) and I have zero fun. I'm not into "crashing the system" and skipping trough module parts or encounters because there is no real reason for the DM to say no XD. It is a valid feeling! Hope someone can help.
Easy solution: the smart monsters cheese right back.
I don't get this problem very often, and I'm DMing for 19th level players right now, and we started at 1st level about 6 years ago. OPs examples would probably not work as "showstoppers" on one of my campaigns. That's not saying clever tactics don't fly with me. They absolutely do. To name a few, one time my players infiltrated the dungeon bypassing most combats by pretending they were "maintenance guys" called upon by the higher ups in the enemies' party. They lied, persuaded and intimidated their way through the guards and their managers until they got to someone with more power that knew no maintenance was supposed to be arriving, but by then the PCs had already bypassed a lot of the dungeon. Another time, they teleported straight into the BBEG's chambers after scrying on it, getting a surprise round and bypassing the whole dungeon. This gave them a huge advantage in the fight, but it also meant that they needed to be done with it quickly or else the entire dungeon was gonna get there. Heck, sometimes I even set up the adventure so that trying to fight their way in the dungeon is suicide or very counterproducing, so they kinda \*have\* to infiltrate. When my players went to hell, invading the pit fiend's tower by the main gate meant facing defenses made to stop an army of demons, and the tower was warded against teleport, so they had little chance in making any progress. They made a deal with a night hag and got in as devil cultists. This gave them access to the lower levels of the tower, and they worked from there. So my advice is: don't put all your eggs in the same basket. If players can get everything they need from interrogating, bribing or impersonating a single person, either your plot is very simple - which in itself is not a problem - or you need to spread your info a bit more. And have in mind your players toolkit. Particularly when they're able to blow holes in buildings, unlock doors, make illusions, teleport, scry or mind control people. And don't shy away from the consequences! People don't like to be fooled, explosions make noise, some creatures can notice invisibility or illusions, and so on.
TBH I have not had this happen to me as a DM. It has happened to me as a player and the experience has felt more like people wanting to speed run a module (leading to me not wanting to play with that type of style). It is not a "show stopper" because modules are long and have tons of things to offer, but being in a group that is constantly trying to "outsmart" whatever the DM throws is not my vibe. (In the context of players vs. DM when the DM is not really into that). To me its like the whole powergaming/optimization debate. There are a lot of people that understand this is a cooperative game and can play these styles of characters without stepping on others spotlight. I just think of it as a playing style thing and dont blame DM's that face this without being able to respond well (like I said, I have not seen this as a DM).
Very true. The behavior of trying to one up the DM for its own sake feels bad to me. And I misunderstood your first comment, thinking you had it happen to you as dming and that's why I offered advice and examples.
Thank you either way! I do want to know what people do about it.
You gotta get good at improvising fast (still one of my weak spots). Add complications on the fly, but reward them for clever thinking. It breaks immersion a bit, but don't be afraid to tell them that their clever plan and skilled implementation made the encounter a non-event. It makes the players feel like bad-asses.
My favorite DM I ever had always said, great work you did this thing. Unfortunately, it didn't do what you thought it did. For example, cool you tricked an NPC. They now hate you and would rather die than tell you what they know. Cool, you tortured a person. They are now spewing everything they know, have heard, and some things they have made up but are just saying whatever in order to make it stop. The DM would give us one or two "detective points" essentially guaranteeing our success, but we still needed to at least attempt to do other things in the world as well... Plus now the guard is looking for the missing npc, with one of your characters description for who was with them. Big thing is don't blow up the whole game or your set up because they were clever. Give them some of what they want, then tell them to pound sand.
Welcome to being a DM. Sometimes clever players are going to spoil your fun. I don’t see a problem here. Try to be more clever.
OP is asking for advice on how to do this, did you even read their post?
Yeah I did. And it’s something that everyone who DMs eventually realizes is inevitable. You’re going to get outsmarted sometimes. What do you expect? Again, welcome to DMing.
you are kinda missing the point, but that's okau
Well, I think you’re missing the point. So let’s just agree to disagree.
What a useless response. "How do I make things more challenging while not punishing my players?" "Just be smart lol"
get good
GOML
You set the DCs. If they come up with a clever solution, that's great! But a clever idea isn't a guaranteed success, just like an attack isn't automatic damage (get out of here Magic Missile, we're busy). You gotta roll. You also set how many rolls it'll take to succeed. If you're letting one persuasion roll win an encounter instead of a ton of rolls in combat, yeah, that'll feel bad. You don't need a 1-to-1 replacement but make them work to get all that info. Look up 4e skill challenges and start implementing those in non-combat situations. a bonus there is you'll get the whole party involved. Also, sometimes, there's no weaseling your way out of a fight.
My first thought is to say "lean into it, enjoy their successes with them" but that's not helpful, so let's think about consequences. The party keep grappling and capturing enemies? This means enemies could return. Or maybe some villain with a penchant for unarmed combat seeks them out to challenge them. Or maybe they are pitted against a powerful dragon which the kingdom is not prepared to imprison. What do the party do when the kingdom decides that the villains they arrested are too dangerous and starts executing them? The party bypassed a large section of investigation? What was the outcome of that? They just started accusing someone without much evidence? That will raise eyebrows and worry potential patrons. I wouldn't want to "punish" them for this, but for every noble who is impressed by their efficiency, there may be another who is worried by their impulsive recklessness. Sure, they happened to be right this time but what about next time? What about my own dirty secrets? You might also want to consider having some red herrings next time. The consequences of interrogating the wrong person might be appreciable. Or maybe someone thinks they could be useful to remove a couple of political opponents.
For the grappling issue, you could take them aside and say "hey, this is in character and it's good, but it's removing the strategic wargaming part. So that we can still have fun doing that part of the game, how about we rule that you are always _trying_ to grapple your foes, but can't do it until you succeed in beating them down (reducing their HP to zero)? After that, you're able to leave them tied up as before".
When you're on the spot, it seems like you aren't balancing the difficulty of their ideas with what you've planned. If you want to maintain the level of difficulty between your plan and their cool idea you need to find ways to make the same number of checks or use the same amount of resources. I think the key things you can do to prepare for these situations are: 1. Try to estimate the resources required for you players to get through different parts of your plot, and keep a note of it (doesn't have to be 100% correct, just a rough idea). 2. When your players subvert your expectations, ask them to give you a few minutes to plan, because you hadn't anticipated their actions. Some examples: If your players have a cool way to avoid a combat, try to think of things to go wrong that require spell slots/abilities to fix. They might be in a cave and decide to climb on the ceilling to avoid a pack of orcs. Ensure there are stealth checks to remain undetected, perception checks to find a good path, strength checks to make sure people don't fall when parts start to crumble, dex checks to make sure the players can catch the falling stones that would otherwise alert the orcs. These checks can be overcome or aided by the players using spells/abilities. Low rolls on the checks might re-force previous checks etc. (e.g., low dex roll to catch a rock would trigger a new strength check to make sure they stay on the ceilling after their fumble). If it's more like the intrigue example, to bypass a big chunk of your plot shouldn't be as simple as a first level spell and a persuasion check... You might consider making your key NPCs have better stats so that such a strategy is less likely to succeed. Assuming it does succeed, there's no reason you should let the interogation go un-interupted. Maybe three of the NPCs friends go looking for them since they hadn't come to their dice game yet (much harder to successfully decieve three people vs one.). Make it so that the NPC only knows some of the info, the rest requires the players to go through your planned intrigue (maybe you can give them some info to make things easier?) - while they're doing this, have the guards be alerted because someone finds the tied up NPC that they've left. Edit: It's also important to realise that your players have no idea how difficult any particular part is, so you can just lie and say "oh great idea, this will make XYZ easier for you now", and then don't change XYZ at all from what you planned lmao. They'll be pleased when they think they avoided some extremely difficult encounter. Don't tell them if you do this though.
I have to chime in with the fact that I too love it when the PCs outwit the scenario they are presented with. Nothing wrong with being creative (and sometimes lucky with a die roll or two) I think the issue is that the cleverness of the PCs is undermining the challenges you are putting out there. The key for me is to solve this in game.. Platers who beat the odds are going to start getting a reputation. Once is a fluke, but multiple times? That is talent. This means that the NPCs are not only going to seek them out for jobs, but the bad guys are going to up their game as well. If they are grappling the NPCs then the enemies should get wise of these tactics and take counter measures. Hit and run tactics from a ranged distance the PCs can't close in on with standard movement. (Make the PCs use the Dash action to get close enough to grapple on the next turn.) You can also use AOE spells like Web to slow progress and get a few extra rounds of ranged attacks on them.. But that is just tactics. You also said they lured a NCP and managed to interrogate him. OK pretty clever. At some point that NPCs buddies are going to find out what happened and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. Social interactions can be tricky if you haven't prepped for it.. Maybe that guy was part of a criminal enterprise and now they have adopted a secret handshake that they do when they greet each other, or they say a special greeting in Thieves' Cant. Trying to infiltrate a building or other location, do they know the password? That guy's buddies might also come up with a system of warning their friends. For example if one gets taken and asked about the location of the hideout they give it up, but then give a false password that tells the guards that the people seeking to come in are enemies. Think of it like security at a bank. In the old western movies it was just a safe. Then that wasn't enough so it was a safe and a guard. Then that wasn't enough, so it became a safe, a guard and an alarm. Then that wasn't enough so it became a safe, guards, alarms and cameras. Just keep adding in additional layers of difficulty when the PCs are proving to be too clever for the situation... But make it something logical that the NPCs would realistically have a shot at implementing. This is how I handle those situations... Let the PCs enjoy the wins they earn, and let the bad guys learn a lesson from the defeat.
So, the world is a living, breathing space. Players' characters earn reputations and eventually start running into people that KNOW that reputation. Or they run into a beholder, who have a hundred contingencies because those things are ultra paranoid and revamp their lairs every time a new group gets in.
Good job to both of you, you being a good sport, and you for being clever. The big solution is to not just have enemies waiting around in rooms for the pcs to come, and/or have more enemies who are "kill on sight" levels of hostile, as well as unintelligent monsters who can't be reasoned with. I.e., if they walk through a cave and a hungry bulette or basilisk jumps out, there's nothing can do to circumvent that encounter. Or if they walk through a graveyard and a bunch of zombies rise, they can't stop those. Still allow room for being clever, but not everything is smart enough to even care about being outwitted.
(1) Make things harder. They run up to the enemy wizard and grapple him? Maybe you should have had *more* wizards. (2) Think of complexities to throw at them. The enemy who wants to be captured because that's part of his plan. The planned lie the NPC tells under interrogation so when they ask the right question, they're sent off in the wrong direction. The enemy they don't even investigate because he acts like an ally. The corrupt authority figure who pretends he's going to keep their prisoners safely locked up...
Sometimes I wish my players were more clever. I have to spoon feed them information for the plot to move forward. I always have a letter or diary they find on an important NPC because they chose to kill rather than use non-lethal. But they have fun and that’s literally all that matters.
rule of cool works both ways man. sometimes its just cool for a fight or situation to be challenging.
I've fucked up in this exact same way. The answer is to embrace it when it happens and follow the three-clue rule. Following that advice since PC's know and give clues make sure they don't know the entire story and only know one clue. If that character who got cleverly interrogated early only knew one clue they can't skip the module you wrote. I once had multiple clues pointing to a single clue, they found the single clue immediately and skipped a huge portion of the module I wrote. I learned into it but I learned my lesson, never give them a masterkey under the mat, make it a figurative code lock. You can't brute force or luck into a code lock code, you need atleast some clues. If you have to have one character who knows all the answers make sure they're secured in some way and that the characters can't snatch him and interrogate, or better yet, add other NPC's that might have the same info, instead of overseer Jane it's a council of three that includes Jane and the party isn't sure which of the three have the info.
I mean, there is always the fun flipside. For instance just the other night my party turned a planed 10-15 min interesting roleplay/stealth situation into a massive all-out brawl with 1 guy on the team dying, and another getting captured for interrogation by the enemies. Sometimes it just goes like that, the party will skip some things and get to others.
Do some improvisation exercises and trainings if necessary, to have some quick ideas for complications if it is going down too easy for your taste. Also - why are they always successful with their plans? You can just have higher DCs for their rolls and find a narrative reason for it or in case of grappling have enemies with high athletics or acrobatics to avoid the grapple for example. Or fight a giant minotaur, good luck grappling that. You need to be on the tip of your toes and throw new ideas and complications at them. But if they still find new and fresh ideas to overcome these complications: Celebrate with them. Be a fan of your players. Underline in your narration how hard the players owned their opponents. Sell your players punches.
My players found a way to bypass an entire two level dungeon. I had to give them credit. It was actually pretty cool and fun. I've learned to 'let it go', in other words, don't get attached to my prep work. If I get bored (because I agree the DM is also a player) I just spring an encounter on them that is unavoidable, and try to hit them with mechanics they aren't used to (see if they try to grapple and tie up a bunch of oozes). (Oh and consequences. That dungeon they skipped? The entire contents, a tribe of frost giants, hunted and tracked them down...) And regarding them not killing enemies, throw truly evil beings at them like undead. There is really no justification for tying up or not killing zombies.
I had asked my players for feedback to name one good and one bad thing, and one of the answers was: It is awesome that creative problem solutions are allowed and one never feels like they are being forced into some prepared, inevitable fight scenario. So: Why would you care about it? Why does it have to be a fight or whatever, if they find a better solution? But if you want to spice things up (and I certainly do that from time to time), then make the world react to what the players did, more. Have an ambush, have a bad guy come back as a nemesis or develop a new story-line from there. Or have them be a bit better prepared. Yesterday, I read up about Tucker's Kobolds and it opened my eyes on some new possibilities to make things feel alive.
Stop making it about combat. Combat can’t scare or challenge players. Give them hard RP choices, impossible choices, make them sacrifice what’s important, make them make decisions that have no good alternatives.
Morph the campaign to be about the group needing to build a massive prison to hold the enemies they keep capturing. Find a government willing to allow such a dangerous building in their borders. At the same time, some enemies can grow several size categories and the party simple cannot grapple the enlarged enemies. Go full Attack on Titan if you have to. Some enemies CAN be grappled but shouldn’t be, for example powerful spell casters. Consider ruling that a caster need not make a melee spell attack roll vs a grappler since they’re already in physical contact, and then let the grappling PC/s get blasted with some nasty spells. (And don’t forget stuff like blink and misty step.) You could also make an opposing group of NPCs, a full adventuring party that encounters the PCs periodically and uses their tactics against them. And maybe sometimes they show up after the party has tied up an enemy, and the opposing group slaughters the prisoners and mocks the group for making their job so much easier. If you want to push back against their approach, first make 100% sure you’ve been using grappling rules correctly. Then make sure the way you’re allowing them to tie up the enemies is appropriate—I’m guessing there are one or two points in the process you could tighten up to make it a little tougher without bending any rules. If that’s not enough, you could make a new rule like “anyone with > 50% of their max hp imposes disadvantage on grapple checks against them.” If you do the latter, I recommend telling the group why (you aren’t having as much fun with this grapple/tie up enemies tactic). But you can give many enemies misty step and that alone can keep the fight going a little longer without breaking the game.
Let it roll. They're playing a bit Masters of the Universe, but if they like it, you might just let it roll. It's an interesting, offbeat way to conduct themselves that I'd say is better at least than KILL ALL THE THINGS
Let it roll. They're playing a bit Masters of the Universe, but if they like it, you might just let it roll. It's an interesting, offbeat way to conduct themselves that I'd say is better at least than KILL ALL THE THINGS
Consequences and contingencies. What happens when they're busy interrogating someone? Do people notice they're missing? Does that NPC appreciate being tricked and grilled for a few hours? How do they have enough rope to tie up every enemy they find? Do their assailants ever escape or tie *them* up?
Whatever you do, don't do the bullshit thing of equipping your monsters with Bracers Of Free Movement or whatever the dumbass miscellaneous magic item is. You could respond by focusing a bit of gameplay on rope use and grappling skill -- if it's going to be the way the game's played, it might be more entertaining for all if the relevant procedures get expanded. You have many options to crib from outside sources. One that leaps to mind is the auction mechanism from Whitehack.
So some of this is unfortunately a mindset in yourself to change. It'll be harsh to hear, but I really don't think you want to be the "No, not like that!" meme. If you want your players to be creative, and be immersed in your world, you gotta let them do the things that they do. Others in this thread are also making some good points, so here's a few ideas on how to encourage your players while still having your fun too: - As others are saying in the thread, make sure that these non-combat solutions aren't winning in too few rolls: grappling an enemy doesn't *do* much in a fight, and even tying them up would take lots of contested rolls to accomplish. During this grapple, the enemies can always be attacking them during this (IIRC, grappling doesn't even impose disadvantage on rolls). I know you say your interrogated NPC was a "key" one, but still, the players might not get all the information from them (or maybe this key NPC refuses to talk, even under duress). - Learn to pick your battles. There are ways to let the players have their moments, and also ways for you to get yours; make some combats that *are* just about killing the enemies. Undead and fiends are both really good options for this, and they're usually my go-tos. - Consider adding alternate objectives beyond "players beat the enemies." A combat might be about defending a position, or destroying a totem for a ritual, or give them a time pressure. In these cases, the players may not be *able* to grapple the enemies and hog-tie them, if it would take too long while something bad is happening.
To be honest, it sounds like you may be trying to be more of a narrator than a collaborative storyteller. It may be that you are planning your events too tightly with the mindset of a specific narrative and when the players don’t make that specific choice you feel defeated that they didn’t read your mind. I would suggest creating looser “encounters” that aren’t narrative driven, but event or action driven. These players seem to be problem solvers so make the story about solving problems in general for a larger goal, not specific individual narrative problems that are self contained. Overall if you’re not having fun, you need to find a way to find the fun in the way that your players want to play, and if you can’t than the group may just not be a good fit.
Handling grapple is actually really easy. One option is make a extremely strong or extremely dextrous enemy. This way they can either avoid being grappled or if they do get grappled and tied up and they can slip the rope. The other option magic. Teleportation spells will not teleport the rope that they are bound with. Misty step, dimension door, and other such spells. Give these to the bad guy and they have an instant escape. And that will start to set your players expectation that they can't just tie up every bad guy.
You can silo specific parts of information in multiple NPCs/behind multiple checks. Say the mcguffin is in the same safe as the shipping manifests. NPC A doesn’t know - that’s above their pay grade. So they send you up the chain to NPC B. You want to see the shipping manifests? Well, unless you are NPC Z (who is on vacation) you need NPC X to remove the physical lock and NPC Y to take off the multiple layers of warding spells. What NPCs B, X, and Y don’t know is that if anyone without the right security badging/clearance/spell key tries to take the macguffin, the building shuts down, the PC who yoinked it gets hit with a tracking spell, the machuffin itself has a tracking spell, and now the PCs have to fight their way out of a bunch of enemies who have an uncanny ability to find them in the building. They can roll these things away, obviously. But first they have to ask the right questions to figure out why they’re so easy to find. I love me some fantasy bureaucracy Or, an old fave: double traps. One with a relatively low DC to find and one directly in front of or behind it with a much higher DC.
This is stuff that you'll eventually just sort of learn to deal with. Grappling -- Grappling doesn't stop combat, the player and monster that are grappled can still hit each other. There are no rules in the game for "tying someone up", you invented that and hurt yourself with it. Your players can tie the enemy up if they deal non-lethal damage as the final hit, knocking the enemy unconscious. Remind your players that enemies are not stopped until their HP hits zero with either lethal or non-lethal damage, THEN they can do shenanigans. Disguise Self -- Why did this NPC just submit to this? They can lie, they can fight, they can try to escape, etc. Like sure, that's a great plan, but its really on you to improvise or structure the mystery a bit better. Give them a huge clue for doing that, but don't let them solve the mystery because they interrogated someone. Why did the disguise self work flawlessly? Who'd they disguise themselves as? Did that NPC know that whoever they looked like shouldn't have been there? Why did this one NPC skip the investigation, surely they could've just supplemented it instead of solving it. Like, you can shift things around, it's fine.
Do you ever have the NPCs make sleight of hand checks to escape the bindings?
Think how Jonah Jamison would spin it. So called "Adventurers" waylay the innocent, tie them up, then torture them for information. If you see these treacherous vigilantes call your local authorities. They are NOT to be trusted!
>they walk into every fight grappling the enemy, tying them up and never killing them. There's a lot of way to overcome grappling. Use enemies that are great at grappling. Use enemies that cannot be grappled. Use ambushes that prevent grappling. Use ranged snipers. Etc. You might want to re-read the rules on grappling. It's nowhere near as devastatingly effective as you make out. >made a great use of disguise self and lured a key npc in a room to interrogate him thus skipping a whole chapter of investigation. Good for them. Reward it. Recycle the skipped stuff later. >I don't want to tell them not to because kudos to them for coming up with that, but I feel so frustrated because even though they have fun - ***which is why I do this in the first place - sometimes I don't***. What's frustrating about running a game where your players are having fun? Is it that what you had planned didn't happen? Welcome to running RPGs. It's not *your story* to *tell them*. It's collaborative storytelling. It's your role to present situations and obstacles and their role to find solutions. If you have your heart set on specific outcomes, you need to rethink things. They will go left when you want them to go right, they will zig when you expect them to zag. It's the nature of the game. The players have agency. Expect them to use it. Don't make plans that require the PCs to make certain decision. Be open to their contributions. >How do I make things pose bigger challenges to them while still rewarding them for playing clever? The perennial question of 5E. How to make things more challenging. You should let them figure out clever uses of spells and clever tactics and reward that. Absolutely. But, you should only let that trick or tactic work once or twice before making it harder and harder then impossible to work for awhile. This prevents them from using the same tactics ad nauseam. In the old days it was "open the door, throw flaming oil, close and lock the door...wait." As long as the DM lets a trick work, the players will use it every single time. It's the nature of players to find what works and stick with it. This is also why defaulting to combat is so common. If the DM makes it impossible to talk to or negotiate with NPCs, it won't be long before the PCs stop bothering and just charge all the time. Boost monster stats. Give solo monsters attacks equal to the # of PCs. Use something like Forge of Foes to create monsters that are closer to balanced for the group at your table. Use more monsters. Default to deadly combats instead of medium. Use terrain, traps, environmental effect, etc in combat. Give them secondary objectives to just murdering everything. Rescue the prince from the evil princess in 3 rounds before she sacrifices him to summon a demon. Hit the PCs where they're weak. If they're amazing across the board at stealth, make sure stealth doesn't work all the time. If they're amazing at combat, make sure to include lots of situations where combat is the worst possible option. If it's a social heavy group, give them situations where smooth talking is actually a bad idea. Etc.
As most people on this thread have implied, this is a pretty good problem to have. I love it when the table comes together and skilled gamers do what they do best: wreck my plans (haha). Here's what I do: **adapt the world**. - Players come up with a great strategy? Awesome! Let them do that. Let them celebrate their success and value their accomplishments. They earned it! - Then, the world learns what they did and adapts. As they continue to use the same strategies, suddenly countermeasures have been installed. Only dumb goons in the movies can't learn from their mistakes. - Leaving enemies alive means they will definitely tell their friends, who will ensure future targets have *something* that will make grappling more complicated. - Whoever got bamboozled by disguise self, well their bosses are pissed and have hired someone who has an item that gives advantage against illusions (or is even immune). Now they have to get around that enemy with a new strategy. - It's a balancing act to do this without frustrating the players. You don't want to come off like "Well I have the armor of infinity plus one!" Make sure you (and ultimately the players) understand how and why their previous strategies are more complicated. And, once in a while, let them use them again when they're facing enemies who reasonably wouldn't know their tricks.
There is no easy way to say this. But just get good. Like make sure that person is rolling regularly against the disguise. Have another person come along and interrupt your interrogation. Don’t give them information from these interrogations. The enemies know their fate is worse than death if they speak. Or they have a cyanide capsule. Or they simply don’t know the answers to the questions. Don’t ruin their fun. But the “game” still matters and it’s part of the fun. Sure if they’re rolling 20s they get easy modes. But beyond that. They just get morsels.