5e Game - Part 13

The heroes trekked thru the wilderness. They must find the hobgoblin army to figure out its size and intentions, much less verify if it even exists. They traveled north, along the ancient trade road, avoiding trouble when they could, and fighting when they had to. They fought the ettercap and the giant spiders, and won. They avoided the trolls, deciding not to mess with the regenerating nuisances and instead sneak away from them. They negotiated with the old timer in the woods and gained a guide familiar with the area. The ambush came suddenly, the hydra rising from the swamp and threatening to charge. The druid cast his spell, bringing thorny growth up from the muck and blocking the hydra's path, so it went around (it passed its INT check, what can I say?). Right into the ranger who was scouting ahead of the party. The hydra, huge and menacing, missed many of its attacks on the ranger, and quickly succumbed when the paladin expelled all of his high level spell slots in one round of furious attacks.

The party continued on, an abandoned keep possibly harboring vanguard elements of the hobgoblin horde a mere few hours past the hydra's swamp. They were right, the hobgoblins were here, along with a manticore, a minotaur, worg riding goblins, and a bugbear sorcerer. The party waited until dark, because they forgot that most of those had darkvision and it didn't matter either way, but it at least gave them a chuckle when the hobgoblin in the tower started howling like a ghost and swinging a dead goblin around a magical light. Then they did the thing that all DMs want their PCs to do - they split the party.

Half the party shimmied up the outside of the tower, and came down the stairs, taking out the lone guard pretending to be a ghost (if you're occupying a supposedly haunted keep, might as well enforce the misconception and keep the locals away), and continued on to find the keep's BBEG, said bugbear sorcerer. Having partially surprised him, the Sneaky McStealthertons sent one of their members back up to signal the others to rush the courtyard. Back in the tower, 2 PCs spent 4 rounds convincing themselves that beating up the bad guy's fists with their faces was a bad plan, but not before he got tired of their shenanigans and left to go see what the ruckus in the courtyard was.

Pulling back from the story a sec, let me relate some technical parts of this, and let me tell you, when the party wanted to pull a coordinated assault on a keep that was just a little too big to fully represent on my board (see episode 9 to see the board I made up), I panicked just a wee bit. But the players were insistent, and I remembered what Matt Colville said about it recently, so I let them split the party. I explained several things before they got started - this will all be happening simultaneously, but we are going to run this part first and then pick up the other, and finally join the 2 where it's natural for that to happen; and these PCs and only these PCs will be involved in the first part, and the rest will be in the other, so don't break the meta too much.

I didn't go as far as he does, but you get the idea.

The first part, the attack on the tower, I began tracking rounds from when the first half of the party signaled the 2nd half to begin their assault. When the BBEG got tired (bored, really) and left the tower, I stopped that portion and flipped to the courtyard assault, redrawing my map. The only real confusion was one player, in the first assault force, cast one concentration spell at the BBEG but wanted to be able to cast another concentration spell at the bad guy's in the courtyard. I saw that problem coming and warned him, drop the first concentration spell when you want to because you won't be able to cast the 2nd one until after the first is gone. Since we were playing out the 2 encounters separately, but treating them as happening simultaneously by winding the clock back (as it were) on the 2nd encounter. He finally understood, and not knowing how long until his 2nd concentration spell was desperately needed, he dropped the first early.

That last has to be confusing, so let me try explaining it this way. Round 1, the Sneaky Squad signals the other half of the party to attack, and pushes their own attack on the BBEG (though they had not figured he was the BBEG yet). The non-sneaky squad blow their hunting horn (alerting and hopefully drawing out as many bad guys into the courtyard as possible) and charge towards the keep. Round 2, the druid casts his concentration spell, but then heads away from the fight with the BBEG back to the top of the tower to support the assault on the courtyard. The outside team is still charging, and I've decided they will arrive next round. At this point, I have the conversation with the druid, and he finally decides he will drop his first concentration spell next round. Round 3, still focused on the fight in the tower, the Sneaky Squad fiddle farts around for this and the following 3 rounds with the BBEG, who finally gets bored and leaves. I redraw the map, and we wind the clock back to the end of Round 2, beginning of Round 3, and shift focus to the courtyard. If the druid had not decided to drop his first concentration spell in Round 3 back when we first ran it inside the tower, I would have been forced to deny him the opportunity to cast the 2nd concentration (man, that is a long word to type) spell until we got to the round in this half of the fight that he dropped it in the other half of the fight. Especially if his 1st concentration spell had done something positive for the party, there is no way I'm letting anyone pull a fast one and do something useful with a different concentration spell somewhere else.

So, TL;DR, if you plan on doing something like this, keep assiduous track of the rounds and what happens where and hope the stuff that happens in the 2nd half can't spill over into the 1st half. Otherwise you gotta rewrite history, and that's just a huge pain in the tukhus.

The 2nd assault party hits the courtyard, and receives the charge from pretty much the entirety of the keep. Fortunately, the wizard's ball of hot expanding gas takes out the hobgoblins, and the druid's 2nd concentration spell starts working over the stragglers, continuing to do so till the end of the game. Many rounds of  fighting here, the paladin's retainer falling multiple times, finally into the Land of the Almost Dead, requiring swift intervention from said paladin, before all the baddies (minus the BBEG) succumb to the party's martial and magical prowess. The BBEG immediately bursts from the base of the tower, puts a hurting on the wizard, blinds the druid, and is about to take Billy Bigsteps back to the horde when the party finally corners him and ends him.

We ended the session there, having run over our usual time limit by half an hour or so. Everyone seemed to have fun, though the player of the party's rogue who is out of state on business, missed his PC finally using his bag of 1,000 ball bearings, something he has been waiting for ever since he acquired said bag. The other players taunted him over text, as is only right. But I have to say, as much of a pain in the butt splitting the party was, I think it worked (not tactically, no, but in the sense of the players felt they had say in the game) and I'd definitely allow it again. They really seemed to like it, and other than a little boredom as we reconciled the part they weren't in and some rules discussions, I think they found it intriguing. How do you communicate between the halves of the party? Who is doing what, where and at what time? If you run into something too powerful (much more likely when you don't have your full complement, much less entire skillset) or something you just can't handle, what do you do? And of course, deciding what to do when the bad guy's just won't cooperate and do something you don't expect.

As for the tactics of the baddies, I played the BBEG smart and didn't engage the party except at an advantage to him. This is a very experienced and nasty spellcaster, I'm not going to let him stand toe to toe and trade blows with better armored and numerous foes, the party had to maneuver around him and finally corner him to finish him off. The rest of the baddies simply dogpiled onto the party and used numbers and advantage giving flanks to whittle away the party's HP pool. Do I feel any remorse for doing that? No. Another gripe of mine with 5th edition is how easy the players have it, especially after they get out of Tier One play, and it's true. A 6th level paladin, a 6th level wizard, and a 3rd level fighter (with a 6th level druid calling down lightning from a hidden position) faced down 6 hobgoblins, 4 goblins on a like number of worgs, a minotaur and a manticore, and except for the fighter going into negative HP off a lucky crit from one of the worgs (40 damage in one blow, we run the crit/fumble tables I stole borrowed from Seth Skorkowsky, who you should watch, he's funny and informative) and immediately getting healed by the paladin and not rolling one death save, the party was otherwise fine. Oh sure, low on HP, but really not breaking a sweat over the encounter.

This very combat is a fine example of how out of touch 5th edition's XP, CR, and building encounters by both of those systems really are. I didn't run the numbers before the game as I'm running an old 3rd edition classic adventure, and I ran it straight out of the book. But if you go into your handy-dandy DMG and look at page 82 for XP Thresholds by Character Level, this encounter (the baddies minus the BBEG) is an XP Threshold of 10,400. The four PCs (well, three and an NPC retainer) have a threshold of 6,000 for Deadly encounters. Yep, more than 1.5x the threshold, and that part of the party really didn't have a lot of problems with it. I have very little remorse for throwing all the monsters at the party, and have for a couple of sessions now. I have to admit, though, I have no fix for the CR or XP system in 5th edition - you're never going to nail down what skillsets are in a party, as there are far too many options out there, and even if you narrowed the option you can't keep a party from doing something strange like playing all fighters or rogues or whatnot. Because of that, I wouldn't try to fix XP, I'd develop tools to provide modifiers to XP depending on said party makeup. {hmmm} Going to have to think on that one. 

Tactical considerations - if the party is slinging a lot of AOE (area of effect) spells and don't have anyone with Sculpt Spell, make sure to line up the monsters so the party has to hit each other. Does the BBEG worry about that? No, that's what "chaotic evil" means, those other monsters are there to be ablative meatshields for the BBEG, they can catch a lightning bolt as long as it also hits an adventurer or two. High AC monsters need to be in base contact with the PCs, and flanking positions if there are multiple monsters. Low AC monsters need to use the high AC monsters as cover. Found a fascinating blog called The Monsters Know What They're Doing that does deep dives on individual monster tactics, you should read through it if you're looking for some help.