Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 166 - Dealing with Ill Prepared Parties

Episode Date: March 12, 2023

Sometimes your adventuring parties just aren't ready for an encounter, a trap, or maybe an entire adventure.  What should you do as a DM?  Throw your hands up and walk away?  Throw hands at your players?  Throw a rave instead of gaming that night?  In this episode look at the different ways parties can be ill prepared for what lies ahead. and talk about multiple options for how to handle this situation.   #DnD #Pathfinder #Opendnd #DMTips

This week on the Taking 20 Podcast. wherever you are thank you for listening to the taking 20 podcast episode 166 what to do when your adventurers are completely unprepared i want to thank this week's sponsor angles i could talk to you for hours about the mathematics of angles but it really would be a protracted conversation. If you haven't already, please consider donating to help keep the podcast alive. I received a very generous donation last week from Tim McKenzie. Tim, I greatly appreciate your kind words, your patronage, and your support. He also had some topic ideas for me, and those episodes will be coming very soon.

So once again, thank you, Tim, so much for your very generous donation. Most of the time being a GM is an absolute joy. Granted, a stress-filled, imposter syndrome-laced, hellish landscape of self-doubt and worry, but an absolute joy nonetheless. When your party's wizard has the perfect spell prepared to counterspell the big bad preventing their escape. When the cleric with timely heals keeps the mages in the fight, allowing them to mix sword and spell with devastating effects. When the rogues surprisingly brought pythons? Pethons? The metal bars that you hammer into the side of a pit, and it allows her and her companions a path to climb out of that pit trap,

it always just brings a smile to my face and warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart. Moments when players show ingenuity, planning, forethought, preparation, bringing equipment, and preparing spells that give them the flexibility to deal with unexpected situations in a way that makes your little DM heart grow warm and makes you consider, dare I say it, awarding them experience points or advantage or hero points for their good role-playing and good thinking. And then there's the opposite,

where the characters don't spend any time thinking about what they would need in a winter hellscape. The female fighter is wearing armor that shows more skin than actual metal to protect against sword blows and zero protection to the elements. Oh, why would you buy winter clothing? It's just a 125-mile trip in arctic temperatures. Tell me, do you like your toes? Because you may be about to lose them because they're going to turn black and fall off while

you're schlepping through three-foot snows of the windbite plains. But hey, I'm sure teenagers love looking at drawings of your outfit. Okay, I'm sorry to go on this rant, but huge props to a subreddit called Reasonable Fantasy where women are drawn wearing sensible armor that wouldn't funnel any chest strikes between their, sorry for the term, gargantuan tatas straight to the center of their chest. You know, where you don't want to get stabbed. Don't get me wrong, I was a young man when the Earth was still cooling from the asteroid impacts that formed the moon, so I understand the sex appeal of drawing characters that appeal to you, but come on. Can we even be a touch realistic? Some of these women would have back problems by the time

they turn 19, and some of the guys are drawn not having a six-pack, but an entire freaking case of abs. Jeez, I'm sorry, I went on a little bit of a rant there. I'm feeling a little bit warm. I love players that buy into the story and actually prepare for the difficult life of an adventurer, anticipating that they may need to be ready for likely threats to make it back home. Many of them do, bringing items like chalk or caltrops or a freaking 50 foot of rope even. Those are the players who are more likely to have their character return home, and any character that doesn't prepare adequately but is able to return home because of their ally's preparation, should kiss that other character's feet and turn over part of the share of the treasure. But what if you have

one of those parties? The parties that aren't the prepare first type. They're the charge! Wait, should I have charged? Doesn't matter, I already did! They don't think about what their characters may need to get out of a certain situation, like traps, inclement weather, or an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters throwing their poop at the party. If your players are like that, how can you handle it from behind the screen? In general, ill-prepared parties come in one of three generic flavors. Ill-prepared party composition, ill-prepared equipment, and ill-prepared spells and consumables for the day.

Each one is slightly different, but they're all variations of not thinking ahead. No matter what, you always have the option of just letting the characters die, or what I term the harsh-but-fair solution. The party set out to fight the great red dragon Cinderglide, and they have zero protection from fire and heat damage? All right. You can always let them charge, get turned into charcoal briquettes, and when the players look at you with a hurt face, you can just ask them, well, what the hell did you expect? You think the 900-year-old adult red dragon is just going to lay down

and let you stab them to death? Of course not. You don't get to be 900 years old without a reason, and that reason is that you are an intelligent instrument of fiery death that can level entire towns without setting foot on the ground. You didn't think, and your characters paid the price for it. I also call this, by the way, the so what did you learn moment, after it becomes obvious they weren't ready. It comes in a lot of flavors. One of my recent favorites is when a group of adventurers creatively sank a ship in the ocean and realized as it dipped beneath the waves that, oops, all the treasure that they needed was on that ship. Whoops! What'd you learn? Or when another party went to the Elemental Valley where great elementals meet to negotiate treaties, adjudicate differences,

and other matters of diplomacy among their four empires. The characters charged in, thinking they were badasses, and realized very quickly that gargantuan elementals can, I believe the term I would use is, tear your faces off and use what's left of your corpse as toilet paper. So, what'd you learn? If you don't know about a place, how about you ask somebody before you go? Another option, if the party shows up ill-prepared, is to let them make modifications immediately. Your character would know that they would need water in the bone-dry step. So yes, even though it's not on your character sheet, you have a water skin full of clean water. Write that down. Your character

would know you need water in a desert. Similarly, you're a rogue. You know your character would need thieves tools. Add it to your character sheet, deduct one gold, and let's move on. This is the nice DM option that keeps a player mistake from destroying the campaign or maybe causing hurt feelings around the table. By the way, this is the option I always take with new players. If someone is brand new to a gaming system or new to tabletop RPGs in general, with very rare exceptions, I give them the benefit of the doubt and retcon the situation to say, yes, you brought arrows with your bow. You're new, you didn't know, it's fine. The party showed up, oops, all fighters, no problem. Most of you are new, hey, who wants to switch classes? No problem.

I might even rule that way a second time, but I have to admit after that, I'll start insisting that they think about what they need and ask questions before the adventure begins. You know, to use an analogy, I give them a fish the first couple of times, but I try to teach them to fish along the way. In general, I tend to over-hint about the future of my campaigns. Even in the most role-play-heavy campaigns, where players talk in-character a majority of the time and interact with NPCs in-voice, in-character, in-world,

the players are only inside the characters' lives for a fraction of what would be considered real-time in that world. Unless your gaming group goes places very different than I ever have, you're not going to roleplay doing the laundry in that gaming world, making dinner reservations, or going to the bathroom. Chances are that character has to pick up groceries now and then, and I doubt you're going to roleplay haggling on prices for leaks. If you do, and you and your players are having a great time, gods love you. Hey, I hope you and your friends have a great time doing that.

But most of the time, we're only in characters' heads for what I would call the exciting times. The times where we get to live out the thrilling moments that we players don't get to in our mundane world. I say all of that to mention that the characters in their world have probably heard more about a person, place, or thing than you've disclosed at the table. The Elemental Valley would probably be something that everyone knows about, parents warn their kids about, or might even be in the news that your character could read about when they're on the Turlet. It might even be in the news that your character could read about when they're on the Turlet.

For that reason, if I as the GM know that the characters will be heading to the Elemental Valley, for example, then I will drop very generic hints that the players may want their characters to follow up on. Your Nan used to tell you that when the Elemental Valley is occupied, it spells disaster for any who intrude upon that sacred ground. Or travelers reported storms and what sounded like explosions coming from the elemental valley, and clouds overhead seemed choked with ash and flashes of red. So DMs, consider giving your players hints about what's to come to hopefully reduce the chance that they'll be caught unprepared. I've been talking in a lot of generalities, so let's drill down to the types of ill-preparedness.

Suppose the party has what I will call an ill-defined party composition. Four druids, or no casters, or all ranged fighters. No one coordinates what they're playing, and they all show up to your table with characters that occupy a certain niche, like tank, or blaster, or healer. As I mentioned earlier, you could take the tough but fair approach by making them rough out the adventure or the nice DM approach and let one or more of them change classes immediately. In this scenario though, before you jump to either of those, take a minute to think about the characters the players brought to the table. Not all party tanks are fighters or champions or soldiers. Clerics and druids, actually, especially in Pathfinder 2e, can vary their builds wildly. A cleric of a dwarven god of battle might be given heavy

armor proficiency and have a high armor class. A cleric of an elemental lord may have the ability to cast variants of spells like Firebolt or Fireball. A cleric of the goddess of night may be able to hide in darkness very well, and the Cleric of a Life Domain could be the best healer in the game. Even though they're all Clerics, that's pretty close to the traditional party dynamic of Tank, Blaster, Flanker, and Healer. None of them may be as good as the traditional classes that occupy those roles, but it still could be an interesting party dynamic.

Maybe these churches all see the threat posed by the big bad and send their young champions to deal with it. It's like the Avengers, but for representatives of various deities instead of different types of superheroes. In this scenario, by the way, talk to the players. See if they even want to change or if they want to go forth with what they have. If you're an experienced DM who's run numerous games, you may enjoy the challenge of tweaking your adventure to give an unusual composition a fighting chance. Opening up the battle maps to give those four rangers a chance to hit creatures with arrows as they close to melee,

or tightening the battle map to let your four blaster casters do damage to groups of enemies before they can get close, or reducing the number of mind-affecting spells and abilities that the baddies have to keep the group of four rogues from murdering each other at the behest of the enemies. Speaking of which, I think I need to do an episode on social skills like diplomacy and intimidation, and how they're not freaking mind control. They're influ- you know what? Yeah, more on that in a few weeks. Stay tuned. Back to adjusting your adventure. This is a challenge. It does get easier with time, though. It's generally only possible if you either

A. Want to spend a ton of time rewriting ahead of time, or what I do, B. Adjust creatures and encounters on the fly behind the screen. Maps? Yes, that's almost always an ahead-of-time thing. But if you allow yourself to adjust the creatures behind the screen, then you can more easily find that balance level for the party no matter what composition they show up with. So a party that didn't coordinate ahead of time by the GM being flexible during the adventure may not be a big deal at all. One exception to that I'm going to throw in is if the game's built around a healing magic or abilities and the party has none, no cleric, no medic,

no one brought a healing potion, it's four idiots with swords but no bandages. In this case, if no one wants to switch, you could either A, be extremely free with the healing consumables like potions, medic kits, etc., or you could consider bringing an NPC along on the adventure. The few times I've done this, by the way, the NPC does not help with encounters and doesn't fight. They are traveling along with the PCs to provide a specific service or capability that the party is missing.

They can search for traps if they are a rogue, pick locked doors, heal the party during downtime, or something similar that is absolutely critical for the party to have in the adventure, but they're missing. I rarely, rarely do this because it introduces complications. What is Dr. Heals-a-Lot doing while the party's off adventuring? Are they back at camp reading a book, 101 Ways to Stitch Up Sword Wounds? Are they baking a cake? Would they really never be discovered by a wandering monster? I would be much more likely to adjust the adventure behind the screen than add an NPC or a DMPC. The party missing a rogue, I'll probably just cut down the number of locked doors, say in half, and maybe reduce the number of traps down to the kind of the minimum I feel like would be necessary. The party's missing a healer, potions

will be found in more treasure hordes. That's also the solution I tend to use when parties are ill-prepared when it comes to equipment. If it's absolutely critical that they needed a piece of equipment and don't have it, well, there's a pretty good chance they're going to find a used, rusty, not-quite-as-good-as-new piece of equipment on a dead adventurer somewhere along the way. Leave it to the party whether they recognize the need for it and take it with them or forget about it and regret it later. For example, the party's in the bottom of a 50-foot pit with difficult-to-climb walls.

I would imagine one of your party members will mention, Hey, you remember when we found that adventurer's corpse and took their armor but didn't take the climbing hammer and 20 pythons? Pethons? Fuck, I gotta learn how to say that word. I wish we had those about now. In these adventures, unless the players have acknowledged that death of their characters

is likely and they don't mind their characters dying due to oversight, consider allowing the characters to succeed even when they're not prepared, but maybe that success comes at a cost. In episode 122, I talked about failing forward, where even if the dice say that the character failed, you could allow them to succeed, but at a steep cost. They're able to climb out of the pit, but had to leave something heavy behind, or dropped one of the treasure bags containing 1,500 gold pieces.

As an aside, one of my groups would literally, literally, rather their characters died than leave 1,500 gold pieces behind in a dungeon. Well, you know, you stayed at the bottom of the pit and starved to death, but at least you died rich. The last type of poor preparation I'm going to talk about are poor spell preparation by prepared spellcasters. If you haven't played a lot of games with traditional D&D fancy and magic systems, they mostly consist of two types of spellcasters. Prepared spellcasters like wizards, clerics, and druids, and spontaneous spellcasters like sorcerers, bards, and summoners.

The classes vary from game system to game system, but prepared spellcasters have to select their spells to have at the ready ahead of time. They have to study a spellbook, pray to their deity, or other method to pick from a list of spells to have them the ready ahead of time. They have to study a spell book, pray to their deity, or other method to pick from a list of spells to have them in spell slots to cast when they need them. Spontaneous spellcasters don't have the breadth of spells available to them to cast, but they are more flexible in the way they use them. A wizard preparing spells may have to decide which two of the eight third-level spells they have in their spellbook to memorize for the day. If they memorize fireball and slow, then those are the two spells they have

that day. That's it. They can't cast fear or water breathing because they didn't prepare them. The sorcerer, on the other hand, may only know four third-level spells instead of the eight the wizard has, but they can cast any two of them throughout the day. Prepared spellcasters have more day-to-day flexibility, while spontaneous spellcasters have more encounter-to-encounter flexibility within a day. Anyway, suppose the prepared spellcaster memorized a ton of fire-based spells for the day, but they're fighting a lot of fire creatures that are resistant or maybe even immune to fire damage. These things happen.

For prepared spellcasters like wizards and clerics, every day is a bit of a crapshoot. After the character wakes up, they make the best guess as to the spells that they'll be needing today. Sometimes they guess right, and it makes one or more of the encounters in the day trivial. But sometimes they don't, and what should be an easy fight becomes life or death. Suppose you're DMing a group and the wizard just guessed wrong. They memorized a bunch of mind affecting spells and they keep running into mindless undead that are immune to it. What do you do in these situations? Good news, 5e and Pathfinder 2e, the rules have you covered. The bad news is that the rules are very different between the game systems. In 5e, give the characters a long rest. In the player's handbook, page 114, it states,

quote, you can change your list of prepared spells when you finish a long rest. Preparing a new list of wizard spells requires time spent studying your spell book and memorizing the incantations and gestures you must make to cast the spell. At least one minute per spell level for each spell on your list. Same rule applies to all prepared spellcasters, clerics, druids, and so forth. In Pathfinder 2e, prepared spellcasters must also decide how each of their spell slots will be used in the morning, just like 5e. Unfortunately though, once those slots are filled during daily preparations, it can't be changed later on. It takes special abilities or feats to be able to change out your spells in the middle of the day. So a prepared spellcaster is much more limited in Pathfinder 2e

than they would be in 5e. Now before you write to me shitting all over Pathfinder 2e, there's some advantages here that Pathfinder 2e has that 5e doesn't. For example, Pathfinder 2e cantrips are automatically heightened, whereas 5e's aren't. Play whichever system you like, I'm not going to judge you. Each system has its good and bad aspects. But regardless of what system you're playing, if your party's prepared spellcaster guessed wrong in 5e, maybe you could be friendly about allowing your party to flee and how long the monster chases them. Maybe they have young or a valuable food source they're protecting so they don't chase the party as far, and it gives your 5e prepared spellcaster a chance to take a long rest and change their spells. Pathfinder 2e? Well, you better advise those

wizards and clerics to buy a wide variety of scrolls to be ready for whatever the dungeon throws at them. Also, there's nothing wrong with letting the characters retreat and try again tomorrow. If the ability to retreat at all makes sense, then maybe just let the party do it. Heal the creature's hit points to simulate overnight healing for them, and maybe have them more on alert for intruders the next day. Sometimes characters just aren't prepared for what you and the adventure are going to throw at them. Sometimes characters just aren't prepared for what you and the adventurer are going to throw at them. Sometimes party composition is a little wonky, the characters didn't buy equipment that should be common sense for them, or maybe the cleric prayed for the wrong

spells this morning. Choose how you're going to handle these situations ahead of time. Communicate that to the players during session zero, and I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. The best way to help more people find this podcast is to like, rate, and subscribe it wherever you found it. Please take a few minutes to do so to make it more visible. Also, tune in next week when I'm going to talk about a topic suggested from Daniel Mahefko, getting into and staying in immersive role-playing. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Angles.

Since Angles are the sponsor, I bet you're expecting me to consider jokes that are obtuse or maybe a cute little joke. If you thought I would consider those jokes, you'd be right. This has been episode 166, dealing with ill-prepared parties. My name is Jeremy Shelley,

and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.