cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11298431
I’ve been a DM for about 3 years, and have predominantly run one-shots and short campaigns in DnD5e and PF2e. I have a player who persistently builds primary caster based characters, but then won’t do anything in combat but “I stab it with my dagger.” They rarely use cantrips, and basically won’t cast a leveled spell unless I suggest it immediately before their turn. They seem to enjoy playing despite the fact that they’re far too squishy to be a front-line melee character and don’t utilize most of their class features. I’ve talked with them explicitly about how their play style seems to be discordant with the kind of play they want to do, and that maybe next time they should try a paladin/champion or a fighter/rougue subclass with some minor casting. They agreed at the time that sounded like a good idea, but low and behold showed up to the next one-shot with a primary caster, and over 3 hours of play and 3 combats never cast a single spell, including a cantrip.
I enjoy playing with this persons as a whole. They are engaged in the fiction, and are particularly engaged during exploration activities. They tell me they also find combat quite fun, and they are requesting I run a mega dungeon in the near future.
As a general rule, I like to let people play how they have the most fun, but issues have arisen with this play style. Namely, all of my TPKs have been associated with this player charging a squishy character directly up to a significantly stronger villain and continuing to stab it with a dagger until they went down, significantly hindering the party in the action economy and resulting in a TPK. I feel I have to intentionally weaken all of my encounters to keep the party feasible in the face of such mechanically poor combat choices.
What else can I do to help drive this individual towards melee builds, and/or help encourage them to change their play style to better suite the caster classes they choose?
If everyone else is playing their characters mechanically well, why not just try to balance encounters so that only the stab-wizard dies? If they see that the low HP of casters isn’t really compatible with close melee combat, they may start either using their ranged abilities or building martial characters. One PC dying doesn’t have to mean TPK.
I’ve tried, I don’t attack downed players. The general flow is
Unfortunately, none of the players are really well versed in the system (and don’t really want to learn beyond in-game learning), so even though they’ll put two characters right next to the boss, they’ll never flank etc unless I explicitly remind them at that time.
I appreciate that the other players feel a sense of camaraderie and won’t abandon the other player, but I’m not going to have a dragon just suddenly decide their going to do ranged attacks when there’s someone standing directly in front of them that is actively distracted doing something else.
I’ve tried the typical advice of minions with a lower level boss, and while the individual monsters are weaker, when the stab-wizard goes down the party gets fucked by the action economy.
Sometimes I’ll do what I did last time, which is just debuff the boss monster to a significantly lower level (moderate encounter level) but then (as happened last time) you get one lucky roll and it’s dead at the start of combat and you’re like “fuck that’s not scary or fun”
Maybe you should attack downed players, that’s what a monster would do. It’s perfectly reasonable for a monster to smash the guy that was just stabbing them a second ago. Or do AOE attacks that target everyone including the downed player.
Or, like others suggested, just make them use pre generated templates. Ask each one what kind of character they want to play, and make PCs to match. Especially if, like you said, they don’t know the system very well, they shouldn’t really be opposed to that. Make a rogue for the stab-wizard so they can experience being good at stabbing.
If the stab wizard isn’t a threat, why not just have such monsters ignore him? I know that if I had 200 HP I would be least concerned about the commoner with the dagger attacking me for 3-6 damage a round.
Alternatively, give your monsters some CC and use that on him. If it’s a spell that would even be an opportunity for him to Counterspell it, which he would probably miss - unless he got frustrated by not having a turn and was motivated to try to stop that in the future. You could even prompt his casting it in this instance, e.g., by saying “The creature begins casting a spell - you can tell it’s intended to paralyze you. Since it’s a spell, if you have Counterspell prepared, you could cast it.”
Also, why are your players standing right next to the boss rather than casting Healing Word from a distance?