What can we either as players or as characters do to be more careful about investigation and reconnaissance without making things slow and boring?
As a party we tend to make poor tactical decisions. One time we didn't set a watch in what should have been obvious as a dangerous situation and we went from asleep to teleporting out barely alive in 5 rounds. Another time we entered a village that we should have been suspicious of and 3 rounds later there's blasted Mind Flayer everywhere and two of our party members have been taken over by Intellect Devourers and have vanished.
However, as a party when we do engage in investigation and reconnaissance, we often spend way too much time discussing it, it is not particularly productive, and we use up a lot of time in ways that aren't interesting or are even boring.
As a group we feel like the game is not as fun as it ought to be because when we carefully investigate it's boring, but when we don't, encounters go sideways and characters are incapacitated and perhaps killed, and we are being set way back in making progress on our goals.
We have had some good discussions about the problem:
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Missing clues. One concern is that the GM is giving clues that we are missing. We've discussed it and things that the GM thinks are obvious some of us are missing. For instance, from the GM's point of view, the Mind Flayer village was obviously a dangerous trap and we weren't paying attention. We had a good discussion and we the player are going to try to be more mindful, and The GM has agreed to hit us harder with the clue stick.
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Recon is boring. Some of the players expressly feel being ultra careful is boring, for instance, if every step of the way you check everything for traps the game just devolves into boring trap-checking. We think there should be a healthy balance between tedious paranoia and reckless abandon, but struggle to find it.
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Recon is unbalanced. As the party wizard, my character is well-equipped for magical recon, with a familiar, arcane eye and other scrying spells, but we don't do much because then my character ends up hogging the limelight. We've talked this over, but haven't really come to much of a conclusion yet.
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We have no party leader. We think that maybe indecision contributes to taking too long to make decisions, or failing to make them, which leads to overlooking things that are obvious in hindsight, for instance, setting watch. We've discussed having a party leader, probably rotating it, with the idea that, at least tactically, one character would be the decision maker, not coming up with all the ideas, but being responsible for keeping us moving forward. (Typically), we've discussed this but haven't come to a decision, although we might be getting there.
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Deadly encounters. We've had a lively discussion about the deadliness of encounters. The GM says if you make camp in an obviously hostile location and a monster that is probably unbeatable comes along and you flee for your lives, well you brought it on yourselves. The party has mixed feelings. Some think the encounters are too deadly, others think not. I really think this is a symptom, not a cause. In each case where things have gone pear-shaped it's been clear in hindsight what the mistakes were, and often we'll say to each other, "yeah, I knew that wasn't going to work out", but we did it anyway. Maybe the PCs are deadier to the PCs than the monsters are.
If it's important, the whole party is 14th level, usually with about six characters. The game is fairly high magic and a good bit of homebrew. Probably party level and composition isn't significant one way or another, although perhaps the challenges encountered at higher levels are exacerbating a problem that's been there all along.
We play voice over Discord using D&D Beyond. We are pretty experienced at RPGs and D&D 5e in particular. We struggle at times with some members being on cell phone and sometimes typing instead of talking. This might be a factor in missing clues. I am less concerned about the technology. We have recognized that this occasionally causes communications issues and we're working together to mitigate this.
So here is my question:
What can we either as players or as characters do to be more careful about investigation and reconnaissance without making things slow and boring?
Although GM advice is welcome, I'm mainly asking from the players' perspective. The GM has agreed to be more obvious about the clues and has been very proactive in fostering after-session discussion.
What are we missing? What has worked for you?
I have some concern that this question may invite bad-subjective answers, and possibly closure as opinion-based. To that end I will say I am looking for answers that:
- Is based on what worked or didn't work for you based on personal experience
and/or - Something you can back up with a reference
Best Answer
Sounds like your DM isn't communicating dangers effectively.
It sounds like the problem is this: The DM is creating dangers, but leaving it up to the PCs to proactively investigate in order to discover the dangers. The players are responding by being overly cautious for fear of hidden danger.
Making the dangers non-obvious turns them into a kind of secret or puzzle. That means the players can miss the solution entirely. It can be a fun mode of play, if the players are the pro-active sort, and enjoy winning by their own wits. However, not all groups enjoy this mode of play. Combine non-obvious dangers with high lethality, and you have players who are hesitant to do anything.
An adventure that relies on uncovering information for success is similar to another tried and tested model: the mystery or investigation adventure (e.g. a murder mystery). The best approach to investigation adventure design is to have multiple ways to discover each piece of key information. Clues lead to other clues. The DM should consider letting player suggestions work even if it wasn't in their orginal plan. If the DM has only one way to uncover each piece of important information, it ends up like one of those old point-and-click adventure games where each puzzle has one specific solution that's obvious to the game's writer but not to the player.
In my experience, this suggests the DM should be more proactive in presenting dangers, and should probably pivot away from encounters that rely on the players detecting danger ahead of time in order to be successful or safe. That mode of play seems to be not working for your players. The DM may want to shift to more obvious encounters (e.g. dungeon crawl type adventures) or scenarios where failing to find information doesn't kill the party (e.g. investigation adventures where you need to acquire information to progress, but there are many ways to acquire that information, and failing doesn't harm you, but merely serves as a puzzle, and the existence of the puzzle is clear, so the focus of the gameplay becomes everyone working together trying to find a solution to the puzzle).
Perhaps the players can institute standing orders.
In olden D&D when the game was somewhat more deadly, players would sometimes instruct the DM ahead of time to assume they were always using a ten-foot pole to check for pit traps, always moving stealthily, always searching for hidden doors, always having someone watch the party's rear, etc. This would both improve the group's confidence and save the players time.
You might institute standard orders like "assume we always scry on a new town before entering it", "assume we're always being stealthy", etc. The DM can prepare for that and very quickly hand you the answers or let you avoid dangers.
If I were DM I might also very quickly sum all the party's paranoia up in one Investigation roll each or something, although of course this is something you hae to ask the DM if he'll allow you to do.