Get dead

We have had a spate of deaths in my DnD campaigns as of late.  In the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure we had 3 people die in a single session fighting in Cragmaw Castle.  Now we have a 4 person party containing 1 original character and 3 new ones that just wandered in to take the place of the dead folks.  It feels weird to celebrate rescuing a kidnapped person from a dangerous castle when we had 3 people die just to accomplish the deed...

Other people don't seem to be complaining about the fights that wiped us out, so I am wondering what is is that went wrong for us.  One major issue we had is that the dungeon has a bunch of enemies that seem like they are supposed to be easy (because they come in large groups) but which are insanely dangerous and lethal - hobgoblins.

These hobgoblins hit for 12.5 damage per swing, which is about half of the health of one of our characters.  They have a really high AC at 18, so we only hit about 40% of the time.  We had one room containing 4 of them that we walked into and we missed all of our attacks, so they replied by taking down our two toughest characters, thankfully only killing one character.  That isn't the expected result of course but when you have 4 monsters that hit for 50% of a character's health in damage, the encounter is going to be extremely lethal a lot of the time!

I wonder if any of the problems we are having are simply to do with the way the game is adjudicated.  Our characters are pretty well built and we have a broken Moon Druid in our group at level 3 so our strategy and numbers are solid.  However, the way that the GM decides what the enemies will do can have a huge effect on outcomes.  If monsters run away early to grab whole rooms full of allies fights can go from reasonable to impossible in a hurry.  If they focus fire squishy targets they can tear down the party in no time, while if they stupidly beat on the bear druid things go really well.

I honestly don't know if Naked Man is playing the game hard or easy or somewhere in between.  It is clear to me that sometimes the monsters make poor strategic choices for roleplaying purposes, and in fact I suspect we would have been TPKed several times now if they had played it smart on every occasion.  On the other hand I have had ideas to cheat out victories on a couple of occasions that got stymied and it seemed like a easygoing GM might have let me inflict ruin on the enemies if I got my way.  Maybe that means he is running down the middle?

I guess this is the trouble with having challenging encounters.  First level is a total mess of instant death attacks, but even at third level we regularly see our tough characters one shotted, and being taken down in 2 hits is a normal occurrence.  I don't see how you build tough but winnable fights with those kinds of swings.  Any time the monsters roll well for a round half the party is unconscious and bleeding, but if we roll well the entire enemy group just explodes.  This leads to exciting combat certainly but it also leads to expendable, faceless characters who know that death is just around the corner.

If instead the designers just make sure the party is not at significant risk then most fights are completely trivial.  We really need some kind of middle ground where monsters don't regularly kill half the party in a round but also present some kind of threat.  The solution, I think, is to have more hitpoints and higher chances to hit so that fights aren't so swingy.

On the other side of the game we have had some incredibly long fights in the higher level group that have taken multiple hours to complete.  I don't know most people have the same experiences I do with the game, but at the moment I am finding low level combat to be hilariously swingy and lethal, and high level combat to involve long, grindy fights.

I am enjoying building characters and figuring out strategy but I can't help but feel that there has to be a better way to design these things.  I like situations where things go badly and we have to respond to a serious threat, but when that threat is a character going from full to dead in a single turn there isn't much to react to and it doesn't feel like you have any control over the outcome.

When I designed Heroes By Trade I made it an explicit design goal to have fights last 5 rounds.  That gives enough time to respond to problems and threats, but it won't feel like any round is irrelevant or that the fight is interminable in length.  I tried to stay away from monsters that hit super hard but die to nearly anything - if it can kill itself in a single attack, that is a problem.  (Hobgoblins, which caused us so much trouble, hit for 12.5 damage and have 11 health.)

On the other hand having lots of deaths does give me opportunities to try out new classes, and it turns out warlocks can do some really fun stuff... so I guess one dead paladin isn't much of a price to pay!