Everyone dies

Last night my DnD campaign came to a screeching halt.  My group wandered into a cave to clear out some stirges (bloodsucking flying critters the size of a hawk) and ended up in the middle of a lair of hobgoblins.  Several of the hobgoblins were more powerful than any of the characters in the group and they had a dozen minions so they made short work of us.  Normally when you die to hobgoblins it is by being stabbed many times but one of the hobgoblins was a terrifying spellcaster who Fireballed us to death.

There really wasn't anything we could do to win that fight aside from get lucky.  They had more hit points than us, did more damage than us, and had home ground advantage.  We could have all gone first and rolled like champions, but other than that we were just hosed.  It feels pretty crappy to die that way because it wasn't like we were facing our final boss or even something that the plot had led us to worry about - it was just a random cave with random dudes who ended us all.

Of course there were things we could have done to try to make the fight easier ahead of time.  Primarily we could have gotten a big advantage from using invisibility to scout the cave ahead of time, but I declined to do that.  The problem with full scouting with invisible minions is that it is boring as hell for all players but one.  I have regularly built characters who have stealthy scouting as a feature and while it is great fun to do it, it is garbage for the others on the team.  Nothing says adventure like scrolling on your phone while someone else plays the game for an hour and you sit and wait for them to tell you all the cool stuff they found.

If I were playing intelligently or conservatively I would scout everything.  No rush, take your time, get all the information first.  Arrange ambushes, run away, classic guerrilla tactics.  But the problem is that this takes time.  It turns what could be a quick 3 round battle into a full session of maneuvering and it usually leaves half the group bored out of their minds. 

Naked Man regularly asks me why I don't play the smart way.  Why don't I use every tool at my disposal to win?  The answer is that those plays make the game awful.  It leaves all the players who want to just bash enemies sad and bored, and means that every single little thing we try to do takes hours and hours while I probe for angles and answers.  The game isn't built for that, modules don't assume that, and honestly I don't want to play that.

Simply put, playing well just isn't much fun.  So instead we rushed into a fight and got dead.

The only other thing we could have done is to let me power game the table.  Some of the players are newer to the system and just aren't able to quickly find the most impactful line of play.  There are people out there who can glance at a conflict and figure out exactly how one side wins or loses, and there are those who just don't see those points of leverage so they just do things that seem like they will help.  I wanted to scream "KILL THE WIZARD" at the other players, but I refused to tell them what to do.  People don't want someone always riding them, telling them how to play, so I shut my mouth and watched the group perish.

Sometimes that is just how it goes.  No big deal really, because I can't bring myself to care that much about my character when I have such a reasonable expectation of them dying in the meatgrinder that is adventuring through modules.  I did appreciate that we decided that the party is dead and the adventure is over though.  If we did wipe in this situation and our plot armour saw us being resurrected or captured but alive or other similar nonsense I would lose all interest.  When you can't fail, success isn't a particularly compelling thing to shoot for.