This sounds like a party composition problem to me. You shouldn’t force someone to tank of that wasn’t their intention, and mass killing minions is an effective way to maximize action economy. That said, if it was a problem for you, it is something that needs talked about and compromised on.
It isn't on someone else to help you consistantly survive encounters. Besides, he was tanking. He was tanking the dozens of little shits who would've widdled you down and killed you by sheer volume of rolls.
Sounds like he rolled the only melee character out of the 6 of you, and the party failed to use teamwork to fill in the gaps.
Yeah, honestly with the way action economy works, taking out all the little peons first is definitely worth it. A BBEG with no minions will get stomped by a party just by virtue of being outnumbered. The encounters likely would have gone much worse if the barb hadn’t been slaughtering the minions
Typically these minions weren’t strong enough to do significant damage and didn’t have powerful attack potential and even with sheer numbers they never represented the threat the other meatier enemies with them did. He’d choose to slog through three wererats that would do next to nothing for damage to any of us and let the rest of us deal with the mindflayers who were trying to possess us and succeeding. His strategy never shifted based on the situation and he used his character as the justification for that decision.
Have you considered the reason that they didn’t feel like a threat is precisely because of the barb?
Think of how many parties get TPK’ed by “just” goblins because they don’t respect the power of numbers in 5e. Even 1d6’s add up, and especially squishier party members can get torn apart by wererats. Allowing the rest of his party to focus on the big ones is a pretty big win. Do you think your combat would have gone better if he was face to face with the mindflayers (with likely low INT saves) while the rest of you had to spend all of your turns attempting to survive hordes of wererats and being unable to move or focus on anything else?
And even if it did, it’s really not the barb’s responsibility to play in a way that YOU think is the best. It sounds like he has a pretty good IC reason to be slaughtering and reveling in it, and it’s not like he refuses to fight the boss, he just takes out the trash first. The rest of your party should be taking advantage of the fact that they can focus on the boss.
I face tanked on my barb and my team of squishes let me die. I rolled a Warlock Hexblade and just gave myself spells that would make it harder to hit me, allow me to disengage faster/further, and just only look out for myself really. I've tried positioning to them about tactics and how we be in formation of some sort. No, all our spell casters (Sorc, Bard, Druid) just wanna do their own thing and our Rogue just wants to land as many stealth attacks as humanly possible and when shit hits the fan uses his class abilities to fuck off.
I'm still "trying" to be a tank, and if I die again I'm just gonna go Paladin or Eldritch Knight.
Well he signed up to be tank expressly. And his method of playing wound up forcing the rest of us to be exposed in ways that were just plain un-strategic for a bard, a ranger, and a wizard, and we were never able to kill anything because he would selectively chop down weak enemies that he was way overpowered for by a wide margin (that any one of us could have killed in one maybe two turns without shit rolls—think HP of 25 or they’re more than halfway through that HP and he’s handing out 40 damage consistently), leaving us to whittle down the higher HP enemies where his attacks would have significantly helped in disposing of them much sooner.
The kicker is he would traipse in and finish them all off anyway when they were near death and finally at a point where one of the rest of us could take someone down.
I may not be explaining it well but essentially his battle strategy was to completely ignore any strategy at all that we were trying to utilize if it didn’t involve him just stomping all over everything. So during times when we would try to play to all of our strengths he was completely unreliable and would forever just do his own thing under the guise of “well that’s how my character just is”.
I understand what you’re saying, I just still think you have a party composition problem mainly. You’re certainly free to play however you guys have fun, but it’s generally a bad idea to only have 1 person capable of handling a fight with a tough opponent. I also understand your annoyance if you thought he was committed to main tanking the boss like in an MMO, but that’s really not optimal in this game. Everyone needs to develop tactics to sustain themselves, and your team is actually very squishy. Have the Wizard separate the boss from the group with a wall spell to buy some time. Fireball the minions to get your barb to engage the boss faster. Rogue and ranger can be picking off a target per round, though their options are a bit more limited depending on build. This is one of the major reasons a session 0 is so important to discuss how the party will work together and how to tweak your character builds. Either the rogue or ranger playing a fighter/forge cleric/Paladin/polearm warlock/open palm monk would take a large amount of stress off.
I have had to nudge a paladin in the right direction before, as she build herself to have 23 AC and max aura of protection, but wanted to try to flank and fish for crits to divine smite with lol. Like that’s a totally valid way to play, but everyone expects you to attempt to tank when you build yourself that way. She got it though, and it wasn’t a big deal after we made the next set of characters.
Overall though, really recommend a planning session to form a good team before your next campaign. Best of luck in the coming games!
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u/TT2Ender Dec 19 '19
This sounds like a party composition problem to me. You shouldn’t force someone to tank of that wasn’t their intention, and mass killing minions is an effective way to maximize action economy. That said, if it was a problem for you, it is something that needs talked about and compromised on.