I love all my player but omg sometimes I wish they were more of the hack-y and slash-y type of players who just charge forward in battle. Which I mean, I LIKE that they look for non-battle solutions, because most of my encounters have one, but some times you just gotta plaaaaay
Last night I had them walking through a city where time has broken and everything's gone full Quantum Break stutters and time skips on them, and I stuck one single solitary Time Shard enemy in the path as a heads up of more enemies farther down the road.
And they spent about twenty real life minutes making their characters hide along the edges of this road and observe the thing while the rogue snuck past it, the witch stood up and tried to talk to it, and when the shard flew at them to attack, the fighter ran forward with a buff from the skald AND sorcerer, and did a power attack at it.
And even rolling low damage, I announced to her that she had obliterated it, it winked back out of existence.
Which instead of taking to mean, oh, this thing is a minion with very few hitpoints, they all panicked and retreated to the edge of the battle map, convinced that this was absolutely 100% a trap (except the rogue who got himself real cozy in a fruit stall where he could see the further enemies down the road but not communicate this to his party)
So then the rogue sat there quietly eating fruit and waiting as his party inched forward two squares a turn with readied actions to hit everything that might possibly move, and so far the rogue and fighter are the only ones with the line of sight to see the Shard Matron floating back and forth and creating new Shard minions around her. The fighter's first turn upon seeing the matron, it tried to hit her with a shard of glass attack (missed) and sent its minions flying towards her. And her reaction was to put her sword away and attempt a (-2) diplomacy check to see if she can ask the matron to join the party.
All in all, it took them about two hours to kill one monster that had two hitpoints, they're attempting to befriend the non-sentient personification of the shattered time conitinuum, and the adventure had to pause there because it was close to midnight.
