From other professional GMs in a variety of systems:
In order for any fight to be remarkable in any way, character death does need to be on the table.
If your party is consistently winning without feeling like they were in real danger, what is even the point of combat? They might feel good about flexing their abilities and mopping the floor now and then, but if every time a roll for initiative happens doesn’t feel like “we might die” then combat becomes a speedbump, and not a thrilling edge of your seat experience.
I think because a lot of GM’s run a game where they don’t feel comfortable killing characters, players lean in to the notion that the only way to end combat is to win the fight. So players end up putting their characters in these absolutely suicidal positions behind enemy lines for “flanking” advantage but then get surrounded themselves. They play on the assumption that Damage per round is the metric to min-max, if you can just reduce all the enemy hitpoints to 0 before yours, you’re golden.
The way you described it, as the rat eventually taking people down, and chipping down the players health… It sounds like at no point did anyone consider running away when their HP was low, aside from the last guy standing dragging someone else out with them. It sounds like the players decided it was a fight to the death; so they can’t be too upset if they’re the ones who died.
They could have decided it was not something worth dying over, and played accordingly.
I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.
From other professional GMs in a variety of systems:
In order for any fight to be remarkable in any way, character death does need to be on the table.
If your party is consistently winning without feeling like they were in real danger, what is even the point of combat? They might feel good about flexing their abilities and mopping the floor now and then, but if every time a roll for initiative happens doesn’t feel like “we might die” then combat becomes a speedbump, and not a thrilling edge of your seat experience.
I think because a lot of GM’s run a game where they don’t feel comfortable killing characters, players lean in to the notion that the only way to end combat is to win the fight. So players end up putting their characters in these absolutely suicidal positions behind enemy lines for “flanking” advantage but then get surrounded themselves. They play on the assumption that Damage per round is the metric to min-max, if you can just reduce all the enemy hitpoints to 0 before yours, you’re golden.
The way you described it, as the rat eventually taking people down, and chipping down the players health… It sounds like at no point did anyone consider running away when their HP was low, aside from the last guy standing dragging someone else out with them. It sounds like the players decided it was a fight to the death; so they can’t be too upset if they’re the ones who died.
They could have decided it was not something worth dying over, and played accordingly.