To keep this from being voted as a duplicate of this, let me clarify. The other question asks for DM tactics to battle chokepoints. Its answers are all focused on fighting at these choke-points. I ask for ways to avoid PCs creating/using choke-points. I want my PCs to jump into the boss room which I've designed, and explore it during the match. I want them to enter rooms and not stand in the corridors during the entire dungeon.

Many classic dungeon maps are modular corridors and rooms, where PCs are expected to gradually progress through. Examples include the Doomvault, Tomb of Horrors, or the Forge of Fury. Advanced DMs can bring a stronger sense of an actual lair filled with enemies, when they start mixing enemies from multiple rooms, but mostly the books describe each room independently, and as far as I've experienced, unless something makes a particularly strong noise, fights are usually contained to the enemies in each separate room.

The Problem

Now, as both a player and as a DM, I've experienced the choke-point strategy. Boss rooms are a prime example, but this works in many situations. Players are faced against the next room, riddled with enemies. The DM reads their campaign book,

Yeah, you have 4 undead zombies, 2 living suits of armor, and a weakened Lich looking at you once you open the door. Roll initiative!

Ok, so PCs at the door, a long corridor behind them, and enemies within the room. The frontliners now simply stand in front of the doorway (effectively blocking it) and the nukers blast from behind and drop massive AoEs on the room while enemies do their best to

• break the front-line


• teleport / run-away with some hidden exit


• spam the party with AoE back


• attack the backliners with ranged attacks suffering from cover issues (thanks to the frontliners)

(This literally happened in my last session. The Bard dropped his Storm Sphere in the room, Druid dropped a Moonbeam, and while the Lich teleported out and tried his best to mess the party up, all the minions inside the room died while slightly bothering our fat Cleric.)

With specific enemies, breaking the party is somewhat easy. If you have on-going AoEs, if you can teleport, if you can protect yourself from the party's on-going spells. But most often, your group of enemies are just a bunch of martial enemies, and they have no way of splitting up the party.

As you can see from the maps, rooms are usually very different. They have platforms, and pillars, and parts with difficult terrain, and this all should be something for the party to take advantage of. But its so much easier to just use the doorway as a choke-point, that rooms are basically just used after everything is dead, when searching for loot.

How can I incentivize my players to enter rooms and take strategic advantage of each room's layout, when using the door as a choke-point is such an easy and effective strategy in many published adventures? Specifically, I want players to want to enter rooms and fight there, not just stand at the doors.

When I design dungeons/enemies from scratch, there are some ways of handling this. However, when using official content, it's gets harder to adapt the environment or enemies, and still keep true to the written content. We don't play in AL, but for example, we're doing Tales of the Yawning Portal, so strategies that also work in such published and mapped out dungeons are preferable.

Talk to the players.

The party isn't doing anything wrong per se. Proper use of choke-points is in fact good tactics, especially if they don't have a strong need to move in and surround the enemy. (If the party had a bunch of melee guys getting screwed over by the tactic, then it would stink.)

But the easiest thing might be to talk to the players. Acknowledge that they've done nothing actually wrong but bring up the points you have brought up here, that it's just not very much fun for you, and maybe for them.

Refuse to engage.

To quote the usual message: "If the party can do it, so can your monsters."

The players like to huddle up in a corridor and refuse to come out? Why would the monsters stand there in the open and try to break through instead of retreating and waiting for the PCs to move?

Encounters as laid out in the book are only the general suggestion of how something works, but unless your monsters are mindless or of merely animal intellect, they should be able to easily recognize the strategy and move to the sides, out of the line of fire of the "nukers" in back. Stalemates aren't fun, especially if there's also some incorporeals or patrolling monster squads hassling the back line (though that depends on the specific fight at hand). Keep in mind that fights are loud, and big evocations doubly so; you have every justification you need to bring random wandering patrols down on the party's back. Just be careful that this strategy makes sense in context; if the party gets jumped by patrols when they fight in hallways but doesn't when they go into the room, it's gonna feel unfair (because it is) and set up a players-versus-DM mentality that you really don't want to encourage in a game.

But, back to the point, the monsters could definitely retreat under fire and pull back into their own hallway position, or even leave the area entirely. Too often I see PCs playing with smart tactics while the monsters just growl and run at the party over and over. Only mindless creatures would do that; an obviously overmatched party of intelligent monsters should retreat, regroup, reinforce.

Engage on their own terms.

On the same basic level as above: Anything they can do, you can do. ("Better" is a matter of debate.)

There are very few monsters who totally lack ranged options. If the party likes to huddle in the back and lob spells, arrows, and cantrips, the monsters can absolutely respond in kind. Orcs can throw spears and axes just as well as they can charge in swinging. If the party insists on standing in a tightly clustered hallway position, use their tactic against them. Fireball and lightning bolt can be highly effective against a group that insists on standing in a straight line.

An extended artillery battle might not be much fun, but if they're gonna play games with doorways, you can play right back, and suddenly moving in close to prevent such a standoff seems a lot better.

By the way, keep in mind that you can take an action at any point during a move, so it's completely valid to have a lich standing to one side of the door, out of easy line-of-sight, then run into view, fire a spell off, and move back into cover on the other side of the doorway. They can ready attacks to hit him when he appears, but it's not a foolproof plan since there's also spells like invisibility and mirror image out there.

Enforce the rules

It's entirely likely that any direct attack made while trying to "shoot over your party's shoulders" in a cramped hallway would invoke a cover penalty on the guys in back. Based on the Dungeon Master's Guide rules about cover when using miniatures (DMG p.251, with diagrams on 250), it's hard to imagine any arrangement of characters as described that wouldn't have 3/4 cover against virtually any target they want to shoot at. They might be able to arrange to have merely half cover against some targets, depending on how you read the cover rules, but in general, firing between allies would be a lot like shooting through an arrow-slit, so 3/4 cover sounds right.

However, ranged attacks from the monsters would have the same penalty against the back-liners, so this isn't actually a solution as much as a way to make the party have less fun and even more dependent on area effects (where cover is measured from the origin point of the blast). Everyone getting a +5 to AC will make fights stretch on and on, and makes it feel bad to the players to keep rolling misses.

Spread out the monsters.

Both tactically and strategically. If the party is relying on throwing area effects, make sure you keep your monsters spread out so only a few can be affected at a time, and maybe break up a big fight into a few smaller fights where they'll have to blow through more spell slots if they want to keep doing their shtick. And along that line...

Don't let the party rest easy.

This strategy seems to me to be very spell-slot-intensive. They have to keep the front line healed, and get almost all their damage from big damage spells like fireball. That suggests to me that the party may be sleeping more than normal, and that you might be allowing them to go take a long rest any time they want to.

Pressure the party to hurry up with time sensitive missions. Launch ambushes if they sleep in the dungeon. If they leave the dungeon to rest, the monsters use that time to reinforce their numbers, reinhabit rooms previously cleared, set guards or traps, block doors or build barricades, summon demonic defenders, and so on. Make the monsters at least as tactically smart as the PCs are. Let the party know that relying almost entirely on the spellcasters' damage output is not going to cut it.

The module is only a suggestion.

The module should not be treated as a bible. Encounters can and should move around, DMs are encouraged to add or remove creatures to make the fights harder or easier, and so on. Tune your adventure to the party, if necessary. Don't feel constrained by the words on the page.

If they're depending heavily on spells for damage, counter magic with magic when you can, especially if they keep leaving the dungeon to "wait until tomorrow". The local spellcasters can and should adapt to their strategies by preparing protection from elements, wall spells, even globe of invulnerability if the levels are high enough. Keep in mind that a simple fog cloud can be utterly devastating to any ranged combat tactics, and a wall of fire blocks line of sight in addition to pulsing fire damage onto the party and forcing them to either back off or run through.

Your players are not choosing to fight from doorway choke points. You are.

"Yeah, you have 4 undead zombies, 2 living suits of armor, and a weakened Lich looking at you once you open the door. Roll initiative!"

All of your monsters are just standing in plain view in the middle of a well lit and empty room waiting for hapless adventurers to come along and harvest some XP from them? That's not even good video game design and RPGs should be much better than that.

Immerse the party in the story. Describe to the party what they are seeing. There's a large room with toppled and broken furniture pushed against the walls. There is a dusty and faded tapestry hanging from the ceiling over one corner of the room. There is a glint of metal from some pieces of armor laying on the floor near the furniture. Then put 2 of the zombies in a darkened corner behind behind the tapestry where they are not immediately visible and the other 2 at the back of the room or under some debris so they attack from a different angle. Let the party think the armor is some treasure to grab and have them come to life when any of the party approaches them. Draw them into the room and let them find the monsters in a more realistic manner. Have the lich reveal itself once the battle has begun.

It takes thought and planning by the DM but it makes for a much better game.

Your players are tacticians

I have some players like this, and I reward them with an inspiration if they find a creative way to do anything, including solving puzzle and defeating encounter. But I have one agreement with them: same trick won't work twice.

I explain the reason to them: I enjoy being amused, or even being trolled, by their creative method, but I don't want to watch the same trick getting used again, and again. It'll get old quickly. Find a new one so I don't get bored.

That works! They enjoy finding new tactics, even simple, but clever, ones. It's a win-win situation. So, talk to them not to overuse the trick.

If they are indeed tacticians, use these methods to stop or deter them from overusing the trick (after you talk to them, preferably):

Simulate real world

Objects have hit points, too! A section of stone wall has AC of 17. A dungeon wall should be large and resilient, so have average hit points of 27.

• Throw a fireball or two, or maybe a bomb, and tell them the nearby walls crumbled, and suddenly 5 ft door become 15 ft. Or the walls nearly collapsed, they will get the hint.


• That big orc boss right there doesn't like being stalled. He smashes the walls and creates a new door for his minions to attack the backliner. Add some cool boss line before smashing the wall
  

_{Disclaimer: RAW, fireball doesn't damage objects, but as a DM you can go simulationist (talk to your player) and make it (and other spells) interact with object.}

Shutting door trap

Or any trap. The idea is that you can't stand at the door.

One example is demonstrating that the doors in the dungeon shut themselves automatically.

"... and John, just before you pass through the door, the door is slamming shut. Do you want try to pass through?"

Most of the time they will try just to pass, but if they try to block it from closing, and if they do, they take some damage because it turns out it is unblockable (or very hard to block). They might also get separated, but allow them to join up easily. Over time, they will take the hint and avoid standing at the door.