L13E2: Yeti King 

Yes, communicating is an important tactic. We've found that telling other people what to do on their turn slows the game down more than it helps, so I try to limit that. Communicating on your own turn doesn't have this problem, and can be highly effective.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Focus Fire is extremely important. I don't know how much time it would have bought Simi, but it certainly would have helped.

Yeah, most Control Spells just allow you to trade some of your actions for some of theirs. As the Wizard is one of the primary damage dealers, I don't think it's a good idea for them to be controlling people, but it really depends on who has what available.

@d20tactics True. It's also up to personal flavor. Some casters rather fireball than cast Hypnotic Pattern, which can be a bit of a bore, especially if you use it a lot. And if a caster is built for evocation, who's going to argue against that?

This campaign is obviously very strict in how the encounters are arranged. When I make my own dungeons, I use this as a template for the frequency of rest spots, but I don't hold the players to it. When I run modules, I don't control when or where the players take short rests. As a player, I try to get through as many encounters as possible before resting, which often puts me at odds with other players.

I've observed that since participating in this project, I now tend to assume when I play 5E that other players will play with the assumptions of this setting - multiple short rests, 5+ encounters per adventuring day. This is NOT how the rest of my table plays, which means I wind up with a lot of excess spells. I also significantly prefer this approach (longer adventuring days). Ultimately, though, the only way to really encourage players to meter their resource usage that I've seen is to penalize them for failing to do so (RP-imposed time limits) or throw really, really unreasonably powerful encounters at them.

@@FearNoEqual Threw a Demilich at a party of 7 level 8's. Had them answer riddles. If they failed, it would use it's Devour Soul ability on them. They passed EVERY TIME, and made it out with a scroll of Plane Shift, 10500 gp, 2 rubies (worth 5000 gold each) and some magical items. I definitely need to make the encounters even more deadly.

More battles and not every one of them as to be a slog. You can even run an encounter on top of an encounter if you don't want so many seperated encounters - ie they take on a goblin raiding party...and then a few worg riding calvary units show up. That's 2 encounters but only one initiative. What I personally do not enjoy is DMs running zero to only 1 encounter. DnD is about heroic fantasy heros battling monsters. It's not the Simms. It can be the Simms and DMs should also do more downtime and allowing players to run bastions full of followers at higher levels, but this is still a game where you and you mates form up to battle creatures that the normal guards can't handle. It involves battle. Pacing is so key here. Balanced exploration, combat, and roleplaying should be the goal. D20 Tactics is just showing off the tactical combat side so I'm more speaking to the normal tables.

I actually was talking to one of my DMs about the importance of short rests to class mechanics. Warlocks and Monks very much rely on the short rest mechanic to stay relevant. Monks need ki points and warlocks get their spells back on a short rest. So DMs that shortcut short rests are very much making life for certain classes that rely on the short rest a lot harder. That's why I don't like a lot of homebrew core mechanic rules because they rarely take into consideration the whole balance of the game. The rules are like webs of a spider, tug at one and you may cause other rules and class features to be redundant or broken.