To keep this from being voted as a duplicate of , 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 , , or the . 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  in the room, Druid dropped a , 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 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.
As a new DM I'm still learning how to control the monsters in a battle. A situation came up last game and although it was fine and fun, I wonder if there are better strategies for a DM to avoid a bottleneck in a doorway.  Scenario: PCs were up against a door deciding whether they should go in. Hobgoblins on the other side of the door open it and an encounter ensues. However, the encounter is basically the PC at the door trading blows with the NPC at the door, while their respective allies in the back try to shoot over their friends' heads. Although you can move through an ally's space, you can't occupy an ally's square. This leads me to assume that you can't move in to an ally's square, attack from it, and move back out of the square (though please correct me if I'm wrong).  This scenario and understanding of the rules brings me to my question.  What tactics can a DM use in a combat scenario like the one above to make sure that the NPCs are all contributing to the battle? Especially if they have no ranged weapons, is there a way that they can all try to attack?
Luggage, connecting flights and customs question for USA I'm flying to the USA, from Australia, through LAX and catching a connecting flight 6 hours later, think it's the same ticket, booked all at once. I've never traveled before, and I'm wondering what happens with customs.   Do I collect my bags at LAX so they can be checked? Do I have to check in at every airport or is it all done when I catch the first flight? There are 4 flights on my itinerary. Finding the maximum likelihood estimators for this shifted exponential PDF? Why doesn't a bike/bicycle fall if going with a high speed? Why does a bike/bicycle fall when its speed is very low or close to zero and is balanced when going with a high speed? I have a log file being written by another process which I want to watch for changes. Each time a change occurs I'd like to read the new data in to do some processing on it.  What's the best way to do this? I was hoping there'd be some sort of hook from the PyWin32 library. I've found the win32file.FindNextChangeNotification function but have no idea how to ask it to watch a specific file.  If anyone's done anything like this I'd be really grateful to hear how...  [Edit] I should have mentioned that I was after a solution that doesn't require polling.  [Edit] Curses! It seems this doesn't work over a mapped network drive. I'm guessing windows doesn't 'hear' any updates to the file the way it does on a local disk. iptables port redirect not working for localhost I want to redirect all traffic from port 443 to the internal port 8080. I'm using this config for iptables:  iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING --source 0/0 --destination 0/0 -p tcp \          --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080   This works for all external clients. But if I'm trying to access the port 443 from the same maschine I'll get a connection refused error.  wget https://localhost   How can I extend the iptables rule to redirect local traffic too? Using continuous color band for raster legend in QGIS composer legend? I'm looking for a way to insert continuous colour legend for a raster layer.  I managed to create discrete symbols with values along the bar, but I would like to have a continuous bar with some values on the bar, similar to the old plugin "One-Band Raster", that it doesn't work with the QGIS version higher than 1.7  I tried to set in properties->style, where I selected the  Render Type "Singleband pseudocolor" and see the "generate new color ramp" box.  I tried both "Continuous" or "Equal interval". However, in the Composer the legend always is displayed with discrete symbols.  Is there any way that can make QGIS Composer to display a nice continuous band for a raster layer? Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) was announced at Google I|O 2012 on June 27, 2012.  (You can review  at the official Android Developer's site.)  Of course, not all devices will get this update right away and others won't get it at all. Each manufacturer and carrier often choose to add their custom modifications which tend to delay the official release.  When will each device get Android 4.1, either officially or unofficially, if ever?  See also: Proof of $\int_0^\infty \left(\frac{\sin x}{x}\right)^2 \mathrm dx=\frac{\pi}{2}.$ I am looking for a short proof that $$\int_0^\infty \left(\frac{\sin x}{x}\right)^2 \mathrm dx=\frac{\pi}{2}.$$ What do you think?  It is kind of amazing that $$\int_0^\infty \frac{\sin x}{x} \mathrm dx$$ is also $\frac{\pi}{2}.$ Many proofs of this latter one are already in this . Ordering by the order of values in a SQL IN() clause Is it possible to have the Corruption and the Crimson Biomes in the same world? I was reading on the wiki how there is a chance that the Corruption will be replaced with the Crimson.  I am wondering if when you get a world where you have the Crimson is it possible to also have the Corruption if you bring over corruption seeds from another world and use them. Or would these seeds just get you more of the Crimson? "I'm lovin' it" How normal-sounding is the slogan "I'm lovin' it" to native ears?  I know it sounded quite odd to me when I first heard it — and it still sometimes does —, but I can't even tell why. Sure, love is supposedly a stative verb, but it's being used in progressive aspect all the time without sounding weird at all (lots of songs come to mind, e.g. ). It's only this particular slogan that somehow doesn't quite work for me. I would expect that to be totally on purpose — it's advertising, after all —, but Wikipedia  any objections from native speakers (as it does with "" and ""). So I'm asking the native speakers of this community: does "I'm lovin' it" sound completely natural to you? Just a bit off? Completely weird? Why? Does Find My Mac work if the disk gets erased? "Specially" vs "especially" When should I use specially and when especially? So why did the price tank all of a sudden and then came back to normal? What does it mean? Does the order in which I set properties using the object initializer syntax get executed in the exact same order?  For instance if I do this:  var s = new Person { FirstName = "Micah",                      LastName = "Martin",                      IsLoaded = true                    }   will each property get set in the same order? Real world uses of hyperbolic trigonometric functions Simplify $\arctan (\frac{1}{2}\tan (2A)) + \arctan (\cot (A)) + \arctan (\cot ^{3}(A)) $ How to simplify $$\arctan \left(\frac{1}{2}\tan (2A)\right) +  \arctan (\cot (A)) + \arctan (\cot ^{3}(A)) $$ for  $0&lt; A&lt; \pi /4$?  This is one of the problems in a book I'm using. It is actually an objective question , with 4 options given , so i just put $A=\pi /4$ (even though technically its disallowed as $0&lt; A&lt; \pi /4$) and got the answer as $\pi $ which was one of the options , so that must be the answer (and it is weirdly written in options as $4 \arctan (1) $ ).  Still , I'm not able to actually solve this problem. I know the formula for sum of three arctans , but it gets just too messy and looks hard to simplify and it is not obvious that the answer will be constant for all $0&lt; A&lt; \pi /4$. And I don't know of any other way to approach such problems. How to solve and see resolution of $13^{53} \pmod 7$ using Fermat little Theorem? Outcast boy meets girl underwater Where can I find out when the next kernel version will be released for my distro version? I checked the , , and  wiki pages but still cannot seem to find a complete answer to this.  When using an LTS release like 18.04, is there somewhere public that can be checked to determine what kernel versions are being tested and when they are anticipated to be released for it? I would like to use 4.19, for example, but would like to know how to check this for any anticipated kernel release.  I know I could potentially just install the 4.19 kernel myself but I would rather know when it (and future kernel releases) were in the release pipeline. Is there somewhere on Launchpad that I could check? Somewhere else? Where are the Ubuntu kernel package maintainers doing their work?