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The original was posted on /r/osr by /u/Tsear on 2025-06-06 11:14:18+00:00.

My players are using a particular tactic very often. They'll open a door to a room with hostiles, park their high AC character in the door, and have everyone crowd the hallway behind them and help their tank with polearms and ranged weapons. I'm having trouble understanding how to adjudicate this in an interesting way at the table. Essentially I've defaulted to having the character in the door not allow enemies past them, which is as effective as it is boring.

Now I don't want to directly nerf the players; I more just want to understand how to make the situation not boring, both in a mechanical and story sense, and help the players not optimize the fun away. Things I'm considering -

• Some variant of the enemies repositioning the tanky character, either by pushing them into the hallway or pulling them into the room
• Some variant of squeezing past the character
• Depending on what's on the party's side of the door, slight nerfs to attack rolls - you probably can't use a polearm effectively if it's too cramped and your back is to the corridor's wall
• Incentivizing the party to enter the room or back into the corridor some other way, at least for some encounters, to prevent monotony

This all seems at least somewhat better, but it's all open to interpretation, which makes it difficult. How are you running situations like this?