How do I get my players to plan and prepare better?
Hi all, I've been running The Golden Vault as a campaign for a while now, and while it's going fairly well and we're having fun with it, I've been running across a common problem.
My players are a pretty well-balanced party for this sort of campaign, with a Rogue, an Artificer, a fairy Warlock who handles recon, and a dragonborn barbarian for muscle. But I've noticed that rather than using their respective skills creatively, they usually take a brute force approach to many of the heists.
For example, We're currently in the middle of "Vidorant's Vault". While talking to Goldenbeard, I had him pretty explicitly suggest multiple avenues they could take to prepare (talk to former guards, scout out the building, check out Vidorant's mansion). They elected to look for the former guards, but after getting a bit of information from that, they almost went straight into it. I reminded them it might be a good idea to case the building, to which they found a secret entrance into the vault, and then promptly forgot it existed. They instead decided to go through the guarded, locked balcony, immediately going into combat and making a ton of noise. I ended the session with Vidorant herself teleporting to the balcony with guards in tow, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it clear they can't (or at least shouldn't) fight their way out of this.
I think part of the problem is that, for one, I've been making combats way too easy. I'm a very new DM, so I'm not good at balancing and I don't think they ever feel like they're in any danger or have any reason to avoid combat.
And two, I haven't been making it clear enough what options they have available to them, or what the best course of action would be.
So if anyone has any advice as to how to deal with this, I would really appreciate it. Sorry if this is unnecessarily long.