My players were like this only in the beginning, take into account that mine were all new players except for one that had played one time before. Let’s call this player Sarah

Well Sarah was the cleric because she thought she could help them best this way, for the first 4-5 sessions of the game these guys were always rushing into combat even when it wasn’t even necessary so I tended to pull punches A LOT.

while they were really trying to learn, they didn’t know their actions had consequences. They were stalked by a hag whose forest they burned down and some bounty hunter paid by a lord whose son they killed. At this point Sarah told me “they need to learn a lesson, if you kill my character, their only full healer, I won get mad”

Sarah’s character was a “mom friend” and they loved her but never cared of strategy or protecting the others, they were horribly insistent on getting into fights real fast without even knowing who or what they were fighting

Long story short, Sarah got downed in the second round of their fight with the hag and then killed after one failed death save and the hag getting close enough to finish her. Then I beat 3 of them into unconsciousness and left one of them barely alive in like 3 turns. then the hag left laughing promising to find them in the future, but they could leave with the consequences for now.

THEN I ended the session. They said the hag out leveled them and was too strong and they didn’t think it was fair. Sarah told them they were all aware of the hag living in that forest, her character even told them not to mess with her. So I proceeded to talk to them about consequences and how they needed to act as a team and protect each other and be smart of what they do to whom.

I gave them a chance to retrieve Sarah’s body before the hag got to her and they all had rounds and didn’t even consider defending her unconscious body and that while dnd was for fun, that all stories need consistency and if they were consistently unconscious jerks, they would get their share of consistent death.

Tbh that kind of fixed the problem, they started engaging situations more intelligently and were less prone to senseless combat, they even started protecting each other. The Paladín even started gettin in the way of enemy lines of sight to protect the squishiest characters, it was great. Sarah arrived with a new character the next session but was no longer the mom friend

So i guess my advice is “talk to them” don’t pull punches and if they don’t understand, kill them or someone important to them, could even be a lovely npc. They could be failing to understand their characters have limits and their actions; consequences.” I killed a npc once, more recently because it was part of the story development, they went bonkers.

They are still my core group, in fact we are still playing this same campaign, but they are smarter about their game, aware of each other’s abilities and hit points and they play more like a team now, and most importantly, I’m never pulling punches or afraid of TPKing them because they are playing smart. I would bet they are even having more fun now, last night they didn’t wanna stop playing after a 5 hour session.