I've either developed a bad habit or my players tend to over complicate things

[Seven]

I think it happens to everyone.

Gary mentioned that his players refused to set foot in the city of drows.
Seems sensible.

It can be frustrating if one spent a lot of time developing a dungeon or spent some money on it.
In this case, I'd let it play out. Obviously they won't get the beast to come out if there isn't one.
Maybe the ambushers will give up first? Maybe another party shows up eventually and enter the cave? Maybe they hear news from the village that the beast has been already been killed, which might mean free loot in the cave?

[Dimirag]

If they choose to not hunt the monster they are after...

The monster they don't hunt today may be the stronger monster that will hunt them tomorrow, or hunt some villagers....
...or may be the monster they encounter on their next adventure...

[teaman]

For future sessions, sometimes a time constraint can put pressure of players to move things along:

- They'll kill him at midnight
- We can't let them get the sword first
- The monster hunts at sundown.

Just some thoughts (and things that I need to remind myself to do as well)

[GrimlinJoe]

Luckily one of my players that is playing a necromancer decided to use corpse servant on the dead remains they found near the cave to scout things out. This is by far the best case scenario that I could hope for.

[Tazer_The_Yoot]

I created this really great mansion full of magical traps and defenses. My players burned it down. My fault for making it out of wood.

I believe something similar happened when Gygax introduced the first portion of his Against The Giants at a tournament. Ernie was running the game, I think, and described the wooden, thatched-roof nature of the Hill Giant stronghold, and the players deliberated about a minute and decided to simply sneak up at night and burn it down.

[LleijS]

Here is the dilemma. They are too afraid to go into the cave. They have been spending the last few days strategizing how they will lure it out instead of scouting or attempting any trial and error. In their defense I have hyped up this monster to seem very terrifying.

Why is that a dilemma? Your player's characters are acting extremely rationally. If this were a real-life situation, you would do the same thing, I would guess. That having been said, I agree with your original idea of leaving a clue that entering the cave doesn't equal insta-death. In fact, I would suggest to follow blogger and author's [url:https://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/20 ... aving.html]Courtney Campbell's[/url] advice of always leaving at least 3 clues. And if after all that, your players still decide to not enter the cave, that's a you problem, not a them problem. In my opinion, the worst thing you could do is to railroad them into the cave as your players will a.) resent having their agency taken away, and b.) learn that taking the time to plan and thinking rationally will not be rewarded.

Is this a bad habit that I am forming by creating scenarios that I have to bail out my players or give up the answers too easily? I really don't want to ruin things by having wall breaks and breaking the façade of the story.

Again, I agree with Campbell and some of the other posters in this thread in that the problem is you're not giving your players enough information to act, not that you're giving them too much. The difference between telling a story and a role-playing game is that you can have dramatic irony in a story as you control the protagonists. In an RPG, you do not control the protagonists - your players do, and it's not fun for a player to not be told something critical for his or her character's survival.

Does this mean you spoon-feed the PCs? Absolutely not. What it means is that you create a scenario in which you provide the characters with a particular problem to overcome (and walking away from the problem should always be an option!), you provide the characters with the information they need to understand the context of the problem through your description and interaction with them by answering their questions, and then you adjudicate the results of their actions taken to overcome the problem. The story develops organically from the players interaction with the environment you create. If your players decide to walk away from the cave, muttering that monster-hunting is for the birds and decide to spend the next week at the tavern - well, then, that's what happens in the story. (And good on them for being smart enough to avoid wasting time on a wild-goose-chase!)

And I'll say this, I'm not one of those sandbox-loving, 'lazy DM,' decide-everything-from-random-tables types. But once you get comfortable with creating situations, as opposed to plot points, you'll find the collaborative story that emerges from your interactions with your player's decisions in your world to be much more rewarding than anything you could have plotted out alone by yourself.

Thank you for attending my TED talk today.

[Lord of Halfcastle]

I would say if the players want to stall then let them. Time passes whether or not the party decides to act. There will be more victims of the monster the longer it remains unslain. I'd have the villagers approach the party and question them as to why the problem hasn't went away. Maybe a mother approaches the party and tells them that her son went missing and she wants to know if they took care of the monster in the cave. Actions and inactions have consequences.

[Tazer_The_Yoot]

If they choose to not hunt the monster they are after...

The monster they don't hunt today may be the stronger monster that will hunt them tomorrow, or hunt some villagers....
...or may be the monster they encounter on their next adventure...

Or the monster a group of NPCs takes down and becomes filthy rich doing so, and constantly brags about it and flaunts it in town, while wearing the animal's hide as armor they had custom-made, and especially rubbing it in the PCs' faces at any given chance.

[Guffaw]

I have some sporadic advice for you and your group.

Here's my advice for your players:
Every day is a good day to die. Spoils are won only by mettle and bravery. Nobody ever became a big bold hero by staking out a cave and letting a monster bore itself to death. Every day that passes, you waste a trail ration. Every few hours that pass, you risk a random encounter. If you're too cowardly to investigate the cave, or too foolish to execute a plan of entry, then perhaps you should go back to town and become farmers and peasants.

Here's my advice for you:
Only prepare your next session. Only have a vague idea for what you want to do with the campaign as a whole. Don't linger on riddles or puzzles if your players don't seem to get them at first. Come back to them. Always have multiple things in an adventure for your players to interact with, and if they are the type that try to "brute force" things... Let them try! Brute force solutions have brute force consequences. Be more mindful of what you say to your players. Be aware of the subtle way you guide them and sway their perception of your shared game-world in your minds. When in doubt, have a bunch of bad guys come and investigate them, ("Who are these weirdos camping outside of our cave for the past week?)