GM Advice: Don't let your characters be as dumb as your players

Taking a break from the law vs. chaos topic. Sorry about being a day late on this as well. I am trying to stick to a Tuesdays and Thursdays schedule.

I'm taking a bit of a different approach today and offering up some GM advice. While I tend to be more of a player I do put a great deal of thought into what it takes to run a good game. Sometimes I think I over think that and that's why I don't tend to run stuff, I'm waiting for that perfect campaign. That said, I figure I can at least offer some advice from the player's perspective.

One of the issues that has come up a lot in my current gaming group is when the GM lets the players' lack of focus, or poor memory, to allow for the characters to do something monumentally stupid. 

Case in point, we had one situation where we were attacking a large group and wanted to capture at least a few people alive in order to question them about the big bad's plans. It was a large combat and we ended the session right after the combat. In the next session I think we were down a player and we spent a lot of the time just socializing and dealing with the bookkeeping of collecting the treasure from the previous combat. Then we started to move the story along a little bit but I know personally I just wasn't in the groove that night.  In the process, we completely forgot about the goal of getting some captives so we made no efforts to stabilize or revive any of the enemies, so they all died. 

This is definitely a situation where I think the GM should speak up. To the characters this is just after the battle, for the players it was a week later and we weren't all that focused. Because of this we failed to take advantage of the situation and were left sort of floundering for how to proceed. 

Obviously it is possible to go too far with this. You don't want a GM to second guess the players at every turn, but I think it's at least acceptable to remind the players about something they'd discussed in the previous session, when it makes sense that their characters would certainly not have forgotten that. 

Your players will have off nights, they won't be focused, they'll forget what happened in the last session. Heck, sometimes they'll just go to make some ridiculously dumb move without realizing it when their character really should know better. As a GM I think it's important to catch those situations and at least nudge the players along.