I cannot stand this modern insistence that all encounters in every published module has to be balanced exactly to the PC party. It's led to this crush-kill-death meat grinder philosophy that states that any obstacle too powerful for the party to kill in a straight fight is some kind of abomination set by idiot designers. Which is insane.
Look, there is nothing wrong with a CR 8 monster in a level 3 adventure. It is just obviously not there to be fought. It is there to be circumvented in some other way. If the players try to kill it, it should become immediately obvious that they can't (if not before they even try), and they need to try a different solution. If they keep trying anyway and get themselves killed, instead of, you know, running away, I'd say that's a pretty stupid death on their part, no?
Insane? Please. Hyperbole much?
Published adventures should match PC capabilities unless they are explicitly called out as gritty in which case, a DM can choose to not run it or modify it.
That does not mean that there cannot be deadly encounters, it just means that there should be a line in the sand that is not crossed.
I play the game for fun, not to roll up new PCs because of subpar module design. Feel free to roll up new PCs all you want. Just because some 1E modules had kobolds in one room and powerful demons in the next does not mean that modern module design should do something so stupid. In fact, many early "dungeons" had levels to avoid this very problem.
DM: "You dummies. You should know not to attack a dragon."
Player 1: "But my PC's background explicitly tells me that I want to do that. The background that the module designers created for me."
Sorry, but bad design is bad design. If you want to play a gritty game, do so. Justifying a module designer doing so, meh.
IT"S A GAME. MEANT TO BE FUN.
Nothing wrong with PC death caused by really bad play or really bad dice rolls. Nothing wrong with deadly encounters. But encounters designed to kill the intended target party level? Bad design.
If there's no information that the party can obtain to tell them that they are not prepared for the battle, then it's bad design.Except these encounters aren't designed to kill the party. They are there to be circumvented. That's not bad design. It's just supportive of a very common playstyle that you don't appear to have any interest in. That's not a knock on you, but it's also not a knock on the design.
Ballocks. Complete and utter ballocks. Nearly the first encounter in Return To The Temple of Elemental Evil is a honking big blue dragon. Keep on the Borderlands is chock a block with encounters way above the pc's weight class. Good grief you have G1 Steading with a fairly large army of giants that are going to blort a party that tries to front end assault it. And that's one of the highest ranked modules of all time.
Sorry but you are flat wrong here.