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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrowhawk" data-source="post: 5748024" data-attributes="member: 6679551">Greenfield,  I find your story very intriguing, please share more of these anecdotes whenever you get the chance.  However, it does shine light on some real dysfunctional aspects of D&D...  In particular, you describe something that could/should essentially happen a lot.  One group encountering another group and neither side has any idea how  capable the other is.  We can even throw in the large hunting dogs and the party had no idea what they were up against.   D&D does a terrible job of really addressing the inability of determining respective threat levels.  I know that there is a Sense Motive option for doing this, but how often is it used?In the real world, like say in war zones or terrorist ridden countries,  you don't see such orders of magnitude difference in killing power.  In fact, guns, are the greatest equalizer because I can kill the greatest martial artist in the world with one bullet to the head.  No individual can kill a group of individuals without hardware and that hardware would be obvious to the attackers.  If we go back to midevil times, there's even more parity between two unknowns.  In other words, the bandits you described would never, ever, ever, fear something like what happened, could happen.And yet, these bandits would seem to run a frequent risk of getting fried by any party with a spell caster or diced by some character with haste and tons of gear.   So you have to ask yourself, do you really think a bunch of bandits would risk rolling up on complete strangers?  Let's expand that question, do you really think people would pick fights in bars with complete strangers? For me, this problem underscores one of the double-edged swords of the DM.  The DM knows what level the PC's are, so the DM doesn't think twice about having x humanoids attack them.  But if D&D were real, is that plausible?  Would those Bandits really risk attacking a party of 7 they have no information on and could be Epic level adventurers?  To put it another way, any campaign setting would be filled with stories of people picking fights with the wrong people and getting annihilated.  You'd have to think that would have a serious effect on how encounters would be handled by sentient beings.</blockquote>

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