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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tequila Sunrise" data-source="post: 5906070" data-attributes="member: 40398">"You can't survive this monster"?Players are notorious for getting into fights, and fighting until a bitter TPK. Seems to me that this is largely due to a lack of communication. Unless at least one of the players has read the MM and has a good head for numbers, there's no established way for players to know when to back down. Most encounters with monsters are written to be overcome in a glory of blood and battle, so players naturally and quite reasonably assume that any monster they come across is killable. Bash WoW all you want, but it gives players some idea of what they're getting into. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />So if you've ever had a monster that you knew would curb-stomp the PCs if they picked a fight with it, how did you clue your players in? A skill check? A friendly NPC with prophetic insight into the PCs' prowess? Metagame comments? Telling your players to metagame? (Had a DM do this, myself.) Or maybe you're just old skool, and you let your players learn which monsters aren't killable at level X by trial-and-death?I saw an OSR blog somewhere with a chart demonstrating the general relationship between size and HD, which I thought was nifty.</blockquote>