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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6704514" data-attributes="member: 2067">One way to think about it:Your players are involved in a McGuffin hunt where the McGuffin is being held in a dragon's lair. The DM plans out the dungeon, the encounters, the combat terrain, budgets the XP, the whole nine yards. Before the party even sets foot in the dragon's lair, do you have some fights in that lair that you will make happen almost no matter what the players do? <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Do you make the party fight every encounter? If they find a shortcut to the dragon's lair, do you then move the McGuffin go be in whatever the last room they clear is? Or is the dungeon a straight shot through pre-planned encounters to get to the McGuffin where they can't choose to go around an encounter?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Do you make the party fight at least the dragon? If they find a shortcut to the dragon's lair, is all the effort you went to making the encounters and terrains in the rest of the rooms content they can just skip over? But will the dragon attack them no matter what they say or what they do? If they send in a rogue who sneaks successfully, do you have the dragon wake up anyway? If they try to flee, does the dragon pursue them and force combat? Is the McGuffin only released after the dragon's death? And if they try to get an NPC army to trigger that death, does that have a chance to work? </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Do you allow the party to avoid every encounter? If they sneak into the dungeon, find the shortcut, grab the McGuffin, sneak out, and hide from the dragon's vengeance, is that something that you'll accept without forcing a fight? </li> </ul>Very old-school D&D seems pretty cool with the last notch on that list, but judging by the few respondents here, it might be the case that most players don't expect that the game is run that way (and a lot of DM's do indeed run their game in such a way that some fights are inevitable).</blockquote>

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