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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James McMurray" data-source="post: 18136" data-attributes="member: 743">You may not have seen enough of my posts to realize it, but I don't fudge the dice rolls. Ever. One of the most important aspects (IMO) in a gaming group is trust. The DM must trust the players not to cheat, and in turn, the players must trust the DM not to cheat. I'd much rather have a long-term foe die early than have to resort to violating the trust of my players.<a href="http://townhall.webrpg.com/index.phtml?nextid=546791" target="_blank">Here's his background</a>, since you expressed an interest:At the point where that leaves off, he meets the party, and joins them to adventure. After they find their way into an ancient sorceror's vault, he waylays them with subdual substitution spells, and teleports away with the loot. He then follow them via scrying, and even manages to steal loot from them one other time (after having killed another dragon).The party starts to hunt him down, and he has foun himself a need for a well-defensible lair. He returns to his mother's home, Dragon Mountain. Prooving his worth to her, and also purchasing the right to mate from her, he and his mother attempt to sire a child with their obviously powerful genetic heritage. At least, that's what Arthax wanted her to think. While trapped in the breeding (kinda like cats or dogs) Arthax begins to assault her, with surprise and "position" on his side, he quickly kills her and takes dragon mountain as his new home.Meanwhile, the party has traveled a bit, and gathered quite a bit of loot. He figures he'll get them to bring it to him, and begins planting clues to the whereabouts of te mountain, as well as letting the group know that's where he'll be.The reason he stayed to fight was that one, he's never lost a fight in his life, and never expected too. Two, he had only taken moderate damage prior to the round of attacks that killed him, and three, he expected to be able to circle around after dealing out some damage, and grab the cleric's dragonbane word that had been dropped by a slain filcher.Sure, I didn't get to run the massive dungeon crawl I had hoped for, but I still had a lot of fun, as id the players. Besides, now we'll be finishing up their jury duty (from the old Ravager of Time adventure if anyone's curious. After that, they'll enter this month's Dungeon Magazine's Challenge of champion for the right to find out what's happening in a certain swamp (aka the start of Return to the Tomb of Horrors.)I think our fun is far from over just because one enemy has died. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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