Drifter Bob said:
Finally, humans are very devious. A brown bear or a tiger or a polar bear is a mighty dangerous critter in real life and even in D&D, let alone a pack of wolves or a pride of lions. Humans in real life routinely slaughtered such beasts well before the availablity of firearms. It is my experience that if you have enough verisimilitude in your campaign, your players will tap into this ingenuity and craft and will amaze you with their abilities to solve the problems of defeating a monster. I find the heightened level of immersion often inspries my players to "rise above" as black flag used to say.
A dragon in a lair somewhere has the same problem as a castle in medieval warfare... if it is a known entity, ways can and will be invented to defeat it.
DB
Hmm, I'd say humans are fairly devious, a surprising number of humans get killed by creatures that really have no interest in them except for getting terribly annoyed, and I doubt that killing a bear with a spear when it shows up to eat your winter supplies is so much routine as possible and bravely heroic, as distinct from epicly heroic where the bear is grendel and you are its winter supplies.
And see the thing about the dragons=castles comparison is that everyone will give dragons the same failings, but noone will give them the same sucess.
Where is the version of France where dragons liter the countryside, repelling English invaders, developing increasingly complex architecture, serving as rallying and organizing points for military power and intellectual might, and taxing the peasants?
'Cause if he's a dragon and he's not doing that then he's not really like a castle.
Not just facetious, a lot of the time I see players in low magic situations come up with clever plans the real problem of the DM is that he doesn't make them suffer for it by forcing them to face creatures with equally clever plans.
Sure you can prepare for the Werewolf in the grove, but you should get hit by it just as hard as if you had 'prepared' for the guerrilla in the jungle.
