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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6075888" data-attributes="member: 8835">Gilladian and others' advice is pretty much spot on for how to move on with the players and group.As a post-analysis of the adventure, there's a whole lot of assumptions going on, as well as risky GMing.As a player, you should never assume the GM who put that dragon in the scene isn't going to kill you with it just because you are first level.  That's meta-gaming.  It's also tactically risky, as you really don't know how ruthless this GM is.On the GM's part, he should never had put a high level NPC in a direct conflict position with the players, UNLESS he expects to wipe you out with them.  Note, I differentiate between you players going off to stupidly hunt and kill a dragon, from the GM putting a dragon in the next scene where you will directly discover he is opposed to the player's plans.  That's just risky and nearly any outcome of him NOT killing you outright with it is blatant railroading to spare your lives because you're first level.  He also may have power-level appropriateness issues if your first level PC then kills off the General, with little difficulty.  That's just nuts.  What kind of pansy was he.  And why didn't the dragon do it himself.This hits yet another aspect of crappy adventure design, convoluted plots to manipulate or confuse the players where they were doing just fine and taking action and getting stuff done.  If the players are pursuing a goal (particularly one based on the content the GM supplied), then don't screw with that.  it's hard enough getting players to follow a plot.  Once you teach them that your plots are screwjobs, they will buck your plots every time.Your fellow players got themselves into a hasty assumption rut, where they assumed the cultists were enemies, and just attacked them.  They also didn't listen to you when you raised up concerns.  They probably could have handled that better.However, assuming the General was indeed a good guy and he needed the Orb, the party probably rightly deduced that people holding the Orb were bad guys.  Why wait for the bad guys to attack first, you know they are bad guys, and look, there's a dragon, further proof they are bad guys.  Your conversation with the Dragon where he asks you to kill the General is even further proof that the dragon and cultists are bad.  So from the other player's perspective, you were confusing what was really a simple situation.It didn't help that the dragon was present.  As a high level bad guy, he should have eliminated you all.  Though it also worked that he manipulated your bard to achieve his end goal.  As a GM, anytime you put something that is over-kill, you force certain outcomes on your players.  Had the encounter just been the cultists, as an even match, your group could try to fight them, parley, or sneak in.  with the dragon present, the GM was going to win, or make it very railroady in order spare your lives so you all didn't die.As a player, you stand in a tricky position.  You clearly see situations differently than the other players, and the GM.  If you read more into a situation than exists, or if the GM has logical inconsistencies, you may deduce something that conflicts with the group consensus and with GM expectation.  Basically, this kind of thing will happen again.I think part of it is on the GM, as he created the situation (probably deliberately), but in a way that caused logical inconsistencies (a dragon is not going to waste time with 1st level PCs if they become a hassle).  I've seen this kind of thing before, where the GM sets up something convoluted to 'trick" the players, and on review, what I see is a convoluted, contradictory setup, that hinges on things the NPC needn't have bothered with to gain the same outcome.</blockquote>

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