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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 6721968" data-attributes="member: 3586">Originally posted by Fallstorm: Steve, First, thank you for taking time out of your day to answer people's questions on this forum. My question (and I am not trying to do a "gotcha" here) has to do with your statement about PCs being able to make it through every encounter via one of the three legs of 5E (combat, exploration, and interaction), and every encounter beside "No Room at the Inn" being balanced. Particularly I am thinking about Chapter 1 of the adventure where a 1st Level PC has to go up against the Half-Blue Dragon cult leader (I'm sorry I can't recall his name) that challenges one of the party at the keep. To be clear, everyone in my gaming group is experienced DnD players, in fact most of us starting playing in 1E or 2E and we love every edition of DnD (including 4th which so far is my personal favorite). We use smart tactics when we play. Yet, I fail to see how this encounter was not desinged to outright kill a PC. All of this is assuming that my DM ran the adventure correctly. I don't have a copy of it so if he did something wrong please do correct me here, but if he didn't let's examine this. YOu have an encounter that takes place duing the first chapter when the PCs really don't have a chance to get a short rest and have had various encounters saving different parts of the town from cultists. They come back and have this half-blue dragon character challenge them in exchange for letting a prisoner go and not attacking the keep. While the PCs don't HAVE to accept the challenge the adventure seems to put pressure on them and make it clear that it is the correct thing to do as any heroic (especially good aligned character) is going to take this bait in order to free a hostage and stop the keep from being assaulted. Then a 1st level PC has to go out and fight this character that gets two attacks with a great sword and has a breath weapon that does 4d10 (if I recall correctl) damage. Our fighter took up this challenge. I will admit he had been injured in one of the previous encounters but he still had more hit points than any other member of the group. Without scoring a critical hit this Half-Dragon killed the fighter in 2 rounds. If I recall correctly (it has been a few weeks) the breath weapon did over 30 points of damage. That NPC would have killed any other PC in the group within a single round. This death wasn't due to a character seeking violence as the only means to solve every problem. This death wasn't due to a character making poor decisions in a dungeon and not picking up on clues, etc. This death wasn't due poor dice rolling on the part of a character. From what I saw it was due to a 1st level PC being de facto railroaded into a facing a creature that it would take a miracle for the PC to win against and would likely kill a PC. In my humble opinion, an encounter like this is a mistake in design. It's one thing if a PC dies to poor decisions (including thinking violence is the way to solve every problem), but is another thing entirely for a PC to die to an encounter that puts peer pressure upon the PCs to engage in as heroes and then puts a PC up against undefeatable odds. Did you think this encounter was balanced? Did my DM run this correctly or is the Half-Blue Dragon not as powerful as my DM made him out to be (no breath weapon, etc)?</blockquote>

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