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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 8233294" data-attributes="member: 6677017">My balanced party of 6 had a pretty intense overall experience, and the closest thing to a TPK I've ever run (sort of an "effective TPK"). The PCs were a tiefling eldritch knight fighter, a human open hand monk, a human life domain cleric, a dragonborn arcane trickster rogue, a human wild mage sorcerer, and a drow transmuter wizard.First, I was upfront with the party about how I deal with dragons. I love dragons, including D&D dragons. I like all monsters to get their due and be more than just sword fodder, but I explained that when I'm DMing I role-play dragons as if they were my personal PCs. They are going to plan smart, fight to survive, and make good use of all of their resources.Before the party met the dragon, I brushed up on the typical personality traits of green dragons by reading material about them in the MM, and I probably referenced some older edition material just for good measure. So I had an idea of how green dragons in particular operate and her basic history, motives, etc. Everything she did involved me planning out exactly what she would do between sessions and sticking with it. None of this was arbitrary last minute adaptation.They initially met Venomfang by walking into her tower as 4th-level characters. She wasn't sure whether she could take them or that wanted to get beat up unnecessarily, so she pretended to be a nice dragon. Since dragons aren't always true to their species preferred alignment (just the vast majority of the time), this was plausible. I interpreted her "young" age category as being equivalent to a youngish teenager. She put on a show of being kind of a nice, quirky girl and the party mostly bought it (the players enjoyed the show too). They left on amicable terms and went about their business. (She may have given them some area info (which may or may not have been true) but I can't recall the details.)Either that night or the next, as they were camped out in the grasslands, she swooped in (beating the Wisdom (Perception) of the character taking that watch) and surprise attacked them at night (she wanted to add their treasure to her hoard!), waking them up with a nice blast of poison gas from above. They scrambled into action immediately. While it started out looking grim, they managed to drive her off, with the eldritch knight using his wand of magic missiles to do some serious damage as she was fleeing. Had she stayed around for another round, she probably would have died. As it turned out, even though she surprised them, and even though some of the party were down and making death saves, it was a pretty solid and epic win for the party.But that wasn't enough for them. One of my players felt strongly that we should accept our win and move on, but the party vote came down to getting enough XP to hit level 5 and then taking the fight back to her at her lair. Venomfang was not idle for those next few weeks. After her humiliating defeat, she expected these adventurers who knew where she lived to come after her. She went into the forest and used some of her treasure to hire hobgoblins to work for her (there might have been a green hag involved too, but I can't recall). She had them fortify and man her tower, and she planned how to deal with returning adventurers.When the party came back, they immediately noticed the changes to the tower, and soon realized that the arrow slits that kept disgorging arrows at them had internal metal covers that regularly snapped over them while the archers reloaded (I took advantage of 5e action economy and a simple plate and pulley mechanism so that the window covers opened for the archer when they stood on the weight-triggered plate in front of them, but closed as soon as they stepped off and away (at the end of their turn). That wasn't really too much of a problem for the party, but it did prevent them from lobbing a fireball in through an arrow slit.When they got close, they had to deal with a fog cloud forcing them fight the various hidden hobgoblins without knowing their numbers or location to start. Stacks of rocks and newly build rooftop battlements were taken advantage of by the hobgoblin defenders. Still, the party persevered and made it into the tower alcove.The tower annex building was filled with flammable wood, which a hobgoblins set on fire. At least the fog cloud's area only extended partway into the building. Now the party had no way into the tower proper but to pass through the flaming rubble and smoke in silence.Or rather, in silence, because that's the spell that was covering the whole bottom of the tower and most of the annex building area. (If they moved over to a corner they could get a few feet to cast a spell.) At least the party made it through easy enough. They had been beaten up some, but there were still plenty of hit points and spell slots to work with.Once they entered the cylindrical tower proper (still in silence) they still faced visibility issues. I can't remember the exact mechanism (like all my dragons, the dragon had spellcasting as per the MM variant rule, and there was a hobgoblin caster amongst the hired mercenaries), but there were visibility issues in the tower as well. The dragon was up at the top (which now had a metal roof, but had a dragon sized door in the top side), and hobgoblin mercenaries (including the caster) manned the spiraling staircase. This was not going to be pretty.I don't remember all the details of this fight (I strictly tracked everything on a virtual tabletop battlemap), but I know that eventually the silence was removed and the drow used faerie fire to counter visibility issues. The party lost a lot of resources trying to fight their way up the stairs dealing with silence part of the time and the other issues. Eventually someone got near the top, Venomfang breathed poison down at them, and then things really got desparate.I don't remember all the details, but the way this ended was with some of the party dead inside the tower, at least one member slain by Venomfang outside the tower, and the badly injured drow wizard barely sneaking away amidst the last of the carnage (she wasn't abandoning her allies, they were all dead and there was nothing she could do).Naturally, the players (particularly the one who had voted against going after the dragon in the first place) didn't find this to be the most satisfying end of the campaign, though we had already finished the main plot elements of LMoP, but I added a couple of epilogues to give it a better after taste. The first one was scenes of the deceased characters in their respective afterlives (based on alignment, deities, and inclinations), getting the "So and so is attempting to resurrect you, do you accept?" treatment (with a bit more flair). They basically all said yes, and that was the end of the campaign.The other epilogue was actually a follow up one-shot adventure (took 2 or 3 session). This one had a party of 20th-level characters facing a kraken off the Sword Coast. I gave each player the option for reprise the roles of their original PC (now resurrected and 20th-level), but I believe only one of them took me up on it, with the rest of them opting to try out new characters for the one-shot. That one (the tiefling fighter) was enough for the follow up aspect though. This adventure started with the 20th-level tiefling clearly wearing a green dragon-tooth dagger on his belt.It was pretty intense, but overall a pretty cool experience. The only regret I have was the slight friction between the one of our friends who wasn't on board with going after the dragon but went along with the party anyway, and still found the experience unsatisfying. I suppose that's a relatively minor thing--no friendships were lost or gamers rage-quit, I just like to have a more general sense of satisfaction for all participants.And that, is why one does not simply kill a dragon.</blockquote>

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