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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 9055930" data-attributes="member: 508">Tonight's "Ghourmand Vale" session left a bad taste in our mouths.  We were sent to bring a contract for a stone giant clan 2 days away to sign, which would have them bring quarry stone to the Vale so the Stone Keep could be enhanced in size and structure.  When we got an hour from the quarry, we saw four bedraggled stone giants clamber down a hill ahead, yelling at us to flee for our lives - a red dragon was hunting them.  They were unarmed and their leather clothes were burnt and singed, and one of the giants (the leader we were sent to meet) was helping a very wounded one to limp along at his best speed.  So we got ready for a decent red dragon fight, out in the open where the dragon's tactics would be to his advantage.  Only:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">After the DM said the dragon was 750 feet away, I looked up the range of the ice storm spell and found out my 8th-level sorcerer could cast it up to 720 feet away, so I said I'd wait until it was in range and then I could cast four ice storm spells at it (my daily limit for 4th-level spells) before it could get into attack range.  Then, suddenly, the dragon - who had been chasing the four unarmed and wounded stone giants in an "if you can evade me for 24 hours I'll let you live" game and had nothing to fear from them - suddenly was retroactively hugging the ground as it flew, and because the crest of the hill was in the way we wouldn't be able to see it until it was only 80 feet away.  Despite the fact that if we couldn't see it, it couldn't see us, and it would have no reason to fly low - in fact, flying up high so it could keep an eye on the giants it was chasing would have made much more sense.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The "you can't see it until it's 80 feet away" ruling also nicely nerfed the elf archer, who can effectively shoot arrows at targets up to 330 feet away (or something like that - I'm going off of memory).  My son was originally going to run a ranger PC for this campaign until the DM offered to let him try out the archer class, and then has seemingly since gone out of his way to prevent the archer from getting to use any of her long-range sniper abilities.  (My son built her specifically to be able to take out incoming threats from a distance.  In our 26 game sessions thus far, he's been allowed to have her do so only once before, slaying one of five orc guards from hiding before all of the others suddenly spotted exactly where she was and immediately hid from view.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">My sorcerer's other attack spells are scorching ray (useless against a red dragon) and magic missile.  So naturally, the red dragon, chasing after four wounded stone giants with no spellcasting ability among them, made sure to have a shield spell already up and active, preventing me from doing any damage.  (Once we got it down to the ground - one of the unarmed stone giants leaped up and grabbed its tail as it flew overhead, dragging it down with its extra weight - and I could no longer target it with ice storm spells without also harming my allies, I had to resort to a 0-level acid splash spell to deal 1d3 points of damage.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Before being grounded, the DM made sure to keep the dragon high enough that our half-elf paladin and halfling rogue had no way to do any damage to it - granted, by that time it knew the PCs were there and that's only smart tactics on the dragon's part, but it made sure the players of those two PCs felt like they were being nerfed as well.</li> </ul>Once the stone giant dragged the Large juvenile red dragon (168 hp, CR 10) down and the paladin could smite evil and the rogue could sneak attack, we slowly whittled it away, with the only ally death being the stone giant grappler.  But I was down to 3 hp and the rogue wasn't too much above me by the time we killed it.  And all of this after the DM had come to me with advice beforehand and I warned him 3.5 dragon CRs were built for a party that knew beforehand they'd be up against a dragon and what type it would be so they could make appropriate precautions (mostly protection from its breath weapon), and that a surprise attack against an unprepared party of the same level as the dragon's CR could easily end with a TPK.  So naturally, he threw a CR 10 dragon encounter against our 8th-level party - bad enough at that, but the sudden "nerfing" is what made it that much worse.  Had my sorcerer and our archer been able to whittle it down from a distance - as they were built to do - we'd have fared much better, and it just seemed like he was in a "I want to bend things to my advantage at all costs" mood tonight.  (He got his start decades ago with AD&D 1E, where he was a player in a campaign with a very adversarial DM; it seems every once in a while he reverts back to what he knew about DMing from those days, although when he plays in my son and my separate campaigns he gets to see DMs very much on the opposite side of the scale, so I don't know what the problem is other than an occasional desire to "win" D&D as a DM.)Johnathan</blockquote>

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