Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6382698" data-attributes="member: 2011">Thanks for this input. I definitely see your POV.On the other hand, it did take you 8 paragraphs to rationalize the encounter. 8 paragraphs that the players never see because much of it is from the POV of the villain or your rationalization of his POV (maybe not many DMs take on him). On the surface, the encounter seems (to some people) dumb, forced, the caricature of a bad movie villain, an attempt to humiliate a PC (at least to me) and/or designed to introduce a BBEG whom the PCs could defeat given the chance, but they are not really given the chance. Digging deeper, it might be plausible as you indicate, but again, that deeper level of rationalization that you added is not necessarily obvious and visible to the players.And it's the players for whom this is either an exciting encounter, or a meh one.And in the case of our group, that half dragon is no longer as mysterious and tough as maybe he was supposed to seem. The entire foreshadowing of what a real scary foe that he was supposed to be is now lost on our group since we already kicked his butt once. He's just another NPC brute to us without the emotional appeal that the designers might have tried to achieve out of him as a reoccurring villain. Granted, there might be some emotional appeal about him from some of our players due to his threatening of the villagers, but instead of it being a scary one of him being a badass (as possibly intended by the designers), it's more that he's just an evil bully who picks on people weaker than himself. By knocking him down once, our group knows of some of his limits and he is not as mysterious as he was before.That doesn't mean that he cannot kick our butts with the proper allies in the future, but it does mean that we should have enough information to present a much greater challenge to him in the future. Information that a group of players who just sent a PC out to take a dirt nap might not have. For example, his breath weapon. He might just cut a PC down in many games in a few rounds without ever using his breath weapon. Our group now knows to not line up in a row against him and/or to get our hands on lightning resist. Other groups might not.</blockquote>

Verification