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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wrathamon" data-source="post: 6394758" data-attributes="member: 7989">Our DM mentioned that he isn't meant to attack the party, just a challenge to see how many guards you can save before he flies away.An experienced DM can roleplay this so that its easy for the group to understand, a bad or inexperienced DM might not be able to sell the cinematic nature of this and either A railroad you into knowing a Key to this trick, or B have the dragon attack you (which clearly it wasnt meant to), it can easily kill the entire party, but that could railroad you into running away and not saving the guards. The issue is making the players want to save the guards. If they dont, DMs just move on an explain what happens. Make the players feel for the loss of the guards, how the leader of the town now looks at the group (not heroic but maybe just murder hobos).  The issue isn't the encounter. It's how the DM presents it, runs it, and "sells" it to the players and how they react to it.  The problem could be that its too old school of leave it up to the DM to figure that part out. Maybe more side notes on these cinematic trick type encounters (AD&D glossary term for puzzle trap or maybe this is more like a skill challenge) would have been useful since this is the first/second adventure out of the gate for most new DMs. In the end, it's up to the DM. They could have written a flow chart of possible scenarios but that eats up a lot of space.  I havent read it, so I dont know if they did have contingency plans for the DM. I know both Winters and Baur are great designers (see their past work) so I wouldn't write this up as wow wotc designers sucks (since they arent wotc). They may have had page count issues to deal with and learning the rules as they were writing it.  In the end, the DM and players need to "own" the game. The designers/writers are just giving you a canvas, and a sketch (or arranged a bunch of fruit in a bowl on a table) for you to paint.</blockquote>

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