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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiaxTheMighty" data-source="post: 6403414" data-attributes="member: 6781142">One of my first times DMing was for a 3.5 D&D game with 4 newish players and 1 veteran. The party consisted of heavy armor types with low dexterity and low-mid perception. Their first encounter was against 4 prone Halfling crossbow snipers. It was a skirmish that they lost. One person was dropped to -1 and stabilized and the rest of them retreated. If you took a picture of those players during and after that encounter you'd never have guessed that they had "lost" the fight. It was smiles and laughter all around. That, to me, is the heart of D&D. No matter the outcome, we all had fun doing it. Nobody got annoyed when they saw the the halfling's hide modifier. Nobody got annoyed because the terrain and encounter in general favored the NPCs. Thankfully we had players who were good sports. Two of them told me it was the most memorable encounter they had ever participated in and that for the first time it didn't feel like they were having their hand held and that resulted in a much more enjoyable experience.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /> Sounds like a well balanced encounter to meAgain with the "This sucks, I quit" attitude being a common response just baffles me. Honestly, I don't mean to be elitist but D&D is not for everyone - Especially if that's your psychological response to frustration. Also, encounter lethality is a particular problem with low level PCs. There isn't much a designer can do to get around that while still also making it feel fun short of making you fight cockroaches and house cats. Hell, in previous editions you could die to a house cat or rats at low level! In previous editions, everything was out to kill you. There was very little hand holding and I for one am glad to see the game shift back toward that.  Hold on now that's not what I was implying. It's never good for the hobby if people walk away with a sour attitude about it. That being said, you can't appease everyone. You just said you prefer it to be awesome. You can't have an encounter be a cake walk and then also call it awesome. I don't understand why you keep saying that the intent of the designers is to feel superior to PCs they'll never meet. I'm pretty sure the intent of the designers was to make the adventure awesome, thrilling, terrifying, heart-pounding etc... Just because that's how you felt doesn't mean that was their intent.  I agree completely.</blockquote>

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