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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 5742336" data-attributes="member: 6680772">Perhaps my word choice was poor, and I should clarify.  The PCs certainly had a choice.  Combat was not mandatory.  The problem wasn't that I made them fight.  The problem was I thought the players could, after a good fight, handle the dragon.  They thought they could handle the dragon.  As I said, I was inexperienced at the time and did not have a full handle on how best to scale encounters.  (In my defense, this was exactly an easy thing in Basic, at least until the encounter challenge formula came out in the Master Set).  Had I been aware of just how dangerous the dragon would be, I would have given them a heads up, suggested putting off the lair for a while, or else stocking up on potions, scrolls and the like.  Or tweaked the stats of the dragon.As it was, the dragon was encountered, combat was joined, and started off well.  While the players of course had no idea how many hp the dragon had (and trusted that I wouldn't give them an opponent above their level without fair warning), I could see that given the damage they were putting out compared to that of the dragon (and the wizard having emptied his big guns), they were rather overmatched.  I didn't fudge to let them win; I fudged to try and bring the challenge level more to the point I had originally envisioned, and had implicitly promised the players through our playstyle.</blockquote>