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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AddizAbeba" data-source="post: 1736755" data-attributes="member: 14283">Ok, so I've really done it now. I TPK-ed my party. Or they TPK-ed themselves, depending on how you look at it.And it even happened with a random encounter. I am wondering all the time "why didn't I pull my punches? Why didn't I lower his hitpoints or some other simple DM trick?"Party: Human Rogue 6, Human Ranger 7 (with Dire Wolf), Elf wiz3/clr3/mth2, Human Rog1/Clr7Encounter: One young red dragon (supposedly CR6) on a open area in the foothills of the biggest mountain range of my continent.I thought: It looks a bit tough (+19 to hit, 6 attacks), but they should be able to win this.I played the red dragon as described: cocky, haughty, self-assured. It spotted the party, flew low over them to detect magic, and then landed on a spot where it could breath on them as easy as possible. The scattered a little when they spotted the dragon, so it could only catch 2 of them (ranger and wolf). It first asked them each for their strongest magic item, or else. They of course declined the offer <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />Then I just went all-out with the beast, going melee most of the time (it breathed twice, once at the start and once two rounds later). Battle lasted about 6 rounds.They managed to do it a lot of damage, and at one moment I even rolled a sort-of morale check for the dragon, which it did not fail.The stupid thing is, the first breath dropped the rog6, while I expected him to save. He stabilized at -7.The dragon then meleed the wolf to dying, and the ranger died. The cleric was doing well, but the theurge basically only mm-ed the beast twice (Oh, and he cast a fireball, which of course invoked the reaction "mmm.. nice and warm!").The thing is, he forgot about his wand of ice storm, even when I told him he did not really have to cast a spell, "there are other options".When the dragon moved over to the Theurge, he cast a phantom steed, to try to get away, but that of course only gave the dragon a round extra, and enabled him to full-attack the Theurge. exit.Then the Cleric only needed to hit him once very good with a crossbow shot (the dragon had 17hp left), he rolled a 20 and confirmed. Then he did (of course) not roll maximum damage (13), and stupid me did not lower the dragon HP's on the spot to let it die by this great shot.End result, TPK, dragon 4 hp left, and a nice bag of goodies to take home to his new founded lair (he had just left his parent's lair, so he wanted to make some fortune).Should I have pulled some punches (like 'forgetting' wing attacks, or tail attacks), or is my party just too stupid? It was the party's very first dragon... (only one player had ever played a dragon-encounter before)Anyway, they are not angry at me (very important) and now a player is going to take over DM-ing from me for a while, and we'll probably start at level 1 characters again. For me it's a bit of a relief that the burden of DM-ing has fallen off of my shoulders, at least for a little/long while.Well, if you made it this far, thanks for listening to me.Ruud (ex-DM)Note: I roll everything in the open, except for hidden skill checks and such.</blockquote>

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