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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kitsune9" data-source="post: 4893803" data-attributes="member: 18507">In other type of thread (the WORST encounter), I asked what was the WORST type of encounter you hated to write up. A couple of posters had indicated that they ran an encounter where the dice was completely against them. So, hence the idea for this thread. Tell us about an encounter that just your players managed to walk through that even if the dice rolled average, they would have thought twice about or it should have been a TPK.Here's my funny little example:I have a 6 character party running through the old dwarven mines in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. There are some "castle areas" in which there are a lot of goblinoid guards, cultists, etc. defending some gate either into the Inner Fane or to the outside. This was an Inner Fane "castle area", so a lot tougher baddies lived here. These fights should be wars of attrition the way the encounters are written up. The PC's kill some guards, run away, kill the higher level baddies, run away, then come back and pick off the hill giants and baddies to clear out the castle area.Well, the party charged in totally gung-ho. It was definitely going to be a TPK, because the gnolls sounded the alarm and started tactics to prevent the PC's from retreating. Well, that was the idea at least. Except that I couldn't roll anything above a 5 to save my life. Not a single creature scored a hit on the PC. Saving throws? All failed. The monsters managed to move to prevent the PC's from escaping, but just died where they stood. Soon the entire castle area came out to kill the PC's, something that would be a TPK for a party three times their numbers, but for some reason my dice bought a one-way ticket to Epic Fail and became a citizen there.I had to dole out like 15,000 XP for all the encounters and my players considered it one of my finest sessions ever as a DM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Happy Gaming!</blockquote>

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