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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1944316" data-attributes="member: 5171">As others have noted, "Talking" is not "Surrender".  Two very different concepts.  A failure to distinguish between the two might hurt your character at some point.  <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=";)" />Wait... I'm confused.  You just said that you have Frost Giants helping you out.  Before this, you were complaining about how overpowered the encounter was, and how the EL was way too high and such... but you've got a GROUP of FROST GIANTS helping you out?  That sorta evens things out a tad.Well, hadn't he earlier tried to talk with you, and you killed him?  So yeah, if I'm playing the BBEG, here's my thinking there:"Well, I tried talking with them, and they killed my simulacrum.  Guess I'd better show them I mean business, so that when I try to talk to them again, they realize that they'd be better off talking with me."In that context, throwing out a bunch of damage makes sense.In terms of your strategy not making sense... you were Con-drained, right?  And you spend some of the paragraphs below talking about how horribly dangerous and hard to kill the Ice Golems were... so why would your Con-drained guy charge four of them?  I mean... you seem to be trying to defending your tactics while also saying that the DM was sending you to your death.  The two arguments are tough to justify side by side.  If your tactics were so intelligent, based on what you'd seen, you wouldn't have died.  And if the encounter was so much more powerful than you could handle, then those were somewhat silly tactics.The way your argument would make sense is if the wizard were zinging you with magic missiles or something, or a non-maximized fireball, that makes you think, "Ha, he's got nothing!", and then you charge in and get fried.  But he was using big mojo right from the get-go.Again, surrender != talk with.  Heck, pausing to talk to a wizard is a great idea a lot of the time, even if you plan on fighting him later.  It eats into the duration of any spells he might have going, and makes it more likely that if the fight does start, you're on equal footing.The flaw I see in this reasoning is that you're basing your "The wizard isn't that powerful" assumption not on the fact that your character has researched him or heard rumors or seen other evidence, but that you the player don't think your DM would send you up against someone that bad.  That's metagaming, and it bit you in the butt big-time here.  Obviously, your DM would send someone like that against you -- either because you had a bunch of Frost giant buddies hanging with you, or because he thought that after seeing the maximized fireball warning shot he fired across your bow, you'd go "Hey, I should maybe talk to this guy, like he wants."And that fireball series was just a warning shot, because the DM obviously knew about your damage reduction for fire.  That was an ideal way for the DM to say "Hey, check it, this guy can throw big hurt," without actually doing that much damage to you.  So, just to be clear, you wanted the BBEG to politely continue asking you to parley without firing back, even after you killed his simulacrum after his initial "Let's talk instead of fighting" speech?  And when you saw multiple ice golems, when just one ice golem had taken you several rounds to kill, you thought, "I should run forward and attack"?I'm just not seeing this as the DM's fault.  The DM obviously didn't want you guys to fight that guy, but you didn't take the hint.  He tried to warn you with dialogue, with big-damage spells that you were uniquely qualified to absorb without really suffering (the big fireballs on your fire-resistant character), and with a show of strength, monster-wise, that ought to have gotten your attention.Instead of reacting as your characters would have reacted, you decided, "The DM wouldn't send something against us that we couldn't beat," and charged.  That, compounded with confusing Parley for Surrender, resulted in your character's death.  Not vindictiveness.</blockquote>

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