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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kichwas" data-source="post: 73086" data-attributes="member: 891">There's a lot you can do with an encounter the PCs work to avoid.You drop hints that it's out there, and that stears any smart players in some other direction. And gives a penalty for those who just absolutely refuse to admit that there are things in the world they cannot handle.A world that lines up to face the PCs by order of EL/CR is at best a video game; at worst unbelievable.Many players will much more appreciate a world that 'keeps them in their place' when they need to be there, and lets them grow up out of it if they work hard enough for it.I used the pit fiend actually for a reason. A current popular movie based on a somewhat decently known set of novels illustrates this point using that very creature.They see the thing there; and they run like all heck. Those PCs knew their place and they knew it wasn't to be facing a creature like that. One of them stayed to hold it off and let the others get away. They were very much a group of PCs who seriously goofed up. They knew something big was in that module; they worked to avoid it, but then they made the wrong moves and they had to flee.Actually the night I made my first post I'd just returned from a game where we'd found ourselves in a very similar situation with some kind of fiend coming up out of the depths after us...We're currently hiding in another part of that underground complex trying to figure out where to go next. In that module we've had a number of almost encounters with things that could wipe us off the map without flexing their muscles.Each time the DM has done his job by ensuring the clues where there if we looked for them to let us know that that was something we should avoid. So far we've been smart enough and only lost about 4 PCs... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />(The DM is the same guy who DM'd cntxt through a Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil of his own design before WotC put out that module. Hopefully cntxt will post story hours on it someday.)Running is not the only thing you can use such an encounter for though. You can use it to impart information, set the stage for a later encounter, or even just to let them know the place has more to it than what they came there for.In other words it adds dimension to the story.</blockquote>

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