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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 4863679" data-attributes="member: 172">I consider that a very contrived example or a very naive one, and illustrates that you missed my point about combat not being the only option. You simply assume that the players stumble into the trolls and get into a combat. That's really back to my take on an undesirable situation or poor sandbox DMing: combat is the only option.You stumble into a hex with a troll in a sandbox game with a good sandbox DM*, the DM will consider what the prevailing situation in the area is. Do the trolls influence the environment around them? Do the PCs find carcasses? Tracks? Remnant of unfortunates who ran across the trolls?When you are doing setting driven DMing, the monsters in the hex aren't the only thing present in the environment, and the terrain is more than just something to complicate your power uses.If this really was the players' fault (e.g., as you said, they assume they can parley with trolls and ignore warnings), then that might serve as a harsh lesson. One that rolling up the new characters should help hammer home.**But trolls surprising players without warning in a sandbox game? That simply wouldn't happen were I to run. Trolls are not stealth hunters; they are used to ruling by brute force.* - And really, you could write a DMG to educate would be good sandbox DMs.** - In BD&D, rolling a new character might be pretty quick. In 3.5, I might contrive to let them live with some major consequence, e.g., they wake up naked hanging over the stew. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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