NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 7996644" data-attributes="member: 6775477">In early editions of D&D, there was a chart that would determine the mood of the opposition, allowing for potential negotiations or even just passing each other by. Sometimes it was unrealistic, but that's what the DM's for, to know when to use the chart or ignore it. Of course, in those same editions, killing stuff was a lot less of your xp, so it just wasn't worth it unless necessary.As for everything should be fought... that's a mentality I've tried to break from a lot of 3E and 4E players. I ran LMoP to teach 5E to an experienced group of 3E players, and they decided to fight the dragon at level 3, where they were immediately killed. One of them asked how you were supposed to kill the dragon, so I asked "what indicated you should even seek out the dragon?" They just heard about the dragon and assumed they were supposed to kill it.This is a failure of adventure design. If you're going to have a party run across something that's way beyond their power level, there should either be hints beforehand (warning them to plan appropriately to avoid or flee) or it should be set up in such a way as to allow the PCs to see the enemy before they can be seen. No one wants a TPK just because of a bad roll on a random encounter table or because they had no idea the cult had managed to summon a demon.We just ran a Midguard one shot, and most of the adventure was pretty good, but there were absolutely NO clues about what was going on. We reacted to events, trying to find out what might be going on, but instead we had to face a CR 5 as four level 1 PCs. We only pulled it off because we figured out its immediate goal and its weakness (fire), and then were able to keep it from pulling off its goal while in a burning building (we were in it too). My character died heroically making sure the creature didn't escape, which was fine for a one shot, but would have sucked for the start of a campaign. Since we figured we defeated the enemy, we followed its tracks back to its lair in hopes of finding out what was going on. Instead we got hit with a CR 6 creature that had a summoning power, with no warning or chance to escape... TPK. We talked with the DM about it later, and it turns out the only way to figure out what's going on is to kill the CR 5, then reduce the CR6 to 1/4 HP, where it will surrender and explain. Most of the this one shot was really good, as we just assumed we missed something as players, but no it was a deathtrap adventure that really gave the players no chance of success.</blockquote>

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