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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmu1" data-source="post: 4670813" data-attributes="member: 319">I'm strongly in favor of causality. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Obviously, we don't know the intricacies of the campaign, and I'm not going to try to guess your motivations.However, the way you've written this up, it doesn't really seem like this was a confrontation the players were going to be able to do too much about. They might have been able to be better prepared for it, and they would have been better off if they never split up (which is fine in a dungeon, but silly if you do it all the time, like sleeping in armor) but if the fact of the matter is that a dragon was going to ambush them at its leisure, then no matter how logical this outcome was, it could very well feel like DM fiat. As someone pointed out upthread, a dragon played optimally - "how would something this old, smart and powerful do this?" - feels like that anyway, and I'd argue that, for all the PCs are usually able to do about it, it often might as well be DM fiat.Although you did mention earlier that you were trying to drop hints that there might have been more to this dragon than met the eye... but if none of your players picked up on them, or tried to act on them, I'd say that means you just need to drop bigger hints. Having the PCs suffer brutal consequences of their ignorance / lack of preparation / lack of planning is fine if your players are the kind that enjoy investigation, intrigue and tactical thinking to begin with - but if they're there to "just play D&D" and aren't engaged in the underlying mysteries of the campaign at the same level as you are, then logical consequences might as well be bad things happening for no reason...(mostly just playing devil's advocate, here - not actually saying I think you're doing anything wrong, and I hope you're not offended...)</blockquote>

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