...4d6 at a time

Wednesday was the opening session for D&D Encounters: Dark Sun: Fury of the Wastewalker.

It was a doozy of an encounter.

The players had just come from Undermountain where they encountered level appropriate fights built with the DMG and MM formulas. This time around the encounter was built with Dark Sun formulas. In order to better match the tone of the setting each monster had the potential to deal 20+ damage with a single attack--more than enough to knock out any PC with a critical hit.

The main goal was two-fold: collect supplies and escape the enemies. This goal caught my players by surprise because that's not the typical objective. In Undermountain the encounters were linear. Kill everything, move on, repeat.

To hammer the goals home to the players, I made sure to play up the fact that they were surrounded and the supply issues they would be facing without the caravan. The result was a bunch of PCs huddled around a cart spending 2 or 3 minor actions each turn to grab stuff. I thought this might be a bad idea with the enemy controller dropping area attacks on them, but they weathered the onslaught and right as enemy reinforcements arrived they were able to escape into the desert.

This encounter has taken a beating online. It seems like every forum has a number of people objecting to the difficulty. One of the more common thoughts was,

"The narrative sets the tone. The monsters don't need to be more damaging."

If you tell them the world is savage and life is extinguished almost effortlessly and then deal 8 damage to them, they will eventually not care what you say about the savagery of the world. Deal 18 damage to them, however, and they will fear every creature they meet.

That seems to have been the main idea with this first session. Scare them. Scare them bad. Unfortunately, many groups are not up for this level of challenge. New players can be turned off real quick when their character spends most of the fight rolling death saves. I regret that earlier today I was not giving any latitude for people who said it was too hard for their table. It definitely can be if the players don't receive the clues about their objectives, don't work together, or any of a number of other things that could go wrong and result in the party getting butchered. New players in particular are likely to be turned off by such an event since they won't understand why things went badly.

Players need to be taught to treat every encounter as obscenely difficult in Athas. This encounter attempted to do that. If they don't, they'll end up skewered and scoured from the earth by the sands when they hit the climatic fights.

DMs on the other hand need to be very careful running this round of D&D Encounters. Make sure they fear Athas's creatures, but make sure the players are having fun. The only way to do D&D wrong is to not be having fun.