I realize we're practically as non-Halloween as it gets (it'll be six months away at the end of April) but I've found myself fixating on horror monsters. I guess to an extent I've always been into them, despite being a total scaredy cat when it comes to horror movies. I discovered a series on YouTube produced by PBS called Monstrum, which is on the "Storied" channel. This one's about the Dullahan, the famous headless horseman of Irish myth, which inspired the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
There's only so many days in the week, and I don't see my Ravnica D&D campaign ending any time soon (I'd say at our current rate we've got at least a year left in it,) so any actual Ravenloft campaign I run is unlikely to start any time soon.
Ravenloft, being a D&D setting, presents a challenge. D&D is all about heroic empowerment. I've often thought of fantasy as "horror except the heroes can fight back." This isn't a perfect definition given that there's plenty of horror in which the heroes do fight back - I mean, Dracula ends with them staking the bloodsucker and saving Mina Harker.
But I do think that, typically, in horror, the protagonists have to rely on ordinary human bravery and ingenuity to fight a supernatural antagonist. Even that's not always true, though: in Stephen King's works, for instance, there's often benevolent supernatural forces at play as well that can give the good guys an edge. Of course, I've often thought that King's works are more often in the realm of dark fantasy than horror, and the truth is that it's all a spectrum rather than discrete categories.
As a DM, you sometimes want to communicate to the players that a monster is there to be fled, not to be fought. And nailing that communication in a way that doesn't then take them out of the narrative (such as literally saying "this monster is too tough for you, so you should run") is tough.
This happened with my Sunday D&D game, in which I am a player.
For reasons outside the game, we started our Spelljammer game well over a month ago and had a huge gap in the middle of our starting adventure - we were going into the basement of a space bodega to figure out where these hostile oozes were coming from. Journeying below, we found an old disused karaoke bar and then a door with access to the sewers, along with a Grick that had burrowed in there and was essentially like the urban legend of a pet alligator that had been flushed down the toilet. The Grick was friendly to us, but the source of the oozes (most of which were too small to be a threat) seemed to be coming from the sewers itself.
And then we didn't play for about six weeks.
So, when we finally continued playing, we went out into the sewers proper and found three patches of kind of swamp-slime. I shot one with a firebolt, and then they came to life as some kind of swamp-monsters. (I just realized when looking up a monster I thought might be similar to them on 5E.tools that I actually looked up the literal stat block, so I'm going to avoid looking further). Anyway, we assumed this was just "the next combat," and the first round went very well for us - only one monster was close enough to get an attack off on the first round and rolled a natural 1, while our party got three critical hits. When those three crits didn't take down the first monster, I started to get the sense that we were in trouble, but by then, they were all in melee and we had a kind of cascade - the druid went down, and then the cleric got her up, only for her to go down again. Then, the cleric went down.
Our DM expressed shock that this was the way the fight had been going, and that she really expected us to have run, but by the time we realized that was what we needed to do, we had the two characters capable of healing (my artificer was out of spell slots) unconscious and a lot of bodies blocking the exit.
Ultimately, while not a TPK, the cleric wound up rolling a natural 1 on a death save after having already failed once - and right after she had painted her new mini!
Given how very early in the campaign this is, our DM has said that we'll have some leeway here - the cleric is a doctor, and my artificer is a city employee, and so we figured we have enough connections to get someone who can revive her.
So, how did that happen?
(As a note: the DM's job is a difficult one. You want to provide your players with a challenge, but a surmountable one. Technically nothing is stopping you from roasting your level two party with an ancient red dragon if your only goal is to "beat them," but then, well, no one will want to play in your games anymore. Some DMs like to hit the party with a tougher challenge while others like to play a little softer, and some players want to feel they've really earned their victories by pulling it out by the skin of their teeth while other players play for that power fantasy and to feel awesome. Calibrating all of that, with different tastes at the same table, is not easy.)
So, the DM told us at the table that she did not want this encounter to play out this way. She intended for us to realize the creatures were too much of a threat for us, and that our main priority from the start of initiative should be to run the hell away.
And we, as a group, have shown that we will do that in some circumstances (even when she doesn't intend it). In our previous campaign, we ventured underground into a mysterious grey dragon's lair. But we also had a teenager, a five-year-old child, and a friendly kobold of indeterminate age (but who acted like a child) that we were trying to get to safety. The dragon's thunderous breath weapon went through walls, and killed the kobold. So, as a group (I was a major advocate of this,) we decided that the danger here was too great given our charges (oh, we eventually got the kobold revived, even though all that was left after the breath attack was bones) and so even though I think she intended for us to fight and kill this dragon (and we probably could have,) and possibly even uncovered an important story clue, as players we proved that we were not pure murder-hobos who would just kill monsters regardless of other factors.
So, I think that she probably already figured we weren't just going to assume every monster was there to be fought.
Another major factor that complicated this was that first round of combat. The one monster that got to make an attack missed, and as I told her after the fact, I had assumed the swamp monsters were some low-CR creature, like a re-skinned zombie. (Ok, I did cheat and look them up - they're CR 1, which is great for a level 1 party if we're fighting just one of them, but not three). So, rather than seeing one of our party members get hit really hard, instead we just assumed that these were easy enough to deal with, and that, like so many adventuring parties, we'd clear out the shop's basement on our first little adventure and be fine. The misimpression we'd gotten from that first round is what the DM mainly thought was the reason why things went poorly.
But, to be honest, I think that, if anything, that was a sort of minor factor.
A bigger factor, I think, was that there had been such a gap of time between sessions. I spent both of my spell slots on the first fight, because I assumed, since we were level 1, we'd probably only have one fight that day. And I figured that any other fight would probably be balanced for level 1, meaning that the expectation would be that I'd only be using cantrips anyway. With the massive gap between sessions, that notion that "we're prepared for what's down there" sort of got reinforced because I didn't even remember that first fight that well (I honestly can't remember if there were any other initiative rolls).
But I think the biggest factor at play was telegraphing how tough these monsters were.
When we encountered these creatures, it wasn't even instantly clear that they were creatures at all. But when they rose up and became clearly things we would be fighting, there wasn't any instant clue that these weren't the kinds of low-level, easily-defeated creatures that even a level 1 party could normally assume to be fightable. We started that fight at full health, and while I had been somewhat liberal with my spell slots, the rest of the party had reserves (indeed I think everyone else was full up).
So, while I think our DM had in mind that these things would show how scary they were on the first round by doing a bunch of damage with a single hit (they hit for 2d6+2 - that I didn't get by looking it up, but because she told us) and that would be our indication that we should run for it.
The problem, though, is that that's unreliable: first off, the first attack missed, and by the time we knew how hard they could hit, we had all three on us. Second, sometimes the damage rolled was low - I got hit by one for 5, which means that she must have rolled a 1 and a 2 on the d6s.
So, what was meant to be a fun, scary thrill turned into a desperate fight in which a party member died.
How, then, would you avoid this?
One way (the boring way) is to simply make every combat encounter balanced and beatable. But that forces you to leave out a fantasy experience. I mean, no one thinks Fellowship of the Ring would have been better if the Fellowship had stuck together and taken down the Balrog together. I'm far from the first person to describe the Fellowship as a D&D party, but I imagine Gandalf as a DMPC who the "DM" wanted to remove from the party, giving him a super epic way to do so by having a CR 19 demon show up when the party was like level 4. (We're all agreed a Balor is just a Balrog with the serial numbers filed off, right?)
If we look at that scenario and interpret it as a D&D combat encounter, you can almost think of it as "ok, the party has fought a troll and a bunch of goblin minions - an encounter that was fairly taxing, especially after Frodo got crit and went unconscious before he could get some healing. The party is at diminished resources and needs a rest. And then, after all that, while they're already feeling down, you have this massive demon show up. But just in case the players think that they're supposed to fight the demon, you have the super-powerful NPC who has been traveling with them explicitly say 'this fight is beyond all of you,' thus making it clear that this is a chase, not a fight."
So, ironically, this classic of fantasy literature does this danger-telegraphing in the most blunt-force way possible: just having a character tell the party to run.
But let's say we don't have a Gandalf there to tell them.
Here, I think it's really tough. In the Curse of Strahd game I'm in (was in? We haven't had a session since last summer, but in theory we could pick it up again) we did the intro Death House adventure that takes you to level 3 before the adventure proper begins. The climax of the adventure has a Shambling Mound show up if you don't sacrifice someone to the powers controlling the house. And a Shambling Mound is CR 5 - in theory way too much for a party that's level 2.
So, this is truly supposed to be a "just run" moment. But our party didn't. And, well, a few lucky rolls and some good tactics and... we just killed the thing. Now, the remainder of Death House has a lot of environmental features that encourage you to run - the whole house starts violently shaking and spinning blades appear in all the doors (it's actually safer to Kool-Aid Man yourself through the walls, which summons swarms of rats, but they're less of a danger than the spinning blades).
There's plenty of foreboding hints that this is a monster that you're supposed to run from, but... well, we didn't, and we weren't really punished for it either.
And that means that this is always going to be kind of tough. But let me suggest another possible way to hint that the monster is beyond the party.
This one does, unfortunately, require a bit of precedent to establish.
Let's say your big scary monster the party needs to flee is going to be a troll. Trolls can be pretty scary to a low-level party, in part because their chance to hit is pretty high (they have a +7) and if the party doesn't have access to certain damage types (or Chill Touch, aka the bane of any DM who wants to use regenerating monsters) but they're also enough of a "standard fantasy monster" that players who haven't memorized the Monster Manual might not think it's that unusual to have a group of level 2 players fight a Troll.
So, this technique is what I call the "gruesome scene." Let's say that the party has fought ogres - a creature that, outside of any specific fantasy property, is more or less interchangeable with trolls (other than the "internet troll" concept). Ogres are CR 2 - tough, but certainly less tough than a Troll (and without any form of regeneration). If the party has fought an Ogre before, and hopefully someone in the party has been hit with their Greatclub attack (which does 2d8+4 - not a small amount of damage for a level 2 character) they'll know that an Ogre is a pretty significant monster to fight at their level.
So, when the party gets near the troll, here's what you do: litter the area with ogre bodies. Indeed, on a mechanical level, the standard ogre doesn't have any fire or acid damage, so a Troll would inevitably win in a fight against a group of ogres. But showing that this troll killed all the ogres and, perhaps, is even eating one of them (to make it really clear the troll is the one that killed them,) you can get across the power differential, and hopefully convince them to run.
As a DM, you don't want to "railroad" the party, but you can sometimes drop hints as to what they should do. One option is to make it very clear that there is, say, an exit from the room or chamber they're in that the monster can't fit through. You can mention this until someone suggests they use it, but you need to be careful to make sure you're never telling them to use it, but more suggesting that they can use it.
I want to make it clear that my friend who was DMing for us is a fantastic DM, and my critiques here are just using this week's experience as an example of for a really challenging thing for a DM to pull off. I do think there's another factor at play here, which is the problem with levels.
Level 1 characters are insanely squishy. Even in the best circumstances, things can go pear-shaped very quickly. For example, my Artificer, at level 1 (we leveled up after that fight) had 10 hit points. Fairly reasonable - it's a d8 class with +2 to Constitution. Now, a standard Goblin, which is one of the absolute most classic monsters to fight at level 1, has a scimitar and a shortbow, both of which do 1d6 damage, and the Goblin gets to add its dexterity modifier of 2 to both. If a goblin rolls a natural 20 and then rolls 6s on both dice, that level 1 character will go unconscious. This could happen before that character gets a turn in combat.
Is it likely? No. But the point is that level 1 characters are extremely fragile. It's hard to even make a monster that can't knock them out with a lucky crit.
As such, I think that basically any fight is one in which the players are going to have to trust luck and be very careful about in those levels. And so, sending a high-powered monster against them that they have to flee is just too risky. They need to have a little flexibility (namely higher HP) in order to have the time to both register that the fight is beyond them and also have the time to get away.
But, I also get why you want to do this at lower levels. In a popular D&D actual play campaign (I won't say which to preserve the surprise for those who see it) the party is six level 8 characters, and before the final boss fight, the DM contrived to force them to sacrifice spell slots and some of their HP in order to save NPCs that were important to them. He then threw an Adult Red Dragon at them - which is CR 17, and thus would, according to Xanathar's, be a "balanced' fight against them if they were level 12.
And, while that fight gets dicey as hell, they ultimately prevailed (technically it required the Cleric to keep rolling death saves after they had stabilized, and lucked out with a natural 20 to pop up to 1).
So: as players get to higher levels, you can be really shocked as to what they're able to do, especially if they play tactically well.
In other words, by the time a party hits tier 3, I'm not sure there's any one monsters you could send against them that is tough enough that they'll A: really need to run from and more importantly B: that they will think they need to run from.
In a way, I think the best thing you can do is find reasons for them to run from combat not because they fear for their own safety, but because there's someone else they need to protect. A group of hardened D&D adventurers will see a dragon and go "yeah, we'll be fine as long as we spread out so only one of us gets hit by its breath," but if the party is motivated to protect someone or stop something else from happening that the dragon is just a distraction for, you can potentially get them to retreat in other ways.
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