Of lack of dungeons or dragons

Last night I successfully ran my second D&D game. Well, mostly successfully anyway.

Last week saw a group of 9(!) first level adventurers in an inn called 'The Obvious Cliche', whereupon they were attacked by 4 CR1ish zombies. Oddly, they didn't get wiped out, despite their best attempts not to run away, but that game didn't really lead anywhere as I kinda hadn't planned ahead very well ;)

This week, I decided to mitigate my lack of DMing experience by running a game straight from a book. And so, my fearless(ish) group of 5 adventurers were set upon by a lone warforged on a bridge in Sharn. This was, supposedly, a CR1 encounter (ie, one designed to present a reasonable challenge to 4 level 1 characters). It got soundly kicked, although not before doing a not unreasonable amount of damage. I would, however, say that it was really a challenge.

Although they PCs took some damage, there was never any real chance of them losing. In my mind, a challenge would be facing an equivilent number of equivilent level characters/monsters, but then its a 50/50 chance that they'll get their asses kicked, considering that the encounter would be as powerful as the PCs. This seems a bit incongruous to me, but never mind.

Considering that I have 5 PCs, I may have to modify future encounters a little to boost up the difficulty, so that the extra PC doesn't become an easy ticket to victory, and so encounters are actually a challenge.

And two games in, no sign of a dungeon, and no sign of a dragon. I may have to bend the printed game to include some, none or more of the above :)