Help in running a campaign

Hello, New comer here. I'm posting this page due to a major concern I've been dealing with while DMing with m friends for the past few weeks. We are a relatively new to the D&D and haven't mastered a lot of the rules. WE have all about taken a turn DMing, i've been doing the most as I'm the onl one who has tried a long story like campaign while the have done a dungeon run. To the point, the last time we played a friend lost his character and stated that m monster was to high in lvl for the part to face. The layout was a lvl 4 human fighter, a lvl 4 half elf ranger, a lvl 4 halfling rouge, and lvl 1 Dwarvin Cleric. The Encountered monster was a Medusa. The fighter charged in not knowing this, resisted the first gaze attack and stayed to fight the monster face to face. The second gaze attack killed him. Now the Cr for the Medusa is 8 which to me feels fine and I've pit them against other strong monsters of the same rating and the defeated it. The Question I'm just know getting to is am I in the wrong or was it just his fault for not backing away?

This is kind of off topic for the Roll20 forums (Like asking about English grammar on the Microsoft Word forums...). You'd probably be better off hitting the Wizards of the Coast Forum or reddit. I don't know what version of DnD you are playing, but Assuming it's 3(.5)rd, 4th, or 5th edition, there are formulas in them for calculating the difficulty of a creature vs. a party. If I remember correctly, it's usually something like a CR 4 would be a moderate difficulty for a party of 4 4th level characters. So a CR 8 would be moderate for a party of 4 8th level characters. Usually, the CR.s balance out so that going up a few CRs makes something difficult to impossible, but look in the books (in the case of 5e, there is a PDF pre release DMG you can get from wizards' website), or posting on a game specific website. Hope that helps!

A note to make. Before hand I informed the party that before they had entered the temple this took place in there was a scouting party that did not returned. And right before the fight, they found stone statues of said scouting party.

=D It's hard to persuade heroes not to be heroic. I've had games where I escalated a fight from "None of your attacks have any effect on it whatsoever" to "you attacks are actually making it stronger and larger" without the party getting the hint. <a href="http://rpg.stackexchange.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rpg.stackexchange.com/</a> is another great resource to try.

I recommend <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/</a>

Matthew, as Mark and Aaron both pointed out that you would be better asking this in a forum more suited it. I'm moving this to the off topic forum and closing it.

One thing about RPG combat in general is that there's a lot of wiggle room in how challenging something should be. I've had a party completely trash something way more powerful than they were, then get their respective rears handed to them by something way less powerful than they were. This is especially true of new players, who don't yet know enough about the game to optimize their tactics (and characters). D&D is balanced so that the heroes win (a party of four characters built and played by average players should expend about 20-25% of their resources to win an encounter of their level), so it's okay to go a bit high on monster CRs if you want to provide a special challenge. But be aware that difficulty roughly doubles for every two CR (a CR8 monster is the same EL as two CR6 monsters or four CR4 monsters), and that higher-CR monsters tend to have abilities whose counters are only available at higher levels (e.g. lower-level characters might not have access to spells to reverse a medusa's petrifying gaze). As a result, unless your players are particularly skilled, it's generally best to keep your encounters within two or three levels of the party average. Assuming everyone is at the same general skill level, and that nobody is pulling their punches, and nobody runs away, I'd give the party about a 40% chance of survival against something close to 5 levels above party level. One thing to keep in mind as GM is that few people (players or GMs) ever think to run away. Most GMs have their monsters fight to the death, and most players have their characters hang around well past the point at which a reasonable person would've fled. If you want to throw your players up against something that's far too tough for them (which certainly has valid story applications), it's a good idea to remind them early and often that running away is sometimes the better part of valor. Edit: Oops, sorry for the after-the-bell shot. Didn't realize the topic got closed while I was typing.