Without other saves, you cannot get out of a story mission to just play in the world. The only thing you can do is lower the difficulty setting to casual and hope that is enough.
If you are not in a story mission (these are selected at the war table and have a green rift over them), then you should be able to fast travel by selecting the world map from the pause menu (press Escape). Select the map from the menu, then in the top left there will be a button called world map. Then choose a new area to travel to.
To make more saves, go into the pause menu and select "Save game." In an RPG, you should usually keep about 10 saves going so you can backtrack if you have to.
For tactics, make sure your toughest fighter always approaches enemies first. They will focus on the first person they see. Try to focus everyone on killing one enemy at a time-use the tactical camera to give orders. You can often ignore the toughest enemy, just stay away from them if you can. Kill the smaller enemies first - they are easier to finish off, and less enemies attacking makes it easier to survive.
I tried lowering the difficulty, and that's not enough. I'm in a story/mission.
This is so unfortunate and a really stupid thing for the developers to have left out. Now I'm stuck, and I will never buy another Dragon Age game again.
Well thanks for your input - I'm gonna sell the game, and be sure to stay away from BioWare and this series. Moronic move to require people to keep 'back saves' to get out of a dungeon or missions, and have no way on leveling your characters within the mission to defeat the boss.
Unless you somehow deactivated the "Autosave" function, you MUST have Autosaves or (Milestone saves) from before you entered the dungeon. It's simply not possible to arrive at such a location without the game making at least a couple.
EDIT: Oh, wait. What platform are you playing?
PS4
