DM advice: How do you NOT kill your party?

[dpkress2]

If you are planning a major combat, (such as a boss fight) one that has potential to be extremely lethal, what steps do you follow to keep the party alive?
What tactics do you use to prevent a party wipe without the party knowing you helped them out a little.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an easy DM. I've killed a few PC's in my day, and I'm good with that if it happens here. But this is a boss fight. I want them to win. But I also want it to be dramatic. I want them to survive by the skin of their teeth.

How do you guys create that illusion if you sense things are going very very badly for the party?

I have learned to use the encounter building system (Through Kobold Fight Club), but never to rely on it. I've built encounters I thought were going to crush my party and they wiped the floor with my baddies. And I have built encounters I thought would be a breeze and almost TPK'ed. I'm sure we have all experienced this.

 

[iserith]

As DM, I don't see it as my role to keep the party alive. That's the players' role. My responsibility is to give the players some clue as to how deadly a challenge might be, then the rest is on them. If I am not willing to see the entire party be killed, then I will not present challenges where life and death is on the line.

I think one thing that is important to do is not to want any particular outcome except that everyone has a good time and had a hand in creating an exciting, memorable tale. And that might include a tale where the party gets slaughtered.

 

[Enkhidu]

As a DM, I try to avoid "fixing" fights, but have done so on rare occasions, because I am a total PC fanboy and secretly root for them to win the entire time - even when I am controlling the dragon that is in the middle of eating the cleric.

Three ideas, when things are going sideways:

* Invest in a DM Screen, and be willing to fudge a roll or two - there's no way that Big Evil Bad Guy crit the cleric twice in one round!

* Don't advertise max hit points for the monsters. Some DMs like to "count down" hit point damage for the villains, to give players a meta idea of how well they are doing (mathematical short hand for reinforcing that the villain is in bad shape or might just need one more hit to defeat). While I like the idea of the running tally from a meta-perspective, I find it better to count up than down - that way the upper limit (hit point total) can be changed if you need to fudge it.

* Telegraph "dramatic opportunities" early in the encounter - Example: if the Big Evil has minions (say, calling for reinforcements that are charging through a narrow tunnel), make sure the PCs have an obvious way to deal with them (like making sure the PCs know that the tunnel is easily collapsed by removing/destroying a keystone), turning a certain defeat into a probable victory.

 

[cmad1977]

I mean... maybe if circumstances warrant it I have a plan for if they wipe. Rescues, prison escapes, henchmen seeing the captured party as tools for advancement.

But I don’t really try to spare them any pain. They’re BAMFs and don’t need my help.

Plus I like to watch them squirm.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Heck, the dice alone can totally change the nature of an encounter. The big undead bad can fail their turning save, or that plain ogre can crit three times in one battle.

But when things go pear shaped, there are a couple of things that I do. If appropriate, the enemies can knock out the PCs when they take them to zero HP. The encounter is still dangerous, still has repercussions, but no one has to die.

If someone in the group has been using lots of AOE effects, I like using that to change the environment up. A ceiling or floor collapse can provide a much-needed assist. Heck, I like to do this to change things up in the middle of the fight regardless of the PCs being in trouble.

But there’s always letting the dice fall where they will. In a pinch, players can surprise you with what they’ll come up with. Once, in a tough fight with a BBEG, the paladin grabbed him, then leaped out of the window. None of us expected that, but it was the kind of moment that makes a game.

 

[nswanson27]

I echo the above sentiments, but on the other hand I'm not a huge fan of situations where the fate of an epic fight is decided by a single bad dice roll. That doesn't feel very epic to me and just feels like playing bingo.

 

[dpkress2]

I don't like fixing fights either, and I generally don't fudge rolls. However I do like to maximize drama.

And there is also the occasion when the encounter builder has failed you and an encounter meant to be difficult becomes impossible.

Let's not all pretend we don't do it sometimes. Of course danger and death should be a real threat, otherwise what is the point? And even the old you're-not-really-dead-you-are-just-captured trick is pretty stupid, cliché and trivializes the fear of death.

Sometimes the dice go bad. The encounter builder fails you. The unexpected happens. I doubt that any DM has never EVER decided that this is not the time for the party to die. What do you do?

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

An encounter building technique I like to use is to design the encounter in such a way that the enemies cannot bring to bear their full combined strength initially. So I will design the fight to have vague phases where more of the enemies can contribute as the fight goes on. Typically this happens most often with positioning and/or environment effects. There is a group close the PCs and a secondary group a couple of turns away so reinforcements will arrive as the PCs deal with the initial group. This also has the added benefit of making the fight feel dynamic as the power level of one side fluctuates instead of only draining.

A recent example was an encounter with 2 skeletons and 2 skeleton horses. For a group of level 1 PCs this is extremely dangerous as the skeleton horses pack quite a punch. But I initially had it so that one of the skeletons mounted on a horse used a short bow and thus kept its distance. This way the second skeleton horse didn't really participate in the combat until one of the PCs ran up to engage it.

 

[Laurefindel]

I'm a big fan of the "fail forward" gaming philosophy. When it comes to combat, I usually plan a "PC lose" scenario. It doesn't have to be a "the eagles are coming" ex-machina situation, that should be used sporadically, but imagining defeat as a plot-moving scenario. Heck, I've planned combats where losing was THE way to move further in the story.

Also, I don't always play all my combats to-the-death. Escaping is often an option. As a matter of fact, I usually tell the players when concequenses are going to be lethal. Such combats need to be frequent enough for victories to be rewarding, but even bosses and BBEG may have other plans than killing their opponents. Slavery, emprisonment, ransom, saving the PC for the big ritual tonight, or just humiliation, are all valid "TPK" scenarios.

Other than that, I try not to fudge rolls and don't show hit points (although I show damage dealt so far), but sometimes I take an opponent with only 1 remaining hp out-of-combat. I call that a failed moral check, the creature feigns death or run away, or whatever. I'll save the 1hp situations for zombies and raging barbarians and whatnot.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

1) Give the players an exit route. Even if a couple of party members die they can be rezed if the rest escape, preferably with the bodies.

2) Victorious enemies may seek to capture rather than kill the party - see: any action movie ever.

3) Don't have enemies keep attacking party members after they faceplant.

4) watch out for monsters with instant kill effects (e.g. intellect devourers, mummies).