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DM advice: How do you NOT kill your party?
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<blockquote data-quote="Lillika" data-source="post: 7401336" data-attributes="member: 6852869"><p>I'm not sure if I'm the one who started the whole "illusion-ism" train of thought. But just a few things about how I do this. I do it more from system mastery, I really study dnd hard and know what players are capable of and what my monsters are. I roll all my dice in the open and don't fudge dice or numbers. I have come up with clever (or at least in my mind clever) ways to keep the story going when others might just call it a party wipe, for example I was running an adventure where the party triggered some runes that dropped everyone to 0 hitpoints. Luckily for me they had just befriended (ok more like bullied a goblin who I had given a name and personality too earlier in the sessions) so instead of having them reroll characters and start again I thought it would be way more flavorful that the goblin took advantage of the situation (he was nearby) and stabilized the pc and tied them up and then the players were able to find their way out of that situation and now one of them has an irrational hatred toward all goblins and especially that npc because of the memorable experience.</p><p></p><p>About the use of minions, yes you do need to be careful about numbers, but players like to kill things, and numbers can give the "illusion" of danger, when actually lower lvl monsters have a less variable amount of damage done and taken to kill them. The illusion is sometimes me knowing better than my players how really dangerous or not dangerous an encounter is, not from me changing any numbers or abilities (although I am not against this in principle).</p><p></p><p>Also I do like to run publish adventures as well has some made up things. I feel the published adventures keep me in line with what the expected difficulty is, I run some AL and home campaigns too and play about as much as I gm.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Lillika, post: 7401336, member: 6852869"] I'm not sure if I'm the one who started the whole "illusion-ism" train of thought. But just a few things about how I do this. I do it more from system mastery, I really study dnd hard and know what players are capable of and what my monsters are. I roll all my dice in the open and don't fudge dice or numbers. I have come up with clever (or at least in my mind clever) ways to keep the story going when others might just call it a party wipe, for example I was running an adventure where the party triggered some runes that dropped everyone to 0 hitpoints. Luckily for me they had just befriended (ok more like bullied a goblin who I had given a name and personality too earlier in the sessions) so instead of having them reroll characters and start again I thought it would be way more flavorful that the goblin took advantage of the situation (he was nearby) and stabilized the pc and tied them up and then the players were able to find their way out of that situation and now one of them has an irrational hatred toward all goblins and especially that npc because of the memorable experience. About the use of minions, yes you do need to be careful about numbers, but players like to kill things, and numbers can give the "illusion" of danger, when actually lower lvl monsters have a less variable amount of damage done and taken to kill them. The illusion is sometimes me knowing better than my players how really dangerous or not dangerous an encounter is, not from me changing any numbers or abilities (although I am not against this in principle). Also I do like to run publish adventures as well has some made up things. I feel the published adventures keep me in line with what the expected difficulty is, I run some AL and home campaigns too and play about as much as I gm. [/QUOTE]
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