DM advice: How do you NOT kill your party?

[Satyrn]

How about death is still on the table but not TPK.

So if i my fireball by some statistical fluke rolls eight sixes, every character fails their save and 48 is enough to kill every character I instead fudge the roll so it is enough to kill all but one. Or even better fudge the DC so that a character passes.

I would prefer not to use the fireball at all in that situation but you can’t anticipate 4 failed saves and a max dice roll.

If one character survives badly burnt and then decides to throw himself back into combat, then by all means TPK the fool.

I think the proactively-avoid-fudging solution in this case would be to not target all of the players.

 

[Cyrinishad]

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.

In another edition of D&D I could see this a more of an issue, but in 5e when someone is dropped to 0 HP it is the attacker's choice to be Lethal or Non-Lethal... unlike 3e where you had to take a penalty to hit if you wanted to do Non-Lethal damage. So, just don't kill the PCs if they're dropped to Zero. Capture them instead. Think about reasons why the BBEG / Monster would want to keep the PCs alive if the PCs are defeated.

DM Secret: I want the Heroes to win dramatically by the skin of their teeth all the time!

However, I won't compromise my role as the DM by entirely removing the risks of death or defeat from the PCs... My players wouldn't appreciate that. They enjoy knowing that any battle might be their PCs last (or that their nemesis might not kill them, since there are fates worse than death...)

 

[iserith]

To me fudging as a DM is like a small pressure release valve on a boiler system. Sure you could just have unweildy double thickness pipes and run at much lower temperature. Instead have your pressure valve to help prevent the boiler blowing up when happenstance causes the pressure to go much greater than intended.

The pressure release of that DM fudge let’s me run my campaign hotter and leaner, more efficiently, whilst avoiding the whole system melting down in a TPK.

What I prefer to do is figure out a way where there can be TPKs and the system doesn't melt down.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I look at intended difficulty and actual difficulty as different things since difficulty is modified by player choice and randomness.

And how consistent/robust the system is.

And if you don't want PCs dying to encounters that are intended to be easy (for example), then making death a possibility, however remote, seems counterproductive.

Taking even the appearance of deadly danger off the table in a game with any pretense to being heroic fantasy also seems counterproductive.

My position is that if they can't explain it so that I can figure out a solution, then they need to suck it up.

It's not that you /can't/ figure out a solution, it's that no solution is going to work perfectly, up-front. You need to be flexible. Taking resolution behind the screen and engaging in illusionism gives you a lot of that kind of flexibility.

Yeah. I guess if that's not desirable it leads us back around to the beginning: If you're not going to fudge and you're not going to take death off the table, how do you prevent PCs from dying? A rather strange proposition.

But not the proposition either of us is making.

I think part of the issue we're grappling with here is that D&D doesn't exactly do an awesome job of modeling genre. One thing it doesn't do all that badly is that it lets players have their heroes do things that should be considered brave - facing 'deadly' (anything that does damage is deadly) dangers - reasonably secure in the player-knowledge of hps. The system doesn't always manage that kind of thing well /enough/, though, and when it fails, the DM is the 'safety valve.'

Players don't always think of it that way, either, sometimes they'll get the idea that, because they know their character has 70 hps, they can hop off a cliff or that taking 'only' 35 damage in a fight was 'easy.'
Giving them back a sense of jeopardy can be tricky. Taking death off the table isn't going to be part of that.

Also, yeah. 3e's monster manual orc was one of those cases where the CR was definitely wrong.

3.5 they simply swapped the greataxe for a falchion, for a max 22 damage on a crit instead of 45 (but 3 times as many crits). It's not so much that CR was 'wrong' in 3e or 5e and EL 'right' in 4e, it's just that the systems were different, and there was a lot more swing in 3e crits and a lot more PC durability in the lowest levels of 4e, among plenty of other things (complex systems and all).

 

[Arilyn]

Sure, but I'm not too concerned about frequency. I'm more interested in how folks are arriving at "ridiculous" outcomes at all. The DM decides when the mechanics come into play and also sets the stakes (what happens on a success, what happens on a failure). It therefore seems to me that either the mechanics are being brought into play when they "shouldn't" be or that the DM is not setting the stakes in a way that both success and failure are palatable. Can you see other reasons for it?

One example, from 3.5. My players were first level in their first session, and ran into kobolds. Shouldn't have been a big deal, right? The players kept rolling really bad, over and over. The kobolds, on the other hand were having a blast. They were golden! Couldn't miss, rolled some criticals. I fudged a little to keep the party from going down in an inglorious TPK. They were excited about their characters. Nobody, including me, wanted to start a new group. Group survived by the skin of their teeth, had no idea I had altered the damage roll that would have downed the cleric, ending in death of the party. This happened because the d20 is swingy and unreliable.

This is what I mean about ridiculous dice rolls that can be altered a bit to keep the game going. And sometimes I make a mistake in my prep that needs to be altered on the fly. No biggie.

 

[Hjorimir]

I’m in the camp of just letting the PCs die if that’s what happens. I don’t actively try to kill PCs, but I don’t move to block it either. My personal taste as a DM is to run a game where the players are cautious and treat the monsters with their due respect. I’ll eat PCs like popcorn if they get sloppy.

Now, I know that sounds rough on the outside, but I’ve been playing with these guys for a long time and they know my style. It’s expected. If the players try to “blunder forward” they know that it is going to likely be a painful experience. Therefore, they’re encouraged to think tactically and cautiously.

There is usually more than enough intel to be gained by the PCs. Between divination magics, scouting, lore, talking with local NPCs, and so forth, there’s little excuse to being blindsided.

Everybody has different tastes and there’s no one true and proper way to play D&D. I like a game that’s deadly enough that when the characters do overcome the BBEG that there’s real joy in it. I guess you could say I subscribe to the philosophy that you can’t appreciate victory without knowing defeat.

Let me pose a question, what do you remember more clearly? The fights that you’ve won or the fights you’ve lost or had characters die?

I know when we’re sitting around chewing the fat about past games, some of our favorite stories are those where the PCs got their butts kicked (and kicked hard). We laugh about those the most. Sure, in the moment there isn’t laughter (there’s lots of screaming and running), but it makes for an exciting experience. In fact, one of our most quoted moments was when one of the player’s cleric shouted. “We. Are. Going. To. Die!” I can just say those five words at my table and players will start to laugh. Good times.

 

[iserith]

Taking even the appearance of deadly danger off the table in a game with any pretense to being heroic fantasy also seems counterproductive.

Less so in my view. I've designed enough challenges where tension runs high enough to feel like life-or-death but where the stakes are something else entirely to know someone can run a perfectly intense game without killing PCs. Or fudging.

It's not that you /can't/ figure out a solution, it's that no solution is going to work perfectly, up-front. You need to be flexible. Taking resolution behind the screen and engaging in illusionism gives you a lot of that kind of flexibility.

"Illusionism" is one of those words that demands a specific definition because it can mean different things. At its heart though, it strikes me as dishonest and as I view trust in the DM as a very valuable commodity, I will not knowingly engage in it.

But not the proposition either of us is making.

I'd like to see a proposed solution to that scenario. Maybe there's an angle someone has figured out.

 

[TheSword]

Honestly I remember both. However if I’m honest when characters have died there has often been a sense of frustration as usually the circumstances led to unwinnable odds (as in my circle of death example earlier)

We don’t laugh about it because everyone, including the DM knew he’d messed up, which led to fun characters biting the dust and the end of an intriguing campaign.

I find there is critical mass to character death, where if you lose too many the soul drops out of the campaign and often the reasons why the characters were invested in it. Kind of like a TV show when too many key actors leave and you just don’t feel it with the new guys.

TPK is like dropping a nuclear bomb on some campaigns. Sure a post apocalyptic campaign may be your thing but it isn’t for everyone. Plus there are so many awesome campaigns we prefer to write it off and start again.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Less so in my view. I've designed enough challenges where tension runs high enough to feel like life-or-death but where the stakes are something else entirely to know someone can run a perfectly intense game without killing PCs. Or fudging.

Or without PCs being in danger of death? Is there always something else on the line they really care about?

"Illusionism" is one of those words that demands a specific definition because it can mean different things.

Yep, but unlike 'immersion,' it has one. It's when the player is presented with choices, options, & checks that actually mean nothing - regardless, the results are already decided. But, the player isn't given enough information to divine that fact.
'Placebo rolls' behind the DM screen, the classic magician's force, fudging a die roll behind the screen - all 'illusionism.'

It's a newish game-theory label for a classic (almost ubiquitous back in the day) DMing style. 5e harkens back to those days in a lot of ways, so I find it a good answer to the OP's question...

At its heart though, it strikes me as dishonest

Nope. It's just limiting the information you provide the player, no more dishonest than not showing them the map of the dungeon. That's the problem with Game Design Theory labels, they'll strike people all wrong.

I'd like to see a proposed solution to that scenario. Maybe there's an angle someone has figured out.

How do you avoid killing PCs without either illusionism or taking even the appearance of deadly danger off the table?

It's the 5e forum so 'run something with less of a tendency to drop random/unintended/pointless character deaths in your lap' isn't an option.

OTOH, modding rules is entirely kosher in 5e. So if the issue seems to be sudden deaths from damage spikes in non-deadly encounters at low level, increase low-level hps, or increase the instant death threshold to -(CON+max hps) it'll make a big difference at low level, hardly matter at high. If it seems to be players doing stupid stuff, institute Common Sense Saves. etc...

 

[iserith]

One example, from 3.5. My players were first level in their first session, and ran into kobolds. Shouldn't have been a big deal, right? The players kept rolling really bad, over and over. The kobolds, on the other hand were having a blast. They were golden! Couldn't miss, rolled some criticals. I fudged a little to keep the party from going down in an inglorious TPK. They were excited about their characters. Nobody, including me, wanted to start a new group. Group survived by the skin of their teeth, had no idea I had altered the damage roll that would have downed the cleric, ending in death of the party. This happened because the d20 is swingy and unreliable.

This is what I mean about ridiculous dice rolls that can be altered a bit to keep the game going. And sometimes I make a mistake in my prep that needs to be altered on the fly. No biggie.

Sure, but again I would say that if you didn't desire an outcome like the one you would have gotten without fudging, why did you allow for the possibility of that outcome at all? There is a non-zero risk of an inglorious death and you were letting the dice decide that outcome. Until you weren't, that is.

In a similar situation at my table, the PCs would have simply died. The players would get out their backup characters (since we plan ahead to solve D&D's iteration time problem) and played on. That may not be desirable for everyone, but it removes the need to fudge. Alternatively, I could set up the scene where the kobolds only wanted to avoid taking damage and steal the PCs' stuff. Or attack to subdue so as to sell them into slavery. Or any number of other stakes. (See for example how I changed the stakes in the opening scene for Lost Mines of Phandelver.)