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Great point. And I’ll add that, in these types of games, the deaths of friendly NPCs, due to failures by the PCs, hit almost as hard as a PC death. There’s real feeling of, ”Oh we f’d up horribly :( “ and from a story angle that’s pure dramatic gold.

Fortunately it never got to that point, and let me tell you, in Tier 4, I was trying to hit them hard! :) But in the higher tiers there are plenty of options and they had allies who could help of course. So it’s doubtful that anything permanent would have happened.

I don’t think we have to fear our AI overlords just yet….

My players weren’t super keen on having a gritty game, life is gritty enough and some had been through some rough times and would have taken their characters death very badly. This is not to say that PCs never dropped or never had to make death saves, but the other players made sure to...

For me it’s thematic/narrative cohesion and changing rules makes my brain happy. For example, I think we use the combat rules in too many places. I allow PCs to knock out NPCs if they’ve got the jump on them and their “whack” beats the NPCs flat constitution. If it doesn’t then a combat breaks...

Fascinating that it’s split at 50/50 so far. Might say a lot or nothing at all :) I voted true for the record. I’m not sure what a pointless combat would be, but I certainly don’t want to waste my players time on them. So all mine are 100% certified pointful!

Crazy to me that that is five years old. Covid has completely messed with my time keeping!

I swore off the adventures, but then bought the Neverdeep one just to see if a new team would offer something better. I’ve read about a third of the way but I can’t say it’s any better than average.

Whilst I don‘t like to reveal the number (at least initially) I like to give guidance: “the creature looks hard to hit”, “that should be easy to accomplish”, as going straight to numbers is a bit jarring in the narrative for me.

I think the problem is Matt, too many of his shopkeepers are very charming/quirky and the players just love interacting with them :)

Yeah I guess Matt was just leaning into that CR trope :D

This surprises me as I feel it is the complete opposite. The CR players really interact with the environment from what I’ve seen and are constantly coming up with creative solutions. It would be pretty dull otherwise.

I agree when a werewolf is just trying to break through a door to escape. Making Travis roll for that was terrible! :)

I don’t understand this, is that not how most tables run? The rules cannot be engaged most of the time? Or are other groups rolling dice for every declared action?

For me, this just proves they’re that worried about entertaining an invisible audience :D

The “we” was referring to us players of D&D 5e. I think I’m very under qualified for this discussion. :)

I’d forgotten all about D&D until I started to see the excited articles on various geek culture websites. I tried to join a local group, but there were no openings, so I started my own group in 2015 mostly recruited from a local board game group. We played solidly for 5 years until covid and...

Agreed, but when I said I adjusted HP during a combat in another thread it didn’t go down well :). We play this game instead of computer RPGs precisely because it’s run in our brains and not in some prescribed, and thus heavy (and necessarily constrained), simulator ruleset. The few times the...

Me too. I want spellcasters, for example, to struggle to maintain concentration as they‘re under attack. Fail your concentration save? You can take a level of exhaustion to keep it up. Of course eventually it’ll kill you :). Exhaustion should be an option to let PCs push their performance for a...

This came up in our game one time when a player wanted to trip a flail snail. I ruled that the snail couldn’t be tripped because its center of gravity is too low. The player went with a different approach. To me this indicates that there is a simulation and it’s running in the DMs head. After...