Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 2194514" data-attributes="member: 1288">Sorry to single out one sentence in a fairly long post, but I felt I had to address this.Of course you can justify it. You can justify anything you want to as DM, and your players shouldn't mind, so long as you do it to make the game more enjoyable for everyone.My players know me, and they trust me. They know full well that anything I do in game is intended to make the campaign more enjoyable. They know I'm not out to screw them, or to "win," so if I do something that seems to screw them, they know that it's tied into the ongoing story and/or setting development, and that it will be explained down the road. (Sure, I make mistakes occasionally, but it's not common.)I feel, and most of my players agree, that campaigns are more fun when the battles are challenging. So I do what I need to in order to make the fights challenging, without making them unbeatable. If deciding, on the spur of the moment, that giving Unnamed Fighter 247 the Improved Trip will make the fight more challenging and more fun, then he has Improved Trip. Pure and simple. Obviously, if every fighter always has the exact proper feat for the circumstances, that's going to get unfair. So I don't do it every time; only when it really feels dramatically appropriate.Lots of people would accuse me of cheating, but again, my point isn't to win. In fact, I tweak NPCs or monsters down as often as I do up. This isn't because I'm unwilling to kill characters--I've killed quite a few, down the years--but because I want my fights to be fun. I don't tweak to avoid danger; I tweak to avoid blatant unfairness and lack of fun, whether it means strengthening or weakening the enemy in the process. I still let the dice fall where they may most of the time, and I never deliberately pit the PCs against a foe whose only purpose is to prove how much tougher they are than the PCs. And not only do most of my players approve, they're only rarely aware I've done it at all.And as regards missing spells or the like, deciding what spells my important NPC casters have is one of the details I do work out ahead of time. And if, by some bizarre chance, the party winds up in a fight with a spellcaster I didn't expect them to fight, and don't have a spell list prepared, I have enough spell lists from old characters that I can just pull one out and run with it. Or, worst comes to worst, I just make it up as I go. Not every spellcaster should be a tactical genius when it comes to combat, and if it's an NPC caster unimportant enough that I didn't generate a spell list for him, then it wasn't meant to be a challenging encounter anyway.</blockquote>

Verification