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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kae'Yoss" data-source="post: 3454895" data-attributes="member: 4134">There's always that. Well, they might get more cautious with their next character, if the current one ceases to be a living, breathing, thinking person (poisonous substances can take those traits from lifeforms  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /> )Well, you can either let it slide, or punish them ruthlessly or, and that usually works out best, go the middle way.What I do (I'm often a big softie in those things): When a player announces a really unwise action or decision, I go windows on them: "Are you sure?" Sometimes, that raises some serious red flags ("DMs asking questions like that usually mean something") or even go as far as explain the situation in greater detail, out of the perspective of myself if I were their character ("So you find a pool of really nasty looking stuff and you want to drink it??"). If they insist on doing it, I let them go ahead and do it. I'm a big supporter of free will and freedom of choice - and of consequences. They want to take a drink of something really poisonous? I let them take it. And then I let them roll a fort save vs. poison.I like how in RPGs you can do crazy things without the risk of personal harm (my characters have repeatedly fought dragons, but I myself was never stepped on, chewed on, incinerated, electrocuded, frozen, or anything else), but I don't like when the character's actions don't have any consequences - for good or for bad. Railroading is one aspect of this: They might manage to defeat the BBEG by some great planning, innovative thinking (and of course, a second helping of dumb luck), but the land is still doomed because the DM intented it to be doomed all along.The other is "wearing velvet gloves": Players can go berserk and do all kinds of crazy things (often happens in evil campaigns when too many players think that evil means marauding maniacs) without fear of repercussions. One extreme case was when in an evil game (I was a player), we found out that the DM was apparently unwilling to kill of characters for any reason, and he wasn't being subtly about it (He'd often ask players how many HPs their characters had, and if they were low, they weren't attacked). So we got it in our heads to test how far we could go (okay, one of the players wanted his character to die because he didn't like it and the DM refused to let him retire that character). So we went into Waterdeep (huge city in the Forgotten Realms, for those who don't know. Something like 130.000 people living there, including some of the most powerful characters of the Realms, and generally a watch that could watch after that place!) and started looting. Watchmen arrived alright, and tried to fight us. But they were relatively low level, so it was not too hard to fend them off. Okay, you might think: He was giving us a warning shot. But When we decimated one group of watchmen, the next group wasn't stronger than the first. Noone saw fit to call the heavy cavalry, apparently. Maybe they intented to send wave after wave of men against us, until we ran empty (Zapp's Manoeuvre), but that was when we know without a doubt that our characters were effectively immortal. Not good.</blockquote>

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