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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tigerbunny" data-source="post: 4578865" data-attributes="member: 21857">Actually, the whole "zombies/necromancer" example provides a good jump-off for what I was talking about.In most campaigns, yeah, the situation as described by Cadfan is - at best - participationist: the goal for the players is to have a challenging fight at every point in the game, so the DM manipulates events (including negating player choices) in order that player choices do not prevent the final fight from being challenging. Everybody knows and expects that the DM will do this, and they would feel disappointed if the final fight was a cakewalk. The DM's job in this situation is to provide a reasonable excuse for the final fight to be difficulty X, no matter what happened beforehand.However, I can envision campaigns in which Cadfan's situation is not just participationism (players & DM cooperating to negate un-fun choices) but full-blown choice-enhancing.Consider a game in which the necromancer has some sort of strong personal relationship to one or more PCs. The point of interest for the players is whether they can redeem the necromancer - convince him that he can step back from his evil before it's too late.The zombie invasion of the town has to be a credible threat - the necromancer can't give up because he's obviously beaten and "reform" in order to escape punishment. That wouldn't answer the question the players are interested in. He has to be able to win, and choose not to because of the PCs' actions.In this case, the outcome of the "thwarting the raising of more zombies" adventure isn't "change the ability of the necromancer to win in the final battle", it's "show the necromancer that the PCs are strong/weak". Depending on the outcome, the final confrontation will take a different form.If the PCs defeated the zombie-raising, the necromancer is full of doubts. His hellish patrons have threatened him with dire consequences for failure, and he is terrified of losing. The PCs must convince him that they can protect him from the dark powers in order to win. He still CAN win, but he might not really want to if it means killing his friends.If the PCs failed to stop the zombie-raising, the necromancer is drunk with power, eager to visit revenge on the weaklings who were once his friends and neighbors. The PCs must reach out to whatever conscience remains within him before he damns himself irrevocably. If they merely defeat his army, their friend is still lost.The zombie army is still the same, what changes is what kind of personal appeals and RP might work to redeem the villain.</blockquote>

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