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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9257151" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Generally, to challenge the tactical skill of the party, and to put something they care about (one or more allies, a resource/treasure, the safety of the city, etc.) in danger unless the party overcomes the conflict. Often, to advance some part of the story or give life and color to the world. Sometimes to complicate their efforts to achieve some other end, e.g. travelling to a new location. Rarely, as in almost never, merely to delay the adventure or sap accumulated resources (I have plenty of better ways to do that.)Does that adequately answer the question?You are desiring that they have a good experience and tailoring your behavior as a result. By definition you are being partial to their enjoyment. For example, I imagine you would avoid dead-end failures where the party has tried everything they can think of and can't progress because the dice just absolutely hate them that evening. (I play a system that is fail-forward, meaning this can't happen, but in regular D&D it absolutely can, regardless of edition.) Hence: some amount of impartiality is genuinely desirable. You do not want your players to be bored. You do not want to, say, squick them out with content that you know would do so, e.g. if you have a player with intense thalassophobia, I would assume you'd avoid aquatic campaigns. Hell, you even said at the end there: "set them up for success." By definition, that is intentional, desirable partiality. You do not want to be an unfeeling robot DM who enforces the rules with perfectly uniform reliability regardless of the effect it might have on the players. You enforce the rules in order that players enjoy the experience. If you encountered a situation where you were 100% certain that enforcing a rule would truly upset your players, you would certainly not do so. Your core claim is that such situations are rare, perhaps extremely so, and thus there is no reason not to enforce those rules, while conversely many reasons to enforce them properly and without "contrivance."I'm frankly not really interested in responding to the rest because you keep doing that same thing, going back to but but but contrivances! Your examples, your phrasing, your whole argument rests on this being a painfully obvious stretch essentially always, and that's just not true. I'm not interested in talking about that because that's obviously bad. From what I can tell, the rest of your post can be neatly summarized as, "As long as it isn't contrivance, great, go right ahead, though I (jgsugden) struggle to believe you can do that." If you feel there is more being said, I welcome correction, but if that really is the long and short of it--"if it isn't contrived it's fine, but I want to talk about contrived examples"--then I think there's nothing further to discuss between us.Also? Great jab, by the way, constantly claiming that because the DM puts in effort to allow character revival, the players' actions have no consequences at all whatsoever no matter what. That's simply not true, at all. As I said above. Death is only one consequence, and often a pretty boring one since (by definition) a random, permanent, irrevocable death ends a story and requires that there be zero further consequences for that player.Precisely. A conflict can only happen once, and there are no do-overs. Can't re-load over and over to get the golden ending; if you struggle and stumble and lose allies or break something important or empower an enemy, tough luck.The one and only thing I will work to address is, again, random (the pure result of unpredictable luck, not forewarned stupidity or intentional sacrifice etc.), AND permanent (char is dead and staying that way), AND irrevocable (party cannot, under any circumstances, revive the char) player character death. Characters could still die (hasn't happened, but it could), but I have, both through prior planning and through leaving myself room to improvise, prepared for addressing such things so that a death, if it occurs, is not the end of the character's story unless the player would prefer it so.It sounds like [USER=2629]@jgsugden[/USER] would always prefer it so, so unless the rest of the players attempt to convince them otherwise, I wouldn't put any further effort into it. Of course, because I have prepared for this already, at least with my current group, there are by my count at least four distinct allies who would all volunteer to bring a dead PC back to life, one of whom could do it purely under his own power (so long as the body was recovered, anyway.) None of these allies were included by contrivance; we're talking "the Sultana" whom the party has repeatedly aided against threats foreign and domestic, or "the head of the priesthood's internal police, who genuinely (and perhaps correctly) believes the party has been blessed by his deity," or "a literal ancient gold dragon whom the party trust and respect as both a friend and an ally." And that's just the allies who could do this; I haven't even considered the powers they could personally call upon, nor services or resources they could seek out. Hell, they could probably even convince their Jinnistani prince semi-kinda-sorta friend to do it, simply because he's an avid consumer of the sensationalized plays based on their adventures, and being the person who revived one of them would mean he would actually become an integral part of their adventures. (Prince Sahl is the personal patron of the Royal Cyclonic Theater, where the Skywind Repertory Company performs their "thoroughly researched" renditions of the PCs' adventures...and several more that never happened.)</blockquote>

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