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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7797935" data-attributes="member: 16814">Last paragraph, entire paragraph:  You'd be very wrong, and your formulation is wrong.  A climax is the pinnacle of the action.  Having tense actions before, that are interesting and engaging at the table, are not climaxes.  If every roll is meaningful and some are even fraught, this doesn't speak to climax at all.Example:  my last session -- the party rushed a group of gnolls lead by a flind, but, due to initiative and actions declared, ended up in a position where the dwarven barbarian was in the room killing some gnolls but the rest of the part was still in the hallway.  Two of the gnolls rushed the door, closed it, and dropped the bar on it, separating the party.  The barbarian quickly went down to the flind and the gnolls.  In the meantime, the party ranger tried to bash down the door, figuring this would be the quickest path to access.  The other party members either tried to assist or tried to think of a different way through the door.  The door resisted the bashing until the dwarf went down on the other side, at which point the cleric suggested the vial of acid she'd picked up on a previous adventure.  As the immediate time constraint was gone, I ruled that applying the acid and letting it do the work so that the door could be broken open would take a minute of time.  Here we have an example of a check that had a big reward for success and a bad consequence for failure (in this case, just time, as it was another round the dwarf had to fight all the gnolls alone).  This was a very fraught moment, as I'm the kind of DM that will kill characters in this kind of situation.  It was not a climax, though.The dwarf was knocked unconscious instead of killed because the flind, wily as it was, had other problems in the complex and so took a hostage to bargain with the party to go soften up the other problems (assuming the party would die, because he'd already beaten them).  The party managed to engage in some negotiation by noting the arrogance of the flind (insight check) and then leveraging that into advantage on the ask for the dwarf back instead of being kept as hostage ("You've already defeated the dwarf, mighty warrior that you are, surely you don't need to keep him and he will help us help you.").  The agreement struck, the dwarf was returned to consciousness and the party was locked into a different hallway (triple barred door this time) with a Stone Golem.  Which was, amusingly, exactly where they wanted to be.Again, checks with consequence and reward, but not climaxes.  The ask for the dwarf was fraught, though, as it meant leaving a party member behind with murderous gnolls and lacking his strong axe arm in any fights.</blockquote>

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