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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riastlin" data-source="post: 5558563" data-attributes="member: 94022">Mneme has it right on.  Its a "Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Folks" sort of thing. For me personally, as a DM, I'm somewhere in the middle I think.  I definitely want the players to believe that there's a very real possibility that their characters could die.  I also think that the possibility of death makes success all the sweeter.  After all, if every PC will no doubt make it to 30th level, then reaching 30th level doesn't really mean anything other than you've "been playing for a while". At the same time though, I do like to bring a lot of story into my campaigns and I love to tie the campaign into the backgrounds of the PCs whenever possible.  If PCs are dying regularly though, this becomes rather difficult.  So what I've done is usually try to make the encounters fair, while also always providing an out if the dice should really go south.  That being said though if the party stands and fights, and the dice continue to betray them, I will absolutely let them die.   When I first started DM'ing I was much more prone to fudge results so as to save PCs from death and what I ultimately started to notice was that the players didn't worry nearly as much about tactics.  Although it was never spoken aloud, there seemed to be a sense of invulnerability.  Once I started to let a couple of characters die though, things changed.  The players became more careful and realized that sometimes they just need to bail on a fight for their own good.  In my opinion, its made the fights much more fun, there's more tension in the tough battles because everyone knows its quite possible for a PC to die and when the party ultimately prevails in that tough fight, there's a greater sense of accomplishment. It should also be noted though that although I'm perfectly willing to let PCs die if that's how the dice fall, PC deaths are still relatively rare in my campaigns, but the PCs have come close many times.  Now, about the only time I'll fudge things is if I end up making an encounter that turns out to be a lot harder than I anticipated, in which case I'm more inclined to fudge things because I screwed up in designing the encounter in the first place.</blockquote>

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