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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7400087" data-attributes="member: 996">And how consistent/robust the system is.  Taking even the appearance of deadly danger off the table in a game with any pretense to being heroic fantasy also seems counterproductive.  It's not that you /can't/ figure out a solution, it's that no solution is going to work perfectly, up-front.  You need to be flexible.  Taking resolution behind the screen and engaging in illusionism gives you a lot of that kind of flexibility. But not the proposition either of us is making.  I think part of the issue we're grappling with here is that D&D doesn't exactly do an awesome job of modeling genre.  One thing it doesn't do all that badly is that it lets players have their heroes do things that should be considered brave - facing 'deadly' (anything that does damage is deadly) dangers - reasonably secure in the player-knowledge of hps.  The system doesn't always manage that kind of thing well /enough/, though, and when it fails, the DM is the 'safety valve.'  Players don't always think of it that way, either, sometimes they'll get the idea that, because they know their character has 70 hps, they can hop off a cliff or that taking 'only' 35 damage in a fight was 'easy.'  Giving them back a sense of jeopardy can be tricky.  Taking death off the table isn't going to be part of that.   3.5 they simply swapped the greataxe for a falchion, for a max 22 damage on a crit instead of 45 (but 3 times as many crits).  It's not so much that CR was 'wrong' in 3e or 5e and EL 'right' in 4e, it's just that the systems were different, and there was a lot more swing in 3e crits and a lot more PC durability in the lowest levels of 4e, among plenty of other things (complex systems and all).</blockquote>

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