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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2522232" data-attributes="member: 19130">Since when is being "mean" and presenting "risk" equivalent to being willing to kill people?  This attitude always annoys me, because I always start feeling a little guilty for not killing people when people take such pride in their willingness to do so.  I'm probably just being neurotic, but in any case it's simply not true that you have to be willing to kill people to make sure they're risking something in every battle.  There're plenty of things they can lose due to failure in battle or elsewhere, from face to the entire campaign, without killing them.To take a recent example from my campaign, my players' 7th-level characters were recently beaten back by an aboleth and its bugbear mercenaries.  They were actually at almost no risk of death since the aboleth had very good reasons for beating them back while keeping them alive, so the evening consisted of a running battle through areas drenched in illusions that played out as a bluff on the aboleth's part to get the party to believe they were facing overwhelming odds (instead of the actual pretty tough odds) before the party reached the objective (a wellspring of disease their trying to purify).I did eventually succeed, after much roleplaying on behalf of the players, in convincing them to retreat.  As a result, they're now in hot water with their time commitments because another plot thread with a deadline is bearing down on them, and the disease fount problem is still unsolved.  This was their primary risk in choosing to attack when they did, and they knew it.  They lost, there was risk (and they lost something), I was even pretty mean to them in the way I horribly abused the aboleth's illusion-creating powers, but nobody had to die.As I see it, there are only two bad points on this little spectrum, and they both involve convincing your players that nothing they do is relevant.  You can do that by removing all risk of failure (and failure =/= death), or by removing all possibility for success by gunning for the PCs and enjoying it when you down one of them for no other reason than that it validates your status as a tough DM.  But pretending that someone who doesn't kill PCs is automatically removing all risk of failure from the game is silly, and it gets on my nerves.</blockquote>

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