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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2526967" data-attributes="member: 19130">I am entirely unsure where you got this from my post, as my entire point is that the risk of dying is not only risk, and is not even my preferred risk when DMing to use to keep the game exciting.  Then again, the sentences I quoted are confusing to me so I may be misinterpreting.I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly.  To give an example of how it would work in one of my games...If the PCs jump off a 200-foot cliff and expect me to reroll the 20d6 several times to get a roll low enough to save them, well, they're going to die.  This has never happened, though, since my players either don't think that way at all or are sufficiently impressed with the danger level of my DMing (Cutter's "sweet spot", either way, I suppose).The PCs are caught in a pitched battle, begin to lose, and one of the PCs is unexpectedly separated from the rest.  He needs to retreat, so he tries something daring - leaping off the cliff at his back, a cliff which I have not mentioned the height of.  Now, it may say in my notes that that cliff is 200 feet tall and has spiky bits at the bottom, but I'm almost certainly going to change that on the fly to 50 or 100 feet, whatever would be required to probably batter the PC severely but most likely not kill him.  The image of the cliff escape is cool enough to me, and the situation it creates is interesting enough to me (the PC is badly wounded and separated from his friends), that I'm not likely to make the attempt fatal.In the example at hand, I can see a number of more interesting possibilities that CdGing the fallen PC, so I do think the OP made the wrong call.  I doubt I'd go with the hostage situation (don't see it as very ghouly), but I would tell the players that the fallen PCs seconds are numbered.  Some of the best sessions I've had have been adjudicating the heroic and bizarre stunts that PCs will try in situations like this.  It's fair to say that watching players improvise a solution and helping them enact it is quite possibly my favorite part of DMing.Nothing wrong with that.  Whatever works for you and your players is the cardinal rule of DMing, after all.  It just seems that whenever this topic comes up, some people seem to be strongly of the opinion that a game with little risk of death is not a fun game, or is bad D&D.  In other words, they seem to see something wrong with how I DM.  I'm not trying to change anyone's play style, as long as it's working, just get them to acknowledge that being relatively unwilling to kill people doesn't make your game a cakewalk.Well, this is the Internet, so I'm fairly sure we agree on most things in principle and are taking exception to certain emphases over anything else.  So, yeah, I agree that our positions are not really that far off here (since I seem to be agreeing with swrushing for the most part).Ah, Awesome!  *le yoink*</blockquote>

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