Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 4980690" data-attributes="member: 957"><img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/yawn.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":yawn:" title="Yawn    :yawn:" data-shortname=":yawn:" />Been keeping players on their toes for going on ten years in 3E.  I'd take pretty serious exception to the concept of making players "feel cheated".  To me that just sounds like a horrid idea for creating fun.But, the idea that player entitlement to know exactly what they are facing is different in 3E than in any other edition is just boggling to me.  And when people complain about problems with 3E and then make this kind of silly claim, I can't help but think "there's your problem".  If you said that players know a lot of detail about their characters abilities, then I agree.  But nothing in 3E entitles players to know much of anything with certainty about what may be around the next corner.  My current game features a gibbering mouther.  Except it is semi-incorporeal, shoots short ranged bursts of static electricity in place of bites, fires blasts of blinding light, and instead of blood drain it uses oddly colored light to inflict wisdom damage.  And that is just what I used tonight.If I was running a mid teens game and the characters all had 100 - 200 hp and they got the drop on a cleric npc and nuked him for 300 hp, then honestly, the npc would die.  Either I did a terrible job of establishing a challenge or they got really lucky.  Either way, let them enjoy their success.  De-railing the DMs plans doesn't negate fun.  Clumsy and obvious fudging does.  Now if they had done 100 HP damage and the cleric had 94, then a 10 hp fudge to give the cleric one shot to escape is an option.  I may or may not take it depending on how the circumstances fit for the best fun.  Frequently, the npc would still be dead just because *I* like "let the dice fall" as a primary policy.  But no rule is absolute.But advances or reworking monsters and throwing things completely outside of player expectations is routine.  The expectations in 3E are pretty much identical to prior editions.  I know that my DMing philosophy didn't change.  If anything having monster building and monster advancement in the core rules, and having the presumption that rather than an orc being an orc an orc may be a barbarian 7 (or was it barbarian 9.....) also right in the core, goes further to support creative DMing.It isn't the box of crayons fault when only using the green makes a boring picture.</blockquote>

Verification