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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4981072" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok.Well, you can do that; you are the DM.  However, it's probably not a good idea.  First of all, there isn't alot of difference between arbitrarily adding 1000 extra hit points to a creature before hand and on the fly.  When you add that big of a number, you are turning the fight into a predictable grind.  However, much more importantly, you'll totally change the balance of the game.  As other's have pointed out, the PC's - once they figure out all the monsters have hit point totals normally associated with dieties - will simply adjust their tactics to defeat the foe in a way that bypasses hitpoints.  In the mean time, any character which developed his skills to dish out alot of damage (an evoker or a fighter type character) is going to find himself basically useless compared to someone that can sling out 'charm monster', 'hold monster', 'polymorph any object', and other effects.  So yes, some player is probably being cheated unfairly merely because you can't find a way to challenge your players other than bigger numbers.Good.  However, you do an amazingly evocative job describing a table in turmoil with lots of complaining, lots of power struggles, lots of rules breaking, lots of authority issues, and I think you do an amazing job of describing how to get yourself in that sort of situation.  If you've avoided it, you must have very tolerant players and/or some aspect of your DMing that greatly makes up for the deficiencies you describe.  And, I should say, that's ok.  One of the best DMs I ever had was a mediocre tactician, a terrible rulesmith and a worse mapper.  That didn't make him a bad DM.Getting player's approval is not nearly the same thing as getting the player's input.  As a DM, you need to observe whether your players are getting bored, fidgety, frustrated, etc. and adapt your play style to meet their needs.  If they like melodrama, give them more melodrama.  If they like hack and slash, give them more hack-n-slash.  If they like big sweeping epic stories, give them more big sweeping stories and if they like the freedom of the sandbox let them play in the sandbox for a while.  That isn't to say that you give them complete control, much less that you need their approval to introduce some element, but if your players are having fun you probably should consult with them before deciding the game isn't hard enough.  Beating the players is easy.  Any DM can beat the players.  All you got to do is make the numbers bigger.   But that is most certainly not the same thing as challenging them.And if that strong challenge is based off a gross violation of the game expectations - say a lvl 20 cleric with 1500 hit points and the capacity to dish out 300 points of damage a round or something of the sort - then its quite possible that the player's feeling that they are being cheated has a significant basis in fact.  I know that if I found that the monsters stats were inflating like that they I'd feel like I was being pushed around by DM toys that grew in proportion to the DM's need to feel in control.Sure, I have no problem with that.  I'm actually known as a 'killer DM', the sort that can rack up a huge body count.  I generally don't do it though by simply upping the numbers.  I do it by playing the monsters with high tactical proficiency, by knowing CR well, by giving the monsters the advantages of 'home ground', and by not letting up.  But if I'm finding myself playing with players that aren't up to the level of skill that I'm acustomed to and see that they are getting frustrated rather than learning to play well together as a team, I'm going to ratchet things down a notch and show off some other time.That depends on the player and the PC.  Usually, killing PC's is a big bummer for everyone at the table.I'm not sure what you mean by 'hoses' in this context, but your suggestions aren't very thoughtful ones in my opinion.  They are brute force techniques that a compotent DM should avoid because they go wrong more often than not.  There is a narrow path that must be trod here between being too easy on one hand and being a self-centered jerk who is ego gaming as the DM.  As the DM, your job is to lose.  You just try to lose in a way that makes it look like the PC's won even though the odds were stacked in the monsters favor.  It's a balancing act, and dropping 1000 extra hit points on your side of the table is well in your power, but is unbalancing and doesn't show alot of finesse.Not every encounter should be a critical one.  Some encounters are simply part of world exploration.  Some encounters exist to give a change to the players to explore their character's abilities (not every player is an old hat).  Some encounters are just oppurtunities for character development, and/or have at their core some problem that is not tactical or martial in nature.  Some encounters exist because the players stumbled into them unexpectedly and quite without you anticipating it.  Some encounters exist because the players decided they wanted a chance to define what the plot was and take the story in some new direction.  Some encounters exist to give scale to the real BBEG.  Some encounters exist to give a chance for the player to experience just how powerful they've become and how much has changed since they first started out.  This is certainly true of stories.  Not every 'encounter' in a movie or novel pushes the hero to his utmost.  Some 'encounters' serve other purposes.True, but the two situations aren't mutually exclusive.  Yes, they may be subject to encountering foes far beyond their means to defeat.  But, and this is more likely, they might not.  If we are sandboxing, the possibilities cover an entire range from encountering nothing to encountering a world destroying monstrousity.  However, most of the time in a successful campaign, challenges offer reasonable rewards or the characters will soon feel as if whatever they do is pointless.I'm being very serious about this.I think you are now just making up what we are talking about, because neither of those look remotely like quotations to me.Well, that does but nothing I said does. No, it doesn't.  It feels very inexperienced.  It feels very unpolished.  But it doesn't seem very strange at all, because its exactly what I would expect a junior high DM to do (and what I was doing about that time).  What's strange and counter-intuitive is your claim to have been doing this 13 years.  So maybe the problem is that you just have a hard time expressing yourself with your writing and your opinions are alot more nuanced than you present them as.</blockquote>

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