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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 2023599" data-attributes="member: 12037">And if the monster gets a lucky critical, then the PC should die.I tell my players they are not allowed to speak their hp, they arn't allowed to infer it to me, although they can yell out that they need healing, or others can ask what they look like (in character assessment). I don't know the numbers, so I am incapable of fudging damage so they narrowly escape death even if I wanted, and they know it.Tactics do help against lucky criticals though. They keep you from dying from them because you arn't as bad off as you would be without them. If you use good tactics you either 1) won't be near the enemy for that attack to occur or 2) will have more hp than you would if you used poor tactics. Saying that good tactics won't help against a critical roll against you is simply untrue. You are better prepared for it.For a game to be fun for me, death must happen. You can't simply say "You might die in my campaigns" as a DM; noone will believe it until someone dies. Until that first death, then noone really understands what is at stake. I'm not saying try to kill a PC, but when it happens let the dice fall. My players would not have much fun if they thought I would get sqeemish and pull my punches the second things got difficult. And, I don't see how a game could possibly considered challenging or difficult (combat-wise) if characters coulnd't die when things got hairy.Now, it is technically counter-productive story-wise for a DM to kill his characters. Last adventure, a barbarian died in a game I ran (luckyly he was raised). I have plans for this barbarian, big ones. I have two sessions at least devoted to what has happened in his villiage since he has been away. But, hey, the PCs can kill villians who I have plans for too, and I don't fudge anything for the BBEG just because I want him to live. I just don't do that for players either. If the plot needs to change, then the plot changes. It might be counter-productive, but if I couldn't handle it, I would hang up the DM hat (not that I actually wear a DM hat, really!).Losing doesn't always mean dying, though. I like alternatives. Reprocussions that the PCs must face, ways that they have failed in their goals so that now things are harder on them, people are dead, armies have risen, nations have fallen, entire planes fall into Carceri (oh that was a fun one). It's only rarely that they're looking down the mouth of an enemy that has a very real possibility of killing at least one of them no matter what they do. That happens, too, though, because its fun for them.As for TPKs... well... they happen. Rarely, I think once in the past 4 or so years I've been DMing, and that was due to players drastically misjudging the situation they were in. Poor guys... And if the very next session they had a TPK... well they'd roll up new characters and we'd start a new campaign. It's not that they don't have a connection with their characters and havn't been having a great time fleshing them out and bringing life to them, but they're still just characters. Sometimes at the end of the play, everyone is dead.</blockquote>

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