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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 6814299" data-attributes="member: 6801286">I agree entirely. When the DM hands a victory to his players, when they should have died, then it feels like the victory wasn't really earned. It sucks a lot of the suspense and the feeling of reward from the game.That is not to say that a DM can't sometimes feel the need to adjust an encounter on the fly, when he realizes he made a mistake. But there are ways to do that that are more subtle, and don't require outright ignoring what was rolled.I understand that I may have done so in the past, and I can see what kind of a dramatic effect it can have on the perceived suspense of my players. So what I do these days, is roll a lot of things out in the open, and tell them what the stakes are.For example, in a recent encounter an Ocularon grappled one of the players, and unless he escaped, then his eyes would be stolen in the next round. So I described to the player how the creature was lining up its sharp tentacles in front of his eyes, ready to pluck them out. All of the grapple checks that followed I rolled out in the open. I wanted my players to see that all of it was fair, and I outright told them the stakes. I told them "unless you escape, then on the next round this creature will attempt to pluck out your eyes". You could feel the tension at the table, and I knew that one of my players could be permanently blinded after this encounter. To my surprise however, the player came up with a brilliant plan to escape the jaws of defeat, and used his Ring of the Ram to launch the creature that was grappling him through a dimensional portal. I did not consider this an option, but was happy to be surprised by the resourcefulness of my players. My players are level 11 right now, and I consider that high level (by 3rd edition standards at least). So that's the level where you should no longer be pulling punches. That is the level when players face really powerful opponents with very deadly abilities, such as Beholders, Mindflayers, Krakens, Demons, etc. So there should be a chance of dying at this point. Further more, they were in The Eternal Depths (a realm of the dead for people who died at sea) when it happened, and it was my goal as a DM to make them afraid of this high level area. If I fudged at this point, it would have totally undermined both the suspense of the entire campaign, and their fear of this important area of the game.</blockquote>

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