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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 6196760" data-attributes="member: 6701124">Recapping the definition...A few pages back I asked:That generated...Thank's for the detailed replies!Thinking about it, one of the first big campaigns I played in seemed to follow (ii) when needed like @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=386" target="_blank">LostSoul</a>; and @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6696971" target="_blank">Manbearcat</a>; discuss... it also had a massive death rate (1/4 of the party every night?) that was part of its charm and must color my views to at least some extent.  There are some I've run that didn't stretch things to save the party, and it became clear to them early on that player death was not being avoided when it came up naturally (and, given that we didn't have the tight 4e encounter building, it certainly did come up).For some others I've played in, I'm not sure if the DM was using Forcing or not.  In many of the games that involved detailed character creation that impacted the campaign design and/or those where the characters had survived quite a while, I think the death rates were certainly lower than would be expected for games (1e, 2e, 3/3.5) that don't have the tight encounter budgeting of 4e. I need to think more about @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=42582" target="_blank">pemerton</a>;'s response (quoted above), the additional points in #516 and #527, and read @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6696971" target="_blank">Manbearcat</a>;'s encounter example from earlier in this thread.  I'm thinking that when I have more time to mull it over it might be easiest to start another thread to explore them in detail.  In particular I'm interested in thinking about a taxonomy of encounter running styles and just hearing what other people use and what divisions they think there are and what their implications are to players with various preferences (and not about what the rules allow or what the one-true-way is).   GM forcing would be just one part of this.For example, say we start making a Venn diagram beginning with a circle for those who write-up the encounter, and once it is written up run it through entirely according to the rules and obtained dice rolls with no modification and without resorting to any possibly-RAW-sanctioned-fudging.  (This seems to be where @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=386" target="_blank">LostSoul</a>; and @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6696971" target="_blank">Manbearcat</a>; are -- please correct me if I'm wrong). @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=42582" target="_blank">pemerton</a>;'s game seems like it would fall outside this circle - death might be adjudicated into something else in spite of how the dice came up (in consultation with the players) and additional forces and complications can be added to modify the in progress encounter.Most of the games I run would certainly fall outside that circle to varying degrees - in some games I might have ad-hoc reinforcements come in, decide an enemy NPC has an extra spell slot or potion mid-combat, adjust the hit points of the foes on the fly (up or down),  reduce the rolled damage caused to a PC near death, and/or fudge a die roll if luck is making it seem like it isn't working.   I also certainly don't usually have a list of required skill-check values for most things set-up in advance.  It seems like some of these aren't that far out of @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=42582" target="_blank">pemerton</a>;'s play style while others of them have crossed several lines (and certainly meet the definition of Forcing).  I don't think I mind using most of these on rare occasions... but I'm afraid my lack of preparation time is giving me an excuse to use them far too often and that the players have an inkling once in awhile that I'm taking too much of their agency (although they haven't complained).  The setting of skill-roll-difficulties and determination of what skill rolls are possible feels to me like it falls into that somewhere.  Also, the interaction of the chosen style with the general lethality/non-lethality of the game and amount of work sunk into character creation could be interesting as well. In any case thinking about where the lines are and what the ramifications of crossing each one are seem's like something I should do more as a DM.If someone else wants to culling out the relevant parts of the previous 564 posts and beat me to starting another thread... I certainly won't complain!   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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