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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8985734" data-attributes="member: 75787">My statement was that your focus on changing the outcome of a combat as the only reason to adapt encounters mid-flow is a strawman. You reject that characterization, but then in the rest of your post you return to it:Again you are implying that the only reason to modify encounters mid-flow is to enforce "GM Plans" and now you are adding the implication that the GM is going to do this every single time! So let me try once more to state why I modify combats: To make them funAh, I was not clear enough in my statement; the "it" in the above statement refers to the challenge, not the encounter (technically that's the correct way to read the sentence, but I should have been more explicit). As a group, we have a consensus on how challenging a campaign is, and therefore on how challenging combats are. I explicitly call this out when setting up the campaign.As examples, for an AD&D game I ran, the group set the expectation that the world was very dangerous, and that it was to be expected that the players might face overwhelming challenges that might kill them if they did not run. Whereas in a 13th Age game, the group expectation of challenge was that fights should be "worth running" (not pushovers) but that death was only likely for climactic battles or against major nemeses.So, EVERYONE was involved in envisaging how we expected challenges to be, and as a GM my job was to uphold the group's decision, so if an encounter failed to match up to what the group has agreed the challenge should be, then that's my failure and I need to fix itYou find difficulties with my approach of modifying to making things fun, namely:You don't have to "omniscient" to modify encounters! Such extreme language! All you have to know is roughly what you expect will happen. As a trivial example, if I modify an encounter to have the opposition run away, I'm pretty confident that I can tell how things are going to turn . Or if I increase the damage done by a monster's attack, I can be pretty sure it'll make the combat harder to some degree.I agree that it can be hard to predict how the outcome of the combat will be changed, but that's your concern, not mine. I'm modifying combats to make things more fun,  and based on our relative experiences, that seems much easier to do!Yet again with the strawman that the only reason to modify a combat is to change outcomesYet again with the strawman that people do this all the time.[USER=4937]@Celebrim[/USER], I think I get where you are coming from, but it's incompatible with where I am coming from. I get the feeling you are attacking a version of play that isn't close to what I'm doing, so maybe rather than trying to attack that position, can we come up with some statements that are more focused about the differences between the outcome-changing and fun-changing methods? Are the following notes at least roughly in alignment with your thinking?<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Modifying encounters mid-flow so as to change the outcome is hard to judge well and can easily lead to the GM railroading players to fit into their desired plans, if they have them. It's recommended that GMs do this very rarely if at all.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Modifying encounters mid-flow so as to make an encounter more enjoyable, potentially affecting the outcome but without that being the purpose, is much easier for the GM and is something that can be considered a GM's style, neither inherently good or bad.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">GMs should consider their groups and session zero discussions when they think about modifying encounters mid-flow. Groups that are more gamist and enjoy the puzzle-like challenge of roleplaying, will generally prefer less modification -- maybe none at all</li> </ul></blockquote>

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