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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6089544" data-attributes="member: 22424">A couple of things I've learned:- It's okay for PCs to die, go mad, lose limbs, lose favoured equipment, be level drained, or whatever else. Just be sure to do it sparingly and, most importantly, make the loss entertaining.The much-loathed level drain isn't bad because it's a bad mechanic (it's not), or because it's not fair (it's not), nor even because it steals away XP that the character has earned (though it does) - it's a bad mechanic because there's no way to make it entertaining - the PC just loses those things, and that's it. Even just adding a saving throw (even a near-impossible one) would make it better (but there are even better ways to handle the situation).- Stop fighting against what the players want to do!I have, on occasion, encountered problem players who will deliberately stretch or otherwise abuse the rules (or the GM's good nature) for advantage, and to the detriment of the game. Unfortunately, this has left me very wary whenever a player wants to try something cool. My default is much more "say no" than "say yes". However, I haven't encountered such problem players for quite some time now, and the simple fact is that I'm now gaming with an older, more mature, and wiser group of players (hence my occasional "play with adults" comments on other threads). The consequence of this is that when one of my current players comes up with something cool, it's almost certainly not because he's found an exploit; it's just because it's something cool. And so, my game is enriched by embracing such things, rather than fighting against them.(On the latter point, it also helped once I fixed the three 'tiers' of 3e play in mind - as soon as I clearly fixed the notion that 6th level characters, even of the "non-magical" classes, are strictly superhuman, a whole lot of issues with versimilitude simply went away. Suddenly those impossible, superhuman things that characters would do became a non-issue - superhumans doing superhuman things isn't exactly a problem. <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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