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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1474727" data-attributes="member: 16936">I don't.  But I'm not as fanatical about "let the dice fall where they may" as some people here are, either.If I suddenly discover mid-combat that I have grossly overestimated what the party can handle and it's going to end in a TPK, I try to find more artful ways to fudge things to avoid that.Because a total party kill really isn't any fun for anyone in our game.  We have one player who hates generating characters, and since we tend to collaborate during character creation (to give everyone a reason to know and associate with each other), this becomes a headache for everyone.  Plus, most of our gaming fun is centered in continuing plotlines and interacting with each other, and killing everyone off totally sabotages that.What I tend to do more often than not is to start fudging what the bad guys are trying to do, rather than fudge the results of what they do.  If a combat starts going really bad, my NPCs start making sub-optimal decisions.  They gloat when they shouldn't.  They react emotionally and go try and thrash the guy who just hit them instead of ganging up on the most dangerous PC and pounding him into a thin red paste.  They don't use an ability that would be devastatingly effective, for no readily explainable reason.That way, if anyone calls me on it ("Dude, how come he didn't use that spell?  He would've totally killed the sh-t out of us!"), I can pretend that I'm surprised and embarrassed about being a big stupid idiot of a GM who didn't use the NPC as well as I should've, or I can pretend to be a clever, theatrical GM who was playing the role of an angry ogre mage appropriately, or just plead the fifth amendment and move on.One time I decided on the cusp of a TPK to have another group of NPCs wade in, slaughter all the other bad guys, then hold, stun, or otherwise incapacitate the PCs in order to capture them.  On the one hand, I was being really generous, because they could've all died.  On the other hand, I was blatantly unfair because they literally had no chance against these new NPCs, mostly because I didn't have any stats for them and had just invented them on the fly.  It seemed really heavy-handed to me, too.  ("Roll a Will save."  "I got a 29."  "Ooh, so close!  But no, you're paralyzed.")My penance for that was that I had to actually stat them out later, figure out what they wanted, figure out how they got involved in this plot, and then keep track of them for the rest of that campaign.  Plot Convenience, my ass:  those NPC sons-of-bitches upped my workload by at least 30%!--but anyway, there's nothin' wrong with not killin' players or their charactersryan</blockquote>

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