Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1474859" data-attributes="member: 645">dreaded beast - As always, great to see how much thought you put into evolving your DMing style.  Sounds as if you're doing good.  <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=":)" />   Re PC deaths and fudging: See it from their side.  If you played in a game where the DM slipped a healing potion into a PC's pack in mid-combat, how would you feel about it? I would feel cheated and wrongly used.  How am I going to enjoy victory if I know the DM will do everything in their power to avoid my PC failing (dying)? It's a matter of style of course, and there are lots of DMs on these boards who'll be able to advise you on techniques for fudging in the PCs' favour without it being all that obvious, if that's what you want.  Your post sounds as if you'd like to go a different way though - less fudging, more honest deaths if the PCs thrust themselves in that direction.  I DM that way and I prefer to play with DMs who do the same:  I make all die rolls in the open, I don't fudge enemy stats downwards in mid-combat, and I certainly won't add stuff to PCs' equipment lists (can't even imagine how that one could work without all the players noticing that fudging is going on...).  First, some bits of specific dire rat combat advice.  Your description sounds as if one PC death was pretty unavoidable when the cleric went down.  That's the players' mistake, for not protecting their only healer!  There's a few things you might have done slightly differently, although none of the non-fuding alternatives I can think of would have been likely to save the cleric.  Just one example: Dire rats are animals.  The moment the cleric went down, those rats that had been attacking him might have started feeding on his unconscious body (read: coup de grace). That would have killed him, but given other PCs in melee distance attacks of opportunity against the feeding rats - or if they were wise, a chance to run away with a whole round's head start.  (The rats, being animals, probably wouldn't have pursued them because (a) they now had fresh meat available and (b) the threat to their territory that presumably had triggered their attack on the PCs had ended.)  Second, I'd suggest to stop worrying about what PC deaths do to story.  If a PC death collapses your planned 'story', that's a warning sign.  Because if that's the case, then a PC's in-game choice (turning down a quest, making a friend or an enemy where you'd intended the opposite etc.) will do the same - which means that only railroading can keep the story intact, and railroading isn't much fun.   If you and your players work together to make every moment of a PC's life a good and enjoyable story moment, something very cool will develop out of it. If the character then dies an untimely death, his friends will mourn him, remember him, and move on.  Not all PC stories are long stories, you see.  Any Plot that is inherent in your world OTOH will still be there if a PC involved in it dies. Maybe it carries on all by itself quietly for a little while, until things happen that cause the other PCs to become interested in it again.</blockquote>

Verification