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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Patlin" data-source="post: 1476619" data-attributes="member: 17264">Absolutely avoid killing your players.  Their characters are another story...However you do it, there should be a difference in outcomes between good playing and bad playing.  The difference doesn't have to be life-or-death, but this is certainly one of the primary ways it comes out in most games.  Generally, I recomend avoiding fudging die rolls -- it tends to create an environment where playing well and playing poorly are indistinguishable.There are some circumstances in which the rules present undesirable results.  Are you experiencing too many combat fatalities, even with the players excercising reasonable strategies? Rather than fudging, a house rule can shift the penalty to unconciousness instead of death.  Expand the range in which a character is knocked out of the fight without being killed.  For example, you could change the rules to allow a character to hold on to life to -50% of hp (so if you have 50 hp you die upon hitting -25 hp.)  Advantages: Penalty of unconciousness is significantly more temporary and less costly than death, and you can get players back into the game faster once the immediate situation is resolved.  Disadvantage: characters will still die, and characters rendered unconcious without other PCs in close proximity will see little benefit unless they are captured.  May encourage greater heroics and less of a realistic fear of injury.You might also fudge a little bit when extreme die rolls are throwing your game out of whack.  Has the monster hit with 5 criticals in a row? You could probably tone that down a bit without throwing your game out of whack.If you really need a deus-ex-machina, however, I'd suggest sending in an obvious outside element rather than "cheating" in favor of your players.  Being rescued by an unusually timely arival of a friendly NPC is less rewarding than winning the fight on your own (especially if the NPC wants a cut of the loot), but beats the heck out of dying.  Your players *know* when they've been helped out by an NPC, so doing this doesn't make a true victory less satisfying, when they win and the cavalry *didn't* ride to the party's rescue.Finally, if your party does something really stupid let the chips fall where they may, even if the characters die.  If your party of 4 first level characters refuses parley with an ancient red dragon, instead charging heroically into glorious battle, then run the fight without mercy.  Truly poor decisions, as opposed to simply poor luck, ought to provoke disaster.</blockquote>

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