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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5622790" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION], I hadn't realised it was a 4e game. To my mind, that makes what you did all the more legitimate within the rules. Like I posted upthread, I've done exactly the same sort of thing - had the PCs rescue NPCs who are maimed, blinded etc from combat with hobgoblins, and who are therefore beyond the help of a healing word or similar spell (again, how can we tell that? because those spells only heal hit points, which recover after a night's rest, and therefore can't on their own represent anything all that debilitating).As I said in my post just above yours, the only mechanics-related issue I can see here is one of jarring with the players' expectations if the nature of hit point loss and hit-point based healing hasn't been thought through - that is, if they haven't noticed that the action resolution mechanics used to handle combat don't encompass the full possible range of combat-related injuries that are possible in the fiction.The GMing style issue seems to me to be this: as you describe the scene, you wanted the dying lord to be colour (and Crazy Jerome already diagnosed it this way quite a bit upthread), and you liked the colour of that better than you did him already being dead. The question for your players was - is this colour, or is this a challenge we can engage with? You've exerted some GM force to establish beyond doub that it's just colour. And you haven't been coy about it (ie you stated that you didn't roll the death save). There was no illusionism here, just upfront force.Whether this is objectionable railroading, or just reasonably hard scene framing, is not something anyone else posting here can work out in the abstract. It's all about whether your players are into that sort of hard scene framing, or not.</blockquote>

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