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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 5624860" data-attributes="member: 20323">Wow this thread is moving at a furious pace! I'm trying to keep up with the comments but I may have missed some, apologies. But I've been reconsidering my position a bit with my particular example in regards to "drama", "gravitas", "emotional poignancy", etc. Maybe they could have saved the life of the lord, what would that mean? Would he blame himself? Would be blame the king? The PCs even? Would he become a liability when the PCs make a sneak attack against goblins? Could the goblins' smart-ish leader leverage his captive family to turn against PCs? What if his family died, would he go out in a blaze if vengeance, turn to the dark side, become a permanent NPC companion? There's really a lot of room for cool dramatic situations there - obviously different in tone than what I had in mind, but still equally valuable.I see, so the player might think " Why should I bother caring about NPCs when our DM is willing to kill them arbitrarily, putting us behind an artificial piece of glass where we are powerless to make a meaningful choice to change the outcome."I thought there was a lot of choice involved in what happened to the lord NPC, it just was resolved in previous adventures. Maybe that was part of the problem? As a DM I already made a decision about the impact of a past adventure then put the PCs in a situation where they confronted that fallout and the bar player felt he should be able to reverse it because of the way in which I set up the scene (with the lord dying, not dead). IOW the finality of the outcome of the past adventure was in dispute.Yeah that's a great scene you've set up there. My group sticks to PG-13, the couple has a 3 year old, several of the ladies are squeamish, and we host guest players now and then. My concern with the setup with the glowing green rod (magic poison, or what have you) is that it establishes this as a challenge. Which may be exactly why it appeals to you. The players are going to bethinking how to beat the glowing green rod with teleport, readied Heal checks and Strength checks, rings of regeneration, etc.  My resistance to setting this up as a challenge was that with this particular group (not universally) challenge-thinking brings out the zany flippant ideas which just kill any emotional impact. It's not that they dislike or are immune to drama, but once they're in challenge-thinking mode their attitude changes.Of course, me wanting this scene to be an emotionally charges one could be the problem. You could argue that this sort of thing should emerge naturally from play. Usually I'd agree. With my particular group, however, that just isn't the case - it really does take DM scene framing to draw that out of them. They enjoy it when it happens (aka I orchestrate it), but it's not their default MO.Heh, considering that we usually play at the bard player's house, that would be pretty funny if I said that. At the very least they'd cut me off on the next round. <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=":)" />Thinking about this in hindsight it would be easy to set up this situation in the rules (not that I had this worked out in advance):NPC lord was hit be special coup de grace which negates natural 20 on death saves, and prevents Heal skill from stabilizing dying character. This is akin to a combination of the 4e peryton's "feast" (kill dying adjacent character) and ongoing damage. Then I give the NPC an ability to stay conscious albeit helpless at negative HP up to half their healing surge value. Not overpowered as it's weaker than a barbarian ability to fight into negative HP. This way it's possible he has been rolling death saves for several minutes and just getting really lucky (or maybe he has an item or feat which grants him bonus to death saves).Anyhow, upshot of that 4e goobldigook is this could conceivably be handled by the rules without needing much special explanation besides "The NPC lord is tough as nails, but the hobgoblin warchief is a badass SoB."Makes sense overall.I tend to notice a bit of bleeding as the PCs begin exploration, so it's not necessarily true that there's an off-on switch where you jump from scene framing to playing the game immediately. That's certainly possible, but I've noticed exploration mode in particular it takes a bit for the PCs to warm up to interacting. I'd be curious to hear you chime in on this [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]? You seem to have a stronger grasp of scene framing than me.There is a force more powerful than the DM: children, especially creeping up at dramatic moments to ruin the tension of a scene wanting to play the yellow "dwaggin" or (personal favorite) choosing as climactic battle music with the dracolich the alphabet song. :sigh:But seriously, youve really made me pause and think how I could do a similar setup better in the future, and how I can empower the players more even if they're not taking the initiative. Thanks [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], consistently well though out advice.</blockquote>

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