Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6487036" data-attributes="member: 58197">I'm coming at this from the point of view of a DM who cut his teeth on AD&amp;D, also known as the Edition of Random Instant Death. Even if you implemented the &quot;death at -10&quot; optional rule (and it was an optional rule back then, the standard rule was death at zero), at high levels those ten hit points made for a very narrow buffer. Any big monster could easily slam you right through to dead. Death was a common punishment for failing a saving throw; any two-bit poison needle trap had a droplet of &quot;save or die&quot; on the end of it. And of course both hit dice and Con bonuses were smaller, and you didn't get max hit points at first level, so you lived closer to the edge from the start.As such, I often found myself having to fudge damage rolls, turn hits into misses, and keep close track of the PCs' hit points just to prevent my campaign from turning into a slaughterhouse. The same was true of other DMs of my acquaintance. I've heard of people who ran AD&amp;D by the book and pulled no punches, and I have the utmost respect for them, but for me it was just unworkable. Even in 3E I still did some fudging. 4E was the first edition where I was able to run the game as I wanted without cheating in the players' favor*.That is what I consider system lethality: The likelihood that PCs die without the DM intending to kill them. When the DM does intend to kill them, that's DM lethality. The low system lethality, combined with tools to enable high DM lethality, is one of the things I like about 5E. The game can be as lethal as you choose to make it, but the system won't go off and start butchering the party without your say-so.[SIZE=-2]*Cheating in the monsters' favor, well... that's just one of the crosses PCs have to bear. <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&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />[/SIZE]</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 6487036, member: 58197"] I'm coming at this from the point of view of a DM who cut his teeth on AD&D, also known as the Edition of Random Instant Death. Even if you implemented the "death at -10" optional rule (and it [I]was[/I] an optional rule back then, the standard rule was death at zero), at high levels those ten hit points made for a very narrow buffer. Any big monster could easily slam you right through to dead. Death was a common punishment for failing a saving throw; any two-bit poison needle trap had a droplet of "save or die" on the end of it. And of course both hit dice and Con bonuses were smaller, and you didn't get max hit points at first level, so you lived closer to the edge from the start. As such, I often found myself having to fudge damage rolls, turn hits into misses, and keep close track of the PCs' hit points just to prevent my campaign from turning into a slaughterhouse. The same was true of other DMs of my acquaintance. I've heard of people who ran AD&D by the book and pulled no punches, and I have the utmost respect for them, but for me it was just unworkable. Even in 3E I still did some fudging. 4E was the first edition where I was able to run the game as I wanted without cheating in the players' favor*. [I]That[/I] is what I consider system lethality: The likelihood that PCs die [I]without[/I] the DM intending to kill them. When the DM does intend to kill them, that's DM lethality. The low system lethality, combined with tools to enable high DM lethality, is one of the things I like about 5E. The game can be as lethal as you choose to make it, but the system won't go off and start butchering the party without your say-so. [SIZE=-2]*Cheating in the monsters' favor, well... that's just one of the crosses PCs have to bear. :)[/SIZE] [/QUOTE]

Verification