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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5518001" data-attributes="member: 92305">Yes, understood.  Your players do have to trust you as GM/DM.   Player bitching isn't always a bad thing.  If players don't bitch a little, it scares me.  Their bitching means that they're "into" the game and care about what happens to their characters--that they're invested. I try to make it fun and let the players have a hand in what happens to NPCs with the stakes are reversed.  Sometimes, they can be quite creative. I also try not to go too far.  I want to cause a problem for the character, not poke out his eye.  I'll leave criticals for when criticals are thrown.  In the above, the character dropped his weapon.  That's not too bad.  And, if he uses that hand, I'll simply give him a -2 modifier when he uses it.  That's not overbearing. Plus, I try to give a check for the bad things not to happen.  The character above got a DEX check vs. a DC 9, and the "9" I got from the damage rolled against the character.  That's not unreasonable. And...sometime some cool outcomes sprout from these obstacles.  For example, let's say the Caelis character is left handed, but Thrallan, the defender is right handed.  The GM listens to the players describing their attacks or blocks and decides that he will give the Thrallan character a -2 on his attack because it's awkward to block a left handed attacker with your right hand and then reposition for a strike. The player playing Thrallan then says, Well, if my arm is shoved with my weapon way out there in a block, the natural thing to do would be to raise my leg and kick Caelis in the chest." That makes a lot of sense to me, as GM, given the physical position of the two combatants as described, so I would not only remove the normal penalty associated with a kick, but I would also give Thrallan a +2 on his kick attack (as a reward for a good idea in combat). This spices up combat to no end, making it much more than two dots on a map rolling dice until the other dot disappears. It makes the combats quite memorable, too.</blockquote>

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