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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9559140" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Nope. But I've said that seven times now and you still think this is some sort of gotcha. I'm tired of explaining over and over and over and over exactly what the problem is.Something that has come up in "defense" of fudging is to prevent a stupid, lame death that would ruin a player's enjoyment of the game. I hate fudging and would not ever do it for any reason (well, short of "literally saving a real person's actual life" but I think you get what I mean). Yet I also recognize that a player could, in fact, be put into a situation where a particular result which is remotely possible from the dice, even if unlikely, would be fun-ruining if it actually came to pass. Hence, my preferred solution to the rare times when such a thing actually comes to pass is to prepare, within the fiction ("diegetically", though some quibble that that is exclusively for music), measures by which the PCs can reasonably either:Not actually die from that random and fun-killing event, instead being saved by someone (who will expect tit-for-tat or at least ask for a favor) or something (which may be consumed or lost etc.), orDie, but in a way that isn't actually permanent death, though it may come with other permanent costs instead,Die, but in a way that the PCs or their allies can restore or repair within a reasonable period afterwardGoing to the dangerous undead caves is not enough. It is nebulous and  the very idea that ANY possible danger no matter what is enough is just silly. Adventurers do dangerous things. Hearing "ooh, that cave is dangerous!" is a bog-standard adventure hook, not a "If you attempt the thing you're about to attempt, your character is at extreme risk of immediate death right then and there" moment, though usually I do not use such explicit terms myself. (My go-to is to ominously ask, "Are you sure?" Usually my players say no and reevaluate. Occasionally, they say yes anyway.) Because every damn time this comes up someone (often but not always Lanefan) talks about doing obviously crappy, disruptive things like "I kill the King that we're talking to" or "I walk across the lava" or the like. (Killing kings out of the blue for no real reason is particularly common in this context.) The explicit intent is, in every case, to show that the DM will never ever let the character actually die no matter what stupid bovine feces the character gets up to. The asker is describing actively and intentionally exploiting the DM's policies both as a big ol' middle finger, "your game sucks" gesture, and as an attempt to demonstrate "hahahaha, I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, and there are NEVER any consequences AT ALL!!!"So. Again.If the death is random, as in, not because you're tangling with the Dread Ghostbeard who drove the Caves of Madness mad and he captured your soul in his ship's lantern, but because we're in the second combat of the caves and a rando skeleton happened to get back to back to back crits (a 1 in 8000 chance) the turn before you were going to be healed, and you're all level 3 and have no chance of doing anything at all about that death, then yeah, I'm going to have prepared the OPTION for ways to resurrect that character within the fiction, which can be triggered if (AND ONLY IF) the player would prefer to continue playing that character. All of those options will have some kind of cost, permanent consequence, or debt/favor/expectation attached to them. If the player would prefer to let the death stand and play a new character, then the death will stand (and you can be sure I'm going to use it for future stuff.) I absolutely will not force a player to keep playing their character if they would find that distasteful or if it would damage their fun, because the whole point is to prevent damage to the players' fun.So. Are we done flip flopping between accusing me of deleting all possible stakes and challenge and meaning to turn the game into an eternal automatic win, or claiming that I can't possibly be changing anything whatsoever? Because it would be really really nice for folks to, y'know, actually work with the notion that maybe, possibly, perhaps, I'm actually serious when I say that it is ONLY this one, narrow, uncommon type of death that is actually a problem, and everything else is just fine. Particularly in D&D, where death has been pretty easy for PCs to revoke since at least 3e and possibly earlier.</blockquote>

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