Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4702228" data-attributes="member: 57791">True. It's our responsibility to know what rituals our players have and reward them for having them by giving them opportunities to use them. I'm very happy that one of my players seems to be finding a new use for Phantom Steed every week (casting it three times and then harnessing them all up to pull the party's ship out of an entangling kelp sea was especially brilliant). Lot of stuff there, Karinsdad. For starters, I'd say that I absolutely believe the risk of death has to be present and that an occasional PC death is good for the game. It provides drama and meaning, and depending on the situation, can either provide a player with the chance to try a new character or give a good sidequest to raise the fallen character (or you can just use Raise Dead too). Following on from that, the "hard encounter" school does definitely increase the chance of death. I don't think it increases it quite as much as you're worried though. Let's break down my history of kills - 3 on the Irontooth encounter in KotS - I'm not the only one who ran into some deaths there, and that encounter has rightly become semi-legendary as a 4e rite of passage. Then a TPK accounting for 3 more deaths in the finale of KotS - that one's all my fault - I was running two groups through KotS, and they both hit the finale down a couple of players - the first group I scaled the fight down too much and it was a cakewalk, so I overcompensated when the 2nd group hit - by the time I realized I hadn't scaled it down enough, it was too late to fudge anything - in 2 rounds they just got devastated. It ended up being great for the campaign though - the replacement party had to deal with the zombified versions of the old party, and they made great villains (one of whom is still in play harassing the party 5 levels later). The other TPK was a result of me laying a nasty ambush for the party in the first session - I saved the campaign by having the bad guys knock the party unconscious and imprison them instead of killing them and it all worked out okay. The other 3 kills were just the result of tough encounters, and I'm perfectly fine with all of them. Still, even throwing out the extenuating circumstances, that's 6 sessions with kills over 9 months at 2 sessions a week (about 70 sessions) for about one session with kills every two months. I'm perfectly fine with that, and my groups are enjoying it.</blockquote>

Verification