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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 7585648" data-attributes="member: 6801286">In my opinion, if death isn't a possibility in your campaign, this undermines the stakes and severely undermines the threat of your monsters. The moment the players notice that you are jumping through hoops to keep them alive, you lose a lot of the suspense. So here's how I handle this:Early on in the campaign, when the players are low level, the encounters are fairly balanced, and during combat the monsters may change focus on a different player to spread out the damage a bit among the group. This is my tool as a DM to offer a bit of a safety net for my players early on. But then as they come into the mid-level range, I take away this safety net pretty quickly. CR's become challenging, but not deadly (or not designed to be deadly). I will however throw in a few tough encounters that put the fear of death into them. At high level my game becomes a lot less forgiving. CR's are through the roof, and often the players are at a strong disadvantage when facing these foes. There are no safety nets, and the monsters will stay focussed on any PC they think they can kill... and they will kill that PC if there's an opportunity. Not every encounter will be fair. There are some encounters that the players would be better to flee from, because the opposition is simply too tough and they will die if they try to fight it. The players need to use their brain to turn a fight into their favor, by using what's available in the terrain, and making clever use of their spells and abilities. By gradually increasing the difficulty curve like this, a PC death will not come out of left field. Of course it still sucks for the player when this happens, but when they are this high level, it is less of an issue. They just roll up a new character (of the same level as the other PC's) and rejoin the party.</blockquote>

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