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Message: <blockquote data-quote="karolusb" data-source="post: 5308660" data-attributes="member: 83359">The first 4E game I ever ran ended with a party wipe on an encounter that I had considered irrelevant to the game. The encounter design was bad, the players used the worst tactics I could imagine for the scenario, luck was totally against them, and worst of all I was inflexible.  1: Player expectations. If you are gonna focus fire unconscious people to death you need to be up front about that. "But she regenerated" is a weak argument, if the party had a healer (who can also stand people back up) would that mean anytime someone went down the monsters would focus fire them to death? (As a player I ignore regenerators, they are rarely worth the effort it takes to kill them before their non-regenerating allies).  2: Encounter design. Has been beat to death (much like your party) 3: Play style. Exclusive of a skill challenge how avoidable was this encounter? Could the players just walk away? Did they know that? Does you game include challenges that people expect to run away from? 4E is presented as a fairly linear game, with balanced challenges, we don't all play that way, but a lot of players expect it.  4: Inflexibility. At some point, pretty early on, you figured out you had screwed up. This isn't just about fudging die rolls, it's about deciding that dominate (recharge 4+) is actually dominate (encounter). It's about deciding that making your falling save means you fell a short distance and landed on a ledge instead of you don't fall. It's about deciding that Incubus are corruptors rather than destroyers, and that they would sell your companion back for a sinister price rather than toss her off a cliff.  4a: Choices. Was she ever presented a choice that would have led to survival? The problem with dominate is that it takes away choices. Leaving only random chance, but random chance actually worked in reverse (every time she succeeded at a roll her odds of surviving went down).  So yeah kill people sometimes. Especially do it in climactic battles. But I doubt anyone enjoyed that latter encounter, it isn't dying after a heroic struggle, its pointless story irrelevant death by GM fiat. I would feel pretty miffed as the person who made 5 consecutive save or die checks to be have it declared a ground rules kill.  I still regret ending my first campaign that way, TPK on a lame throwaway encounter. Had they died facing the master villain at least it would have been a worthy death.  You didn't TPK, with luck you learn from it, as do your players. (Ideally though your players will think you didn't learn from it, that way they will think you are still a jerk and they survive because they are awesome <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)</blockquote>

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