Thank you. That does help better understand your view.Ok, so I can see the confusion.
And I've honestly had trouble GMing most of the post-2000 era F20 games (3.x/PF1, 4E, 5E, PF2) for this reason.
The games' challenge comes from encounters, designed to ramp up with ever-increasing threats across several categories:
1) Tactics
2) Terrain
3) Increased monster abilities and HP
Eventually, there is only so difficult you can go in these categories that you reach a TPK. How can an encounter-based game stay fun without ever-increasing the challenges of the encounters?
In a story-based game, you can keep the interest in the narrative. In a mystery, keep creating mysteries. But in a game about fighting where you're allowed to only push the combat to the X Level to threaten the group only to 25% of their abilities? You're gonna mess up. It doesn't matter how experienced of a GM you are. It doesn't matter how tight the math is. Just by trying to keep them on their toes and keep it interesting, you're going to wipe out the party.
Never? Do they frequently use hero points on failed saves or are they just lucky on saves to begin with?I've never had a character fail a save on a disease or other affliction.
In the current AP I'm running, my group has had multiple people fail their saves and contract ghoul fever, which has led to them leaving the dungeon early to seek aid in town when I described the onset of the affliction. It definitely made their characters fear fighting ghouls after that. Also two of them failed their saves and contracted lycanthropy. That one is going to be fun because I rolled some dice to figure out the current moon phase and determined the full moon was 2 weeks away. Aside from vaguely describing the wound from the werewolf initially, they've probably forgotten about it and we're currently about a week away from the first full moon. I'll remind them again a day or two prior when I describe some dreams or something, I haven't fully figured that one out yet.
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