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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9618787" data-attributes="member: 29398">As I just posted, tonight I saw a series of rolls occur that on average would happen only once in every 1608 attempts.  That to me counts as extreme odds.Extreme results might never happen,  You could play all your life and never see that one-in-a-million sequence of rolls someone else saw the second time they played.But that they might never happen in one's experience doesn't deny the possibility of their happening.If before a battle begins that same state exists, where the PCs are at full pop and the enemies are only 10% of what they might have been, then by your own logic (bolded above) it's not a foregone conclusion.Also, it is never the case that "the remaining combatants cannot possibly do enough damage to take down any PC", because as long as even one opponent remains fighting there is still a chance - however small - that an extreme series of good rolls by it and awful rolls by the PCs will see it prevail.  Sure the odds might be lower than one-in-a-million, the point is that they are not zero.To me, openly altering the game is the same as secretly altering it: you're denying something the possibility of occurring in favour of something else occurring.  Whether or not the players know about it is, for these purposes, irrelevant.There's a huge difference between having your foes try to retreat from the battle in-character (meanwhile allowing the PCs to react in whatever manner they see fit) and simply declaring "the combat's done, they ran away" without any chance given to shoot them as they leave or chase them down or even follow them to see where they go.Even worse would be declaring "the combat's done, they're all dead" when the foes were fighting to the death (let's say they were mindless zombies or something), as this much more obviously denies the chance for something extreme to happen.As for when the PCs are the ones getting clobbered, the concept of player agency dictates they can make their own decisions as to whether to retreat or surrender or fight to the death or whatever; and if they did decide to fight to the death I assume that would be played out in full in any case, largely in long-shot hopes of that miraculous series of rolls occurring that bails the PCs out.</blockquote>

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