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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 3033957" data-attributes="member: 3424">I guess this is where my DMing philosophy differs from yours: in my games, lack of player skill does not automatically result in character death. That is not to say that player skill has no effect on a game. I tend to calibrate my challenges so that characters played by less skilful players still have about a 50% chance of overcoming them. With player skill, the chance of overcoming the challenge increases, or the characters are likely to expend fewer resources (hit points, spells, etc.) to overcome the challenge. I like to think of that as my happy medium between placing too much emphasis on player skill, and not requiring player skill at all.I'd like to turn this scenario on its head. These players don't exist in a vacuum. Relatively inexperienced players take their cue on how to behave in a fantasy RPG from the books they have read and the movies they have seen (and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have portrayed the protagonists using a rope to pull a lever). More experienced players take their cue from the way their DM has run his games. So, what has the DM been doing all this while? Has he given them sufficient opportunities to learn that sending a monk to pull a lever, even after checking for traps and finding nothing, is a bad idea? It seems to me that this attitude of extreme paranoia towards dungeon trappings does not occur outside of the games of certain DMs. I think the issue is less about player abilities vs character abilities than it is about player expectations vs DM expectations. To me, the question is, if in your games, a character's survival depends entirely upon the player's ability, why bother with character abilities at all? Just rely on what the player says he's doing to adjudicate success and failure. I'd say that a 100% reliance on player ability instead of character ability is about as extreme and unfair as a 100% reliance on character ability instead of player ability. And happens about as often.</blockquote>

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