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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5898380" data-attributes="member: 4937">I tend to be a killer DM.  Part of this comes from having played for many years with a very talented group of players who were hard to kill and enjoyed a challenge.  So I have a tendency to overestimate what people can handle.  Part of this comes from a gaming background where 'killer DM' was a far less scathing appraisal of a person's skill than 'Monte Haul' was.  Part of this comes from having a somewhat realistic/simulationist perspective on the role of the story teller.  I would like to utilize Croathian's safety net narration more often, and do do so whenever I can come up with the thinnest thread of an excuse, but often times I simply can't think of one and there is only so many times you want to appeal to Deus Ex Machina.  I'd love to have PC's captured to be ransomed or rescued (or escape), left for dead, marooned or what not, but oozes, beserkers and hunger maddened ghouls don't exactly leave a lot of options here.  Sure, I could get around this by using only foes with interests in keeping the PC's alive, but that would drastically shrink my pallette and would tend to move it from the Grimm's Fairy Tales meets Call of Cthulhu sort of games I prefer to run.Indeed, Deus Ex Machina is encoded into the rules of my game.  The PC's, being heroes, can indeed call upon divine favor with some hope for succor.  But often the gods are busy elsewhere or don't hear or fear to intervene or perhaps have their own agenda.  It is an unreliable mechanic, but it offers at least one more chance of miraculous escape.  Likewise, I have destiny points for rerolling failed saving throws or cancelling unlucky critical hits.   This provides more safety net.And further, PC's tend to have more hit points than PC's of equivalent level in any edition except 4th, and I use 32 point buy, and players start with essetially 1 1/2 feats.   Often it isn't enough.   After going about 25 sessions having killed no PC's (in some cases purely by luck), I've now killed 7 PC's in the last 5 sessions (and 4 in the last 2).  Additionally, I ran two one shots when a player couldn't make it and both ended in TPKs (though that was partly planned).  I would also note that in 30 4 hour sessions, we just had the first PC reach 5th level.  Additionally, for a variety of reasons (some I feel are outside of my control )no PC is currently at normal wealth by level.   I very much want to have continuity and long running characters, but I'm having a hard time finding a sweet spot where the desire to have long running characters doesn't have such a high priority that it makes the story unbelievable, trite, or juvenile.  I haven't learned to keep players alive without breaking their suspension of disbelief, or encouraging unthoughtful play because they feel nothing has a real consequence.Far and away the biggest cause of deaths in my campaigns over the years is something over which I feel I have very limited control - breakdown in party cohesion.  I would say that 90% of the deaths that have ever occurred in the games I have ran occured due to the players stopping working together as a team - separating the party, players hoarding resources for themselves, players adopting conflicting agendas, one or more players deciding very early in an encounter that they would adopt the position that they weren't going to be the ones to die and abandoning PC's or the rest of the party.   In the current campaign, there hasn't been a single fight that would have resulted in a death had the whole party been working together and somewhat oddly, the big dangerous 'boss' type fights haven't proven to be the most lethal ones.  Players tend to come together and rally behind each other for those.  It's the ones where they get unexpectedly confused, greedy, cowardly, or self-interested that gets them killed.If I could figure out how to keep my players from working against each other, I could stop being a killer DM.</blockquote>

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