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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5899872" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, earlier I said that it is quite hard to walk the line between having plot protection and being a killer DM.  And I still believe that.  But, you don't even seem to be trying, and there is a vast chasm between the two extremes that you are asserting here.  You have excluded pretty much the entire middle.  Very skilled players ought to be hard to kill, yet you boast you kill one of your PC's once a session.  Either you should dial down the difficulty to suit the inexperience of your players, or else you have nothing really to boast about because killing players is easy if you have that as a primary goal.  The DM can always win if he wants to.  The trick of DMing, what is hard, is to arrange things so that if the PC's do well, you will always lose by slender margins and yet, to at the same time not fudge and previcate so that - had the PC's done less well - failure or death would not have awaited them.I mean, maybe it's me, but after 30 years of opening trapped doors, a steady diet of that has gotten stale.  Don't get me wrong; I can dungeon crawl with the best of them and enjoy an occasional Tomb of Horrors inspired puzzle section either as a player or DM, but if that's all you got in your DMing pallette then I think I'd find it a bit monotonous.  Besides I long ago learned that the secret to winning those sort of scenarios was to refuse to play the DM's game.My impression from your posts so far is that you had a bad experience with a pushover DM, and that you are overcompensating.  Now this isn't to say that traps should do 1d8 fire damage/save for half if you intend the trap to be anything more than a nuisance/attrition.  One famous trap in my current campaign involved a room with harpoon traps that, if they hit, not only did weapon damage but grappled the character and reelled the unlucky sap up to the ceiling 20' above for reverse falling damage.  The ceiling was covered with spikes, which impaled the character leaving him trapped and bleeding out.  And of course, unless a clever plan of rescue was discovered and great skill used, there was a good chance if you tried to cut yourself free from the barbs you'd only do more damage to yourself and then drop you 20' to the floor.  This trap was used against 3rd level characters.And did I mention their was an invisible evil cleric in the room as well?So while I agree that plot protection or mechanical protection to the point where everyone knows death is not a real possibility is not enjoyable for the player, I think that you perhaps have not considered the possible joys of deciding not to kill PC's on purpose.  If the dangers are real, they'll find ways to get themselves killed without your troubling to plan it.  Neither your game nor the straw man of a game where failure has been made impossible describes my game remotely.</blockquote>

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