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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Caliburn101" data-source="post: 6951732" data-attributes="member: 6802178">Not having a sense that even if you do the right thing you might have your character killed is central to effective suspension of disbelief and a great catalyst to role-play.I had a player in a club game when I ran a 5th Edition campaign and he was a veteran player who would reasonably regularly make predictions of the party's demise as his characters resources began to run out in the middle, not the end, of a tough fight. All his calculations were based on CR and standard encounter design expectations.None of the players had experienced my GM'ing style and they loved the game - the sense of their decisions making  a real difference and some of these being dangerously close to 'life or death' made the game really edgy.Yet not one of  them died, and none spent undue time out of play with their characters 'down' - but then I've been DM'ing a long time and can dance along that edge with skill - but it's a skill everyone can pick up with practice - trust me on this!Once you make the game actually dangerous it takes on a new and better life - and I'm not just talking about combat... a court encounter with the great and powerful where a PC's life imprisonment or the execution of an innocent is hanging in the balance on the PCs' actions is just as tense and thrilling.It is all about making players choices MATTER - not just the absence of their mistakes... sure, have trash encounters to demonstrate they are the heroes, they should feel that way... but as Samwise said;“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”   If you slavishly stick to the rather broken CR formula and the players have to make unforced errors to risk significant loss, then you are falling short of the game you could have if you take this passage to heart...</blockquote>

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