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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AdmundfortGeographer" data-source="post: 9824702" data-attributes="member: 4682">Great questions. As far as the party pushing on, the most direct tool for when a party pushes on is within the player’s control.Are PCs too low in each of their recoveries and do they want to press their luck and push on and risk death and dying because they have no recoveries to boost their Stamina during combat, or take the respite and recharge their recoveries? It’s fun to watch the players wrestle with this one!Directors are empowered to craft encounters that are out of their party’s current capabilities, and let players be stupid and run into a buzz saw. Then have the tools to turn what would be the TPK into “you wake up in the hobgoblin general’s dungeons”.Also, directors are not mandated to spend their malice points. One way to let up on the gas of an encounter is just let malice go unspent if you want to let the PCs suffer for a series of unfortunate tier 1 results from the RNG gods curse. I’m learning to not press my players to the bleeding edge and spend every drop of Malice now, but at the start I was feeling like I was giving them a soft session if I wasn’t spending all points.Because PCs running out of recoveries is the closest measure to PCs dying or needing to take the respite (respites refresh recoveries to max again plus respites victories reset to 0 and convert into XP), I often reminded players that when a session was coming to a close they left some hero tokens unused and the rules allow conversion of 2 tokens into a recovery. And since they supply of hero tokens refreshes every session those tokens are basically free recoveries, using them up means their characters can last longer before needing to take a respite/rest. I just ran a playtest of Dark Heart of the Woods (an upcoming adventure for the future Encounters book), and saw how the adventure design gave out hero tokens as rewards with victories. So that is one more tool at your disposal to give out if you seen things turning dire, offer hero tokens and let the players decide if they want to spend them on recoveries or something else!</blockquote>

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