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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7846619" data-attributes="member: 29398">Level drain?  Save-or-die?  I'm having trouble seeing the connection between these and "fun at the expense of other players".Unless you mean that these things increase the DM's fun at the expense of the players', but that would depend on the particular DM and approach, I suppose.Where I don't mind things that bypass hit points and get straight to their effects: poison, paralysis, death, limb loss, polymorph, and so forth.Particularly in 3e4e-5e, funnelling everything through hit points can bog down in that after low level everyone - PC and monster alike - just has so flippin' many of them.For clarification: when you say "major item reward" do you mean something given to the party (or a PC) as a reward for a completed misison, or are you referring to treasure you've placed in an adventure to (you hope) be found?Neither do I.Where I see a disconnect is when one at the same time seems to have an issue with the mirror image: magical or divine penalties or Bad Things.  If one exists, so should the other IMO.Hmmm...yeah, we play differently; as those are two of my favourite items in the game.Well, given that the whole point of the Deck is to radically change things, removing the cards that make the biggest changes does kind of knacker it.  [side note: if you've never seen it, check out the Harrow Deck - it's a 52-card Deck put out by some 3e-era third-party publisher with tons of different possible effects (alignment-based but it's easy to strip that out; I did) that you might find of interest; even if you take out the most beneficial/devastating cards you'll still likely be left with a viable Deck]Are you running a hard-baked adventure path?  If yes, I can understand your concerns about derailing the campaign narrative.  But if no, why does this matter?And I would never in my life use either matched or milestone levelling (which brushes against the thread topic; as these certainly count as Mechanics I Don't Want To See, Ever) as - to use your own phrase - these things IME allow and encourage a different style of toxic play: the passenger character who hangs back and lets others take the risks*, knowing everyone's going to get the same rewards (in terms of levels and treasure) anyway.* - difficult to pull off in a small party but much easier in a larger group, which is what we usually have."Primary" does not mean "only", however; and I see h.p. as but one source of survivability among many, with another being resistance (i.e. saving throws), another being wisdom and forethought (e.g. sneak around rather than fight through), and another being sheer luck.Good on ya for this! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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