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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8667825" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Obviously there's a line to be drawn.  If the game presents you with a blank space, the DM is left to their own devices to fill it up.  I think this is perfectly acceptable, I've done it myself.  In 4e, I was running a season of Encounters where the players kept encountering members of an undead "ghost legion".  Their stat blocks stated they had a ranged attack, that uses a crossbow, but they were also equipped with a long sword and a shield.  This might have been to save space (some soldiers could be infantry and some could be archers), but at the time, I thought it was perfectly legitimate for them to use both.One of my players asked me how they could switch weapons so easily without taking actions to stow and draw them.  I gave this some thought, and decided that, since they are ghosts, they can sort of let go of their weapons, and they just float in the air following the ghost around until they grab them again.  It still cost an action to switch weapons, but this way I didn't need to have them just drop weapons on the ground or use other actions to stow/sheath them properly.During another season, the players came across a fortified wall, which had crossbowmen perched on it.  One player ran up to the wall, and then cried out in dismay when he was fired upon.  "You can't fire a crossbow straight down", he said, "the bolt would fall out."I had nothing indicating that this was meant to be a factor in the combat (nor is it even a rule), but I decided that the Duergar had solved this problem with an engineering modification to their crossbows.  The player was still annoyed about it, but I told him if he wanted to pick up a crossbow that could fire in a downwards direction, there were some free ones laying around, lol.So where is the line to be drawn, exactly?  Obviously some fudging is part and parcel of the DM's job, and is somewhat necessary to running the game.  But obviously, just arbitrarily deciding "the Paladin did too much damage, I should give the bad guy 30 more hit points" seems a bit unnecessary.  Because once you do that, do damage rolls become meaningless?  Are lucky critical hits something the DM has to allow to occur?  And what about fudging in the player's favor, by making enemies easier to kill behind the scenes, to avoid the game being derailed by an untimely demise or TPK*?*Before any "death needs to be a consequence!" guys appear out of the aether to get on my case, let me explain what I mean.  If we're on a time sensitive adventure, and it has 7 planned encounters, and your four man party turns into a three man party due to the dice, such as murdering the Cleric when there's no chances to take even a short rest in order to heal, the adventure is probably over at this point.  The players probably can't complete the adventure, and depending on how high the stakes were set, the campaign itself could be at risk.  So I'm talking about deciding not to murder a player at this time in order to keep the game from crashing to a screeching halt.Whether or not that's something that should be done, I leave up to an individual DM to decide.</blockquote>

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