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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 3316585" data-attributes="member: 2">Okay, now I understand your question better. I'm not sure you'll necessarily like the answer, because I don't have any hidden knowledge. I think it's a combination of good player tactics, me having several alternative tactics prepared at any given time, and luck.A few particulars:Nolin's death. This wasn't pre-scripted. I would have been happy for Nolin to live! But when we ended the game with him half-eaten and at about 3 hit points, everyone was pretty sure that this was going to be ugly. The player made a tactical decision to do as much damage as she could if her PC was going to die. Soder's infatuated, infuriated reaction to Nolin's death was a natural one given the circumstances, but things certainly could have gone differently if Nolin had lived. I'm guessing that Soder would have tried to save Nolin before the Ivory King tried to eat him, but would gleefully have let the rest of the party die.That long chase flying through the undead city cavern, with all the cloaker spectres chasing them.  Velendo was powerful enough to incinerate many of the spectres, and Malachite's positive energy burst would have fried them all. I was actually expecting this! I figured that the PCs would draw the spectres close with some clever flying and then nuke them in one glorious sunburst. The fact that they didn't was cool too, but a little unexpected by me. And that underscores a point. I knew that all those spectres were dangerous but had a glass jaw, but the players didn't -- and so there was definite terror when the spectres started chasing them.Soder's Mordenkainen’s Disjunction. The spell made perfect sense for Soder to cast, but I as a DM knew that it was fairly unlikely that he'd have a chance in hell of actually getting it off. The group was ready for some trick. I wouldn't have had him start a fight with that spell from an ambush -- maybe that's realistic for some enemies, but it's really not fun. My goal here was to emphasize his power, and underscore that he was starting to get annoyed. If it had gone off, I'd probably have compensated with a great big treasure haul in the underdark. The heroes knew that if they went home, they'd probably fail, and the consequences of that were worse.You get the idea. What you're seeing is not me pulling punches at the last minute or having mystical luck; it's me trying to gauge challenges accurately, having a couple of alternatives in mind, combined with players who know how to work as a team. I generally go with whatever seems coolest for the players. "Coolest" doesn't mean "deadliest," but neither does it mean "harmless." Know what you want out of an encounter and constantly evaluate your encounters while they're happening. That will help you realize right away when an encounter is unsurvivable, and will let you tone down your encounter on the fly if you want to. Even more importantly, train your players. If they're in trouble and one of them tries something unusual (gaining cover, taunting a foe, etc.) then let it succeed. Don't punish that success, either. Once they know instinctively that clever tactics work, they'll get used to using them, and that adds tremendously to a PC's survival rate.</blockquote>

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