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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 5809322" data-attributes="member: 3400">Except that it's really not save by DM intervention. Remember the original case that I quoted above that generated this line of the discussion. The two guards designated for the encounter get bumped off ahead of time. Barring intervention (or plausible game events), those guards aren't supposed to be there. The setup you proposed, that the guards were designated for the throne room encounter, makes the counterfactual the reality prior to intervention to preserve the challenge of the encounter. They could still take the king hostage, even without having to be pressed by a pair of additional guards. The dice may turn ugly on them and press them. They may come to realize that killing the king opens a whole new can of worms and prefer to not be branded as regicides. At this point, as DM, you're the one choosing which consequences of encounters you want to value. You're hoping that you're favoring the ones your players favor, but what if you're incorrect? What do your players say if you ask "If your actions as PCs would make a future encounter easier, would you like those actions to have those consequences? Or would you prefer me to add complications to preserve the challenge of the encounter?"Shall we dispense with propositions that haven't been proposed like vastly different levels between the character and the opposition. What I've been talking about is players affecting the challenge of future encounters by their own in game choices. Equating that with a 30 to 1st level differential is misrepresenting the specifics of the discussion.Then why not let the PC's effect on the throne room encounter, by bumping off the guards, have an effect if mechanical balance is rarely an aspect of honoring earlier story choices? How exactly are you  honoring their story choices if you aren't letting them cause downstream effects? Or are they doing all the work of patting themselves on the back for bumping off the guards? My assumption wouldn't be that they wanted to just have another couple of kills or to show off. My assumption would be that they wanted to actually accomplish something by bumping off the two guards.</blockquote>

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