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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 5113527" data-attributes="member: 5890">Character deaths happen when:a) The DM screws up and throws an unwinnable, high damage fight at the PCs and the PCs have to retreat without one of their party members.b) The PCs screw up. They overextend themselves and push for one more fight in a day (which your PCs never do, because they only fight once per day). They decide that they don't need to worry about someone until they've failed a death save or two. They use the heal to fill themselves past full when their buddy is in a pit of acid.We've had a party death: we figured that our dragonborn warlord would survive one death save, and then we spent the next few rounds dazed, slowed, in difficult terrain etc etc and thoroughly unable to reach him while he bled out. The fact that we'd already used all the healing dailies available didn't help.The fact that you're only staging one encounter per day, and that one only at level + 3 means that you're really limiting any possibility for the PCs to screw up. They always have their full complement of dailies to fix any problem that might show up, they always have their full complement of surges to slog through every fight with.If you insist on having only one fight per day, make that fight a lot harder. I'd suggest increasing the quantity of foes your PCs are fighting. Make sure that additional monsters are brutes, artillery and minions with the occasional leader and controller thrown in and not soldiers (because soldiers just make the game grind).Be mean. If a creature cannot implement it's favorite tactic, gouge someone who is down instead. If your PCs drop and then stand up again, it's sensible for intelligent monsters to start shoving the unconscious ones off cliffs and into pits, or just laying the boot in.</blockquote>

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