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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 5778940" data-attributes="member: 17106">Interesting typo there.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />A DC is what is says it is; difficulty class. If the party is facing something on-level, it should be makeable. If the party is high-level and runs into a cockatrice or something, and interesting dynamic emerges where they'll rarely fail the save, but there's an extra bit of tension because if they do it would matter. If you're fighting a truly overwhelming opponent, you should be dead, regardless of the mechanic that's used to make this happen. I'm also in favor of some things not allowing a save and just killing or disabling outright (perhaps an iconic medusa that always turns you to stone, or an archdemon or something).There are two underlying reasons for this. One:If there's no sense of danger in a combat, there is no reason to fight it. Just stop rolling, say you mopped the enemies up, and move on. And frankly, it's important that when you gain a level, it feels earned.Two:Death is a perfectly valid outcome. A character dying does not inherently indicate that anything is wrong with the system, the DM, or the player. It certainly could be one of those things, and certainly everybody will have a different preferred level of danger in their game, but fundamentally a system should allow characters to die. Instantaneous character death is not inherently unfair compared to an extended combat; there is no difference between one roll with a 50% chance of success and a series of rolls which carry an aggregate 50% chance of success. If the DM has decided there's a 50% chance a character will die (or whatever number), then that's that.</blockquote>

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