Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scott Christian" data-source="post: 9542598" data-attributes="member: 6901101">You are correct. My bad.As for the DM stepping in, you really shouldn't have to if you did your prep work. I mean, unless you are playing D&D with one player and one DM, another person in the group should step in. If you have a group with no healers, and no one bothered to bring Goodberries, healing potions, etc. Then, you should, as a player, have some expectation that your death might happen. And even then, it's reversable.My point is, a DM should be able to consistently, and almost without error, create encounters where the entire group isn't wiped out. And half the encounters are unintelligent beasts. They're not there to hit the unconscious cleric so they don't rise and start healing the fighter. So they knock a PC unconscious? After that they might just take off.Let's do some math: If a group has two encounters per session and the campaign lasts for a year and everyone plays once a week, that is a total of 104 encounters. As DM, if you know your group, you can create these encounters to be fun, rewarding, challenging - and not deadly. And let's be real, creating 100 encounters is not that difficult. You are not spending 20 hours each week. You are spending an hour or two. (Yes, there is a lot of other work to do as well. But we are talking about encounters.) If one or two hours is too much, then perhaps you should let another person DM.  My own experience with numbers: I have played seven different campaigns with the 2014 rules. I have played under four different DMs. Once, just once, did we have a TPK. Once. And even then, it was with a wild beast that just flew off. There was a fight where we surrendered. There were a few fights we ran away. And there was a fight where we had to use wish to bring my character back. (Damn you disintegration!) That's it. Out of 500 fights these four DMs managed to do their job correctly, meaning they prepped for the sessions and didn't just make it up as they went along. (PS - All but one rolls in the open. And the one that doesn't always says, "You have to see this!" while encouraging us to look at his die rolls.Since those DMs do the work, our sessions are not destroyed by a few bad die rolls. And by fourth level, there are so many options open to PCs that death doesn't actually mean death. All this brings us back to rolling in the open versus rolling behind a screen. If you are ok with rolling behind a screen as DM, then you should also be ok with letting your players. The same for rolling in the open. The only reason to have just the DM roll behind the screen is because they didn't prep for the session - and therefore they have to obfuscate the results of dice because their on-the-spot impromptus had unintended consequences.</blockquote>

Verification