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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7151732" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The consequences of failure need to be significant enough that the players will want to avoid them, but not so bad that they spend more time indulging their paranoia than actually moving forward. If death can be reversed instantly and without cost, then there's no incentive to not die, and that can get silly pretty quickly. If consequences of failure are so bad that it's better to spend ninety percent of your time on precautions so you don't lose all of the progress you've made so far, then that's not much fun to play.It's a bit of a balancing act, so preferences will vary. Different games lend themselves toward different balances. Getting stunned is worse than dying in 4E or falling unconscious in 5E, while the opposite is true in earlier editions.As a general guideline, I like to be able to estimate my odds before I figure out how badly I lose, because that gives me more ownership over the outcome. If I charge a mindflayer without knowing about its mindblast, then I feel like I'm being sidelined without a good reason; it wasn't something I could take into account, so it wasn't a threat that could change the way I approached the problem in any way, unless it's just supposed to make me paranoid about attacking anything I don't recognize. If I charge a mindflayer and I know that it has a mind-affecting stun attack, then whether I estimate my odds of resisting at 5% or 95%, that's a consequence that I accept when I decide to engage it.</blockquote>

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