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<blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7553062" data-attributes="member: 12377"><p>Philosophical aside:</p><p></p><p>One thing I've noticed as I've evolved my DMing style (or "leveled up" my DMing, if you prefer) is I spend a LOT more time thinking about consequences than difficulty. I feel like new DMs often stress about DCs and penalties. "How hard should this be???" I know I used to do that. Because you want things to be easy enough to be feasible, but hard enough to introduce real risk. <em>What is that magic number?</em></p><p></p><p>But now, I just toss out any old number, and instead I tell the player what will happen on success <em>and failure</em>. That second part's important because usually the player already has a good idea of what's happening on success -- it's the thing they're trying to do. They bring success to the negotiations, and you, the DM, the adversary, the uncaring cosmos: you bring the consequences for failure.</p><p></p><p>So a "toolbox" of bad-yet-interesting-and-not-sucky failure results is really useful for any DM to have. Wasting six seconds is a perfectly fine failure to utilize in combat, but out of combat, there's a whole host of more interesting negative outcomes. It takes way too long; you break or lose an item; you make or alert an enemy; you reach a wrong conclusion; you take damage or exhaustion; you burn spell slots; you catch a disease or a curse or get injured; you get lost; etc. The best way I've found to train this muscle is to MC <em>Apocalypse World</em>, but that's not everyone's cup of tea, and there are D&D-centric approaches you can take. Look at the downtime complications in Xanathar's as a great example of outcomes that can be repurposed as failure consequences.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="77IM, post: 7553062, member: 12377"] Philosophical aside: One thing I've noticed as I've evolved my DMing style (or "leveled up" my DMing, if you prefer) is I spend a LOT more time thinking about consequences than difficulty. I feel like new DMs often stress about DCs and penalties. "How hard should this be???" I know I used to do that. Because you want things to be easy enough to be feasible, but hard enough to introduce real risk. [I]What is that magic number?[/I] But now, I just toss out any old number, and instead I tell the player what will happen on success [I]and failure[/I]. That second part's important because usually the player already has a good idea of what's happening on success -- it's the thing they're trying to do. They bring success to the negotiations, and you, the DM, the adversary, the uncaring cosmos: you bring the consequences for failure. So a "toolbox" of bad-yet-interesting-and-not-sucky failure results is really useful for any DM to have. Wasting six seconds is a perfectly fine failure to utilize in combat, but out of combat, there's a whole host of more interesting negative outcomes. It takes way too long; you break or lose an item; you make or alert an enemy; you reach a wrong conclusion; you take damage or exhaustion; you burn spell slots; you catch a disease or a curse or get injured; you get lost; etc. The best way I've found to train this muscle is to MC [I]Apocalypse World[/I], but that's not everyone's cup of tea, and there are D&D-centric approaches you can take. Look at the downtime complications in Xanathar's as a great example of outcomes that can be repurposed as failure consequences. [/QUOTE]
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