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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5602154" data-attributes="member: 7006">I've been in games where the DM has done just what Chris did (not D&D - it was a long-running 7th Sea game), and it's frustrating and painful at the moment it happens, but in the long run it does make the highs that much sweeter.  It's definitely the hallmark though, of a campaign when story trumps everything else.  The story needs the highest of highs and the lowest of lows in order for both things to have meaning... and we players realized and recognized this... so we swallowed hard when we were forced to take our lumps.  It sucked at the time... but when we then pulled things off that probably shouldn't have worked, it was such a bigger feeling.To Barastrondo's point... I myself wouldn't agree with using just the dice as the arbiter of all the highs and lows with the game... because more often than not, relying on just the dice will produce lows of an arbitrary or undramatic nature more often than lows that are DM planned.  And lows that occur for no dramatic reason are much less palatable in my mind than ones that come out of high stakes and grand action.So Perkins setting up the loss of the ship at a dramatic juncture in their narrative (along with the deaths of almost all of the PCs) meant there was a better chance of Chris Youngs doing what he did... making broad, far-reaching character decisions after getting raised from the dead that took things in a whole new and interesting direction.  Had it been purely a dice and numbers game... the ship could have sunk just because as they were on their way towards accomplishing a major quest, some random ship-to-ship encounter against a meaningless foe just happened to go horribly wrong and the ship went down unceremoniously.  Would Youngs have had his character go off the deep end like he did because of some crappy dice rolls meant a hole got blown through the ship's hull by some worthless pirate that had nothing to do with the story?  Possibly not.  The sinking would have been so uninspired and undramatic at such an inopportune time that he might've just been annoyed and just wouldn't care.The dice occasionally will produce unintended but really cool dramatic situations... but the odds of them ALL being that way are much less.  By stacking the deck and having the DM manually insert occasional points of massive gain and painful loss, I feel that has a better chance of resulting in a more cohesive and memorable story.</blockquote>

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