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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 5479794" data-attributes="member: 6669384">The title refers to the tendency of some DMs to pull punches, to avoid killing PCs.It came out in a D&D 3.5 session the other day in a relatively extreme fashion.A PC Bard with 9 hit points left got thwacked for 24 points of damage.  He's dead, even with our house rule that you don't die 'til you reach the negative of your CON (he had a 12 CON, went to -13).  Raise Dead and its variants are pretty much unavailable in this game world, at least until we go up a few levels.  (We're currently 5th-ish).The DM tells the player not to make a new character yet.  He says that the Bard's spirit is in line to enter the next life, but the line isn't moving.  For some reason the gates to the underworld are closed, so nobody can actually die right now.The PC's heal the (more than) mortally injured Bard, and life goes on.Now we had no problem killing the enemy in that battle, and while it might be a neat plot point the fact is that 5th level PCs don't go solving cosmic problems on other planes.  It's well beyond anything the party is capable of.  At the moment, in fact, the only way to go to where the "problem" is is to have everybody die.Now I have to admit, as pulled punches go this one was handled better than most.  But the fact that the last remaining monster just sort of lost interest and wandered away in the middle of the battle kind of gave away the fact that it was a pulled punch.So, colorful examples aside, how do you as a DM deal with the situation where your monster keep rolling crits and the PCs keep rolling 1s?  When you're looking at a TPK that shouldn't have even been that much of a fight?Or, to put it more simply, when is it okay to pull the punch?</blockquote>

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