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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CanadienneBacon" data-source="post: 3260682" data-attributes="member: 11146">I welcome your feedback, as it will help me improve future combat rounds.  I'm appreciative of the fact that without you being here to game in person at my elbow, you don't benefit from knowing what all I might be rolling behind the scenes.  Maelicent got but failed his save to move out of the way.  As for the vagaries of the dice, I am rolling by hand at home and am using what I roll to adjudicate combat.  A foe can pump up his AC to a decent level but if I roll high for a player's attack, the foe's painstaking efforts to jack up his AC won't matter worth two beans.  The same applies in reverse for foes' attacks on players; your character does have a good AC, but sometimes the foe just gets lucky.  While it's not my style to use or link to invisible castle rolls, I can work on tweaking my descriptive language to make it more evident to players when and what I am rolling.  It tooks me about 90 minutes to work up each round of combat.  I work from home and have four children milling about my house who require attention...I basically look for any way I can to shave off time from how long it takes me to provide combat posts.  I see others using invisible castle, but the extra time it takes to use that service then link to it is a killer for me.  Real, physical dice are faster and more convenient, so that's what I use.  Having players who trust their DM is critical to the success of this game, and I certainly am willing to work for yours.  I will sometimes fudge die rolls in increase the likelihood that things turn out a certain way.  Did I do that here?  No.  Would I ever do it even though I know it's going to utterly screw over a character?  No.  Your characters are the life of the game.  If you die, there's no game.  If players leave due to discontent, there's no game.  Recounting the actions in the IC, I was overgenerous with movment and attacks on behalf of the party vice the monsters, and by a large margin.  I had actually been hoping that no one would realize the encounter came out tipped in your favor, because oftentimes such realizations spoil one's willing suspension of disbelief.  That you think it's the opposite (that in one instance the spider managed to disarm and damage your character) tells me that you're viewing the combat through a lens of how it affects your character.  I don't mean that rudely, but in hindsight I do see that you're definitely disappointed with my desicions and description.  The long and short of it is that the spider's attempt to jump was the cause of its rather abbreviated death.  In my opinion, the spider kinda came out on the short end of the stick on that one.edit:  I'll be around if you want to continue hashing this out, but off and on throughout the day.  Please don't feel that I'm ignoring the situation if I don't immediately reply.  I did also want to chip in that I think the real issue here is that the players and I are establishing trust.  Counting up who got what attack, when, and where is kind of fruitless as it addresses a symptom of a problem and not the root cause of the issue at hand, which is trust.  I'll need yours if we want this game to function, and I'm willing to earn it by trying to think in the future how things look from the player perspective and seeing if I can somehow clean up description to supply you with the information you need.  I'll need for you to go with the flow a little bit so that you can see me establish a pattern of not screwing your character over.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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