Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9455907" data-attributes="member: 29398">The answer there is to always interpret anyhting that even remotely sounds like a hint of danger as a hint of danger and proceed accordingly, i.e. either with great caution or face-first, depending on your party/characters/mood.If it's a TPK, you're right.  But if players run their characters with any sense of self-preservation, true TPKs should be extremely rare.If there's any survivors, then someone learned something and can - one hopes - put that knowledge to use next time out.And, as a player, every time* I start over I get to roll up and run out a new character idea.  That alone is more than enough to keep me interested in the process.* - exception: if my character dies in its first played session (it's happened!) before anyone got to know it then I might come right back with the same concept again.It also depends on how long everyone expects the campaign as a whole to last.  If you're looking for a one-year 1-20 campaign then sure, blow through the low levels.  But if the campaign's intended to last 10+ years then as a DM you want to spin those low levels out as long as you can in order to delay getitng to near-capstone levels where the game becomes almost unplayable.A half-dozen old reliable tricks is still five more than the single old reliable trick of fighting.This comes back to the old combat-as-war vs combat-as-sport debate.  I (and others, I think) am approaching this from a very C-as-W perspective, where combat probably shouldn't be option 1 or even option 2 or 3 because combat is where the greatest risk lies.For some of us, "gotcha" is sometimes a feature rather than a bug.  Danger awaits around every corner and sometimes you don't - or can't - see it coming.I've never DMed ear seekers in my life; and rot grubs just once, only because the module I was running had them in.  But cursed items, cloakers/lurkers/trappers, ambushes, death traps? Hell yeah, now and then.As with anything, though, don't overdo it. <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>

Verification