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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 6783131" data-attributes="member: 6801286">I didn't say there was no possibility of defeat. I also didn't say that I know the players are going to win. What I did say, was that how tough the fight is, is entirely in my hands. I can reduce the difficulty during the fight, by having a monster make a decision that is not entirely in his favor (such as, choosing to not continue to attack a player that is down).  I can also increase the difficulty, by having reinforcements show up, or by secretly increasing the maximum HP of the monster a bit.When I say that I'm on the side of the players, that doesn't mean that I stretch the rules of the game to always make them survive. What I do mean by it, is that all my monsters and npc's are considered expendable. I will never fudge the dice in their favor. If the dice say they don't get away, they don't get away, no matter how badly I want the reoccurring villain to make a dramatic exit.But I will occasionally fudge in favor of the players. If a monster has 1 hp left, then I might just declare it dead for dramatic effect. Because maybe one of the players just had an awesome role playing moment, and the death of the creature would be the natural outcome if this were a movie or book. That's pretty much my approach to storytelling in D&D: The players are the actors, and I am the director. I may choose to have a monster pick on someone else, instead of going in for the kill, because it might be more fun that way. Not always, but sometimes. For example, in one of the sessions of my pirate campaign, I had a cannibal try to drag a player character into the jungle after the player's character went KO. I could have let the cannibal just kill him. But I decided that it was more fun to give the other players a chance to save him. If the cannibal had gotten away, they might have had to go find the village, and rescue him from becoming dinner. And a new quest could have emerged for that. Fortunately for them, they were able to track down the cannibal, and stop him before that happened. In a boss fight, I had a giant spider ignore the player who was down, in favor of other players who were uninjured. I reasoned that the spider wasn't very clever, and thought he was dead, since he had stopped moving. Plus there were other enemies attacking him, which was enough excuse for it to be distracted. This was more fun for all players involved. I wanted all players to have fun fighting this thing. I also gave him a little bit more hit points during the fight, because I had underestimated how much damage they could do. I didn't want the boss fight to be over in just a few rounds.</blockquote>

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