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: 8379158" data-attributes="member: 29398">If my goal was to kill the PCs I could, obviously, do so on a whim.  Not much fun for anyone, there.It's a bit more subtle than that, however.  My goal is to - fairly - challenge the PCs such that their survival (with commensurate benefits e.g. treasure, xp etc.) is an earned reward, not an expected right.On average there'll be a couple of party deaths each adventure, of an average party size of 6-8.  Sometimes there's none.  But the party as an entity nearly always survives: in the well-over-2000 sessions I've DMed since starting in 1984, I've had exactly one (1) TPK; and that mostly due to sheer bad luck (their main Fighter got dominated against them and wiped them out; said Fighter then became a puppet of the dominator until he died of starvation a few months later).I've lost numerous characters over the years via field-testing cursed items.  Does it stop me from field-testing?  Never! <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=":)" />If I used DCs they'd be DM-side info only.Most often it just ends up humourous; which is kind of the point.  And all it takes is one character trying to sleep on a rough stone floor wishing she had a feather bed and having it >>poof!<< appear in the middle of a dungeon to get people to watch their words a little. <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=":)" />In the game I play in, we're currently in just this situation.  We found a chest containing five items of clothing.  Field-testing showed four were very useful but one - the cap - lost all enchantment on being donned.  That character is really being careful what she says now, just in case the thing gave her a hidden wish; even more so as all four other items had curses trigger the next time we got into combat!If by "real information" you mean actual mathematical odds then sorry, you won't get those here.  Same as it'd be if you were the actual PC looking at this stuff - you-as-PC don't know the odds of something being corrupted, so why should the player?If the cast an actual Identify on it they'd get the right answer; but in my game casting ID costs a 100 g.p. pearl every time and knocks the caster back for 8 hours, so they tend to cast them rarely if ever in the field.And if you don't die you've earned xp for taking the risk, and also learned something for the party. (this is one of the many reasons I dislike any xp method other than individual; I want to specifically reward the risk-takers)There's a middle ground between these two; where the main choice - as seen through the eyes of the PCs - is whether to take a risk or not.  I do my best to ensure player info is the same as character info; after that they're on their own to do what their characters would do.Where I describe what they see (and feel, and smell, etc.) as best I can, answer any in-character questions they might have, and then leave it to them to figure it out.Was his next adventure going to be something along the same lines, or something different?  If it was going to be the same again, I could see it getting dull; but if it was to be something different then having one journey-as-adventure isn't all bad. <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