NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HJFudge" data-source="post: 7990797" data-attributes="member: 6997593">A game without Impactful Death is a game I do not have interest in.For me, if I feel like the DM I am sitting with is fudging the dice rolls or making decisions to try and prevent my characters death, it offends me.Let the dice fall where they may, as many have said.Now, as prior stories have attested, there is a difference between 'ah, bad luck/bad choices, sorry friend' kinda death and a 'gotcha!' death. Also if I am DMing, I make it very clear I will be playing fair and thus death is a possibility. I don't do hidden dice rolls to prevent any temptation I may have to bend the roll to make the story go in a direction I want.I want to see what story emerges based on the results of the parties success or failures, and the enemies success and failures as well.That said, I do my best to balance any challenge or encounter so that the danger level fits the scene. If the party wipes during some encounter I thought would be trivial, well thats my bad. Obviously the dice have a mind of their own sometimes, so I try and bake that into most situations. Retreat is almost always an option. In this way, by carefully curating the challenge level of the dangers, I can help to make it far more likely that if they go down, its in some interesting and dramatic fashion: Throwing themselves at the Dragon to buy time for the villagers to escape, Fighting the Necromancer Cult Leader to a stand still before succumbing to the overwhelming hordes of undead, or realizing they have no hope of stopping the demon from breaking free of his prison, so they bring down the structure on themselves to trap it (hopefully) forever.This way, if they DO kill that dragon, or they DO stop the demon from breaking free...well, they know that it was because of their choices. Not because I, the DM, willed it to be inevitable.</blockquote>

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