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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blackbrrd" data-source="post: 6578601" data-attributes="member: 63962">The thing is that you have sooo many other ways of cutting an encounter short that doesn't rely on fudging. You can for instance have the monster flee or surrender, or have a dragon allied with the monsters appear and then the PC's might fly. You can also just sum up the encounter like you do with travel or other uninteresting activities.Take one encounter I ran that was just a bit too hard. The PC's did really well and had killed the main bad guy and his right hand man, but there was still some more henchmen left. Two long time allies of the henchman and one mercenary. I could just have started fudging a bit earlier in the combat and the encounter would probably just have ended with the PC's killing everyone. I didn't go that route though. The players know my style and know I am playing "hardball" and that just keeping on doing their ordinary stuff would probably lead to 1-2 PC's dying and all the NPC's dead. One of the henchmen was badly wounded and decided to make a run for it. One of my players then tried to make a deal with the remaining mercenary and gang up on the last henchmen. He had earlier role-played his character in such a way that it really made sense and he rolled well on his intimidate/diplomacy check. The mercenary turned on the last henchmen and they killed him pretty quickly. Then we had an interesting encounter role-playing what the deal would be between the turn-coat mercenary and the PC's. The players also know that monsters might flee if their leader has been killed or to shift allegiance. This adds another dimension to the game, much more interesting than fudged hp or rolls which lets the players just rely on the combat mechanics.I am fine with fudging if you cleared the fudging with your players in advance. It's more of a play style thing, even if I think less fudging is better. <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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