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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 4507699" data-attributes="member: 18280">I would agree with this, but IME, the "Save or Die" room is yet another gloss of mythology.  Now it is not the encounter, and how the encounter is dealt with, but the room itself that makes you save or die.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm    :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" />Maybe you have had experiences with really bad DMs -- the kind of lazy DM that doesn't care to think through encounters, perhaps -- but IMHO and IME creatures leave signs of their existence, which in turn allows you to predict the type of creature(s) you are liable to meet long before you meet them.If a party is entering an abandoned tomb, which they believe hasn't been opened in centuries, it makes sense to expect undead and/or constructs.  And traps.  It also makes sense to consider that the tomb has actually been breached and now has living beings making part or all of it into their home.  D&D in all editions (except, perhaps 4e?) has had more than ample means to allow you to have some idea of what you'd meet.Even in infamous meat grinders like the original Tomb of Horrors -- the King of Save or Die (if you even get a Save) -- you had a chance to perceive and deal with a threat before you made a potentially lethal save.  And if you were unable to recognize threats for what they were, you certainly discovered the need for caution in that dungeon.  I took the entire group of "Name" characters from the back of the Rogue's Gallery into that one (as a player) and managed to get them all slaughtered.  But that was bad play on my part; I would certainly have been capable of better had I used a bit of forethought.Divination spells have been provided since Day One for a reason.  Although they are not as flashy as fireballs, they are, in fact, the most valuable spells in the game.  Players ignore them at their peril.....or, at least, they do so in games where there is a risk of death.I have seen one or two bad DMs who revel in PC deaths.  I have never played with them twice, however.  And, in the end, I haven't known any of these DMs who was capable of sustaining a player group.  For obvious reasons, I should think.OTOH, I have seen many, many players who drift from group to group, always wanting the game to be about them, seldom contribuiting to the group as a whole, and always complaining that the DM is a bad DM because dancing naked in molten rock turns out to be a bad idea.In conclusion, if your DM likes to spring SoD on you without any chance for you to perceive a threat, without any chance to make any choices relevant to the threat, and so on, that is simply bad DMing.  Of course, radically more powerful monsters have the same effect as SoD in this case, so removing SoD is unlikely to help all that much.For the most part, I stand by my statement that the complaint arises less from incompetent DMs and more from players who mythologize their failures so as to avoid responsibility for them.  The "My bad DM killed me and I had no chance to do anything" problem is, IMHO, far more mythology than fact.Individual cases may vary.RC</blockquote>

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