cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/14567016
DMing is the Call to Righteousness and faith in God and His d20 (John 14:6)
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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The important thing when DMing is to never let the players know if there was fudging going on. Fudge in secret if you need to, but the moment the players know there are no consequences then there's suddenly no reward.
See, whenever there's a chance something horrible could happen, I roll out in the open so everybody can see that it's the dice and not me.
So I guess I take the opposite approach.
I've only ran a few sessions in different games, and I have a hard time with the consequences part. I tend more towards games where the consequences of failure are, you try again a different way. Maybe you lose some reputation, or you don't get as big of a payout. I need to get better at enforcing consequences for players.
IMO a lot of it comes down to player expectations. If you say up front "player characters can and will die if they make poor choices or even just get unlucky" and your players sign off on that, you can put death traps and over-leveled monsters all over the place.
If you plan to run a high-lethality campaign I'd recommend having each player play 2 characters, with 2 backup characters ready to go. I call those meatgrinder campaigns.
"Yes it's a campaign but the whole thing is a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel! :D"