DMs, do you offer mercy to the party if you notice they are getting screwed up by RNG and may be wiped out?

I let the dice decide.

I prefer to avoid putting them in situations like that in the first place, but when they do inevitably come up, I do offer leniency.

Nope. You rolls your dice, you takes your chances.

It's really more about playstyle than system. Any system can be lethal if the GM wants to run that kind of game. Likewise, any system can be a breeze if the GM wants a low-lethality game.

Tales of Equestria is positively LETHAL in terms of "combat" (Scuffles)...which makes a degree of sense since the entire point is to simulate MLP, where problems are generally solved with teamwork and guile, not scuffles.

Wipe them out. All of them.

Normally, no, but I encountered some downright supernatural dice hatred recently, which would have killed half of a new party in a game people have been looking forward to for a long time, so I maneuvered a way out of it.

>Could this be a massacre?!

This.

While I don't want PCs to die, I want players to feel like their PCs are at risk. I expect my players to see through any fake risk (eg dice fudging), thus the risk must be real.

When the dice say that a PC dies, that means one of three things:
- They were acting stupidly. Their fault. Their choice if they want to be smarter next time.
- They had bad luck. Nothing I can do about that.
- I made the encounter too hard. I'll learn for next time.

>The pony RPG is lethal
Well fuck I don't like pony shit at all but now I want to play a game about technicolor horses murdering the shit out of each other.

This. If things are going catastrophically bad will I fudge the dice. Of course, if one player does nothing but roll hot every sesh, I feel a need to dial things up against him.

i realize i'm probably in the minority, but i value the narrative and player enjoyment over absolute fidelity to the dice

i've had characters get captured, put in a coma, or be left for dead (only to recover later and rejoin the party) when they should have been kaput. i'd rather deviate from what was planned or what the dice dictated in order to keep the story going. that said, i have let characters die when it seemed narratively appropriate, or when players made really boneheaded decisions.

Why do you even use dice?

>if you don't respect the game and it's rules then there's not much point in playing

t. doctrinaire

Did you see the user I was seconding? It is an incredibly rare occurrence. Maybe once every three months.
And my cranking things up against hot shit player is usually making specific foes for him to actually be challenged by, not fudging those rolls.

>And my cranking things up against hot shit player is usually making specific foes for him to actually be challenged by, not fudging those rolls.
>taking someone's rolls into account when building encounters
What??

Then you probably don't want a highly lethal game. I've found that games where combat is very lethal to both sides tend to have players looking for non-combat methods to resolve their problems because they want their PCs to survive.

One of my players' dice, no matter which ones he use, are autistically geared towards combat, and will open roll consistently.
I almost think he's perfected some dice-rolling technique for those situations, as the entire group has never seen him fudge the rolls, and the dice will roll poorly out of combat.

Nah nah nah, I want to go full out with it. My horse will die and I will throw another horse in the meat grinder. The glue factory will be working overtime by the time the campaign finishes, fueled by the party's dead horses and the enemies.

>Mercy
They get captured instead of killed.
I give the PCs the option to switch characters and let them die off.

That being said. When they get captured their punishment of erotic slave adventure begins

Depends on the tone of the campaign I'm running, and how important the individual characters are to things as opposed to them just being statblocks there to oppose whatever the villains are.

He probably trim the edges.

I do when it feels appropriate. In my last session we had a player in the group who is super new to RPGs as a whole take a fatal amount of damage. Earlier in the session he tried to tame a monster that was a giant molten rock lava-centipede thing, he was super creative about it and roleplayed it really well so what the hell he can have the pet. He asked when being hit with the fire blast that would have killed him if the Lavapede could jump in the way and protect him with fire-proof rock armor and mitigate some of the damage. It was a clever way and it made at least a bit of sense, and its really shitty to have a character die due to a combination of bad saving throws and crazy high damage rolls.

Yes I do. I aim to make my games feel like fantasy novels to the players (much different from writing a railroad fantasy novel and running your players on it, but I digress) and it doesn't feel like a fantasy novel if the protagonists keep being replaced. Also, generally speaking, the RNG screwing the players over shouldn't necessarily lead to a party wipe unless you're totally uncreative with consequences and can't think of any consequences for failure other than "you die and story ends." Failing in a way that moves the plot forward doesn't mean failing in a way that's not a significant consequence to the characters.

A lot of people here are ideologically opposed to my DM style, but I have a sneaking suspicion they don't actually play games as much as they bitch about them online.

>if you notice they are getting screwed up by RNG and may be wiped out?
Spotted someone playing 1d20

3d20 is best, for the sole reason shit like what you speak of doesn't happen. You can quickly turn battles around if you allow the players to have advantage.

Not only that, but you don't even need to go "looks like you guys are getting your ass kicked, guess I will grant you advantage for the rest of the battle to even things out", instead you say nothing, and the players will constantly attempt to get an advantage bonus. So if things are going bad you just grant it or not. Similarly you can fuck them up hard with the disadvantage die.

You are just a cuck, OP. You play 1d20, and I bet you play D&D too. Not only that but I bet you use the Resurrection mechanic too. Damn OP, I'm disappointed.

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2edgy5me

What the fuck are you playing, Mario Kart?

I thought of that, but he's had similar success with a literally fresh-bought set of chessex that he immediately used, with no chance to do anything hinky.

Depending on the system though pc death could be a relatively non-random thing, basically the more dice that are rolled before a player death the less random

What a way...

... to beat a dead horse

Yes. Fudging dice in extreme cases such as this is a good way to avoid the players getting salty over really bad luck.

More often than not, though, I have to fudge the dice in order for the villain to hit the party. I have really bad luck rolling in combat: with any lieutenant or villain that isn't a mook in the past few months I hit the party 32 times out of 100, if we went by the dicerolls.

Instead, I had to rule that they hit when they didn't because otherwise the encounter would have been over in two rounds at most.

YEEEAAAAAAAAAAAH

Don't worry, user, I'm on board with that style of play. Folks need to recognise that this isn't a video game where "failure" means "death".

Depends.

If I misjudged the difficulty of a certain encounter then I will try to rectify it.

If, on the other hand, the players are just being reckless then I'll let the dice decide.

I've had encounters that I spent hours building fall apart in five minutes because the party kept critting their asses off and the creatures they were fighting kept critfailing their asses off.

I don't fudge my encounter rolls. I won't let the party live unless there's a reason for it. If they're fighting bandits, the bandits might keep them alive to sell into slavery instead of killing them. If they're fighting owlbears? The second they are all unconscious, I say, "You're all dead, time to roll up some new characters."

When necessary, but to save them from their own mistakes.

Not at all. I run a high RP and low combat game, and roll everything out in the open and there are no regeneration or resurrection spells here. I have a good sense of how to balance difficulty for them despite being rather new at GMing.

This particular party has only had 8 or 9 combat encounters, and they barely squeaked out by a hair most of the time and they feel like death and danger have been their constant companions.

They managed to push through and win those encounters (or assessed the situation correctly and picked the right moment to run away, ie. before shit hit the fan) even when things seemed hopeless because they didn't give up and came up with smart tactics and creative spell/item use, they didn't expect me to solve their problems for them.

They often talk about the game outside of the game, and about how satisfying those victories were or how harrowing their escapes were. I know they wouldn't have been that way if I went easy on them at any point.

The players should be smart enough to have a plan to bug out if things go south, or adapt to changing odds.

I GM a system that has a large barrier between dead and knocked out. If the players all get knocked out we'll have a fun prison break or escape the monster's lair sequence. I've never had a party wipe in a situation where the enemy would instantly execute or eat their enemy. Don't know what I'd do then.

Depends on your group. Specifically their creative agenda.

If the players are in it for a challenge, or want to "live" in the world, then the dice fall where they may and tough cookies if someone dies.

If the players are more about planning and telling a story arc, then I either pick the most dramatic outcome or fudge the roll a little.

Agreed.