Yes, that's a good point that is worth keeping in mind. If the fight is something the PCs can't handle, the fight can end in death and the end of fun. That doesn't mean that every encounter needs to be a fight, that every fight needs to be to the death, or that every PC death results in the rest of the party getting killed as well, if possible. There are a lot of ways for an encounter to go, and getting creative with it makes the game more interesting, though harder to run.Krakatoa wrote:While in broad strokes that's a fair point, not all things are equal. The danger zones in an MMO are pre-built and automated and your character or party is incidental to the broader function of the servers. Death usually results in a not-so-steep penalty as well. In tabletop, an encounter that vastly outclasses your party, wipes them out, or is in some way otherwise ill advised, the game can turn into drudgery for all players involved. It's especially true in 3.X and Pathfinder where the CRs aren't actually that helpful when trying to figure how much a challenge rates.Lesson: Sometimes there's a dangerous place where people simply do not go. You might be a hero, but some of those places apply to you as well. Run your games with a much wider range of difficulties available to players and let them decide what is level-appropriate and what isn't.
For instance, in the first session of a new campaign I played a character who was good at scouting. A behemoth being lead by powerful soldiers was coming up a river so I scouted ahead with the assumption that a level 1 character was in danger, but probably not overwhelming danger. I was wrong. The soldiers were good at spotting spies and eager to feed their beast. It's tongue attack, with a 20' reach, rolled a 39 to hit and my character was swallowed whole and died instantly. In shock, the rest of the party took that to mean they should probably go nowhere near that and the encounter turned into a challenge for them to stay as far away and hidden. It set the tone for the rest of the game in which we only did battle if we controlled the battlefield and were fairly certain of victory. The GM had to get creative with what constituted a "win" when determining XP and creating challenges, but it was a very deep, thought-provoking, and immersive game.
Later on we were jumped by a powerful cleric and lots of his allies. We were outclassed and soon routed. It ended with the reckless new guy getting gutted and the rest of us willing to surrender rather than get killed. The GM knew just killing us would have been boring drudgery as you stated, so instead we did a bunch of social challenge stuff and lost some belongings in order to get away with our lives. Again, we couldn't succeed on the combat level so the circumstance was tense, exciting, and full of dread - but the GM knew that challenging us in non-linear ways made for a more interesting game so he let us decide if violence would be our chosen method of winning the encounter. It was for the reckless new guy; the rest of us knew better.
