Shadzar, I'm exaggerating. He was a fine DM; he just subscribed to K's theory that everyone remembers the awesome fights and no one remembers curb-stomping kobolds for the nth time. Which is definitely true; I remember the fights we had with a band of ogre mages and a white dragon much more than the times we curb-stomped a bunch of kobolds.shadzar wrote:That isn't a problem with death as a part of the game, that is just a bad DM.hogarth wrote:But on the other side of the coin, I played in a 2E campaign with a DM who liked tossing us in trouble over our heads. When we succeeded it was great, but after the 3rd or 4th time of hearing "In the end you were rescued by, oh, let's say...Moe." it got a little tiresome.K wrote: Most people have a basic assumption that the DM will set the difficulty to a level that they can handle. I don't know about you, but I just don't care about battles I know I can win; however, I do care about battles where I know I'm outmatched and I am trying to pull crap out of my ass to win. In fact, one of the more dramatic campaigns I have been in involved a DM who decided to run one of the more infamous "killer" campaigns and hamstring us with no clerical magic outside a few pre-set items in the adventure and it involved a fair amount of planning and chicanery on our part to sqeek by with survival.
Don't blame the game because the person running it doesn't know how to. Also the players share in that problem because they should have said something sooner in disagreement of how the fights were going, doesn't matter what game it is.
But the risk is that when you're fighting against the odds, then you'll lose more than you'll win -- that's why it's called "against the odds". Then when you lose, you need to come up with some explanation why the game isn't over (as K suggested in his original post). Each time you have to come up with an explanation, it gets lamer and lamer.