The other monsters are two raven swarms (CR1/2 I think)
the casters can def. be squishy
they're new players, and I want the casters there so that they (and I) can be tactical and make combat interesting
there'll be plenty of environmental stuff around for them to improvise with, and I don't want to penalise them for it by saying "well, that worked, but this thing still has a million HP"
But I feel like it's this paradox of "I want the threat of death to be real to make fights meaningful and tactics necessary" vs "D&D is inherently probabilistic with a high spread"
ah here it is: "They [the player] want the repeated experience of narrowly escaping death, but D&D is probabilistic, so there's only so narrow it can be without ending up being a coin flip."
"Those odds have to catch up with them at some point; if they don't, you're fudging which means you're not providing the narrow part of the narrow escape."
the thing is, I know some DM's actually WANT a TPK to happen
not all, but some for sure
I don't think that is the right way to go with it, but then again, some PC's are probably at least ok with it
or even like it because they can take it as a challenge
I wouldn't go so far as to say that means they are doing it wrong, but I certainly don't agree with that style of play, or at least don't want to engage in it myself
I don't like it when one of my characters dies before I am ready for that to happen, and it is definitely not cool when someone else is making it their mission to kill one of my characters off without my consent
of course, if all the PC's in a given group are ok with it then I don't see a problem with it in such cases
In Great Ork Gods random, inglorious character death is also built into the system's mechanics, but the game isn't trying to tell long-form stories about character arcs, character creation isn't a significant sunk cost, and system mastery can't mitigate anything.
Speaking of writing stuff, I thought the second part of the Sunless Fate conversion would be about ship combat, zeafaring, trading, and maybe GMing advice if it fits. I haven't even finished writing up ship combat yet, and I'm already approaching 1k words.
That's true. The post doesn't go quite as far as Fate's "characters die only when you want them to". It does make random death very unlikely without changing the way combat works.
I suppose, this by itself still wouldn't make me want to play 4e over fate at this point
in fate, the last time the character I was playing would have actually died in a D&D type game, instead he "died"
like in a movie where the hero "dies" but shows up later and explains why he really didn't
I liked that because the thing that "killed" him kinda came out of left field, but I could still let it dramatically "kill" him and have him come back later so I could still play him for a bit
and if I have a character I either want to have die, or am ok with dieing at the current time under the current circumstances, I can still have or let that happen, it just isn't going to happen because someone else decided it, or even worse, solely because some random dice said so
Flumphs are great. I populated a Dwarven mine in an asteroid (carved into the shape of a giant Dwarf head) with them when I ran a 5e/Spelljammer one-shot.
Katanas & Trenchcoats is counting down to hours! Less than $4000 to go to make the book color. :D https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanmacklin/katanas-and-trenchcoats-retromodern-roleplaying/ #YOLF