For me, it was: “If it’s going to help your players have more fun, cheat. Fudge a die roll. Make shit up. The dice don’t tell you what needs to happen, your players’ reactions do.”
Obviously, many people will disagree with this, but I’ve always appreciated this advice, and I believe it has made me a better GM.
> When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play.
Players are allowed to flee. Enemies are allowed to mock them and walk away.
I’m not sure why basically ever single discussion I ever see about GMing seems to live in this world where the only options in combat is “PCs die or NPCs die”, and the only workaround is to pick and choose when you’re playing a probability game.
I agree that many seem to have a narrow view of combat outcomes. I’ve seen in a couple of threads that Basic Roleplaying, for example, is described as a “lethal” system unless player characters get double the hit points. This is in spite of the game engine document stating that characters can surrender or flee from a fight. Granted, death is mentioned far more often in that document than surrender, and it’s a long document, so I’m not sure I can blame anyone for missing it. Fleeing is mentioned more frequently and there are several pages dedicated to chases.
I wonder how many tables would benefit from the game master simply asking players if they want to run away.
Change or fudge enough rules and you’re basically playing a different game.
No time constraints? Now the GM has less levers to pull on to make choices feel meaningful.
Not tracking rations? Then there’s nothing stopping the players from travelling back to town to rest after every encounter.
Lots of game rules feel “less fun” in the moment but the alternative is constantly playing rocket tag because now fights don’t feel consequential unless player death is on the line - and that’s an easy line to accidentally cross. And then you end up fudging rolls to balance encounters.
But you wouldn’t need to make individual encounters so hard in the first place if pc death isn’t the only negative consequence on the table.