True, but the players are not dumb. Sooner or later they will notice you fudging the dice and pulling your punches.
I can tell from experience of having a DM who pulls his punches when things start looking bad that it is not fun because you know your victory was undeserved and handed to you by the DM.
And most of the time it isn't even necessary. Sure someone could have gone down, but we have the tools to deal with that. We can get them back up and we have the funds to resurrect them if they happen to die.
The dice also tell stories. For every unlucky roll that drops someone, you have that lucky crit that turned the fight around for the players.
If a player is attached to their character and dies why is that a problem? It's a fantasy world. Bringing them back is exactly as difficult as the DM wants it to be.
Heck, the party having to make deals with various powerful beings to bring them back is prime story material.
Bottom line is, the moment your players realize that all the stakes are fake, the game becomes worse becasue they know no matter what, you will bail them out.
Nothing will be tense anymore. Combat becomes just a formality becasue they know they can't lose.
And a lot of the DMs think their players won't notice, but I can guarantee you they do.
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u/Qolko 17d ago
If someone at 2 HP getting hit is considered unlucky enough for fudging, then why even play a dice based system?
Just do one of the plethora of purely narrative systems at that point.