this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Sometimes it's okay to fudge the numbers to benefit your players. If you have to, pull something weird including having the monsters retreat due to something happening elsewhere or whatever. You can totally just make stuff up to preserve the party and advance the story if needed.
Having enemies retreat is the opposite of fudging, it is having monsters react to the world around them instead of being bags of hit points that always fight to the death. Fudging is ignoring the random chance rolls.
Totally, even if the reason to retreat might not have existed until you just made it up because the plot was about to go to hell. But, agreed, it's a better way to do it and done well, while kinda fudging, gives everything much more depth. (For example, could give you an excuse to bring in an NPC or group that might be able to work with the party in interesting ways. An ally can moderate difficulty AND repeatedly make a long storyline more interesting.)
Still, nothing wrong with "coincidentally" having a strong mob roll a nat 1 and eat dirt to buy a round or two while you figure out a way to put things back on track.
Whenever something seems to be moving towards a TPK, I make sure the players have some sort of reasonable escape. There may be one or two PC deaths, but nothing crazy. I think I ran OOTA with only 2 PC deaths for the whole campaign.
The other thing is that OOTA specifically gives you lots of NPCs at the start so they can take the brunt of the deaths.