they could as well miserably fail too thanks to this adjustment .
Thats the idea, i want the possibility of failure to be there. I make my campaigns challenging. I enjoy challenging my players on different levels, be it with resource scarcity, testing loyalties, testing morals, testing mettle, challenging them in an strategical and a tactical layer. I encourage power builds. I dont bitch about minmaxing, their "min" will make them sweat, and their max will make them shine all the brighter. I encourage team play and i want my table to be memorable.
I can tell you this much, nobody remembers generic dungeon romps and that job they did for that noble that one time that ended up with them getting a +1 sword. Nobody remembers the generic fight against orcs to get their level up to 4.
They grow to love these characters, because i offer development outside the books they also develop their characters in very personal ways.
I remember one of my players in a villain campaign being a drow warlock, he once got his hands on a divine scroll, one that allowed him to attune to the source of destruction. later in the campaign it seemed like there would be a team wipe, one was already bleeding out, the others werent faring much better and he knew neither math nor luck was on their side that night.
He suddenly remembered the scroll (I actually had forgotten he had it). He read it in a hurry it turned him into an avatar of the void, an entity that would swallow and turn everything into nothing by merely focusing on it. He saved their lives that night.
Once it was done and the power of the spell ran out he found out everything he owned got destroyed, his very soul corrupted. He didnt care, he loved it. He devoted his life to follow this law of the void. His powers mutated to reflect it. This became the source of adventure hooks as anything he could dig up on this was explored. And this was just one of the characters in the campaign.
You had a half-vampire that only wanted power finding his heart and giving up said power to preserve the life of a child, out of regret for having sacrificed his own son years before. He learned to harness the power of blood, his spell list added several spellls that followed that theme.
You had a yuan ti whose sole mission in life was making his own species thrive in the surface betray his principles only to save his skin, this became his shame. He begun to unify the tribes after that.
Their nemesis, was just some very high level drow assassin they came to blow with a few times before things started getting personal. Ended up with one of the players (The vampire) losing both his wife (Sweet woman, ugly but kind, he loved her as one would a pet. And he found her gutted on his bed) and his lover (An dragon empress) and shit got very personal inside the game.
The players struck back, killing the drows husband. And it went downhill from there. Until at the very last story, while they were trying to save everyone they cared about from a world that was about to be destroyed and remade that this fucker showed up and they had their final fight, with only minutes to spare. As one of the player could not act, he could only watch helplessly as he made rolls to keep the portal from which they would flee open, the possibility of them being stuck there if he failed very real (Dude eventually failed, they had to find another way, getting into an area sealed by the gods, with enemies with a CR above 20.
The players still talk about that campaign to this very day.
If you arent homebrewing you arent really DMing.
