New DM, please help balance my boss... (SPOILERS for Everett)

[Nhorianscum]

To the first point, we can agree to disagree. IMO, take away the DM, you got no game, take away a player you still have a game if you have more players. I will agree that the table is the game from the players perspective. I'm a DM who occasionally plays.

To the second point, I give you this from the AD&D DMG by Gary Gygax (c) 1979 page 100, an example of game play.

"You get up all right, and there is a crack where you can pound in a spike. As you're doing it, you might be in for a nasty surprise, so I'll let you roll a six-sider for me to see your status - make the roll! (Groans as a 1 comes up indicating surprise. The DM then rolls 3 attacks for the ghoul that grabbed at the busy gnome, and one claw attack does 2 hit points of damage and paralyzes the hapless character, whereupon the DM judges that the other 3 would rend him to bits.

However, the DM does NOT tell the players what has happened, despite impassioned pleas and urgent demands. He simply relates: "You see a sickly gray arm strike the gnome as he's working on the spike, the gnome utters a muffled cry, and then a shadowy form drags him out of sight. What are you others going to do?"

Please note that the DM decided NOT TO ROLL, instead just narrate the outcome. Taboo according to GG? He either edited it, wrote it, or approved it. My point is, when the outcome was already decided by the DM, the dice were irrelevant. And you can search for something GG wrote that supports your point. He's (sadly) dead, we are not, and the game we are playing is not his anymore. Besides, he wrote ToH, and then rails against such dungeons in that same DMG (p.92, second column, 4th para.)

Tp the last point, are you sure about that? You just know when the DM took it easy on you in order to not have the session suck/save you from a meaningless death? If that were so, you might not keep playing because you'd have no sense of accomplishment. And we'd hear a lot more about TPKs.

I ask you to go ask your DM if they've EVER fudged a roll or rewrote/hand waved something in part because it helped the party, the story, or the session.

Not entirely certain what the point of the example is. That's an "average roll" situation used for the sake of brevity and used to set up a conflict for the party to solve. Fudging rolls and pretending monster x has "plot amount" of hp has nothing to do with this straw man and is in fact the opposite of the quoted segment as you remove the parties role in solving the problem. Morover this segment is the result of an action taken by the PC.

I have never fudged, rewriting and handwaving have been done but only pre-session for the sake of making a campain more... Interesting (IE deadly).