Fudging is not your friend

steenan said:

It was another way around for me.

I fudged quite often when I was less experienced, knew less games and couldn't really decide with my friends what style we want to play in advance.

As years passed, I improved my GMing skills, I learned communicating with my players and I gathered many different RPG systems. Now I don't fudge. If I know I wouldn't like a possible result of a roll, I don't make such roll. If a game rules would push me towards making rolls I don't like, I house rule (before the game starts) or just switch to a different game. And my players enjoy games I run with this approach.

For example, I used to fudge to save PCs from rolls that would kill them. Now I just discuss with my players if they want a lethal game or not. If they want lethal play, we select a game where character creation may be done in 10-15 minutes and we all accept that one or two characters die in a session. If they don't like their characters dying and want to focus on long-term development, we use a game that has more interesting stakes in conflicts than character death.

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I think every DM has to find what they are comfortable with doing. I don't think there is anything wrong with fudging nor do I think there is anything wrong with not fudging.

The most important thing is what you mentioned being on the same page with your players.

My players want a game where it is hard to die but the chance exists. I have added things to my 3.5 game like action points and we play that no name mooks don't crit only named bad guys do.

The reason I say I will fudge is because I have had two times in this campaign seen where it was what I considered necessary to keep the players fun up.

One was the time the player lost a character in the session before and then just had terrible luck with rolls and even with the action points and other things I still killed him outright with damage. I have myself I have been in a situation like that as a player and I hated it and I could tell he was not enjoying so it so I fudged the damage and knocked to minuses.

The other time was with my good friend who hates having her character die it is her least favorite part of the game. She accepts it as part of the game and is not a baby over it. Anyway she found out a few days before the session that she was going to go blind. This was heart breaking for her she is an artist and does a lot of crafting one of her major hobbies is painting miniatures. I should say was. She no longer can do any of that.

I asked her if she wanted to play and she wanted to, to keep her mind off what was going to happen. That session she failed a reflex safe and the damage would have been enough to kill her character. I chose instead to knock her to minuses but not kill her character it just didn't feel right to do so that night.

To me people are more important than the rules and sometimes I think that it is okay to bend them. I have never found the very occasional fudging to do any harm to the game.

I am not advocating to fudge all the time and I do believe it is better to have things in your game so you don't have to fudge. But to me taking a hard stance of saying you will never do it just seems limiting to me. It is a tool you may never need it but to say I will never fudge just seems rigid.

Cadence said:

For the non-dice fudgers here: Do you alter what the encounters will be on the fly before the party gets to them?

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It depends. Often, I'm running on the fly to some extent anyhow. I usually do adjust on the fly encounters for "number of pcs present". Planned encounters, less so, but in planned areas (e.g. dungeons) I usually have smaller encounters with possible reinforcements from nearby areas.

Also, when there are fewer pcs present, I'll sometimes throw in recharge elements in big encounters (say the pcs are encountering a big two-wave encounter that starts with an elite and two non-elites, then a couple rounds later adds a second wave of three 'standard' monsters and a bunch of minions- maybe when the pcs defeat the first wave monsters, they all get to recharge an encounter power and spend a healing surge or something).

Cadence said:

(e.g. If the dungeon was well balanced for a party of five and one just died... wouldn't the smart party always just leave to try and find someone with the PC aura at the appropriate level to join them to finish?

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That's player choice, not me changing an encounter.

Once a player's new character is ready, I try to get them in play as quickly as possible.

That said, I don't generally modify the difficulty of encounters for dead pcs.

Cadence said:

What if the party missed all the places where there were vital clues about the upcoming big encounter because they did something you weren't expecting... do you give them some other way to find the clues you weren't planning on?)

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No, I run a sandbox, so if they miss one hook, there's always another. If they are seeking those clues, they'll probably keep looking, but if they don't (or say they collapse the dungeon or something), oh well, maybe they fail their quest. That happens sometimes.

Cadence said:

If yes, would you argue against my thinking that's still fudging, just at a different stage of the process?

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I wouldn't call that kind of thing fudging. That said, I do rarely fudge- less than 1/session, probably more like 1/3 or 4 sessions.

Elf Witch said:

I am not advocating to fudge all the time and I do believe it is better to have things in your game so you don't have to fudge. But to me taking a hard stance of saying you will never do it just seems limiting to me. It is a tool you may never need it but to say I will never fudge just seems rigid.

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Hi Elf Witch - I think that in practice you may actually fudge less, and in more extreme circumstances, than some of the 'anti-fudgers' posting here. In principle I'm strongly against fudging as a general practice to 'make the game more fun', but goodness knows what I would do in the particular cases you have brought up. I certainly wouldn't say you were wrong to fudge in those cases. In fact I'd say you were almost certainly right to fudge.

I think any rule must be admitting of exceptions, extreme cases where it is better not to follow the rule. That does not mean the rule should be discarded. "Don't lie" is a good rule. "Don't lie, even if telling the truth will get an innocent person killed", is wrong.

Following a rule no matter what, no matter how extreme the circumstances, is wrong.
Discarding a rule because there are extreme circumstances where it would be wrong to follow it, is also wrong.

Ok, I admit I read the first three or four pages and skipped ahead, so, if this has been dealt with, sorry.

I don't fudge very much. What fudging I do tends to be on the side of perhaps "forgetting" a bonus or ignoring a possible combination that might be a tad too nasty for the encounter. Sure, the baddies still beat on the PC's, but, maybe this round they don't focus fire on the mage. That sort of thing. Sub-par tactics.

OTOH, I have zero problems handing "fudging" power to the players as a character resource. Action points or bennies or what have you. Let the players affect the flow of the game as they will within limited, pre-set parameters. To me, this is the better way of dealing with it. The players get a new toy to play with, as a DM, I don't have to feel like I'm giving freebies and, since it's a resource, the players have to make important decisions about when and where to spend those resources.

How do other people feel about player "fudging"? ((Putting that in quotes since it's not really heavy duty fudging since it's a limited resource.))

S'mon said:

Hi Elf Witch - I think that in practice you may actually fudge less, and in more extreme circumstances, than some of the 'anti-fudgers' posting here. In principle I'm strongly against fudging as a general practice to 'make the game more fun', but goodness knows what I would do in the particular cases you have brought up. I certainly wouldn't say you were wrong to fudge in those cases. In fact I'd say you were almost certainly right to fudge.

I think any rule must be admitting of exceptions, extreme cases where it is better not to follow the rule. That does not mean the rule should be discarded. "Don't lie" is a good rule. "Don't lie, even if telling the truth will get an innocent person killed", is wrong.

Following a rule no matter what, no matter how extreme the circumstances, is wrong.
Discarding a rule because there are extreme circumstances where it would be wrong to follow it, is also wrong.

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I just want to say that I as I have gotten older I have found far more shades of gray. This is true in life and in gaming. There really is not one right way to play the game. What it comes down to is what your group enjoys.

I do admit titles like this one fudging is not your friend does tend to get my back up a little. It implies that it is wrong to do so. The OP saw a difference in his game and it worked for the better for his group but it is not a universal truth.

I also get a little no make that a lot pissy over the idea that some how it is morally superior not to fudge that some how that makes someone a better gamer or a better DM. That is just BS. Again it is simply a matter of taste.

The most important rule is are you and your players all having a good time.

Like I said earlier if you are fudging because you don't want a lethal game I think there are better ways to handle it than fudging. One of the issues with doing it by fudging is making a mistake in your numbers and still killing the PC.

I also think it makes your job as DM harder because now you are having to keep track of a lot more. I usually have one of the players track damage for everyone and another do to initiative. That frees me up to just concentrate on running the encounter.

Hussar said:

Ok, I admit I read the first three or four pages and skipped ahead, so, if this has been dealt with, sorry.

I don't fudge very much. What fudging I do tends to be on the side of perhaps "forgetting" a bonus or ignoring a possible combination that might be a tad too nasty for the encounter. Sure, the baddies still beat on the PC's, but, maybe this round they don't focus fire on the mage. That sort of thing. Sub-par tactics.

OTOH, I have zero problems handing "fudging" power to the players as a character resource. Action points or bennies or what have you. Let the players affect the flow of the game as they will within limited, pre-set parameters. To me, this is the better way of dealing with it. The players get a new toy to play with, as a DM, I don't have to feel like I'm giving freebies and, since it's a resource, the players have to make important decisions about when and where to spend those resources.

How do other people feel about player "fudging"? ((Putting that in quotes since it's not really heavy duty fudging since it's a limited resource.))

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I don't really care if a player fudges once and awhile. I trust my players I don't have to see their rolls I even let them do rolls for characters creation and hit points at home. I guess I feel that if they really feel they need that stat or that hit point total or they don't want to fail that save this time then okay.

I do have an issue if they do it all the time and if it starts bugging other players. I will talk to them and find out why they feel the need to do this and see if we can fix any issue that may be making them feel this is necessary for their enjoyment.

Since this is not a game where someone wins like monopoly or a strategy game it is not taking a win away from the other players.

There was a girl who I noticed was fudging her initiative roll so she went first. I talked to her out of game away from the other players. It turned out she was very frustrated as the party wizard she had a lot of area spells that she never got to use because most of the party had better dex and went before her and would run into combat to engage the enemy and she could throw her spells because it would hit them.

This showed me that I needed to plan my encounters better with spacing of enemies to give her a chance to do her thing. I also suggested she have an in character talk with the others on tactics.

It worked and the game play actually got better. I would have preferred her to come to me first rather feeling she had to resort to fudging her roll but if I taken the step of calling her and cheater and throwing her out of the game, which I have often seen stated here on En World as the way to handle fudging, I would have lost a good player.

Elf Witch said:

There was a girl who I noticed was fudging her initiative roll so she went first. I talked to her out of game away from the other players. It turned out she was very frustrated as the party wizard she had a lot of area spells that she never got to use because most of the party had better dex and went before her and would run into combat to engage the enemy and she could throw her spells because it would hit them.

This showed me that I needed to plan my encounters better with spacing of enemies to give her a chance to do her thing. I also suggested she have an in character talk with the others on tactics.

It worked and the game play actually got better. I would have preferred her to come to me first rather feeling she had to resort to fudging her roll but if I taken the step of calling her and cheater and throwing her out of the game, which I have often seen stated here on En World as the way to handle fudging, I would have lost a good player.

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I think my preferred approach here (assuming I liked the player and wanted to keep her) would be to get her to rebuild her PC with high DEX and improved initiative. If she was concerned about low rolls I might even bring in a house rule that you can take 10 on initiative checks. Also, as you said she needs to talk to the other players about tactics.
There is actually a player in my 4e game who plays a low-DEX, low-init wizard with area effect attacks, but being 4e a fair number of them are 'targets enemies' and I don't think she's generally frustrated.

S'mon said:

I think my preferred approach here (assuming I liked the player and wanted to keep her) would be to get her to rebuild her PC with high DEX and improved initiative. If she was concerned about low rolls I might even bring in a house rule that you can take 10 on initiative checks. Also, as you said she needs to talk to the other players about tactics.
There is actually a player in my 4e game who plays a low-DEX, low-init wizard with area effect attacks, but being 4e a fair number of them are 'targets enemies' and I don't think she's generally frustrated.

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I did ask her if she wanted to rebuild her character she really didn't. We already have a house rule where we roll a d10 for int we have been doing this since 3.0 came out. It just seems to make improved intuitive more valuable.

I think once she talked to the others in character it improved their tactics and their working as a team. Something that had been kind of lacking before.

And like I said it helped me improve as a DM I had not been as good at placing my NPCs in combat.

I have done things your way in other situations where I have had a frustrated player. Rebuilding changing out feats our house rules does help fix things.

Here's an example of fudging from our last game: The party went up against a pack of displacer beasts. The fight was dragging on because of their displacement ability and I forsaw a frustrating time-sink of a fight, so I cut their HP in half.

The fight ended up being a loads of fun and at times flirted with a TPK.

Elf Witch said:

Because he views it as the same as fudging or DM cheating.

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Which is kind of funny, because in 1e and 2e fudging is explicitly RAW. Two DMG quotes from many similar ones are:But 1e does note:PF also notes "...[the GM] shouldn't feel bound by the dice." and

Cadence said:

For the non-dice fudgers here: Do you alter what the encounters will be on the fly before the party gets to them?

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Yes. I don't run a very exploration-oriented game, so the world (and the encounters within it) aren't pre-given. I frame situations and encounters in ways that seem like they will be interesting to me and the players in light of what's come before.

(This is what [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] upthread called my narrativist-drifted 4e.)

Here is an example of changing the encounter composition mid-encounter: the player of the invoker declared a Perception check before moving to hide behind a stalagmite, clearly concerned that it might be a roper. He rolled a high check, and - for fun - I decided to stick a roper in there for him to avoid hiding behind!

Cadence said:

If yes, would you argue against my thinking that's still fudging, just at a different stage of the process?

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For me this isn't fudging, though. I associate fudging with action resolution. Whereas what I've just described is scene-framing. Or, in the rope case, adjudication of a Perception check by introducing an amusing complication in response to it.

There was certainly no deceit of the players - they knew that I stuck the roper in in response to the check (and groaned appropriately). (I'm a pretty upfront GM - I don't use a screen, and I tend to declare most of my rolls to the players.) But for me that's what scene framing, and adjudication, are about - following the players' cues and always prodding and pushing, keeping up the pressure so that interesting choices are made, and consequently interesting things happen.

I should also say that my judgements here are coloured by the rules system I am using (4e). In classic D&D, for example, the line between scene framing and action resolution is less clear, because the action resolution mechanics include a whole lot of dungeon exploration and divination stuff that is meant to lock down the details of the dungeon prior to them actually being engaged as encounters. There is a strong argument that, in classic D&D, it would be cheating to introduce a roper into an encounter in the way I did if it hadn't been planned for, because doing so would undermine the integrity of the players' decisions about scouting, divining etc.

Olgar Shiverstone said:

Average DMs fudge die rolls; great DMs fudge tactics. You can roll in the open and let the chips fall where they may, and the players will never notice when the evil ogre fails to take the finishing swing on the wounded wizard in favor of the "more dangerous" fighter.

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Again, I don't see that as fudging. It's the GM's job to adjudicate the actions of NPCs and monsters.

That's not to say that a GM may not make decisions that produce a boring or "weaksauce" game. But there is no deception of the players or suspension of the action resolution mechanics: the players know what actions the GM is choosing for the ogre.

When I choose actions for my NPCs and monsters, I'm guided by a number of overlapping considerations: what will display/reinforce their character and colour; what will keep the pressure on the players; what will engage the various players; what seems fun or interesting at the time, etc.

S'mon said:

Here are my personal criteria for when it is ok to fudge:

1) If the game is centred on drama and story, not on challenge or the exploration of an objective environment.
2) If the ruleset used does not fully support drama/story creation play, eg you are trying to use d20/D&D for this. I played in a Midnight campaign, d20 ruleset terrible fit for the dramatist campaign. This assumes there is no metagame mechanic such as Fate Points available, or they are undesired for some reason.
3) If you have player consent.

If all three criteria are met, then the GM can, and probably should, use their discretion to fudge.

I would tend to think that in most cases a player-side resource such as Fate Points used to influence the story might be a better approach than GM-side fudging; fudging in practice often seems to be kept secret in order to maintain an illusion that the players are actually playing a challenge-based or environment-simulation game, not a story-creation game, and I don't like that sort of illusionist play.

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I think you give a good description here of some of the issues that arise when you try to take a system that offers only weak support for non-exploratory play (simulationinst or gamist with simulationist chassis) and try to drift it in a different direction - there is pressure to correct its infelicities so that it better delivers the desired experience.

I agree that Fate Points are probably a better stop-gap than fudging, although they can interfere with simulationist preferences.