Fudging is not your friend

Of course fudging is your friend.

But he has mood swings, and occasionally he's not really looking out for your best interests.

So you have to pick and choose what game nights you invite him to, as with any gaming friend.

Nice anology Cor.

I generally roll my dice in the open - only every once in a while making secret Detection rolls when I don't want to tip players off. If anything, if a fudge occurs it's because I (usually subconsiously) pull an NPCs punch in some way. More often than not, I'm just forgetful or a bad tactician and the players get an unexpected benefit from my untimely goof. It's also why I don't mind an occassional fudge or impromptu reskin of abilities* - I'm not a perfect person and a tweak here or there to compensate for that doesn't seem out of line.

Also, in non-D&D games, I do a lot of enemy stats off the cuff - for two reasons. The foremost is that generally, other games don't have the breadth of premade NPCs/monsters that D&D does. Second, most other games don't have a time-consuming creation requirements that D&D does. I can generally decide on such NPCs on the fly and do a decent job.

If the players go off in left field in a game (as which has happened in my current Hunter game) I have no compunction about making an NPC enemy on the spot and rolling with it, rather than grind the game to a halt so I can waste play time on fully statting out an NPC that's going to get rolled in 5-15 minutes of combat. (There's no way in hell I'd do that in the middle of a 3.5/Pathfinder game.)

* In our Rise of the Runelords game, the party was supposed to face a BBEG goblin on the back of a lizard. Lacking an appropriate miniature, I used the goblin spider Birthright mini I had in its place, describing the goblin as mutating into this form for battle. It ran mostly the same, but the reaction it drew by this impromptu tweak felt like it made the battle more exciting - as well as inspiring some interesting BS explanations of what caused the mutation after the fight.

Alaxk Knight of Galt said:

2. Why roll the dice if you already know what outcome you want.

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Because that's usually not what's going on. More often, for me at least, it's a question of not wanting all of the outcomes the dice come up with. For example, the dice told me that the triceratops skeleton critically gored the rogue trying to tumble around it. OK. Then they told me the gore did X (pretty high) hit points of damage. Well, I didn't want to do X points of damage in that circumstance so I opted to do X-10 instead. That was more than a regular hit but not as much as the crit damaged rolled out to be.

Li Shenron said:

Uhm... does this really help?

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For some groups- mine included- it does. It helps establish that the dm is fair, and it shows that the dm isn't playing softball.

Li Shenron said:

But I would expect at least some negative side effects to rolling everything openly when it comes to success/failure rolls, e.g. attack rolls and saving throws.

One side effect is that some players will get distracted by the possibility of figuring out the modifier. E.g. you roll a 15 and declare a hit, then roll a 14 and declare a miss, hence the modifier can be easily figured out. I strongly believe that this information is almost always useless to the players, but the problem lies in the fact that the possibility of knowing it causes a distraction.

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IME, the players are usually too busy figuring out what to do to worry about the monster's attack bonus. But I can see how some groups could easily get distracted by this.

Of course, they can also get distracted by a car driving by outside or a dog barking. There are always distractions. The onus to 'play through them' is on each player (including the dm); I don't think it's possible to eliminate distractions, and one of a dm's most important skills is learning to keep the game going. I don't really think it's any different with the "figure out the modifiers" distraction.

Li Shenron said:

Another complication is that the game is full of temporary bonuses, from spells and either abilities. If you roll 15 twice, but the first is a hit and the second is a miss or viceversa (because of some effect that was temporary) it may raise suspicions from some player. This could be a good thing if there really was a temporary effect and the player uses this information for some tactical choice with an in-game explanation: perhaps her wizard PC had a hunch that the enemy turned on some magic item and now she tries to launch a Dispel Magic. But if there wasn't a temporary effect and the DM just made an honest mistake, some players may get upset. You can say that in this case rolling hidden helps making occasional mistakes part of the random process by hiding them.

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Players are aware that there are all kinds of temporary modifiers in the game; they benefit from them all the time. And players and dms all make mistakes from time to time. There's no reason to get upset over this, although there's nothing wrong with a quick "But he missed me last time on a 15, are you sure?", as long as the player is willing to accept "Oh, I'm sure" as an answer.

billd91 said:

Because that's usually not what's going on. More often, for me at least, it's a question of not wanting all of the outcomes the dice come up with. For example, the dice told me that the triceratops skeleton critically gored the rogue trying to tumble around it. OK. Then they told me the gore did X (pretty high) hit points of damage. Well, I didn't want to do X points of damage in that circumstance so I opted to do X-10 instead. That was more than a regular hit but not as much as the crit damaged rolled out to be.

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So why roll damage? You already knew (approximately) how much damage you wanted the attack to do (more then normal, less then max).

BTW: Skeleton Triceratops are 100% in my next game.

Edit: I'm against fudging in general as think that Skeleton Triceratops goring the guts out of that Rogue is interesting, even when I'm the Rogue. That Player took a chance and the dice told a little story about that chance. That's what I love about gaming.

DragonStryk72 said:

Why are the dice not involved in your fun? They should be the first thing included in the festivities.

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No. PEOPLE should be the first thing included in the festivities.

Maybe, just maybe, his players like it better his way. Maybe not everyone has to play the same way.

Alaxk Knight of Galt said:

So why roll damage? You already knew (approximately) how much damage you wanted the attack to do (more then normal, less then max).

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Because 99 times out of 100 the results are fine and work well. Why roll dice if you don't factor in the rare situations when it doesn't? Because we're people, not computers. We don't always foresee a problem until it happens.

Alaxk said:

Edit: I'm against fudging in general as think that Skeleton Triceratops goring the guts out of that Rogue is interesting, even when I'm the Rogue. That Player took a chance and the dice told a little story about that chance. That's what I love about gaming.

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But you concede, I hope, that that's not what everyone loves about gaming? Or that story is always going to be interesting?

I'm 100% in favor of fudging. But I'm in favor of doing it very carefully. And I'm in favor of fudging more intangible things about the game than the dice rolls, frankly. I don't really believe in fudging dice rolls.

In my very first campaign as a DM i fudged the heck out of my rolls, as I was afraid to kill the PCs. It got so ridiculous, that I just rolled, so the players HEARD that I was rolling.

For me that was a lot of "work"* and I hadn't fun with it. So now I am rolling in the open and the players can even see the attack & damage bonus (due to maptools).
It's less "work" for me, I have more fun with it and my players haven't complaint yet.
So it works for us.

* "work" as in planning out if I want to hit and if I hit, how much damage. And to make it an even flow in the encounter, so no hard hitting at the beginning and suddenly no enemy hits anymore.

Fudging is a tool. No more, no less.

As a tool, people are free to use it, or not use it - just like dice software. Sometimes I use it, other times I don't.

Alaxk Knight of Galt said:

So why roll damage? You already knew (approximately) how much damage you wanted the attack to do (more then normal, less then max).

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I can easily imagine a situation where a fudging DM doesn't know how much damage he wanted to do till the rogue gets critted and mentions that he's close to dropping.

Edit: I'm against fudging in general as think that Skeleton Triceratops goring the guts out of that Rogue is interesting, even when I'm the Rogue. That Player took a chance and the dice told a little story about that chance. That's what I love about gaming.

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Are you saying that all the other stories the dice could have told are inferior? I trust my judgement as a story teller over a million monkeys at a million typewriters.