Keeping a Group Together

I suppose, if you are a simulationist sort of GM, and you are highly skilled in your game system, and you never design an encounter with any errors in it, then I can see espousing a style of play where you set up an encounter and do not improvise any modification to it at all. There's no real difference between adding or removing elements, changing hit points, modifying enemy tactics or whatever. The question really is: will you modify an encounter from how it starts?

I am not a perfect GM, so I will. If my timing is off and I need to finish this scene fast so I can play th next scene before players have to leave, I'll reduce hit points, modify enemy tactics so they flee, not and in reinforcements or whatever.

Importantly, my players know this. I have run much more constrained games (lots of Livign Greyhawk) where I have had to not do this and make th game significantly less fun for players simply because they did not have an optimized group, or were slow to get started, or unfamiliar with to some system aspects. It soured me on the whole simulationist approach, with rigid non-interference.

If your group likes it, great, but I am almost positive, based on decades of experience running for hundreds of people, that this is not usual. Most players prefer, if their GM has screwed up, for him to fix the issue as discreetly as possible, rather than just kill of their party.

Grogg of the North said:

Hmm ... let me try to explain. Fudging some die rolls to ensure that the game continues and that everyone at the table is having fun is, in my experience and opinion, a good thing! Fudging the die rolls so that the baddies always hit, make their saves, crit or generally make it feel like the DM is being vindictive is a bad thing. Does that help?

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I am confused. There is no NO DIE ROLL RESULT that will automatically end the game. Even if a TPK happens the players can simply roll up new characters and keep playing. The game only comes to an end if the participants decide that they want to end it. As to having fun, this will be heavily dependent on the group. For every group that had fun because you fudged to keep them alive, another will have their fun spoiled because they DIDN'T die as they should have. Keeping the group together on these issues is achieved through honesty about the style of game you want to run.

Grogg of the North said:

The 3.5 DMG. My apologies on not being specific. The gist of the passage is that as DM, you can't cheat. What you say goes. But you should be careful in what you do because you're playing a game and the point of the game is to have fun. It also states that if your players feel you won't let them die they'll get crazy in what they're doing. Pathfinder's core rulebook, IIRC, gives similar advice. The BESM handbook, while I don't recall it calling out fudging exactly emphasizes having fun above the rolls and rules.

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The one good way that never fails to impress on the players that their characters can die is if they actually can. There is no substitute. Many of these tricks & deceptions used to "maintain the fun" only come about because the DM is afraid that his/her players cannot handle failure and will cry if things don't always go their way. Do mature people not play these games? Is the concept of win some, lose some no longer known as a consequence of playing games?

Players conduct themselves differently if they feel that as "heroes" they cannot ultimately fail and everything will work out eventually. They will never retreat or shy away from the most ridiculous overwhelming odds simply because they know that they will win because of hero status. Victories are never won, they are inevitable.

Grogg of the North said:

As for being asked about it directly, the answer I would give is "That's not for you to know". If you're really worried about being "caught", get multiple d20s and put on a little show about how your dice have betrayed you and can't roll above a 5. Putting the die in "Time out" helps. Again, as I've pointed out I've been in sessions where we suspected that the GM was fudging. He was fudging in order to keep the game going and so that everyone at the table, himself included, was still having fun*. No one begrudged him for it. In fact we were all happy he took steps to keep the game going.

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Again I am baffled at the extraordinary measures employed to "keep the game going" when that is going to happen anyway unless the group chooses to stop.

Grogg of the North said:

I think we've reached a point in this discussion where the disagreement on GMs fudging a die roll is going to come down to play styles more than anything. Some players are going to want a grim and gritty, play it where it lays game. Where a streak of bad luck will result in a TPK and that's that. Other players want to play in a more narrative based game where heroes succeed in spite of the odds. Neither play style is wrong. Neither is right.

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This I can agree with so long as all of the participants know what style is being run and are on board with it.

Grogg of the North said:

Have I fudged die rolls? Yes. Would I do it again? Yes, if it helps the game and enjoyment of everyone. Did my group know? I don't know. No one ever said anything to me and I've been playing with the same group, more or less, for years. Have I been in groups where the DM has fudged? Yes, and I don't mind. As long as it keeps the narrative going and everyone has fun.

I'm not sure if we, as a community, are going to reach any sort of consensus on this topic. We're on page 5 and the discussion seems to be just going in circles. I've certainly contributed to that and I feel I have done this discussion, and the community, a disservice. If fudging die rolls is a deal breaker for any player, then I think the best thing to do, when joining a new group or having a new DM at the table, is to ask what they feel about it. If the DM is fine with fudging die rolls but the group wants all the rolls in the open then the DM should go with what they want. D&D is an incredibly social game. The DM is, responsible for ensuring everyone at the table is having fun. If one player wants everything in the open but the rest of the group wants DM rolls hidden, then that player should ask themselves if that is a deal breaker for that game.

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Yeah, and I think that is really what some of us have been saying. Play in whatever style suits the group and make sure everyone can make informed choices about what games they want to participate in.

GrahamWills said:

If your group likes it, great, but I am almost positive, based on decades of experience running for hundreds of people, that this is not usual. Most players prefer, if their GM has screwed up, for him to fix the issue as discreetly as possible, rather than just kill of their party.

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There is also a difference between a DM actually screwing up and players insisting on biting off more than they can chew. A genuine mistake can be admitted and corrected, but if the players decide to attack a village full of trolls because it seemed like a good idea then the mistake was made by the players not the DM, and it may be a mistake that ends with a large stew pot and a stack of fresh character sheets.

Grogg of the North said:

Some players are going to want a grim and gritty, play it where it lays game. Where a streak of bad luck will result in a TPK and that's that.

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Greenfield said:

As for PC death: If you can't lose, winning doesn't mean anything.

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Everyone at my table - including me, the GM - rolls their dice in front of everyone else. But this has nothing to do with "grim and gritty" - we are playing 4e, which is not a particularly grim or gritty system.

There is no connection between "not fudging" and "grim and gritty" or "failure = death/TPK". For instance, in 4e (as in 5e) being dropped to zero hp can result in being knocked unconscious rather than being dead.

Lanefan said:

I seem to recall similar sentiments in the 1e DMG, though I can't quote page ref's as my DMG isn't with me at the moment.

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Not really, no.

Gygax's DMG talks about the GM ignoring dice rolls used to introduce fictional content (like wandering monster rolls, or rolls to discover secret dungeon levels) in order to keep the game interesting (pp 9, 110), or to interpret death from hit point loss as something other than PC death (eg blinding, maiming etc: p 110). But he actively states that the GM should not "allow the party to kill [monsters] easily or escape unnaturally, for that goes contrary to the major precepts of the game" (p 9).

GrahamWills said:

There's no real difference between adding or removing elements, changing hit points, modifying enemy tactics or whatever.

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There's a huge difference. If reinforcements turn up, or enemies surrender, that is transparent to the players. In some versions of the game (eg AD&D 1st ed) it might affect XP earned. In 4e, reinforcements change the encounter level and hence change the way it interacts with the milestone system.

Whereas fudging hit points is secret, and bypasses all those other mechanisms that relate encounter design to PC progression.

pemerton said:

Re: fudging dice is the same as fudging tactics ...

There's a huge difference. If reinforcements turn up, or enemies surrender, that is transparent to the players. In some versions of the game (eg AD&D 1st ed) it might affect XP earned. In 4e, reinforcements change the encounter level and hence change the way it interacts with the milestone system.

Whereas fudging hit points is secret, and bypasses all those other mechanisms that relate encounter design to PC progression.

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I don't really use or care for the "monsters == walking bags of XP" -- I award an so for the encounter using the expected difficultly as a guide, so actually it is FAIRER if I adjust the difficulty to match the XP. Otherwise my mistake in making too hard a fight for the XP is both secret and hidden from the players as well as straight up wrong. Much fairer to fix the encounter to make it in line with the awarded XP.

Also, changing tactics is exactly the same -- secret and affects XP. Suppose i change the tactics so that the opponents run away when they take half damage, and I award full XP for that -- how is that any different from reducing hits? I can even lie about it "oh yes, that is how I built the encounter -- I figured that into the XP budget" exactly the same as I could about hits.

Sorry. I don't buy that monster hits or attack bonuses or whatever are special in some ill-defined way that allows me to manipulate everything fairly, except if touch them I am considered "cheating". That's just a bit odd to me.

GrahamWills said:

changing tactics is exactly the same -- secret and affects XP.

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How is changing tactics secret? The players can see the changes you are making.

When one of our DMs wanted to nerf a monster he'd roll a dice to see who it attacked, every round. They drew every AoO on the board, again and again, and pretty much went down like the idiots they were.

When a critter's functional IQ changes abruptly in mid scene (i.e. changes between smart and stupid tactics) it might be secret, it might not.

If the monster suddenly gains the dreaded "Telepathy with DM" power, throw all your plans out the window. Said critter will abruptly be capable of thwarting any plan, and may even (retroactively) have just the items, spells or other precautions needed to throw an impenetrable road block in your path.

I've seen it happen. (Though, to be fair, with that particular DM the monsters always had that ability.)

Greenfield said:

If the monster suddenly gains the dreaded "Telepathy with DM" power, throw all your plans out the window. Said critter will abruptly be capable of thwarting any plan, and may even (retroactively) have just the items, spells or other precautions needed to throw an impenetrable road block in your path.

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The book of challenges has a side table on running monsters that are smarter than you. Towards the end it suggests that while listening to the party making plans, assume that whatever plan they come up with the monster has already thought of itself. It does warn the reader to use that tactic very rarely as the PCs will not appreciate having their plans continually thwarted.

I had a DM in a superhero game who came up with a team-mind thing that, according to him, was so smart that it/they could foresee any plan, and were always prepared to counter it. There was literally no way to win against it.

He was a bit surprised when people started avoiding his monster and looking for other things to do, and eventually started avoiding his game.

I've often said that if you can't lose, winning doesn't mean anything. There's a twisted corollary to that: If you can't win, playing the game may not mean anything.

That's the risk you take when you fudge:
If you fudge in favor of the players, you may take away the achievement of victory.
If you fudge against the players, you may take away the hope for victory.

Either way, no cookie for the players.

Or another way to put Greenfield's Dilemma (this sounds like a math thing somehow):

Fudging in the players' favor means they can't learn from their mistakes (even if the "mistakes" were simply "leaving too much to the dice").
Fudging against the players means they can't learn from their successes (even if the "successes" were simply "the dice were with you today.")

Interesting topic. It doesn't surprise me a bit that it's contentious and full of strongly-held opinions.

I used to fudge a lot more than I do these days. Hell, these days, I almost never fudge- I can only recall one instance since 5e came out, and that was an example of me mis-reading a monster ability before the encounter started, realizing how it actually worked and sort of backing off of it. Generally, these days, I just plain don't fudge. There have probably been less than a dozen exceptions (on single rolls) in the last five years. I nearly always roll all dice in the open except for those that the pcs shouldn't get to see, like Stealth or Perception checks, although I don't always tell the players what a given die is for (and I still do the thing where you roll dice just to do it, to keep the players on their toes).

I don't think there's anything wrong with fudging, per se; it's a matter of playstyle choice. It doesn't suit my current playstyle, but for the first, oh, 20 years? of my DMing career, I was more than willing to fudge when I felt it was called for. Unlike most people in this thread, who seem to feel that fudging should almost always favor the pcs, I always had a policy that if I fudged for you now, I was going to fudge against you later- it would even out in the end.

Some years ago- after my style had changed to a much lower amount of fudging- I was running my 3.5 epic game, and one pc had split off to go do something solo. He encountered a shator demodand, who was guarding a portal the pc wanted to go through. The pc destroyed him with a single save or die spell, and the shator never even got to act. Later, a number of the players approached me separately and told me how cool they thought it was- because they'd been in many games where the bad guy would NEVER die on a failed save in round 1, and the fact that it had happened really drove home how impartial I was- how I really did let the dice fall where they may. Those conversations really reinforced my dedication to a nearly no-fudging style of DMing. But that doesn't make it the right style for everyone- just for me and my group.