AD&D DMG, on fudging

[Votan]

I was thinking about this and it occured to me that I had a real life example of this back in the early 1990's. It was D&D 2E and I was playing a Paladin and I was about level 3, iirc (might have been 4).

For various reasons, the character got separated from the party and was having fatigue penalties on the way back to town. So the DM rolled a random encounter. It happened. The he rolled for type. 1d3 trolls. So he rolled 3 trolls.

Needless to say, I woke up to monsters that moved faster than me, had me surrounded and that I could not injure in any real way. End of the Paladin.

After the game, the DM confessed that he felt bad about the Trolls. They were an unlikely encounter and I had the worst possible result. If he had to do it all over he would have just picked the kobolds off the list. I might have been killed by them too but then it would have been a tense battle and we'd all have felt better about it (I was pretty upset at the time).

I went on to try a vanilla CG human fighter and things went well.

In this situation, it would have been better to pick and not roll. But I might have accepted rolling, deciding it was a really unfun result, and picking the kobolds as an option.


Now this is worlds apart from deciding to fudge combat rolls on a regular basis. While I suspect that could be done too (after all, diceless roleplaying exists), I think it might make more sense to declare that up front and use a system where the lack of randomness is an expectation of the game design.

 

[billd91]

But even that aside, how does the DM know it's "easier" to just discard some of the possible results, without stopping and thinking about what they might be? And if he does stop and think about what they may be, and then decides it's easier to use DM fiat to change the probabilities ...

... that's not fudging.

DM's Internal Monologue:

Wow, this is an important roll. If the assassin rolls a crit here, he'll kill the sentry silently, and at that point he can coup de grace the whole party.

Seems like a pretty good time to "stop and think" to me.

Okay, so I'm going to roll, but if a crit comes up, it's just a hit. The poison might still kill the PC in 10 rounds, of course.

That's not fudging. That's the DM assigning probabilities on the fly, and adhering to them. That's the DM doing his job which, yeah, does include the necessity of stopping to think from time to time.

And the practical difference? Nothing. Not a thing. Why is one fundamentally different from the other? Either way it sounds like some posters around here would call you dishonest because you rolled one result but disregarded it in favor of an outcome you preferred. Yet you think one is a fudge but the other isn't?

 

[Jeff Wilder]

And the practical difference? Nothing. Not a thing.

First, that's not true. In one case, the DM is actually engaged with the game and with the consequences of the choices he's making in terms of challenges for the players. A DM that thinks about these things -- "can my 4th level group reasonably survive the crit from this T. rex?" -- is a better DM, and, practically speaking, one that becomes less and less likely to make mistakes that (surprise!) some of y'all claim justify fudging. That's a (literally) practical difference.

Second, even if there were no practical difference, that doesn't make the distinction worthless. There's "no practical difference" between waiting until I sober up to drive (and making it home without incident) and driving home drunk (and making it home without incident), but one of those choices is superior to the other.

(As an unrelated aside, I think Piratecat's concern that this thread would turn into an extension of the other one is proving to have been correct. I've said what I wanted to say, in both places, and people can give it consideration or not (as I can the words of others). I'm bowing out and taking my share of the thread-cloning with me.)

 

[Fifth Element]

What we are talking about is the DM setting a chance that X happens, quite possibly believing the odds are so small that it will not happen, and then changing the roll when those small odds come up.

If this is what you've been talking about all this time, no wonder the two sides seem to be talking past each other. No surprise, really, given the use of an ambiguous term like "fudging". You're using a very, very narrow definition that you did not define well to begin with.

I daresay most people would include "if I roll a crit on this next roll, it will just be a normal hit" to fit the definition of fudging. I would describe it as fudging, and used the term as such in the other thread.

 

[ExploderWizard]

All this talk of fudging has made me soooo hungry......

 

[Umbran]

Folks, the other thread got closed after more than 50 pages - if you go back and read it, I think like me you will see that it got very repetitive. It had, as PS noted, shed as much light as it was going to. Nobody was budging an inch.

We seem clearly on the road to duplicating that here. Please, let's not.

This thread started with a very specific purpose - exploring the AD&D DMG on fudging. Not the validity of the technique as a whole, but what the book had to say on the matter. Let's stick to that.

 

[pawsplay]

These are not in any way mutually exclusive. Cannot one have a conscious, deliberate decision to avoid a particular natural outcome?

Of course, one can. In fact, let me make explicit that part of the reason I started this thread is because I thought the DMG passage was interesting from the standpoint of looking at certain nuances.

And, by the way, thinking about it, "overruling the dice" seems to me to require it be post-roll. Like in a court of law - the judge cannot overrule an objection until after the lawyer voices an objection. Similarly, the GM cannot overrule the dice if the dice have not said what should happen. Overruling implies a prior ruling to be overcome.

I want to ask explicitly - are you trying to find meaning in the fact that he didn't use the specific term "fudge" or didn't specifically note the example of changing a to-hit roll?

The latter. Although it seems to be within the realm of what he might allow, if jusified, it appears, to me, to be in the category of things he would recommend not doing.

If not, ignore the rest of this post.

If you are, I'd like to point out that, as a tool of analysis, looking at what is not said is highly error prone, when compared to looking at what is said.

For example - he never uses the term "fudge". So what? While Gary first coined many gaming terms, he didn't coin all of them. Language use drifts a bit over time, and new words get adopted. We have had decades to adopt jargon Gary didn't use. His failure to say "fudge" (or any particular piece of modern gaming jargon) does not speak directly to whether he intended us to do what we today call fudging.

Another - he did list some example of what he meant. Would you expect that list of examples to be exhaustive? Given that he said, "at any time," I would expect the examples to be merely demonstrative. "At any time" is so clearly all-inclusive that to also expect a specific list of all possible cases would be superfluous.

Otherwise, what we are considering him to have said was, "overrule the dice at any time, and by 'any time' I mean 'only this specific list of times'". That when he said "any" he didn't really mean any, he meant some.

That was not my reading. He said overrule the dice any time, and then he went on to describe some circumstances in which it might be helpful. Since he did not suggest changing a to-hit roll, wrote that monsters should get an even break, and suggested changing a PC death into perhaps a severe maiming, I draw two conclusions:

1. Gygax did not take an explicit position on fudging a singular die roll in that passage. (I would be curious if he took a stand elsewhere, actually).
2. If allowed, it doesn't seem to be a part of what he's recommending.

If you want a slippery slope, my friend, this kind of analysis is it. "He said X, but what he really meant was Y..." is a good way to have the text mean anything you personally want it to mean, and the original author be damned.

Certainly, we're not going to go there. I just want to clarify that EGG claimed the sovereignty of the GM over the dice, but he did not say, as may have been implied by others, that he endorsed die-roll fudging in combat resolution.

I am not pointing a figure at you, but I do get a sense that I am being asked to defend the position of, say, Raven Crowking. I don't consider myself a person of extreme viewpoint. I hold a nuanced position in the fudge-versus-don't-fudge debate, although I stand in the no-fudging camp. Because the AD&D DMG is being held up as a historical authority, I want to explore what it says. By my reading, Gygax also takes a nuanced position, although he suggests some particulars I might be discinclined to do, although I wouldn't rule them out.

Specifically, nothing in the DMG I'm reading says to me, "Yes, fudge," by a fairly general understanding of fudging to be, "To alter the outcome of a die result, covertly, primarily and almost purely because the result is disliked." I would say, "No, don't fudge," but I don't read anything in the DMG I categorically disagree with.

 

[Fifth Element]

You'll have to kill the orc first. But it's so worth it.

 

[Umbran]

1. Gygax did not take an explicit position on fudging a singular die roll in that passage. (I would be curious if he took a stand elsewhere, actually).

Agreed.

2. If allowed, it doesn't seem to be a part of what he's recommending.

When I read over some of this stuff, though, I come across something fairly notable. He does, as you said, advocate the sovereignty of the DM over the rules. But most of the verbiage is general. The number of specific examples he gives of doing so is very small. I think there's only a couple.

If we are to use that as a guide, his view on that sovereignty is actually pretty darned limited, especially when one stops to consider how many specific acts of exerting that power the GM could choose to take.

If he'd really wanted us to limit where we should exercise the power to very limited cases, he could have listed those cases very easily, and explicitly said, "don't do anything other than this", could he not?

I am not pointing a figure at you, but I do get a sense that I am being asked to defend the position of, say, Raven Crowking.

Not my intention - that's why I stopped and asked, to make sure I wanted to know what you were about, instead of assuming and having you defend a position you didn't hold

Specifically, nothing in the DMG I'm reading says to me, "Yes, fudge," by a fairly general understanding of fudging to be, "To alter the outcome of a die result, covertly, primarily and almost purely because the result is disliked." I would say, "No, don't fudge," but I don't read anything in the DMG I categorically disagree with.

Okay, here's something I'll quibble with - you make the reasons for fudging intrinsic to the act. I think that leads to prejudgement of the technique.

 

[pawsplay]

Okay, here's something I'll quibble with - you make the reasons for fudging intrinsic to the act. I think that leads to prejudgement of the technique.

My reservations are intrinsic to the act. It's possible to outweigh those intrinsic costs and risks. I guess more generally I would say that any approach has a price. However, I am particularly skeptical of die fudging, because I feel it undermines some of the unique characteristics of RPGs.

To me, this section seems to exclude all but edge cases of fudging:

In making
such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player
character with your actions. "ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!"

It's hard to argue that causing a whiff is not harm to a monster. Obviously, Gygax is not concerned about the monster's feelings, but about the game construct itself. So although Gygax has not taken a specific position on that action, the general principle seems to discourage it.

Following up:

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will
have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but
still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you
should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent
with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right
to arbitrate the situation.

So while he does not forbid saving PCs explicitly, he is explicitly saying to let them die due to a "freakish roll of the dice." Whether or not such a call is permissible in a given GM's style, clearly Gygax has here declared that those improbable, undesirable results are to be endured.

The only dice he explicitly invites you to fix are ones related to creating the structure of the game: its wandering monsters, the availability of clues which lead to adventures, etc. Those rolls determine the initial starting conditions.

Now, I am going to step beyond what Gygax has stated outright. If the fixing of dice that alter the scenario is permitted, but saving PCs is discouraged, the general principle I draw is: Do not tamper with the outcome of the resolution systems, they contain a certain kind of truth within the game. Whether or not that was the intended message, it was certainly a part of my grooming as a young gamer in the mid 1980s.