Keeping a Group Together

[Sunseeker]

I would absolutely flip my if the DM told me his "fudging" was an accident. I would much rather he told me he did it on purpose to achieve a specific result. I may not like that result, but I would more readily accept such an explanation than "oops".

 

[Umbran]

Continually re-asserting this doesn't make it so! Not everyone shares your view about the role of the GM in refereeing a FRPG.

If you haven't bothered to have a separate conversation about a rule for a given table, what is in the rulebooks should be the base assumption.

If you have a major issue with a common gaming practice, you owe it to your fellow players to mention it before play begins, and not surprise people with it during play. If you didn't mention to your GM that you cannot tolerate fudging, and it then causes an issue for you, the problem wasn't the GM, fudging, or cheating.

Even after that conversation - zero-tolerance policies are often not the most constructive approach. Unless we are in a scored tournament, we are just a bunch of people sitting down to play a game. Yes, many folks have a strong emphasis on the "game" aspect. But we also have to remember the "play" aspect here, and keep perspective appropriate. This is a casual pursuit, and not a whole lot is riding on the result. Reactions to what people do should be considered with that in mind.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION]

The post to which I replied stated that "Only your DM can decide if they want to fudge. It is NEVER cheating."

The first sentence is trivially true, in the sense that (absent the sorts of duress and so on that are not normally present in RPGing) the GM can decide what s/he wants to do. Likewise, in exactly the same sense, players can choose whether to accurately report the results of their die rolls, to keep accurate track of the equipment on their character sheets, etc.

The second sentence is trivially false, in the sense that there are plenty of tables which regard GM fudging as cheating. And this and the many other fudging threads that take place on this board provide evidence of that.

Polite behaviour among a group of relative strangers - which is what your post seems to be addressing - seems orthogonal to those two points.

 

[Umbran]

The first sentence is trivially true...

The second sentence is trivially false...

Polite behaviour among a group of relative strangers - which is what your post seems to be addressing - seems orthogonal to those two points.

Perhaps. But then, your two points are 1) trivial, by your own admission, and 2) orthogonal to the original intent of the thread, which seems to me to be more to talk about practical advice on how we can all get along.

Seems to me that I'm the one back on-topic here.

 

[pemerton]

Perhaps. But then, your two points are 1) trivial, by your own admission, and 2) orthogonal to the original intent of the thread

I was replying to a post by the OP.

The OP, in the OP, says "I also encourage the DM to do this [ie fudge] whenever he feels it's worth it, and keep it secret." I think that's bad advice for keeping a group together. And it's not advice found in any DMG I can remember - they say to keep any particular episode of fudging secret (for obvious reasons), but they don't advise GMs to deny that they are using the technique.

If someone wants my advice on how to keep a RPGing group together: don't lie to one another about how you're handling action resolution. Also: if you don't feel, as a GM, that you can make the game work for you without lying to your players about the techniques you're using, find a game that is better suited to what you want.

 

[S'mon]

If you have a major issue with a common gaming practice, you owe it to your fellow players to mention it before play begins, and not surprise people with it during play. If you didn't mention to your GM that you cannot tolerate fudging, and it then causes an issue for you, the problem wasn't the GM, fudging, or cheating.

I've never seen a PHB that says "your DM may fudge" - the expectation seems to be that the GM wlll play fair arbitrator when it comes to task resolution. At most you get some rather weaselly fudgist words
in the DMing section of the rules, with no real solid guidance on what a table might consider acceptable.
But far more common is "don't let an undesired random encounter trash your campaign" type advice - ie GM should use discretion in content-generation. This may or may not be conflated with 'turn hits into
misses to keep PCs alive' type task-resolution fudging, but I definitely don't think there is some kind
of broad player consensus on the latter.

 

[Libramarian]

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.")

The only time I feel tempted to fudge is when letting the dice stand would seem to retard the players' learning. Like if they have a good reason to think there's a secret door in the area and search for it, but the dice say they don't find anything. But I still resist the urge to fudge. We all play poker so we're familiar with the idea that sometimes you make the right play but still lose. In this type of situation it's important that the players know the rules. If it's more of a black box situation, then I'll always give the players some kind of immediate feedback so they can learn something. Like if a monster is immune to fire damage, I'll tell them their attack seems to be ineffective, even if I'm tracking HP behind the screen. So not quite Say Yes or Roll the Dice (that's too kind for D&D IMO), but If You Say No Explain Why.

Last session a player cast augury before trying on a cloak of poisonousness. They had a 74% chance of success and I rolled a 77. So tempted to fudge but I didn't and the PC was stricken stone dead.

I never feel tempted to fudge against the players.

 

[Grogg of the North]

I'd like to pose the following scenario. Consider the following as a stream of consciousness from the DM.

"Hmmm ... I designed this encounter to be tough but, geeze, I really over estimated what the PCs are capable of. If only Bob was here tonight to play instead of being out sick. If I don't do something these guys are goners."

You are the DM, what do you do?

Assume that in this scenario that retreat is not an option. The avenue of escape has been cut off, the PCs are on a clock, the PCs are gearing up for a doomed last stand and ignoring the exit, et cetera.

Does your decision change if introducing Bob to a bunch of new characters is implausible? What if a TPK means the campaign is over and unresolved?

I'm curious to know what people think.

 

[pemerton]

I'd like to pose the following scenario. Consider the following as a stream of consciousness from the DM.

"Hmmm ... I designed this encounter to be tough but, geeze, I really over estimated what the PCs are capable of. If only Bob was here tonight to play instead of being out sick. If I don't do something these guys are goners."

You are the DM, what do you do?

It would depend very much on context. That said, there are three main options open: follow through on he TPK; set defeat conditions other than PC death; or have some sort of assistance for the PCs arrive.

Here are some anecdotes from my current campaign that illustrate each.

(1) Before my last session, which involved the PCs launching their attack on Orcus in his stronghold, I told the players that Orcus doesn't fail forward: ie if the PCs die, the PCs die. (Would I have stuck to this? I don't know - it's not going to come up, because in the subsequent session, which took us halfway through the assault, it became clear to me that the PCs will win.)

(2) The only time in my current campaign when there actually was a "TPK", the PCs weren't all killed. Of the five, three were captured. One died because the rules didn't leave any capture option (he had already been reduced below negative bloodied hit points). And a second died because, when I gave the players the choice of having their PCs died or captured, this particular player preferred his PC to die so that he could bring in a new PC.

(3) In an encounter described here, the following happened:

The invoker-wizard also came through the gate, in order to Thunderwave some elementals into the lava, but this turned out to expose him to their vicious melee and he, too, got cut down. In desperate straits as he lay on the ground next to his Gate (he was brought back to consciousness via some sort of healing effect), being hacked down by fire archons, he spoke a prayer to Erathis (one of his patron deities). After speaking the prayer, and after the player succeeded at a Hard Religion check, as the PC looked up into the rock cleft high above him, he saw a duergar standing on a ledge looking down. The PC already knew that the duergar revere Erathis (as well as Asmodeus). The duergar gave the Deep Speech hand sign for "I will offer you aid", and the PC replied with the sign for "The dues will be paid". The duergar then dropped a potion vial down to the PC. (I had already decided that I could place a duergar in the cleft if I wanted some sort of 3rd-party intervention into the fight. The successful prayer was the trigger for implementing that prior decision.)​

In fact, as things turned out, the PCs didn't actually need or use the potion (they got lucky with some other desperate stratagems).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'd like to pose the following scenario. Consider the following as a stream of consciousness from the DM.

"Hmmm ... I designed this encounter to be tough but, geeze, I really over estimated what the PCs are capable of. If only Bob was here tonight to play instead of being out sick. If I don't do something these guys are goners."

You are the DM, what do you do?

Assume that in this scenario that retreat is not an option. The avenue of escape has been cut off, the PCs are on a clock, the PCs are gearing up for a doomed last stand and ignoring the exit, et cetera.

Does your decision change if introducing Bob to a bunch of new characters is implausible? What if a TPK means the campaign is over and unresolved?

I'm curious to know what people think.

Alright, so: presuming that I and/or the system have failed so spectacularly that defeat is assured, but the normal escape clauses (being captured or retreating) are complete non-starters, I see at least three possible solutions. I'll list them from worst to best.

1. Tell the players, "Guys, I have ed up now, I have given you an unwinnable fight. If you're okay with it, I'm going to take a 15 minute break, and when we come back, we'll be doing this fight over from the beginning--because I screwed up. Bad."
This is the worst option because it kinda abandons even a pretense of maintaining fiction continuity, and the players may not even accept it, at which point the problem remains unsolved. If the players to accept it though (and I'd assume many would, if I am open and clear about the fact that this is *my* screwup), this has the benefit of actually fixing the root of the problem: *my* mistake. It doesn't punish the players, and if they treat the "first" fight as non-existent (or perhaps fodder for some other story, e.g. an alt-timeline failure, akin to the "Grima wins" timeline from Fire Emblem: Awakening) it avoids any concern of "fudging"--or, at least, I don't see this as being the same as "fudging." Re-writing an entire combat, with the explicit permission of the players, is rather a different thing than ignoring actual rolls (in secret, in the open, or pseudo-secret, e.g. "I might ignore dice at any time").

2. Call for a quick (~15 minute) break, during which you attempt to figure out how to extrapolate from the already-established fiction so that you can improve the party's chances of success and/or weaken the bad guys. Potentially, confer with each of the players individually and ask them what they think could go well or poorly. When the group reconvenes, apply these ideas to the fight (whether in progress or about to start). For example: perhaps the fight venue is dangerously unstable, like an ancient ruin or a volcanic cavern. The magical and physical energies released during the combat could easily cause the place to go from unstable to actively unsafe: encourage the players to make use of these instabilities, while the enemy freaks out about her/his lair/base/etc. falling apart and any lower-level participants (whether or not they are "minions") run around trying not to get crushed/burned/etc. instead of attacking the PCs.
This solution is better, in that it doesn't require a retcon and doesn't "really" require the buy-in of the PCs. It's not perfect, though, because you could *probably* still come up with SOME kind of special case scenario where there are NO extenuating circumstances, NO possible venue-related benefits, NO resources the players can draw on, etc. I would think such a fight would not be particularly good to begin with (since, IMO, the terrain should always be *at least* as interesting as the people you're fighting on it!) but I admit that it is a *possible* scenario.


3. If some of the party has plausible ties to higher powers or could plausibly have caught their interest (gods, demons/devils, primal spirits, powerful organizations, what-have-you), have one or more of these groups come in to save the day. Perhaps even have *each individual person* get a special moment--unseen by the other players--during which someone or something offers aid. Perhaps the party Wizard has long been snubbed by the elites at the Academy, but now--suddenly, *suspiciously*--they offer their aid in her hour of desperate need, if she will agree to do a...service...for them. The religious party members could get a divine mandate: You must live, there is a task appointed to you that you have not yet completed! (But perhaps they do not actually know who it is--a message delivered by an angel could come from almost any god...) Maybe the Fighter hears the call of all his ancestors: "You cannot pass this way until there is another." Etc.
I consider this best for three reasons. One, it turns what could have been a disaster into an enormous opportunity for roleplay and for players to feel awesome and badass just at the moment they thought they were toast. Two, it allows me (or generically the DM) to tailor entire new, and potentially very open-ended, plotlines for the players: and even *not* doing something for a particular party member could be a plotline all its own! (E.g.: "Everyone else in the party has someone special WATCHING them...why don't I?" Or: "I got powered up too, but no one claimed responsibility--WHO is watching me, and WHY??" Very appropriate for a Rogue, that one.) Three: It doesn't even require the kinda-sorta-semi-retconning of option 2, because it (hopefully) draws upon enough ideas already established in the fiction, and I find it unlikely at best that I would DM for a group that had NO attachments whatsoever to SOME being or group that could intervene.

If push came to absolute shove, and I had ZERO time to prepare/reconvene/fix, and NOTHING could be changed? I would almost surely go with option 1 and re-do the fight at the next session, with profuse apologies. If "next time" weren't an option--perhaps a one-shot kind of thing?--then, and ONLY then, under what I consider pretty "extreme" duress (as much as DMing can produce anything remotely like "extreme duress"), would I even consider fudging--and I would *still* hesitate to do it, and scramble to find SOMETHING else I could do.