Do you "save" the PCs?

[Fifth Element]

Acceptable. If the parameters were badly chosen, the best I can do is try to remedy the situation. I wouldn't bother telling the players and distracting them with maths they can't see anyway. If they ask, I would tell them I decided the regeneration rate on the skeletons was wrong and I have corrected it.

Unacceptable. Now I'm just pretending to use the rules.

I think my ultimate point here is that I see this as an arbitrary dividing line. If you can decide that the regeneration rate is too high, you can also decide that an attack bonus is too high, or a damage value is too high, or a crit range is too great, etc. There have been a lot of "okay/not okay" assertions made in this thread, and for the most part I don't see any real difference between the situations in question. Generally they involve the DM applying his authority, and there are no hard-and-fast rules as to how that should be done.

 

[pawsplay]

I think my ultimate point here is that I see this as an arbitrary dividing line. If you can decide that the regeneration rate is too high, you can also decide that an attack bonus is too high, or a damage value is too high, or a crit range is too great, etc.

I could do lots of things. That doesn't mean they're all equally good ideas.

There have been a lot of "okay/not okay" assertions made in this thread, and for the most part I don't see any real difference between the situations in question. Generally they involve the DM applying his authority, and there are no hard-and-fast rules as to how that should be done.

Of course not. It comes down to judgment.

I think it's one thing to say, "Ok, I made a mistake, I am going to try to fix this scenario with a minimum of fuss," versus breaking the central premise of an RPG: that the imaginary events are like real events in some way. If I change the regeneration of a skeleton, I don't go from a position of knowing to a position of not-knowing, I just alter a parameter I'm already controlling. On the other hand, if I start fudging rolls or using arbitrary situational modifiers, I move from a situation of not knowing an outcome to one of controlling it absolutely. Not only have I changed the nature of the game, I have changed my intentions toward it.

The skeleton thing is an example of where things have gone wrong, but it doesn't violate anyone's expectations if I go back and fix the math such that it is as-if they had regeneration 3 the whole time. I could just as easily have Gandalf show up and zap them with holy light. If I changed the regen rate and it seems like the players might be able to discern the change, I would be up front about it. "Sorry, guys, I had the regeneration rate on these guys wrong. Rather than redoing last round, I am going to drop this last one you hit before anything else changes and adjust the other's hit points to be what they should have been."

So, in short, it's not an arbitrary distinction, though its subtlety is difficult for you to understand from your viewpoint. To me, it's a very serious distinction, at least, about as serious as anything in an RPG is going to be. The skeleton thing is not an ideal scenario, so my rationale may not be as satisfying in that situation as in others, but certainly with the critting bad guy, I know exactly what I am about when I get behind that screen.

 

[Ariosto]

I can't parse this, so I can't respond to it.

It is a general rule that there are no polar bears in the Great Mafrican Desert. Let us suppose that, even as a "special" on the same sub-table as monsters summoned from the Elemental Planes, a polar bear is about as arbitrarily bizarre as an incalculably great number of other things that could turn up by truly random selection -- a carp, a Corvaire, a pack of Cub Scouts.

And yet, there it is on a table that someone else made up and I pressed into service. It would be an enigma to me, but the players might think of it -- and get into a position to treat it -- as a mystery. Let us suppose that I don't feel up to coming up with a reason for why a polar bear is in the desert. Maybe I've actually done that before and once is enough.

So, I re-roll and get a steam mephit instead. It could be passing through the desert en route to an errand elsewhere. Its lower-planar masters might well have sent it specifically to plague the PCs (depending on what they have been up to).

 

[Doug McCrae]

I think my ultimate point here is that I see this as an arbitrary dividing line.

A lot of lines are arbitrary. But sometimes there's value in having a line and saying, "I will not cross." For instance if I set myself the task of working on a project from 8pm-10pm Mon, Tue and Thu, I could've made it a different time and/or day, but there's value in setting a rule and sticking to it.

The other issue is that fudging a dice roll is 'cheating', deceiving the players, in a way that having an extra couple of monsters join the fight from an adjoining room isn't. Well, that is also cheating, kind of, but it's not such bad cheating. One could make a sliding scale, similar to what Benimoto has done. For me adjusting a dice roll is the worst and I won't do it. I don't think I'd ever change a monster's stats in the middle of a fight, but I have adjusted a monster's powers at the start of a battle (I did that at least once last campaign) where I looked at it and thought I'd just made it way too powerful. Fairly often I've planned encounters without defining the numbers of enemies present and made it up on the spot, which some GMs would probably regard as bad form.

I appreciate what you say about these lines being arbitrary. They are, in a way. But our lives are full of rules that are at least somewhat arbitrary.

All that said, I fully respect that you have chosen to fudge. Every GM is different, every table is different. There are no universal rules of roleplaying. (Well, except that Mary Sue NPCs are bad )

I've played with literally hundreds of different people, must be dozens of different GMs. There are so many different viable styles. I once played in a game which was very railroaded, and it worked extremely well, even though I'd normally say railroads are bad. There was one particular scene where the BBEG was clearly predestined to escape, and my PC was trying to stop him, and I thought it ended up being f--king brilliant with my character being pushed to the absolute limit (and beyond). The GM was coming up with really creative ideas to explain how the villain got away (on the back of his mutant shapeshifting dragon). It turns out mutant shapeshifting dragons can be surprisingly hard to stop.

And yet we are told that scenes where the PCs cannot win are always bad, that railroads are always bad. They're not always bad. They don't work for some groups, but they do work for others.

The moral is - there are no rules. Do whatever works.

 

[Fifth Element]

So, I re-roll and get a steam mephit instead. It could be passing through the desert en route to an errand elsewhere. Its lower-planar masters might well have sent it specifically to plague the PCs (depending on what they have been up to).

I understood what you meant by your example, it was the last line of your previous post I couldn't comprehend, the one that seemed to offer the reason why re-rolling like this is okay but fudging in combat is not.

 

[Fifth Element]

The moral is - there are no rules. Do whatever works.

I'm with you there. I have no problem with arbitrary lines, I draw them myself all the time. Just as long as everyone realizes they're arbitrary, and that the lines can be in very different places for different people, and it's up to everyone to draw their own lines. And that my lines being in a different place than yours does not betray a weakness in me, or a lack of planning or anything like that.

 

[Ariosto]

I understood what you meant by your example, it was the last line of your previous post I couldn't comprehend, the one that seemed to offer the reason why re-rolling like this is okay but fudging in combat is not.

Very simply, "without some extraordinary reason, there are no polar bears in the Great Mafrican Desert" is a rule of the game. "The DM saves or dooms your character on a whim, regardless of what the combat dice read" is -- with or without a "TPK" clause -- very simply not.

The rule is very clearly that the DM does not do that. It is not at all hard to parse for the people to whom it is actually relevant.

If we've got bless and chant going, and someone miscalculates a roll, then we correct the figure of lost hit points (or whatever may be at issue) if the error is caught soon enough. Why? Because how those spells work is also a matter of rules upon which we have agreed.

We could agree to a rule that, say, "no creature can go below zero hit points unless it was at zero before the hit. Any excess damage is wasted, and zero h.p. just means unconsciousness. A creature so unconscious is as vulnerable as we have established is the case for one magically sleeping or held, and dies if brought to -6 hit points."

Were that the rule, then obviously it would mandate that a creature with but 21 points left cannot lose 48 points from one hit, "critical" or otherwise. If there were some exception to the rule, then the exception would itself be a rule.

 

[Fifth Element]

Very simply, "without some extraordinary reason, there are no polar bears in the Great Mafrican Desert" is a rule of the game.

Unless, of course, the DM decides that there is a polar bear in the Great Mafrican Desert this time. Which is certainly within his authority to say.

"The DM saves or dooms your character on a whim, regardless of what the combat dice read" is -- with or without a "TPK" clause -- very simply not.

And it's also not what we're discussing, despite misrepresentations or misunderstandings to the contrary.

The rule is very clearly that the DM does not do that.

And if the DM can ignore the polar bear rule if he so chooses, say because he thinks it would be cooler for there to be one in the desert this time, he cannot ignore this rule because...

 

[Ariosto]

And it's also not what we're discussing, despite misrepresentations or misunderstandings to the contrary.

Wow. Please tell what you think "we're" discussing, so I can decide whether I want to discuss it.

And if the DM can ignore the polar bear rule if he so chooses, say because he thinks it would be cooler for there to be one in the desert this time, he cannot ignore this rule because...

The DM is not ignoring "the polar bear rule". The DM is applying the rule, so that the players can also use the rule and thereby play a game, instead of being on rails through an utterly arbitrary environment that permits no formulation of strategy.

The DM is letting the players play the game.

It is not necessary for you to understand, and it is most unlikely for you to understand if you are determined not to understand.

Look, you CAN break whatever rule you want! The only recourse anyone has is not to play with you.

Why shouldn't the DM change the ability scores, race, class, sex I have chosen?
Why shouldn't the DM change my character from 1st level to 30th, or vice-versa?
Why shouldn't the DM drop an asteroid for an extinction-event TPK?
Why shouldn't the DM have my player's spells randomly produce almost anything -- from a rabbit to tapioca pudding -- except what they are supposed to?
Why shouldn't the DM just ignore anything and everything that interferes with making events conform with her outline of the Epic Fantasy Novel for which we are merely to fill in the dialog for her?

Why shouldn't the DM "save" the PCs?
It's the same fundamental answer.

 

[Hussar]

/snip


A session can only be derailed if it's on the rails to begin with. The "good stuff" can come from the most surprising of places when the players control the action.
/snip

Bold mine.

Too true. However, the incredibly boring, bad, and crappy stuff can also come from exactly the same place.

And, how does changing a monster's die roll have anything to do with the player's controlling the action? The players have no control here either way. Whether their fate is left to the dice or to the DM, at no point are they masters of their own fate. Barring, of course, game mechanics like in Mutants and Masterminds which explicitly give them this power.

But, "I'm going to reduce the damage here so that the PC is at -5 hp instead of flat out dead" has nothing to do with player control over the action.