D&D 5E Do you want your DM to fudge?

[Tony Vargas]

I have to second Aaron of Barbaria's response here: your phrasing implies that the only options are "do nothing, and thus have a game that sucks" or "fudge, and thus have a game that is good."

Another way to look at it is that 'fudging' is perfectly justified when it will result in a better game, whether that's preventing the game from sucking or merely making a good game a bit better.

Why fudge to make the game worse? Running bad games is dead easy.

Yeah as I've said elsewhere, "placebo rolling" (good phrase, that) isn't among the things I classify as "fudging."

I have to consider it all part of the same broader phenomenon of running the game from behind the screen instead of above board. Taking more of the game behind the screen gives you more tools to manage the experience, it dovetails neatly with DM Empowerment (because too much of that, in the players' faces, can concievably cause some resentment or some sense that the experience is less real or less 'immersive' or whatever). Some games run fine above-board with the DM less empowered and more like a player in many ways. 5e, by design, is not one of those games.

I'd be careful about throwing around the word "dishonesty" in this conversation. I do think that making players THINK a roll matters when it doesn't is...disingenuous, at the very least, which is why I don't like the "placebo rolling" thing. But people get offended, and probably rightly so, for having their fudging called "dishonest," so...maybe don't use that word.

Thanks for the words of sanity, there. Some lines have definitely been crossed in this thread - disagreement is one thing, blatant insults quite another. To my mind, there's nothing dishonest about taking parts of the game behind the screen. By doing so, it's clear things are being concealed from the players, and whether that's a map, the number of hps a monster has left, the results of a die roll, or whether that die roll mattered, is immaterial.

They literally did nothing but change how it was described. When I learned about that, it poisoned my appreciation of the so-called "rested bonus"--because mathematically equivalent things should arouse the same feelings on my part.

Just human nature.

If it is the group versus a bad guy, why is Steve striking down the bad guy so much more interesting than Joe or anyone else? It may be more fulfilling for Steve -- or not since striking down the bad guy is a team effort still.

Good example. It's precisely because you want to emphasize that it's a team effort that you might want to tilt the glory one way or another in a particular instance. Some games force that kind of thing with mechanical balance, but, in 5e, as the flip-side of Empowerment, it's a responsibility of the DM. The best way, IMHO, of keeping that kind of spotlight balance moving is to have really diverse challenges so that each PCs specialties come up at some point - but fudging a specific roll or detail in the moment might be an effective way of assuring it.

It's very different from 4e's tightly-structured class & encounter balance (in 4e, I could run with not just die rolls, but monster stats out in the open, and let players track hps, and have seen many DMs do the same - heck I could leave the 'dungeon map' out in the open, since navigating it would be a skill challenge rather than a pixel-tapping exercise), or 3.5's RAW-adherence (in 3.5, players can count on the rules being the rules and build their characters and make decisions accordingly - even if the DM invokes rule 0, the expectation is he'll do so up-front, and stick to it, same with any 'interpretations,' little respect that they might get). In 5e the DM really is Empowered. The rules rely on him for interpretation at every turn. Rulings trump rules, and the game can be run in the moment, to deliver the best possible play experience to the best ability of the DM, not executed like an algorithm or negotiated like a contract.

 

[Umbran]

Basically, a DM will resort to cheating the dice because of a personal need to do so. I think if we took, at random, a close look at all the fudging done by some of the people who admit here that they do it, almost all of it would be completely selfish in nature. They aren't doing it for the enjoyment of the group.

Do you understand how insulting this is? "My personal experience means that pretty much all of you are doing things for selfish reasons."

How would you like it if others started making negative suggestions about people who paint with a broad brush in this manner? Would you like people to start speculating about why you seem to have a need to tear others down, for example? I daresay that, if they felt like it, folks could come up with some very uncomplimentary suggestions about your personal psychology. We could provide tons of innuendo and personal examples of when we saw that someone doing this kind of thing was a total nozzle.

You probably wouldn't like it at all. And, you'd have very little moral high ground to stand on, given how you just insulted people.

So maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't do this to others. You remember the Golden Rule, that you were probably taught in kindergarten? You might consider applying it from this point on.

Thanks.

 

[Nytmare]

Players do the darndest things. What happens if Steve misses/decides to do something other than strike/loses his turn? Does the fight continue with non-Steves not managing to drop the bad guy until Steve gets around to finishing him? If not is the outcome any better than giving Joe the kill? Does the bad guy (or anyone else on his side) get to hit anyone else in the meantime?

If the rule I decided on is "the next hit drops him" then the next hit drops him. If for some reason I decided that strain on the pacing and the narrative was worth yet another round, then maybe I would, but I doubt it and we're probably just throwing around too many imaginary layers of make believe for the conversation to be worthwhile. I believe that my sense of how to write a story aided by random input is better than straight out random input.

Robbing Joe to potentially give Steve a payoff looks like a losing proposition to me while at the same time extending the duration of the fight. I don't want my DM to adjust the universe based on his prediction of what I may do next and/or how I (the player) may feel about my role in the current team endeavour.

I consider robbing Joe to give Steve a payoff, extending the duration of the fight, and adjusting the universe based off of predictions as to what the players might do next to be decisions better made by a person entrusted to running the game.

If it is the group versus a bad guy, why is Steve striking down the bad guy so much more interesting than Joe or anyone else? It may be more fulfilling for Steve -- or not since striking down the bad guy is a team effort still. It's not like Steve's PC called the bad guy out for a duel of honour or anything. If the DM really wants the emotional payoff to occur, arrange the setting and situation such that some form of personal battle makes sense and give Steve the chance to earn that payoff (or not if he feels the need for team support).

If there IS a more interesting outcome, a person is going to be able to recognize it better than a 20 sided die. Maybe that recognition will come far enough in advance that the DM and players will be able to act on it. Maybe that recognition won't come until the bad guy is one hit away from dying. The imaginary situation I'm illustrating is the second one, not the first.

 

[Skyscraper]

OP here. Um, you guys are kinda over-arguing this, don't you think?

Well, if you're having fun, why not. But... are you?

What everyone thinks fudging is and what it means in the grand universal scheme of things is kinda overthinking things in my very humble opinion. Like BB King said, everybody lies a little, sometimes No biggie.

Thanks for all the talk however, it's very interesting to see the divergence in points of view, and mostly the divergence in this and the other thread's results. I'll post something on that topic right now.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Thanks for all the talk however, it's very interesting to see the divergence in points of view, and mostly the divergence in this and the other thread's results.

Keep in mind that it's unlikely the exact same people responded to each thread. So we can't just up and conclude that DMs who happily fudge in their own games 'hypocritically' resent it when they're playing. You may have fudge-happy DMs who don't play at all, or who didn't respond to this poll for whatever related or unrelated reasons.

 

[Skyscraper]

Keep in mind that it's unlikely the exact same people responded to each thread. So we can't just up and conclude that DMs who happily fudge in their own games 'hypocritically' resent it when they're playing. You may have fudge-happy DMs who don't play at all, or who didn't respond to this poll for whatever related or unrelated reasons.

Indeed. Even if the responders were totally different however, it's still an interesting result.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

False dichotomy.

I didn't make a dichotomy.

That a tool can be used incorrectly does not mean that the tool when used correctly is bad.

I didn't say that it did... but, I know you are literate so you know that already,

Fudging is a tool that when used correctly is for the shared fun of the group.

Fudging is a tool that when used correctly can still cause difficulty in your players trusting that you are using it correctly, so even when used correctly it is a tool that carries a risk of harming the shared fun - thus it is not as good for the shared fun as a different tool, like not-fudging, that supports the fun of the group but does not carry the same risk.

There's no way you will ever be able to tell what I rolled when I announce a hit, miss, crit or fumble. You'd have to be able to see the die roll for that.

You are delusional if you think I need to know what the actual die result was in order to be able to tell that you are lying about the result of the die roll - and worse, a player need not actually be correct in thinking a DM has fudged for damage to be done to the fun of the game, they just need to think the DM is fudging and the DM not be ready and able to provide evidence otherwise.

While I can't guarantee that it will be more fun, the tool is there so that they do have more fun and I can observe the increase in enjoyment.

Right... um... what?

Namely, I see them get dejected when they have extreme bad luck and are getting their arses kicked, despite doing everything right. When thing even up a bit more due to fudging, their fun skyrockets. So far I've never been wrong, but I suppose I might be one day.

You don't actually know that your fudging resulted in more fun that what would have happened if you let their bad luck carry through and just progress from their, so you might actually already have been wrong by having prevented the players the cathartic "revenge" after a loss.

I'll take the risk and continue to use the fudging tool for its purpose.............to increase enjoyment in the group.

Which you have already admitted you can't guarantee you are actual increasing.

 

[Hussar]

Swimming upthread a ways but this caught my eye.

Forgive me for a completely anecdotal tangent:

If asked independently and individually, my old stable of 3rd Ed players would easily have pointed to a single night's adventure as the "best session" of our 4 or 5 year Scarred Lands/Bane Warrens campaign. After months and months of playing, they finally got the upper hand over their enemies, and tracked them and the current MacGuffin to their secret base. They planned and plotted a stealthy assault and crawled, combat round to combat round, into and through the rotting and abandoned lighthouse their enemies were hiding in. Stealth checking, lock picking, flanking and outmaneuvering, accompanied by me mapping and rolling, checking my notes. Asking for perception rolls, rolling dice, looking at NPC character sheets, grabbing miniatures, double checking the stealth rules, noting exactly where light sources illuminated to.

And the place was completely empty.

I don't give a crap if I was outright lying to them, and after they found out that I was, neither did they. It thrilled them, and if that makes me a bad DM, so be it.

Heh, it always surprises me when I read people's gaming stories about what they enjoy or don't. If I did this as a DM, my players would beat me about the head and shoulders with bags of dice. I just wasted (presumably) significant table time on something that could have been summed up in one sentence - You search the tower and it's empty. And the player's not only were good with this but also considered this a great session?

Or, am I misunderstanding and the place was originally designed to be empty and you filled it after the players decided to assault it? If it's the latter, then fantastic. I wouldn't consider this fudging in the least. A bit "on the fly" sure, but, since you're creating an entire scenario to be played through, I wouldn't have an issue with it. It's not like there was any deception going on at all. Sure, the tower was originally designed to be empty, but, meh, that's not an issue. The players expect the baddies to be in there and, sure enough, the baddies are in there. Fantastic.

Which, to me, is significantly different from changing results at the table because they don't fit with what the DM wants.

------

I think it's rather funny to see the disconnect between this thread and the other fudging thread which is directed at DM's. In the other thread, only about 20% of DM's say they never fudge. Yet, here, 40% of players say they never want the DM to fudge. IMO, this leads to a LOT of friction at the table because of the disconnect between what the DM thinks makes a "better game" and what the players think makes a "better game".

Me, I don't fudge, roll virtually everything in the open, never adjust monster HP, and the treat the die roll as law. To me, and not to anyone else, just me, I don't see the point in playing a game where you have random determiners and then ignore those random determiners. Lots of games don't use random determiners. I enjoy the heck out of those games too. But, AFAIC, if the dice hit the table, you deal with the consequences of that. If that means that a PC dies a completely meaningless death, fantastic. If that means the PC's smoke my Big Bad in one round, that's great too. There are an unlimited number of PC's and NPC's out there. They are ultimately all replaceable.

 

[Lehrbuch]

Heh, it always surprises me when I read people's gaming stories about what they enjoy or don't. If I did this as a DM, my players would beat me about the head and shoulders with bags of dice. I just wasted (presumably) significant table time on something that could have been summed up in one sentence - You search the tower and it's empty. And the player's not only were good with this but also considered this a great session?

One person's "waste of time" is another person's "building atmosphere and paranoid tension". Sure I wouldn't like it if this happened lots. But happening once in a campaign (and not every campaign) is fine.

It's the sort of thing that players/PCs will refer "fondly" back to later, "You want to sneak into and ambush the bandits in their lair? You remember that time we did that in the Waterdeep and the bastards weren't even fecking there. Are you absolutely sure they are here..." It becomes part of the lore of the campaign/playgroup. You don't get that effect from one sentence "You search the tower and it's empty".

 

[Tony Vargas]

In the other thread, only about 20% of DM's say they never fudge. Yet, here, 40% of players say they never want the DM to fudge. IMO, this leads to a LOT of friction at the table because of the disconnect between what the DM thinks makes a "better game" and what the players think makes a "better game".

If the DM succeeds in running an entertaining game from behind a DM screen, each player will walk away thinking that what he believes is the right way to run the game was exactly what was going on behind the screen. If the game sucks, they'll be convinced you 'did it wrong' under the cover of the screen. If a DM runs a great game 'above board,' any players who are convinced the way he ran it was 'wrong' won't benefit from it, and may well bring everyone else down, too. The more latitude you have in how you run your game, the more sense it makes to take it behind the screen and limit what you share with your players. That creates opportunities for 'fudging,' placebo rolls, and all sorts of DM little tricks, as a bonus.

To me, and not to anyone else, just me, I don't see the point in playing a game where you have random determiners and then ignore those random determiners. Lots of games don't use random determiners. I enjoy the heck out of those games too.

5e is a game that uses random determiners or not based on the DMs judgement.