D&D General The Problem with Talking About D&D

[billd91]

It is not made clear to his players. He has said, in another video, that he will straight-up lie to his players about whether he honestly rolled a particular result. To the point of faking die rolls so there's a physical object to point to. He will straight-up tell them that he's playing exactly by the numbers when he's not, and he thinks this is perfectly acceptable.

Again, people play differently.
But since this is about fudging, it's obviously a religious issue and should probably not be appropriate for this site.

 

[Jahydin]

I don't believe the point of 5e is just for the DM to show the players a good time. As has been said, feels very cruise director-y to me. That said, I'm glad it works for you.

When it comes to combat you'll have to share your house rules with me then, because as is, from Level 3 and onward, 5E seems completely built from the ground up to facilitate happy times and high-fives all night, lol.

The "cruise director" bit confuses me though? Besides combat, there are plenty of other factors that challenge the characters and give them plenty of opportunities to make meaningful choices. Out of the Abyss starts off with all the characters enslaved by the drow with all their items taken from them. In order to get out, they will need to make NPC friends, use their skills in clever ways, find whatever tools and gear they can and make the best of them, make sure to dodge the high-level drow in the area, and figure out the safest destination once they escape, since just wondering the Underdark would surely get them killed.

In the past, I've relied solely on solid combat math and dungeon exploration mechanics to challenge my players. Part of getting the best 5E experience in my opinion is letting that go and focus on challenging story objectives.

 

[pemerton]

Too many DMs, despite speaking so highly of the importance of stakes and how choices have consequences etc. seem rather precious about making sure that every fight goes according to plan, such that they'd rather deceive their players than allow a fight to be an accidental curbstomp (whether for or against the players.)

I don't think the normative language ("too many") is necessary. It seems more productive to recognise that you have a different priority from them - their priority is that the desire "story beats" occur and be experienced by the players; your priority is a type of "integrity of the challenge" that would be disrupted by the kinds of in-the-moment changes/fudging that are being discussed.

I explicitly referred to doing it in play ("once battle is joined," which I said twice) so it feels more than a little unfair to skewer me on "but clearly this can happen BEFORE play!" Statistics that haven't entered play yet are not inviolate. I have no problem with that. I am specifically and exclusively talking about modifying a creature's statistics or rolls during combat.

Here's an excellent example of why normative language is best avoided. Your willingness to allow changes of statistics before entering play works for you. But there are approaches - some of the classic approaches that I mentioned upthread and @Thomas Shey commented on - where what is in the GM's notes, and particularly the dungeon map and key, are expected to be inviolate, because part of the point of play is for the players to engage with and work out that hidden information, and they can't do that if it is subject to change.

To be clear: I am a very poor practitioner of that classic style, very rarely attempt it (unless you count my recent Torchbearer sessions) and am not advocating for it in this thread. I'm just using it to illustrate the point that different groups of RPGers have different play priorities, and those different priorities make different techniques - including changing stats during or before encounters - more or less useful. And so it seems more helpful, in discussion, to bring out those features of different techniques and their utility for different approaches, rather than to adopt normative orientations towards them.

I have never--not one single time--needed to fudge a single roll or secretly alter a single creature's stats, in four years of gaming (with a fair number of "we need a week off" breaks now and then, but definitely not a full year's worth of them). It is not necessary to do this

I mean, the words "needed" and "necessary" here really mean wanted and desirable. It's about preference and play priorities.

In my Traveller campaign, I have tended to make up the geography - be it local, or interstellar - "just in time", often in front of my players with them aware that I'm making it up, because it is no part of the play of that game to uncover hidden geographic information. But when I recently GMed a session of White Plume Mountain, and running Torchbearer over the past several weeks, I have religiously stuck to the prep as best I can, because part of the point of those RPG experiences is for the players to cleverly engage with the pre-established geography of the setting.

it is absolutely deceptive to do it. Coleville himself openly said he will fake dice rolls so he can "prove" that the die "really" rolled what he said it did, even though it didn't. That is actively deceptive and, thus, cheating.

There are all sorts of deception that are not cheating, from parents telling kids about Santa, to teachers fudging answers to questions about what will be on the exam, to white lies told to smooth over socially awkward moments, to the performances of stage magicians.

Clearly you do not place the same priority on GM as deliverer of a performance and RPG play as experience of a tightly pre-scripted story as Coleville apparently does. That's fine. As it happens, nor do I. That doesn't mean that Coleville is cheating. The inference from preference to norms, here, is unsound.

he (and a lot of other DMs) design a lot of monsters and encounters and playtest them in their main campaigns, which they don't want to completely destroy by a single encounter.

If you accidentally homebrew an overpowered monster for your players to fight or end up adding too many enemies to a single encounter (which could lead to a TPK), it is perfectly valid to adjust their stats mid-combat and fudge die rolls to make them a more appropriate challenge for the party's specific level and class composition.

Speaking a bit abstractly - thinking across a range of RPGs beyond just 5e - there are other possibilities here. For instance, in Burning Wheel if a monster introduces a new creature, a player is entitled to ask about how many "points" of build it has (there's a bit more to it than that, but I hope I've conveyed the idea). In Marvel Heroic RP, the stat block for an opponent is normally much more public than in D&D. In many systems, there are approaches to consequence narration which mean that harder than expected doesn't entail TPK, let alone "game over".

My reason for making this point is to further illustrate why I think talking about play priorities, and how different available techniques - some of which are system-dependent - support or undermine them, is a more profitable approach to discussion than a strongly normative orientation.

 

[pemerton]

All of our tables are different

<snip>

We all play the game differently. We all have different players, playstyles, and adventuring parties. This fact proves that what might be acceptable at one table might not be acceptable at another.

<snip>

Furthermore, being "deceptive" is often a necessary part of being a DM. DMs are the storytellers of the table, and like any good storyteller, a DM sometimes has to mislead or even outright lie to their players at different occasions in order to craft/foster a better story. There is no substantial difference between adjusting an encounter mid-combat than there is to having the BBEG pretend to be a good guy in order to deceive the party and players.

Because I agree with the first two quoted paragraphs, I disagree with the third. The notion of necessity is out of place here. Not all DMs, let alone all GMs, are the storytellers at the table. And at some tables the difference between your two scenarios is substantial.

 

[Jahydin]

Again, people play differently.
But since this is about fudging, it's obviously a religious issue and should probably not be appropriate for this site.

I don't think it's a religious issue, but more of a concern of establishing a consistent world and/or making D&D less of a game. Like if someone cheats at solitaire, even if you don't think it's a moral issue, you might still think they're wasting their time, no matter how much fun they're having.

 

[IvyDragons]

Some people play different types of games. I would never want to play a serious game of D&D with Matt Colville or anyone who can't respect the dice. If you messed up and we all die, I'm ok with that just don't make up dice rolls or fabricate fewer hit points just so you can decide how the game goes. That is the most egregious railroading, and its great and very appropriate for children, but not for me.

 

[Jahydin]

I have also used reduced-HP / nerfed creatures because I know the standard would likely be a TPK. But again, that decision is made before the encounter starts.

Before an encounter begins I might also make an "Orc Commander" with a +1 or 2 to AC, attack rolls, etc. as a leader of a band of orcs, who will likely have better hp. But that is part of the design of the encounter, not on the fly to make it harder.

Why is it so important if it's before the encounter or during?

To me, everything game related is in a quantum state of sorts and doesn't "materialize" until it's observed. The orc's AC is normally 13, but until a character "observes" this by hitting with a particular die roll, why can't it be 11 (no armor) or 15 (better armor)?

 

[DND_Reborn]

Why is it so important if it's before the encounter or during?

Because IME the players go into the game (and encounters) with an understanding of how the world works. Can they change their prepared spells to work for an encounter because the prepared ones don't fit? Can they just change their armor from a chain shirt to chain mail because you are hitting them too much? I highly doubt it.

If you think about it, you are setting up the encounters for them, and they are setting up their PCs for you. The DM should have to abide by the same restrictions the players do. If I expect heavy combat, yes, I can change my chain shirt for chain mail (disadvantage on stealth now but better AC) or prepare different spells if I think I will need them.

To me, everything game related is in a quantum state of sorts and doesn't "materialize" until it's observed. The orc's AC is normally 13, but until a character "observes" this by hitting with a particular die roll, why can't it be 11 (no armor) or 15 (better armor)?

Related to this, as DM, I only reveal a creature's AC if someone precisely hits it. Otherwise, they don't know if they just hit or hit by a lot.

But in the orc commander example, I don't have the orc's armor suddenly change in battle to make him harder to hit, he shows up to the fight in the better armor.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

The first rule to making D&D fun is to listen to your players at your table. Not the designers. Not the people on youtube. Not the people who post on forums daily and will likely never sit in one of your games.

This also applies to almost everything else in life.

 

[Jahydin]

If you think about it, you are setting up the encounters for them, and they are setting up their PCs for you. The DM should have to abide by the same restrictions the players do.

Should they though?

Even Gygax changed things on the fly:

If mere chance is the cause of the impending failure, I modify the situation to have the adversarial side be likewise blighted by ill fortune. If I over-powered the NPCs/monsters I do indeed reduce these capacities in some way so as to enable the party to succeed.

— Dragonsfoot, Q&A With Gary Gygax, Part VI, 2006

Not saying I agree. I'm really unsure. Been thinking about this all night now, haha.