D&D General How do players feel about DM fudging?

[loverdrive]

And by your previous post it still isn't a good plan unless it success with absolute certainty (since you said it isn't good if randomness has any chance at all of scuttling it).

If the plan can be utterly ruined by randomness, to the point where it can't be salvaged and adapted, yes, it is a bad plan. Is that a contentious opinion?

Setbacks happen, hell, black swans happen, but both accounting for them and adapting to the situation at hand are a crucial part of overcoming challenges. If DM has to "save" players' smart plan with fudging or it will crash and burn, that was no smart plan, that was a gamble.

no plan of operations can with any certainty reach beyond the first encounter with the enemy.’

Have you read the essay this quote originates from? Because "don't make plans lol, wing it" isn't what I took away from Moltke's writing. More like "plan, but reevaluate your plan at every step".

The first task of strategy is the final assembly (Bereitstellung) of the fighting forces, the first deployment of the army.38 Here, multifarious political, geographic, and national considerations come into question. A mistake in the original assembly of the army can scarcely be rectified in the entire course of the campaign. But these arrangements can be considered long in advance and — assuming the war readiness of the units and the availability of the means of transport — must unfailingly lead to the intended result.

Also included in the broader tasks of strategy are the combat employment of the assembled units, thus operations. Here one will soon encounter the independent will of the enemy. We can limit this only if we are prepared and decisive in taking the initiative. But we may not be able to break the enemy's will except with the means of tactics, with combat.

The military and moral consequences of every great engagement are of such a far-reaching kind that they usually create a fully transformed situation, a new basis for new measures. No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength. Only the layman sees in the course of a campaign a consistent execution of a preconceived and highly detailed original concept pursued consistently to the end.

 

[TheSword]

If the plan can be utterly ruined by randomness, to the point where it can't be salvaged and adapted, yes, it is a bad plan. Is that a contentious opinion?

Setbacks happen, hell, black swans happen, but both accounting for them and adapting to the situation at hand are a crucial part of overcoming challenges. If DM has to "save" players' smart plan with fudging or it will crash and burn, that was no smart plan, that was a gamble.


Have you read the essay this quote originates from? Because "don't make plans lol, wing it" isn't what I took away from Moltke's writing. More like "plan, but reevaluate your plan at every step".

Sure. Fudging is that reevaluating. Not so much ignoring dice but tweaking monsters, load outs, tactics and reinforcements as the session progresses rather than in advance.

I suspect we’re not in disagreement. I just like the quote

 

[loverdrive]

Sure. Fudging is that reevaluating. Not so much ignoring dice but tweaking monsters, load outs, tactics and reinforcements as the session progresses rather than in advance.

...we're talking about players using skillful planning and skillful execution to overcome challenges, not DM's notes on how the session was supposed to go.

 

[TheSword]

...we're talking about players using skillful planning and skillful execution to overcome challenges, not DM's notes on how the session was supposed to go.

Well the quote applies to both.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I have had GMs deny me roleplaying opportunities, agency, and worse. Fudging something as tangible and unpredictable as random dice rolls and variable hit points is the very least of my concerns as a player.

 

[Cadence]

If the plan can be utterly ruined by randomness, to the point where it can't be salvaged and adapted, yes, it is a bad plan. Is that a contentious opinion?

It feels like most player plans would be ruined by, say, the bad guy rolling nothing but criticals for three rounds in a row and all of the players missing their attacks and saves for three rounds. If a plan would succeed except for that happening, it seems contentious to me to call it a bad plan.

Setbacks happen, hell, black swans happen, but both accounting for them and adapting to the situation at hand are a crucial part of overcoming challenges. If DM has to "save" players' smart plan with fudging or it will crash and burn, that was no smart plan, that was a gamble.

It doesn't seem useful to me IRL to call driving to work in the morning or walking down the steps a gamble. But there's a chance the semi behind your car doesn't stop or that you trip and break your neck even if you're holding the railing. I assume everyone has different levels of where it does though (getting up in the morning? ever drinking alcohol? ever smoking? not wearing a seat belt? going 5 mph over on a crowded road? going 15 mph on a crowded road? goofing off driving on a snowy interstate in front of a semi? etc).

 

[DEFCON 1]

If your DM notes state that getting the NPC to do something requires a DC 15 Persuasion check, but then you end up not even asking for a roll because the roleplay was good enough that you just let them auto-succeed... that is also "fudging". If you do that, you are a fudger. You were not letting the dice roll where they may when your notes stated the requirement for success. You essentially fudged an automatic '20'.

And this is why I don't care about fudging. Because I'm not going to let my notes or the dice be a roadblock to good and fun play.

 

[Xetheral]

How, exactly, you're reconciling an irreconcilable conflict between fudging and players being challenged? What's the point of executing smart plans, managing risks and picking your own battles, y'know, addressing the challenge, if you're doing too well enemies will get stronger, and if you're doing too poorly, DM is gonna save your gluteus maximus?

If a DM fudges to force a predetermined outcome, then I absolutely agree that doing so reduces/removes the challenge faced by the players.

But there are other reasons to fudge that don't involve forcing a predetermined outcome to a challenge. In some situations, fudging can actually honor the challenge faced by the players and their agency in trying to overcome it. Consider: player agency to overcome a challenge is limited by their ability to understand the parameters of the challenge, and since human communication is imperfect sometimes the players understand the challenge differently than the DM intended. In such a case, fudging the mechanics in the background so that the challenge matches what the players understood it to be promotes their agency to address the challenge. By contrast, running everything exactly as written in the DM's notes limits their agency to however well they understood what the DM was trying to communicate. (One can also fix communication errors via re-explaining and retconning actions taken in misunderstanding, but some tables prefer a less blatant fix.)

 

[Vaalingrade]

It seems like the real divide is based on how much you care about the sanctity of luck as part of the game.

I do not.

 

[loverdrive]

It seems like the real divide is based on how much you care about the sanctity of luck as part of the game.

I do not.

Then what's the point of playing a game, where luck is an important part of the mechanics? Fate exists for, what, fifteen years now?

But there are other reasons to fudge that don't involve forcing a predetermined outcome to a challenge. In some situations, fudging can actually honor the challenge faced by the players and their agency in trying to overcome it. Consider: player agency to overcome a challenge is limited by their ability to understand the parameters of the challenge, and since human communication is imperfect sometimes the players understand the challenge differently than the DM intended. In such a case, fudging the mechanics in the background so that the challenge matches what the players understood it to be promotes their agency to address the challenge. By contrast, running everything exactly as written in the DM's notes limits their agency to however well they understood what the DM was trying to communicate. (One can also fix communication errors via re-explaining and retconning actions taken in misunderstanding, but some tables prefer a less blatant fix.)

Evaluating the situation, both before the engagement and when it already started, sounds like an integral part of the player skill to me. They underestimated the opposition? Welp, time to cut their loses and run.

That said, I do think that when a misunderstanding happens, being open and honest is the correct course of actions.