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

[LordEntrails]

Yeah. My predetermined outcome being 'the Players have fun, tell a collective story, are challenged and the game doesn't come crashing down to a pointless TPK due to nothing more than naughty word luck'.

I've not needed to fudge to have that fun etc happen.

You sound like the sort of dude who would choose to put your group through a book adventure, then when (through no fault of their own) an encounter that they had no say over crushes them (due to bad adventure writing and/or bad luck) you'd TPK them and shrug your shoulders.

You are once again wrong with your assumptions, because you have built up an image of me based upon your erroneous conceptions and misinterpretations of what I have written and chose to interpret everything I write with that bias. It would be best if you just stop the veiled personal attacks, ok?

One could use fudging to enhance the chances of player's clever plan succeeding. Sometimes the players come up with something really smart, but the dice conspire to ruin it. Now such result is fine in my book, but it is also hard to argue that using fudging in such situation to let the smart plan to succeed would somehow diminish the player agency. It only becomes a problem if the GM fudges so that the players win regardless of what they do.

You're mixing up the definition of chance. Chance means their is a greater than 0% and less than a 100% probability of something happening. If failure of a plan is not an acceptable option, then DO NOT make a roll for it. If the players plan is so perfect that you are not going to allow a 1 in 20 chance of failure, then don't call for a roll!

As DM, what ever you decide that acceptable number is for success or failure, you get to set that as the definition of success. So there is no reason to fudge the roll.

 

[Maxperson]

...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.

Excellent, because DM notes on how the session was supposed to go is in the extreme minority of reasons DMs fudge, at least going from the two(is it still two?) fudging threads going on.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

Luck and bad luck are fine. Extreme bad luck on the part of the players at the same time as extreme good luck on the part of the DM is not fine. A TPK or loss of a PC to that sort of situation is bunk.

That sort of situation happens once or twice in a year long campaign. If PC death or TPK is inevitable, why play the game? I like my players to become attached to and invest in their characters. If they're doomed to death, because the DM won't fudge in those extreme situations, they aren't going to do that.

When I do fudge, it's not to make the PCs live. It's to even things out a bit so that they have a fighting chance to survive, but could still TPK if bad luck or bad decisions happen. No DM story is being preserved when I fudge and it isn't even to give the DM or players any sort of advantage.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't think this sort of it's-all-relative-so-nothing-matters approach is helpful for this discussion, since now you're getting into meta territory.

Yeah, well, as soon as someone broke out the "all fudging is cheating" trope several pages up, it showed we were already in meta territory. So my post just highlighted how rather absurd all sides of this convo can be.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think it depends on what specific task was tied to the ability check in the DM's notes and what the player actually had the character do. If my notes say a given approach to a goal, X, has by default an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure and therefore a DC 15 Persuasion check is necessary, but the player does Y which, in context does not have an uncertain outcome and/or a meaningful consequence for failure and thus no check, then all I did was write a contingency that is wasted. I did not fudge. I was only reminded of how prep time may be squandered preparing contingencies and must now adjudicate for Y.

If instead the player actually did do X and because I liked their speech or whatever I just granted auto-success, then that's something akin to fudging, but as I said in this thread or the other, not technically so since in my view fudging is about asking for or making a roll then ignoring the result. Because the effect is the same as fudging, I avoid this. That said, this approach is not entirely due to the desire to avoid fudging. It is merely a happy side effect of what I see as the proper process wherein the DM ignores the player's acting ability in delivering the speech and boils it down to a task to be adjudicated. (In this example, their speech amounts to X, which requires a check.) If the character has a personal characteristic the player portrayed in the doing, I can award Inspiration that the player is then welcome to spend on the check for advantage on the check if they want. Or they can retain the resource for later.

All completely understandable. But for my money it seems like you are putting in a bit of effort trying to justify to yourself why what you are doing is not really fudging or maybe not true fudging or perhaps just acceptable kinda-fudging or whatever other reasons you are giving as to what you are doing. Which is cool... if you feel that is necessary for your gameplay and your enjoyment and your justifications for how you run things... that's great. Whatever works and makes you happy.

But for me... when I read through all the justifications you give... I just can't help but see all of it as a big "Why bother?" I don't know why anyone would go through that effort and verbal wordplay this-and-thats trying to get to the results they wanted while still be able to claim "I don't fudge"? Personally, I just don't see the positives or the necessity. I think it's just easier to say yeah, I fudge. I fudge happily whenever I need to. No wiggle-room or outs necessary.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One could use fudging to enhance the chances of player's clever plan succeeding. Sometimes the players come up with something really smart, but the dice conspire to ruin it. Now such result is fine in my book, but it is also hard to argue that using fudging in such situation to let the smart plan to succeed would somehow diminish the player agency. It only becomes a problem if the GM fudges so that the players win regardless of what they do.

This kind of thing can be particularly an issue depending on the way the game mechanics and probabilities are set up.

As a classic, caper stories are based on the idea that you have a multi-step plan that when reaching fruition, will produce a result that would have been hard or impossible to do without all the steps in between. And maybe there are steps that don't go quite as planned, but they can be salvaged to continue things forward.

This doesn't tend to survive contact with the game system in many cases. In ideal circumstances, the GM sets things up, or the game system has secondary mechanics so that individual failures can be bailed out, but not all GMs are good at the first part (I'll plead not always being able to see how to extract from a failure without the whole thing crashing to the ground), and people play with the game system they play with (most big-linear-die systems are going to be particularly prone to letting you down in this sort of thing) so they'll patch at the "fudge the dice" end.

Its not ideal by any means (see my comment about having preferred "An occasional necessary evil" as a poll answer), but people use the tools they have.

 

[Umbran]

That really depends on what we call "ruined". I see "ruined" as, well, ruined, unsalvageable.

Randomness introducing setbacks that need to be addressed doesn't sound like ruining to me

I don't think we can say that fudging to eliminate setbacks is particularly common. Except, perhaps, for those setbacks which the GM can see are highly unlikely to be meaningful or interesting to play through.

Like, the BBEG has already gotten away, and the party faces a setback that means several more rounds of grinding through goons? I'm fine with that getting fudged aside.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'd say, if the plan can be ruined by randomness (assuming, that DM doesn't ask nor makes rolls where they're uncalled for), it's not really that smart of a plan.

At that point that describes almost all plans.

 

[iserith]

All completely understandable. But for my money it seems like you are putting in a bit of effort trying to justify to yourself why what you are doing is not really fudging or maybe not true fudging or perhaps just acceptable kinda-fudging or whatever other reasons you are giving as to what you are doing. Which is cool... if you feel that is necessary for your gameplay and your enjoyment and your justifications for how you run things... that's great. Whatever works and makes you happy.

But for me... when I read through all the justifications you give... I just can't help but see all of it as a big "Why bother?" I don't know why anyone would go through that effort and verbal wordplay this-and-thats trying to get to the results they wanted while still be able to claim "I don't fudge"? Personally, I just don't see the positives or the necessity. I think it's just easier to say yeah, I fudge. I fudge happily whenever I need to. No wiggle-room or outs necessary.

I don't fudge, and the effort made to explain how and why this works in writing on a forum is obviously a lot more than the effort in prep or at the table. This isn't an effort at justification, but rather communication. What I don't care for though is an attempt at obfuscation, suggesting that something which isn't fudging is fudging and, therefore, everyone fudges. That's simply not true and not an admirable discussion tactic in my view.

 

[Umbran]

I don't know why anyone would go through that effort and verbal wordplay this-and-thats trying to get to the results they wanted while still be able to claim "I don't fudge"? Personally, I just don't see the positives or the necessity. I think it's just easier to say yeah, I fudge. I fudge happily whenever I need to. No wiggle-room or outs necessary.

I cannot speak for anyone in particular, but do remember, there's a segment of the community that speaks as if it is highly judgemental on the topic. Some folks may be sensitive to that, and while you may have a devil-may-care attitude towards it, that's not the general human take on social pressures.