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

[Thomas Shey]

Why? There are always factors that are out of your control. Minimizing impact of those factors, having contingencies and expediently adapting when things don't go exactly as planned is pretty much what good planning means.

The kinds of things RPG adventurers get into almost always include some situations where there's limited contingency planning possible (because some information not accessible in any functional way and functional continengicies require the GM to be very much on the same page as the player). Using the standard you're working under almost always trains people that the simplest thing is to go directly to surprise and violence and skip anything else.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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.

Fair enough.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The suggestion was that characters via players should be expected to make patterns and connections between monsters seems very odd to me in the context of legendary resistance. Even more so, when as you say it’s an abstract concept. I just disagreed that that was a good reason for legendary creatures to always have 3 doses of legendary resistance.

I'm not wedded to that in particular, I'm just saying that players recognizing that's a thing can be a perfectly reasonable process that echoes in an indirect way what their characters would know. There are cases where genre-specific mechanics are dependent on characters not acknowledging their existence to work, but I don't think this is one of those.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I voted neutral because I'm not entirely convinced by what is meant by "fudging". Simply changing numbers? At what point? I mean, we certainly fudged character generation numbers for years. And I fudged die rolls back when I played on the tabletop. Virtual tabletop makes numerical fudging more difficult, simply because most rolls are out in the open. OTOH, as DM, you can simply choose less optimal or more optimal strategies and stack the deck on the back end. End result is the same.

Often the use is on-the-fly because a bad string of results is leading toward undesirable catastrophe or anticlimax that would not have been predicted from looking at the expected results. Or, end result may be the same, but the point in process when you figure out you need to do it can be quite different.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Also, what makes for a great heist story is when something random throws a wrench in the works, and the heisters have to recalibrate to overcome it.

The unstated end of that sentence is, however, "if they can." This is another one of those cases where avoiding single-points-of-failure is the ideal, but isn't always done for any number of reasons including not realizing one is there until everyone gets there.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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?

To me, yes. Because sometimes there is no possible plan where that isn't true. Or at least where the "adapted" adds up to a failure state, albeit a lesser one.

 

[loverdrive]

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.

OK, we kinda need to stop, and check if we're on the same page on what "fudging" even means. I don't consider "There's what, five orks? Who cares, you rip and tear through them, what ya gonna do next?" as fudging.

The definition I'm using: fudging is when DM changes some numbers (roll results, AC, HP, whatever) with no intention of notifying the players. If the DM changes stuff, but acknowledges it, that's not fudging in my book.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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?

Every plan can be ruined by randomized results, if one is playing in an improvised way that lets players author a lot of what happens.

of course in a heist or soemthing that requires a really tight plan like that I allow the players to “plan after the fact”, in order to get to the action and let the heist have the surprises and wild twists and turns of a good heist story, so I usually avoid fudging just by virtue of the players having the tools to turn a failure into either “I had a plan for this”, or “this was part of the plan all along” (ie one PC had to get caught in a diversion in order to pull the guard fromthe nearby door and allow the guy pretending to be a guard to be passed the key card and get through that door, etc), or whatever else.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

OK, we kinda need to stop, and check if we're on the same page on what "fudging" even means. I don't consider "There's what, five orks? Who cares, you rip and tear through them, what ya gonna do next?" as fudging.

The definition I'm using: fudging is when DM changes some numbers (roll results, AC, HP, whatever) with no intention of notifying the players. If the DM changes stuff, but acknowledges it, that's not fudging in my book.

Wait what? I don’t think that is the common usage. I’m fairly sure most people by far include “oh snap sorry guys I didn’t realize this critter had AC appropriate to a much higher CR, I’ve adjusted it to a normal level. Let’s rewind, go ahead and take that swing again.” In their conception of what fudging is.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Personally, if an encounter turns out to be much harder than I had meant for it to be, I just tell the players so, openly and honestly. “Hey, sorry everybody, I badly underestimated the difficulty of that encounter. Do you all want to take a mulligan on that one?”

As a player, I would much rather the DM do that, rather than secretly changing the results of rolls, or HP or AC numbers. Again, if you felt the need to hide it, then you knew I wouldn’t like it if I knew you we’re doing it. So don’t do it.

Interesting.

ID much rather the DM half the main enemy’s HP mid battle than offer a mulligan on the whole fight.