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

[Charlaquin]

Or else it's a chart where as the DM I'm fine with 90% of it, so I just eliminate the others before I roll, rerolling if one of the eliminated numbers comes up. That's perfectly valid, not a screw up, and not fudging.

I agree! That’s just changing the parameters of the roll, which I think is an infinitely preferable option to fudging.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If you rolled the die and then announced a result that is not consistent with the one the die indicates, that is literally telling a lie.

The GM tells you what the result is and the result is what the GM decides. No lie. Sure, the dice may give the GM suggestions what the result might be, but the GM is not beholden to such suggestions.

 

[CleverNickName]

I'm not at all surprised that people who think fudging is good are in the minority. Fudging is a kludge that some people use to fix mistakes, bugs and imperfections of the system. I'm sure that even majority of those who occasionally use it would prefer if it was not needed.

It's probably not entirely a coincidence that about 1 in 5 voters think the Dungeon Master fudging their rolls is a good thing, and also about 1 in 5 people at the table are Dungeon Masters.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yep thought so.

You blokes who complain about balance, diss martials and sook about fudging don't want to engage in actual game play hypotheticals or engage in actual play examples, because you know the results don't favor your argument.

Um, excuse you, I’m perfectly willing to engage in hypotheticals. @iserith has never complained about balance or martials that I’ve seen and doesn’t like hypotheticals because they consistently don’t accurately reflect his game. Pretty sure @LordEntrails is in the same boat there.

Also apparently you're infallible DMs who never find yourselves in a situations where you've thrown an encounter at your group, that they clearly cant handle, so you've never been in a situation where you had to improvise some dues ex machina to keep them alive (or you just TPK'd them anyway).

I absolutely am not infallible and have indeed been in such situations. Just not in ways that resemble the hypotheticals you put forward here. Again, when my mistakes impact the game, I own up to them, apologize, and try to do better next time. Over time I make fewer and fewer such mistakes.

Frankly though, I dont really care. You do you, and I'll do me, going by the RAW and guidance of the DMG that expressly tells me to ignore the dice when the result goes against the story or the game.

Cool, have fun with that.

 

[Charlaquin]

If need be.

Well, alright then.

I have terrible news about the entire history of human interaction...

All sorts of things that would not be appropriate to do to your players happen constantly throughout human history.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's one way to play I guess.

I can think of better ways to spend my free time, but that's just me.

In my experience, TPKs are extremely rare, even in a no-fudging game. I think often people fudge because they’re afraid the results they’ve rolled won’t lead to a fun experience, but I find that D&D tends to be a fun experience regardless of the results of the rolls. And personally, I find the experience overall is better when the results of the dice sometimes lead to outcomes we would not have intentionally chosen. As a player I want any given roll to go in my favor, but I don’t want every roll to go in my favor. And I don’t want a the DM to be the one who chooses which ones go in my favor and which ones don’t. That’s why we use dice.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would dislike that, as a player. The only time I want to be consulted on a thing like that is if it directly involves my PC, like proposing to change how much damage I just took.

Isn’t that what we’re talking about? Things that directly affect the PCs?

I think what is being lost here is that it’s not “going behind thier back” so much as working to keep the flow and feel of the game consistently immersive.

By doing something they wouldn’t want you to do if they knew you were doing it. I don’t see how that’s anything but going behind their back.

 

[Charlaquin]

Not really. I mean, its a human game, with human elements to it. I see no need to remove that human element. As a player you put faith in your DM to run a challenging and fun game, and as a DM you repay that faith and do just that.

Hilariously, even the 'anti fudgers' seem to be totally OK with this human element being involved to ignore charts entirely, or simply selecting results or an outcome the DM wants from a chart, as long as the DM doesnt also roll the dice at the same time.

What about if I selected my random encounter, yet still rolled the dice, but for no other reason other than to hear them hit the table, and I didnt even look at them, or register the result?

Would the anti-fudging crowd still be angry at me?

I feel you’re mischaracterizing me here because I am an “anti-fudger” and I would not be angry if you fudged the roll for which monsters are involved in the random encounter that has already been determined is happening, for reasons I have been over already. If you fudged the roll for whether or not a random encounter occurs, or a monsters attack or damage roll, or HP or AC, that’s a different story.

 

[Charlaquin]

The GM tells you what the result is and the result is what the GM decides. No lie. Sure, the dice may give the GM suggestions what the result might be, but the GM is not beholden to such suggestions.

If my AC is 16 and the roll says 20 and the DM says it misses. That’s a lie.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It is rather than people think that they're way better at noticing these things than they actually are. It's just very basic confirmation bias, people of course are not aware of the times they didn't notice, only those on which they did!

No, I pretty much stand by my statement CL. While you'll get people who will throw false postives sometimes (usually with players who's attenna's have gotten oversensetive from experience) I've hit a few too many cases where I knew GMs who admitted they did it to me but thought their players didn't know, whereas when I talked to said players other times they casually mentioned realizing it on more than one occasion when I'd been aware it was the case. Not all of them gave a damn, but it was abundantly clear that the GM thought they were better about this than was the case. You see the same thing with GMs who think they're being clever with illusionism too whereas the players are like "Yeah, DM does that sometimes."

A lot of this comes up because the timing is liable to be when people are most alert, because most GMs are not fudging constantly (because, why would they?) but only on key occasions.

But yes, if the players notice, then it has become a thing that affects the actual experience. Like the infamous GM mentioned on these boards who didn't even record the damage and just let the monsters die when they felt like it! That definitely would affect the play experience! But I doubt a GM altering a die roll couple of times in campaign would be noticeable or affect the play experience.

Different people have different sensitivities to this, and once someone has noticed the GM does this, it can very well color all the other experiences he has with that GM.