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

[Lanefan]

I like and respect Seth Skorkowsky, but in his video about great role-playing, he gave an example that sticks with me of what not to do as a DM.

The final capsule of the video defends why be a better roleplayer. “Surfer Dude”’s Barbarian receives a crit, but because the DM likes the character, he downgrades it to a hit so the Barbarian won’t be knocked unconscious. I don’t think any DM is 100% equitable in their treatment of the characters, but they should aspire to be. Fudging a hit so a beloved player doesn’t go down seems like putting your thumb too much on the scale. I couldn’t help thinking whether the too generic elf ranger would also be saved.

More important: while something like this happening just once might not turn many heads, IME these things tend to develop into long-term patterns - to the point where it becomes more or less obvious to all after a while that Surfer Dude's mortality rate is consistently lower than everyone else's even though, based on all surrounding factors, it shouldn't be.

 

[soviet]

Oh, I think that qualifies as a detectable subtext for some of the anti-fudgers.

I think that's more an issue of picking the right system for the job. If you want a random chance of PC death, however slim, then you can play D&D or Rolemaster with no fudging and have a blast. If you don't want that, but still want to play D&D, fudging is not the only answer. Many people in this thread have already suggested house rules along the lines of no permanent PC death, 0 HP = KO, etc.

 

[CleverNickName]

But... you're still going to accuse everyone who disagrees dishonest, anti-player, power-tripping, etc right?

Right?

Come on dude, we need this!

Oh. Um, sure.
Okay so you need to play the way I do. Because if you don't, you're like, super wrong and stuff. Um. And you aren't enjoying the game as much as you think you are? or something? Yeah. Anyway, that's all gospel truth and, um, you know it.

(Am I doing it right? I'm not very good at this 'winning an Internet argument' thing.)

 

[Vaalingrade]

Oh. Um, sure. You need to play the way I do, because if you don't, you're like, super wrong and stuff, and you aren't enjoying the game as much as you think you are. Or something? Yeah. That's all gospel truth and, um, you know it.

(Am I doing it right? I'm not very good at this 'winning an Internet argument' thing.)

We'll workshop it.

 

[Maxperson]

None of those things involve lying to the players…

Neither does fudging, as I proved. If I roll a 20 and your AC is 16, by RAW I can announce a miss and it is in fact a miss. No lie or deception there. The monster objectively missed and that miss was reported to you.

 

[Maxperson]

If you "know" your significant other has cheated on you once, do you think they are going to do it again?
Hence why I said pages ago that it 'erodes' trust.

Juuuuuuuast a bit of a False Equivalence there.

It's more like when my wife takes a candy bar from my son's Halloween bag and doesn't tell him. He's not going to know. It's nothing like a significant other cheating on you.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If you "know" your significant other has cheated on you once, do you think they are going to do it again?
Hence why I said pages ago that it 'erodes' trust.

Hubris. For all your protests, you'll never know your significant other is cheating on you. But over time, you will "know" it. And even if you can't "prove" it, trust will errode. Why hang out with your ex when you don't have to? Why change dice rolls when their are so many other tools to use?

Mod Note:

Generally speaking, using infidelity as an analogy can be powerful…and inflammatory. Probably a rhetorical choice best left for more serious issues than running RPG sessions.

 

[Maxperson]

Why do the rules only serve the DM? Aren't they supposed to serve everyone?

Because that's what 5e says about a half dozen times all across the DMG.

Plus, who the hell cares if it's officially supported? You cannot tell me that if the books were silent on this subject (as they are on the prospect of "player fudging") that you would suddenly abandon any thought of DMs being able to fudge.

Of course not. The 5e DMG just finally acknowledged officially what has been true for decades.

In fact, I am 100% certain that even if the books were explicit and thorough about denouncing fudging as an inappropriate tactic, you would openly say that that was stupid and every DM could and should ignore that section.

That's wrong. Yes, I would personally ignore it, because the rules serve me and not the other way around. I would not say that every DM should ignore it, though. That's a personal decision each DM has to make for himself.

No, no, no, and (most likely) no, no, and no. You keep inventing these examples to make it sound as though there must be an infinite variety of things that all have to be judged individually. There aren't. I have very clearly defined a clean, simple definition of fudging. Does it cover all possible forms of DM overreach or inappropriate DM behavior? Heck no, no definition could ever do that. But it is very clear about what it is: changing the statistics or random number generators applied to, or caused by, a creature that has already entered play. The only possible grey area is "what if it's on the board but has not acted or been acted upon?" And frankly at this point I'm even willing to say "okay, fine, whatever, if it has literally not done anything at all yet, nor had anything at all done to it yet, then sure, maybe some minor tweaks--a couple points of AC, shifting its HP within its rolled options--is not the absolute worst thing ever.

The point is that keeping things from the players happens all the time. Fudging is just another tool to use that the players are not aware of.

And my main reason for allowing that is LITERALLY NO ONE HERE TALKS ABOUT THAT, except as a gotcha "well what about this, huh?!" Because immediately before and after asking that, people will go right back into what they actually use it for: keeping a creature alive/active when it should have fallen or killing/disabling it when it should still be standing (meaning it has taken hits already), or turning the fifth crit in a row into a miss, or lowering monster damage because the party is getting wrecked, or...

The vast majority of people who have posted in these threads use it when they've screwed up and misjudged an encounter, and only to even things up and make it a fair challenge, or they use it when extreme bad luck rears its ugly head for the same reason.

Only a very few use it to advance the story or to make sure PCs don't die and things like that.

Do you really want to commit to the line that fudging is in fact necessary? As in, it MUST be used? Because I strongly suspect that you do not.

So to clarify, it's a tool that necessary for inclusion in the game, not for individual DM use. Like any other tool, some DMs will use it and others won't. Some will misuse it and some won't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't purport to be a perfect individual, but I have seen no instance in any game with any group of players where the information I conveyed was in and of itself causing the players to reach an erroneous conclusion. They may well reach conclusions that are flawed, but that would be due to things they don't know or assume or ignore or downplay or assign more import to than is necessary. And even when they do, they tend to prepare for unforeseen eventualities anyway, which allows them to mitigate the result of their bad conclusions in the moment.

This leads me to believe the concern is way more overblown than is being asserted in this thread.

Not to be too blunt here--but different people can have vastly different experiences. Positive experience ("I've seen X") thoroughly outweighs negative ("I've never seen X") because both of them can be true, while the second one only says why the second person feels as they do, while not being able to say the first hasn't come by their feelings legitimately, too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To my understanding, yes, at least a few posters have included revising notes after play starts as fudging. My intent was to be as inclusive and non-judgemental as possible, and hadn't considered that including the broadest definitions might be interpreted as deliberately presenting others' arguments in a poor light. Thanks for pointing out that possibile interpretation--I can see it now that you mention it, and will give some thought as to how best to make sure my intention comes through accurately in the future.

I draw a kind of fine line on it. Just because a session starts doesn't set any holy boundary to me--as another poster noted, if it did, that would make every on-the-fly a fudger by definition no matter what they did once things jelled--but if I think if an event calling for dice rolls is in process, changing the situation at that point is fundamentally indistinguishable from changing a die roll other than how people feel about it.