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

[Thomas Shey]

But if a DM is going to fudge, why not just tell players that they will do it and when they do it? Why the need to keep it a secret?

I'll just note again that the answer to that first question conflates two, not directly related things; there are people in this very thread who've indicated they don't want to know directly when it occurs.

 

[Monayuris]

I'll just note again that the answer to that first question conflates two, not directly related things; there are people in this very thread who've indicated they don't want to know directly when it occurs.

Well that is fair.

i still think It should be explicit.

A DM should explicitly state they will fudge for the purposes of obtaining the game play they desire.

If players explicitly state they are ok with fudging but they don’t want to know about when it happens, then they are ok with the act of fudging.

I see no problem with that arrangement.

it’s when one doesn’t have that explicit understanding and instead use fudging to subvert/change/manipulate the game is when I find offense.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sounds to me like the GM had not mastered their own particular style of storytelling yet if those uses of GM Fiat were noticeable roadblocks to compelling fights and the resultant drama they were trying to help get across.

It was common enough both locally and in responses at the time--from people who had been running the game for a long time at that point--that I'd have to suggest there's something a bit beyond that. At a certain point when you see a problem repeatedly "git gud" is not a particularly useful answer.

Personally... I think that's when you know when you have become a really good GM... when you can use the concept of GM Fiat judiciously to help a game reach even greater heights without the players ever caring or even noticing that it may or may not be happening. The game is so compelling and fun that no one is spending their time even thinking about it, let alone looking for it.

Using it is not supposed to be secret in the game in discussion there. In fact, it can't be since players get a hero point every time it happens.

I mean, it seems like there's all this talk in these threads about "DM Trust"... and how that appears to be an actual impediment for a lot of player's gaming. And I feel kinda bad about that, because it sounds like they've played with some DMs in the past who just were not at the level they felt they wanted their DM to be, which is what led to even the possibility of the loss of "DM trust".

I'm going to bring up something I do every time a conversation goes in that direction. Though some people don't accept the distinction, there's a pretty large gap between "Trusting a GM's intentions" and "Trusting a GM's judgment". Playing with someone who you don't trust the intentions of is probably a mistake. On the other hand, lots of people don't have 100% trust for a GM's judgement all the time (I'm one of them). So I'm going to suggest that "playing with DMs not up to the level they want their DM to be" is sometimes a given, because they don't expect that to be, in practice, possible.

(And important element is becoming aware that you're never going to reach that impossible paragon, so that even if you find problems, including big ones, you don't turn them into big personal judgment-fests. Some people claim that no one has a problem with them as a GM or that the GM they play under never evokes these things from other players, but, well, lets just say I save to disbelieve; among other things, its going to be extremely rare that someone can know these things with the certainty some people try to present).

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Not sure how to ask this without it seeming confrontational, but is there something unique about D&D (and D&D-adjacent game, like PF) that makes this whole topic more pressing, and more controversial?

A lot of OSR games might be D&D-derived, but very few that I've seen involve painstakingly curated and balanced encounters. Sometimes the situation is terrible for the PCs, sometimes it's not. No need to dice-fudge if you hadn't tooled some specific vibe or pace ahead of time.

In something like Call of Cthulhu or Traveller or GURPS or PbtA or Fate and so on, there's way less guidance or emphasis on balancing encounters or building them in a specific way. You might or might not still have to stat something up, but it doesn't seem all that similar to what's being discussed in this thread. I get the quasi-wargame appeal of 5e combat, and why it often needs to be modeled the way it does, but thinking about other games, is there less need or temptation to dice-fudge, because encounters might be more free-flowing, or simply not intended to be "balanced?"

 

[Thomas Shey]

I will concede that that example did not seem to be very contrived, but it also did not seem to be an example that most people who dislike fudging consider fudging.

As I understood it, you had chosen a monster for an encounter on the basis that you believed it had 10 DR. Before combat started, you realised it had 30 DR instead. Even if you had only realised this during the combat, wouldn’t it have been at the moment you went to calculate damage taken and realised you were subtracting 30 instead of 10?

I don’t see this as fudging. You were planning an encounter with a DR 10 monster, you provided an encounter with a DR 10 monster.

But in terms of fudging, that's also exactly the kind of situation where I feel its okay. That's a particular big blunt object example (because it was going to become excruciatingly obvious it was a problem early on), but there are less obvious situations I've had where I realized in the middle of a fight that I had seriously misjudged its difficulty, but there was no easy fix. The best I could do was lowball various things for the rest of the fight. Given I had more information than the players about what they were getting into and bollixed it up, I wasn't going to punish them for my error.

(Personally, I don't consider changing things on the fly material different from changing a die roll once things have already began. I know not everyone agrees with me regarding this, but as someone said, there's not a lot of practical difference between changing an attack bonus or a saving throw on the fly and changing the die roll you add to that.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well that is fair.

i still think It should be explicit.

A DM should explicitly state they will fudge for the purposes of obtaining the game play they desire.

That's probably true. But as I've noted before, a lot of things don't get discussed that should at the start of campaigns because people take it as a given. This is especially true of GMs used to various kinds of game culture who hit people who have different ones.

Communication can be hard, who knew?

If players explicitly state they are ok with fudging but they don’t want to know about when it happens, then they are ok with the act of fudging.

I see no problem with that arrangement.

it’s when one doesn’t have that explicit understanding and instead use fudging to subvert/change/manipulate the game is when I find offense.

Well, see above. Contrary to some of the more hostile reactions in this thread, its often less actively trying to get one over on the players than just assuming "That's how things are done."

 

[Charlaquin]

Well, there's your disconnect. You seem to be equating impartial with, I dunno, impersonal or arbitrary. Impartial doesn't require the lack of personal DM judgment over things including whether or not a result generated by the dice are appropriate to the situation. Impartial means that the judgment is fair, just, and/or treats sides equally. And that doesn't mean that the judge needs to be an unfudged die roll. Is fudging to blunt the effect of a string of bad luck really unfair or unjust? I don't think so.

No human being is unbiased. A DM judging when to fudge and when not to is inherently introducing bias to the determination of what happens as a result of the action. They may endeavor to be “fair,” but without player input there is no check or balance on their opinion of what “fair” means. It is literally impossible to be impartial in this situation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not sure how to ask this without it seeming confrontational, but is there something unique about D&D (and D&D-adjacent game, like PF) that makes this whole topic more pressing, and more controversial?

Who says they are? I've seen not dissimilar discussions in more general venues and about it more generally.

A lot of OSR games might be D&D-derived, but very few that I've seen involve painstakingly curated and balanced encounters. Sometimes the situation is terrible for the PCs, sometimes it's not. No need to dice-fudge if you hadn't tooled some specific vibe or pace ahead of time.

I don't think its that tidy. As noted before, there can be a lot of reasons to do it, and one of the easiest ones (when done in the players favor) is because you created a set of opponents that are more capable than they were intended to be and the players had no way to know that and no good way to back out of the situation.

At the other end, you just have people who want to make encounters interesting and dramatic, and you can get those in any game system. The fact the game doesn't have the tools to try and make that work just means they do it by look and feel, and that can be fraught, especially if you're not overly familiar with the game (by now I can eyeball a set of old style RuneQuest opponents and a group of RQ PCs and make a pretty good educated guess how a combat between them will go, but that came of using the system a whole lot for a few years. It was far from what I was up for within the first few months of using the game (and the players weren't any better at figuring out they were in over their head until it was too late).

In something like Call of Cthulhu or Traveller or GURPS or PbtA or Fate and so on, there's way less guidance or emphasis on balancing encounters or building them in a specific way. You might or might not still have to stat something up, but it doesn't seem all that similar to what's being discussed in this thread. I get the quasi-wargame appeal of 5e combat, and why it often needs to be modeled the way it does, but thinking about other games, is there less need or temptation to dice-fudge, because encounters might be more free-flowing, or simply not intended to be "balanced?"

I think you're seriously underestimating how much attention a lot of people pay to that sort of thing; its just they do most of it ad-hoc.

 

[Cadence]

No human being is unbiased. A DM judging when to fudge and when not to is inherently introducing bias to the determination of what happens as a result of the action. They may endeavor to be “fair,” but without player input there is no check or balance on their opinion of what “fair” means. It is literally impossible to be impartial in this situation.

Is that also a problem with a lot of DM decisions? (How many back to back encounters to put in, how hard they are made to escape, what immunities the chosen creatures have vs. what items the players have, how the NPCs are set to react, how the monsters play to or against individual character's strengths and weaknesses, whether to ignore the roll on a random monster table or not, how difficult the random monster table was made, considering how much IRL experience some players have with situations vs. others, etc... )

 

[Irlo]

No human being is unbiased. A DM judging when to fudge and when not to is inherently introducing bias to the determination of what happens as a result of the action. They may endeavor to be “fair,” but without player input there is no check or balance on their opinion of what “fair” means. It is literally impossible to be impartial in this situation.

True, but how important is unbiased adjudication, and is that necessarily a good thing? There’s a reason we play with other people.

It seems to me that DM bias much more significantly affects decisions about monster tactics, choice of targets, threshold for retreat or surrender, etc. Yet I wouldn’t want to randomize all that.

Edit: Cadence won initiative.