And I feel sorry for all of you who don't have that luxury and have to keep one eye open to make sure your games are on the up-and-up. Splitting your attention like that I imagine must be really tiresome and it's no wonder there's these hard and fast rules for some of you-- it's one less thing you need to worry about when trying to play.
Discovering a DM fudges IS the very thing that would induce me to do that though. That's my point. Fudging is THE thing maximally likely to make me "keep one eye open to make sure [my] games are on the up and up." Doubly so if I were to discover it after play has begun.
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.
It really, truly doesn't. Particularly since, as many have noted, even the 5e DMG's reference to fudging explicitly says to never let your players find out you do it. You keep banging on this drum and every single one of us has already conceded it. We get it. There are players cool with fudging who just don't want to hear that it is happening in the moment. That has zero intersection with whether DMs should be honest with their players about whether or not they "reserve the right" to fudge.
True, but how important is unbiased adjudication, and is that necessarily a good thing? There’s a reason we play with other people.
If the dice have been actually invoked to resolve a contested situation? Essential. If the dice
have not been invoked to resolve a contested situation? Extremely important, but not essential.
Hence why I have said die rolls used merely to inspire the DM (quickly rolling up an NPC, frex) or speed up a non-adjudication process (generating a magic item, for example) are perfectly acceptable. The rules have not been invoked to resolve a contested situation.
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.
There is a vital difference: All of those things are in the open. The DM cannot, even in principle, conceal what tactics the NPCs use against the players because, in order to use them, the NPCs must diegetically interact with the PCs. The NPCs cannot conceal their threshold of surrender because they must openly attempt to surrender if that threshold is passed.
You cannot even
attempt to make these things "invisible" to the players.
I have no doubt that this is true. Most DMs aren’t so hostile towards the players that they would be actively trying to trick them in this way; I think most fudgers simply assume “that’s just how it’s done” and accordingly don’t even consider it something that might warrant a session-zero discussion. I’m suggesting that we ought to work towards changing that.
Look, I’ll never convince people who fudge that what they’re doing is deceptive. What I hope I can impress upon people is that, regardless of whether you think it’s deceptive or not, there are a lot of players out there who will feel deceived if they learn you have been fudging. The solution to this is not to hide your fudging so the players who would feel this way never find out, but to talk about it to your players. Find out if they care about fudging and to what degree. Come to a mutual agreement about what is appropriate and what isn’t. You know, like we do with any contentious play preferences.
Exactly. Could not say it better.
I think it's interesting how several folks on here's views about character's using players knowledge in a metagame way (reading monster books, knowing the module, doing IRL things the character wouldn't know) contrasts with their views on DMs fudging die rolls (for combat, saves, and skill checks anyway) - there seem to be a lot of OK/Bad and Bad/Ok. I wonder how many OK/OK and Bad/Bad there.
Anyway, thinking about session 0 talks, I guess how either metagame knowledge use is not cared about or is thought of as something to minimize should also be in session 0.
Yeah, I haven't explicitly called it out as such before (or at least not recently), but fudging by definition is a metagame action. Like, intentionally. Every single justification given for it is meta: avoiding hurt player feelings, preventing undesired story beats or guaranteeing desired ones, adjusting intended encounter difficulty. Fudging is inherently meta (and anti-diegetic). If people dislike metagame reasoning but are totally cool with fudging, that would baffle me. I'm opposed to both.
Indeed, it is! But, in theory, the dice are supposed to be called upon in situations where it is desirable to avoid that bias. When an action could reasonably fail, could reasonably succeed, and has meaningful stakes. Granted, it comes down to DM judgment what qualifies as a reasonable chance of success and failure and meaningful stakes, and that’s one of the reasons it’s good policy to tell the players the DC and any stakes their character could reasonably anticipate, to insure that there is mutual understanding of what’s being risked. Regardless, there is an underlying principle that the outcomes of some actions shouldn’t be decided by the DM and those actions are the ones that dice rolls are typically called for to resolve. Fudging violates that principle by letting the DM decide the results of those actions too.
Again: completely agreed. Dice (and player-facing rules generally) are invoked to resolve contested situations. That they are truly impartial, incapable of even friendly partiality, is the whole point!
When I get time, I'm going to try to think about when I've fudged in the past and see if I can make a list of what they were. I wonder if they're tight enough that they could be a general rule that could be thought about ("having monsters auto-fail a second confirmed crit role in back to back rounds or against a downed character" or whatnot).
If there was a list of things like that, does that feel more like a rules modification than fudging if everyone knows in advance? (It feels less loose to me than deciding DCs and reinforcements on the fly, for example).
That's tough. On the one hand, as I have already said, I respect such candor, and the effort to "fix the fix" as it were also deserves respect. On the other, my opposition to fudging is so strong that even this is hard to accept, at least in such abstract form. But if the DM is willing to honestly talk about it and work out a table agreement, it would be rude to flip tables and leave. The devil's in the details, but...at least in principle I'm open to talking about it.
Because as several people here have shown, some people are prone to misinterpretation. I'd rather avoid that.
Why not just...be honest with them about what you do and let them decide for themselves whether that's something they can handle? Why conceal this in this way? This is exactly the paternalistic "it's for your own good" mindset that fudging promotes and which I so vehemently oppose.
You go out of your way to create issues that don't really exist? I don't.
I'm not the one concealing from my players that I secretly modify their rolls and actively work to prevent them from ever finding out!
That, right there, is the deception you claim does not exist. You do something, which you not only conceal from your players, you actively work to ensure that they cannot find out that you have done it.
If one of your players point-blank asked you if you fudge a roll, when you had in fact done so, would you say yes?
I give the simple truth of why a lot of GMs sometimes fudge, but do not necessarily advertise that they're doing so: the players like feeling that their characters are in mortal peril, they like the suspense the knowledge that their character could die brings... but they don't necessarily like their characters actually dying. So letting the players think that the risks are more real than they actually are is an attempt to have it both ways.
I never fudge. Partly because we use a Discord dice bot, partly because I'm opposed to it. I also don't include random, irrevocable, permanent character death. You and others keep acting like fudging is the only way to achieve this end. It is not. The DM toolbox is full almost to bursting with tools to prevent or ameliorate unforeseen or undesirable consequences, and no other tool is so inherently anti-diegetic and controversial as fudging.
On the contrary. If a game ends because it was discovered there was that large of a fissure between the playstyles of all the players, I think everybody wins. Because now they can go find other players who better suit them.
That's a hot take and no mistake. "Your game group crashed and burned because of a preventable problem? Awesome!!!"
Playing a game with a ticking timebomb of a group is no way to go through life. Always being on edge checking to make sure everyone is going to play the way I need it to be? No thanks! Rip the bandaid off early and move on, I say.
Or, y'know,
defuse the gorram bomb in advance. Avoid getting the cut that requires the bandaid. TALK to people! Good Lord, why is "talk to your players and get them on board in advance" such an onerous burden?!
To be fair, the DMG says it's a thing you can do if you're using a DM screen. That's far short of an endorsement of the practice and it is in the Table Rules section which isn't the rules of the game, but rather table rules for how the game is played (as it puts it). So it sits outside the actual rules of the game and advises DMs to set these expectations with players prior to the game so that everyone can have fun together.
That it includes any text whatsoever about "don't let your players find out" is morally objectionable to me.
I only fudge under two very specific circumstances and then only to achieve very specific results.
1. In events of extreme luck. With the following requirements. If any requirement is not present, I will not fudge.
A) Extreme bad luck on the part of the players. Not just bad luck, but extreme bad luck. Events where the players are not rolling above single digits and are failing all or almost every saving throw.
B) Extreme good luck on my part. I'm not only hitting out the wazoo, but critting a bunch of times. Making all or almost all of my saves.
C) No mistakes or bad decisions on the part of the players. Regardless of luck, if they shouldn't be in the position they are in and made poor choices to get there, nothing gets fudged.
D) The party is very likely to or definitely going to TPK over the extreme luck through no fault of their own.
If all of those are present, I will specifically fudge only enough to give the PCs a fighting chance. I'm not going to fudge so that they win or have an advantage, and I never ever fudge to help my side of things. Once they have a fighting chance, even if the extreme luck continues no more fudging will happen. The party could still TPK or end up with deaths.
2. If I screw up the encounter difficulty. In the event that a badly misjudge an encounter and it goes into deadly territory, I will fudge it down to merely a hard encounter. I'm not going to kill or TPK a group over something I misjudged.
That's it.
Mad, I know arguing with you about the words you use is an exercise in transcendental frustration, but...
Those are not "strict rules on when [you] fudge and to what degree." Those are barely even
guidelines.
I'm anti-fudging, though perhaps not to the extreme degree of a few here: I can see rare - as in, maybe once every few years - cases where it fits.
I'm anti-metagaming, perhaps as strongly as anyone here.
As noted above, I find this very curious. Why does the inherently metagame nature of fudging not put it on equal footing with player-sourced metagame behavior?
Contrast this with - a few paragraphs later - Metagame Thinking. The DMG flat condemns metagame thinking and specifically says the DM should discourage players from practicing it.
As above: I strongly oppose such a distinction, where blatant DM metagaming is acceptable but no form of player metagaming is acceptable.
They aren't recommending any actions. They are recommending table rules that they give in the section. Each individual table rule is one that they recommend.
....Max, you DO realize that "endorsement" is a form of recommendation, right? And that you cannot recommend both doing X and NOT doing X? You can either recommend one or the other or have no stance toward either. But you cannot, of the same thing, in the same sense, simultaneously recommend X and recommend not-X. "You should do X, and you should do not-X" is a straight up contradiction.
