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

[TheSword]

So I have a better analogy for fudging than my biscuit analogy.

Fudging is like going to the doctor and the doctor not remembering the correct drug to prescribe or the quantity because you’re allergic to the standard one (and because there are thousands of drugs.) So the doctor asks you to take a seat in the waiting room, gets out the very thick British National Formulary and looks it up. Then invites you back in, asks a couple of extra questions for cover and then gives you your prescription.

The doctor doesn’t tell you they’re looking up the drug and dosage in a book because patients don’t want to think their doctor doesn’t have the answer, doesn’t want to think the drug they’re taking is obscure and doesn’t want to contemplate that the doctor might be guessing. The doctor makes sure the patient leaves confident and happy there is a resolution.

It’s a deception, but a polite and harmless one. Just like fudging. It also doesn’t work if the doctor explains what they are doing… just like fudging.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So I have a better analogy for fudging than my biscuit analogy.

Fudging is like going to the doctor and the doctor not remembering the correct drug to prescribe or the quantity because you’re allergic to the standard one (and because there are thousands of drugs.) So the doctor asks you to take a seat in the waiting room, gets out the very thick British National Formulary and looks it up. Then invites you back in, asks a couple of extra questions for cover and then gives you your prescription.

The doctor doesn’t tell you they’re looking up the drug and dosage in a book because patients don’t want to think their doctor doesn’t have the answer, doesn’t want to think the drug they’re taking is obscure and doesn’t want to contemplate that the doctor might be guessing. The doctor makes sure the patient leaves confident and happy there is a resolution.

It’s a deception, but a polite and harmless one. Just like fudging. It also doesn’t work if the doctor explains what they are doing… just like fudging.

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So, hang on. A doctor taking the time to look up medication to make sure they don't kill you is the same thing as a GM deciding the outcome of a fictional game because they think it will be better that way? And this is only because the doctor does keep you in the room when they do the research and so you're classifying this as deceitful because the expectation is that doctors always remember everything they've ever learned and have every patient's chart memorized at all times?

Do I have this right?

Again, don't care if you fudge or not unless we're at the same table. Do kinda care about inventive excuses for behavior that try to hide or change the actual behavior to make it sound more acceptable to people that don't like it and don't matter to people that do.

 

[TheSword]

So, hang on. A doctor taking the time to look up medication to make sure they don't kill you is the same thing as a GM deciding the outcome of a fictional game because they think it will be better that way? And this is only because the doctor does keep you in the room when they do the research and so you're classifying this as deceitful because the expectation is that doctors always remember everything they've ever learned and have every patient's chart memorized at all times?

Do I have this right?

Doesn’t keep you in the room.
Also a GM isn’t necessarily deciding the outcome. They may be deciding one small part of the outcome.

Other than that yep. That’s about right

It is deceitful, the doctor is quite rightly hiding the fact that they are looking something up (which they are perfectly right to do)

Just like fudging.

 

[soviet]

Obviously bad analogy is bad. Your 'deception' is simply sitting the patient/player in a different room while the normal correct procedures are followed. An example of that actually occurring in an RPG might be the GM pretending to need the bathroom to buy time to figure out an NPC's reaction to something. For your analogy to be akin to fudging the doctor/GM would have to pretend they were calling an imaginary Medicine Hotline before prescribing the drugs they intuit might be correct.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Doesn’t keep you in the room.
Also a GM isn’t necessarily deciding the outcome. They may be deciding one small part of the outcome.

Other than that yep. That’s about right

It is deceitful, the doctor is quite rightly hiding the fact that they are looking something up (which they are perfectly right to do)

Just like fudging.

I'm a bit lost. Where is the deceit for the doctor coming from? Are they telling you that they 100% totally remember everything and never do research? If so, you need to run away and get a new doctor as fast as possible because that guy is a total quack you shouldn't trust with your health. Anyone that actually has an expectation that doctors aren't going to do research and feel that a doctor doing research but not explicitly telling you about it is the doctor lying to you is mentally unbalanced. I'd say seek a doctor's help, but, well, unlikely to have a positive result in that situation.

As for GM's deciding outcomes (and this is what is happening with fudging, it's not something else because the outcome is embedded in a longer series of conflicts) being the same as verifying facts to save people's lives, yeah, hard nope. That's outright silly, and claiming a level of justification that's as imaginary as the elf-games we're talking about.

Fudging is, simply put, overriding expected mechanical resolutions to fiat decide outcomes and doing so in a clandestine way. There's no need to sugercoat this. Again, if people have a problem with it, a farcical comparison to a doctor researching treatments for a patient isn't going to sway them, and if they don't have a problem with it, it doesn't even need to be a justification made. The only thing this does is some weird self-aggrandizing that GMing a game is the same as saving lives as a doctor -- fudging is the same as due diligence research into treatments. It's not, and the attempted claim is a bit insulting to the intelligence.

 

[Irlo]

Maybe the doctor accidentally poisons you with the wrong meds and then injects you with an antidote while telling you they’re taking a blood sample.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Maybe the doctor accidentally poisons you with the wrong meds and then injects you with an antidote while telling you they’re taking a blood sample.

Hey now, your doctor knows best. They're keeping you at death's door to maintain dramatic tension!

 

[soviet]

'If I fudge, it's for your own damn good! Stop struggling and take this medicine! Don't you know I'm a professional!'

 

[soviet]

All doctors fudge, it's even clearly endorsed on page 34 of the Physician's Guide!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is one key issue with your intended analogy, @TheSword . The doctor is not just following the rules, she is actually explaining what the patient needs to know and doing so in a thorough manner. The one and only thing being concealed here is the looking up part. In all other ways, specifically including what is prescribed, why it should be taken, and what the patient should do both when taking the medication and in general, the doctor is required to be as transparent and explicit as possible or be liable for malpractice.

This is disanalogous with fudging, but entirely analogous with several of the non-fudging tools for addressing these issues. E.g., adding or removing intended participants to a combat that is lies in wait but has not been observed yet: the players are not notified about this, but that knowledge is outside what their characters could reasonably possess, and thus (so long as the change does not exceed what IS known to them) such changes may be acceptable. Or turning an incoming crit into a miss, and giving a fully diegetic explanation of why that happened, inviting players to investigate.

To address this problem, you would need to have the doctor intentionally conceal medical information from the patient. So, for example, if the doctor had misdiagnosed a problem in a previous visit, but then realized that the problem must be something else, then if she did not ever tell the patient that it was a misdiagnosis, but instead massaged the medical technobabble that most patients don't understand so that the misdiagnosis got corrected to the right diagnosis, then that would be analogous to fudging...and would be significantly more problematic, wouldn't you say? I don't expect doctors to be perfect, medicine is an extremely difficult profession, but concealing a misdiagnosis and "fudging" medical records so that the correct treatment was indicated all along sounds absolutely unacceptable and, if revealed, would almost certainly be grounds for a lawsuit and possibly getting the doctor's medical license revoked.