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

[Cadence]

I mean, I was intending "accept" to be an actively, but not necessarily strongly, positive stance. If someone finds a situation "acceptable," they're usually assenting, not just "putting up with" that situation.

Is Accepting one's fate a sign one is happy with it at all, or just that they aren't fighting it anymore?

Is Accepting the complement of Rejecting? Rejecting seems negative, and the opposite of negative would be either positive or neutral?

Should the neutral category be "Fail to reject"?

 

[Hussar]

I gave the probabilities. Say any given player has a 15% chance of being opposed to fudging--slightly over half the percentage from the above poll, and completely ignoring the "somewhat negative" voters. That means any given person has an 85% chance to not be, and the chance that all four people in a four-player group are not vehemently opposed are (0.85^4) = 0.522, or (1-0.522) = 47.8%, meaning nearly half of four-player groups would have someone opposed. A five-player group would be (1-0.85^5) = 55.6% chance of at least one vehemently-opposed player.

That's iterative probability at work. It's like a DM asking you to succeed on four or five stealth rolls in a row. It doesn't matter if you succeed almost all of the time. Having to succeed many times in a row can transform even a small chance of problems into a sizable chance. It might be the case that only 10% or 15% or whatever of players really would have a problem...but "the vast majority of players have no problem with it" can still translate to "a large number of groups have someone who has a problem with it." Having one-in-two odds--heck, even one-in-three!--of someone in the group being upset about a thing that is asserted to be so common sounds like a recipe for Problems.

I understand. It's the Gnome Effect. I get it.

My point is that your 15% is probably EXTREMELY exaggerated. If you honestly think that 1 in 8 players is so vehemently opposed to fudging that they'd walk away from groups, we're simply not going to agree here. And, as proof of this, I'd point to the fact that virtually no one has ever seen it happen. Heck, I doubt that 1 in 8 players is actually opposed in the wild. Players simply don't care that much. It's tolerated to a much larger degree. I'd guess, as a guess, that there's a significant bias of self selection going on here.

Like I said, if you were right and around half of groups should include someone who is strongly opposed to fudging, then fudging would be a MUCH larger issue than something that comes up every couple of years, get's kicked around for a bit, and then forgotten about. Yet, outside of a couple of threads like this, that crop up from time to time, fudging is virtually never even cracking the top 10 of table issues.

 

[billd91]

I don’t know why anyone would interpret neutral in anything but a “fudging is at least tolerated” or “live and let live“ manner. It’s clearly not a negative response.

 

[Hussar]

I don’t know why anyone would interpret neutral in anything but a “fudging is at least tolerated” or “live and let live“ manner. It’s clearly not a negative response.

Well, I DO think I know why people would interpret neutral as negative, but, it's not a particularly charitable interpretation.

 

[Steampunkette]

I gave the probabilities. Say any given player has a 15% chance of being opposed to fudging--slightly over half the percentage from the above poll, and completely ignoring the "somewhat negative" voters. That means any given person has an 85% chance to not be, and the chance that all four people in a four-player group are not vehemently opposed are (0.85^4) = 0.522, or (1-0.522) = 47.8%, meaning nearly half of four-player groups would have someone opposed. A five-player group would be (1-0.85^5) = 55.6% chance of at least one vehemently-opposed player.

That's iterative probability at work. It's like a DM asking you to succeed on four or five stealth rolls in a row. It doesn't matter if you succeed almost all of the time. Having to succeed many times in a row can transform even a small chance of problems into a sizable chance. It might be the case that only 10% or 15% or whatever of players really would have a problem...but "the vast majority of players have no problem with it" can still translate to "a large number of groups have someone who has a problem with it." Having one-in-two odds--heck, even one-in-three!--of someone in the group being upset about a thing that is asserted to be so common sounds like a recipe for Problems.

So... here's a couple layers of problem for your probability of "Any Given Player":

1) It assumes a relatively high distribution apropos of essentially nothing.
We all acknowledge that this forum is a self-selecting group of individuals, who self-select into specific threads. Further, the sample size is woefully small. A standard sample size of 500 is considered the bottom rung of acceptable, with 1,000 being a good sample size and higher than that being progressively better. Using a poll with less than 200 respondents is dubious at best.

2) It assumes equal distribution across all groups.
I think if we actually broke it down, the predominant responses for anti-fudging would likely fall into a series of specific categories of player, rather than just a random assortment from across the entire playerbase with no other shared traits. I suspect "Theater Kid" groups and the majority of zoomers are in the 'Neutral to Positive' range, while sticklers for the dice would skew older and toward more rules-heavy gameplay. And while you might find a "Dice fall where they may" player sitting at the theater kids' game, it's probably not an equal distribution across all tables.

Because people self-select. And not liking fudging is one trait that is very likely connected to a series of other traits that people self-select their groups for.

 

[iserith]

What's the prize for having the most people voting for your position? Oh, right. Nothing.

Also, why not just take the Neutral position out entirely, call it neither positive nor negative. Then those who believe it is negative win... oh, right. Nothing.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I understand. It's the Gnome Effect. I get it.

My point is that your 15% is probably EXTREMELY exaggerated. If you honestly think that 1 in 8 players is so vehemently opposed to fudging that they'd walk away from groups, we're simply not going to agree here. And, as proof of this, I'd point to the fact that virtually no one has ever seen it happen. Heck, I doubt that 1 in 8 players is actually opposed in the wild. Players simply don't care that much. It's tolerated to a much larger degree. I'd guess, as a guess, that there's a significant bias of self selection going on here.

Like I said, if you were right and around half of groups should include someone who is strongly opposed to fudging, then fudging would be a MUCH larger issue than something that comes up every couple of years, get's kicked around for a bit, and then forgotten about. Yet, outside of a couple of threads like this, that crop up from time to time, fudging is virtually never even cracking the top 10 of table issues.

There's the element of keeping it secret, of course. I'm not sure why people who feel fudging is perfectly fine also include the need to keep it secret rather than telling everyone when they do it. So that's probably a factor. Then there's a lot of social fear -- if I call this out, this thing I really dislike, what happens in the social setting? So you have that. So, to walk away from a game, you need to have a certain kind of courage and the correct situation. I've been in games where fudging has occurred, I've known about it, and I didn't walk away, although my attachment and care for the game certainly diminished significantly, to the point that I was showing up to hang with friends and didn't really care what happened in the game. Most argument about rules in games sits along this axis as well.

The space isn't "if you dislike fudging you must walk out or you don't really dislike fudging." Fudging will always significantly reduce my enjoyment of a game. If there's not enough other there, then I'll walk. I've done it before. But not every time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. It's just that Tolerate has "Accept" as part of it's definition, so it feels like splitting hairs to say Neutral means "Tolerate" rather than "Accept"

Semantic loading is a thing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The space isn't "if you dislike fudging you must walk out or you don't really dislike fudging." Fudging will always significantly reduce my enjoyment of a game. If there's not enough other there, then I'll walk. I've done it before. But not every time.

I just want to be very, very sure you are saying what I think you're saying.

You are saying that you have left a game, specifically because you discovered that the DM engaged in fudging. It isn't that you would leave, or considered leaving, or whatever else. You did in fact actually leave, and it was the discovery of fudging which prompted you to do so.

Is that correct?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I just want to be very, very sure you are saying what I think you're saying.

You are saying that you have left a game, specifically because you discovered that the DM engaged in fudging. It isn't that you would leave, or considered leaving, or whatever else. You did in fact actually leave, and it was the discovery of fudging which prompted you to do so.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that's what I said upthread yesterday. I've done it twice. To be explicitly clear, I have left a game because of fudging.