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

[Thomas Shey]

D&D rules aren't perfect, but in this case, I don't think it's the rules that are encouraging some DMs to fudge. As I said before, it's DMs setting stakes they can't accept. If the dice would result in a dead PC and you can't accept that for any reason - including bad luck - why did you have character death as a possibility in the first place? Why didn't you have the monster knock them out? That's within the rules.

I don't think the big linear die roll part helps, but I think a big part of it is just the culture of the game (and trad games in general) which have been sort of passively accepting it for getting close to 50 years now.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Wrong" is an unnecessary judgment.

Fudging is on its face a temporary fix for a problem that sometimes arises. So it's helpful in my view to examine where the problem comes from and whether there's a solution to it that removes the possibility of the problem arising in the first place. Why am I not okay with the dice producing a given result? Can I just take that result off the table in favor of something I am willing to accept? The answer is obviously that I can. And in the doing, I don't have to fudge at all.

The problem is when the result is entirely situational. Then you have to decide to remove it selectively, and that isn't necessarily going to be popular, either.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think of it in terms of weight. Fudging - even if done sparingly - has a significant gravitational pull on the style of game you're playing, moving things toward a certain level of safety and GM showmanship and away from a certain level of player challenge and/or player empowerment. If you want to play on the first side of the river, fudging can be a helpful or perhaps necessary tool. But if you want to play on the second, fudging can be very destructive. I always want to play on the second. I guess many others feel the same way. So I think the point is, fudging should not be a default assumption, it should be a playstyle choice that's made clear in advance (in principle- I accept that once agreed to, individual instances will probably be invisible).

Well, of course, an awful lot of GMs consider whatever side of the river they lean to running as the default. You can argue that shouldn't be true, but it is.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would LOVE to have conversations with my players about DMing, if only to convince them to do it and let me play.

I'm finding this an odd subthread, since out of the eight other people I game with regularly these days, seven of them have GMed at least once, and five of them do so regularly, so I've never had a problem starting discussions of GM habits and style. There might be specific areas that going there would be fraught, but avoiding discussing it at all? Not only not now, but probably not in thirty years.

Maybe its an artifact of groups that have a much lower GM density.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Ooof. It's a game and we're playing a game. Part of that game involves concealment. What should be concealed and under what conditions can be debated, of course, but to frame that concealment as lack of integrity is misguided and perhaps divisive.

BUT -- knowing now that some people do feel lied to with hidden methods of resolutions of in-game actions, I agree it makes perfect sense to have conversations about that. It's not a conversation about integrity or honesty. It's a conversation about how you plan to play a game.

Fudging is not concealment of expected play, it's concealment of changes to that play that one person is making unilaterally and without expectation of doing so. That the GM doesn't show you the map of the dungeon before play, or doesn't tell you that you missed a secret door when you fail a check looking for it is NOT the same thing. The GM rolling behind a screen is being trusted to truthfully represent the results of the roll. When fudging occurs, the GM is NOT truthfully representing the results of the roll, but rather doing something else and pretending to truthfully represent the results of the roll. This isn't the same thing at all.

 

[Irlo]

Fudging is not concealment of expected play, it's concealment of changes to that play that one person is making unilaterally and without expectation of doing so. That the GM doesn't show you the map of the dungeon before play, or doesn't tell you that you missed a secret door when you fail a check looking for it is NOT the same thing. The GM rolling behind a screen is being trusted to truthfully represent the results of the roll. When fudging occurs, the GM is NOT truthfully representing the results of the roll, but rather doing something else and pretending to truthfully represent the results of the roll. This isn't the same thing at all.

My fault -- I wasn't clear because I didn't want to write an essay. I'm not talking about maps and secret doors. I'm talking about concealing the methods of resolving actions. I'm talking about the players being in the dark about how the DM is arriving at the results of the players' proposed actions.

When I first played D&D in the early '80s, my DM ran the game from behind the screen and I had NO CLUE how he was resolving in-game activity. And I didn't care. It was all concealed from me. I didn't know about to-hit matrices. I didn't know how he was deciding if I was sneaky enough to get passed the guards undetected. If he was making stuff up, fudging numbers, or rigorously adhering to dice rolls -- it didn't matter to me and I didn't care to know. In those days, my expectation was that almost all DM stuff was intended to be concealed. (I seem to remember admonishments in the game books that players should not even peruse the DMG.)

Now, more than 35 years later, I'm in a group with a first-time player who barely knows how their own character sheet works and has no interest or particuar expectation that the DM shares the methods of resolving actions. Is it dice? Is it making up stuff? Is it occassional fudging? This new player doesn't know and doesn't care. The DM is doing what DMs do by running the game.

And no trust is broken.

The GM rolling behind a screen is being trusted to truthfully represent the results of the roll.

That's your expectation, and it's common, but it's not universal. Here's my version: the DM behind the screen is trusted to be the arbiter of in-game actions. That often involves dice. How much of the specific methods of arbitration are revealed to players differs from table to table. By all means, have the conversation about how you plan to run the game (or how you want the DM to run the game). If a DM tells you they're running a strict let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may campaign, the DM should abide by that. If they don't agree to that, it doesn't make them liars or show a lack of integrity.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My fault -- I wasn't clear because I didn't want to write an essay. I'm not talking about maps and secret doors. I'm talking about concealing the methods of resolving actions. I'm talking about the players being in the dark about how the DM is arriving at the results of the players' proposed actions.

When I first played D&D in the early '80s, my DM ran the game from behind the screen and I had NO CLUE how he was resolving in-game activity. And I didn't care. It was all concealed from me. I didn't know about to-hit matrices. I didn't know how he was deciding if I was sneaky enough to get passed the guards undetected. If he was making stuff up, fudging numbers, or rigorously adhering to dice rolls -- it didn't matter to me and I didn't care to know. In those days, my expectation was that almost all DM stuff was intended to be concealed. (I seem to remember admonishments in the game books that players should not even peruse the DMG.)

Now, more than 35 years later, I'm in a group with a first-time player who barely knows how their own character sheet works and has no interest or particuar expectation that the DM shares the methods of resolving actions. Is it dice? Is it making up stuff? Is it occassional fudging? This new player doesn't know and doesn't care. The DM is doing what DMs do by running the game.

And no trust is broken.



That's your expectation, and it's common, but it's not universal. Here's my version: the DM behind the screen is trusted to be the arbiter of in-game actions. That often involves dice. How much of the specific methods of arbitration are revealed to players differs from table to table. By all means, have the conversation about how you plan to run the game (or how you want the DM to run the game). If a DM tells you they're running a strict let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may campaign, the DM should abide by that. If they don't agree to that, it doesn't make them liars or show a lack of integrity.

Look, no one is saying that you can't love to be fudged. It's cool. Go for it. But you cannot explain away the feelings of others that don't want to be fudged, especially with a description of your preferred play that I find to be particularly unappealing.

 

[Irlo]

Look, no one is saying that you can't love to be fudged. It's cool. Go for it. But you cannot explain away the feelings of others that don't want to be fudged, especially with a description of your preferred play that I find to be particularly unappealing.

I'm not explaining away the feelings. I have said more than once that people should talk about it, especially knowing how negatively fudging is perceived by some players.

By the way, I haven't provided a description of my preferred play. I actually don't love fudging. But if my DM is fudging, it's not because he lacks integrity. (I voted neutral on the poll.)

I think I'm done here. I'm not successfullly contributing to the conversation. Apologies all around if I've muddled my own points.

 

[Hussar]

it's concealment of changes to that play that one person is making unilaterally and without expectation of doing so.

That's not true though.

There is most certainly an expectation that the DM can and will fudge during the game. It's explicitly called out in pretty much every DMG ever written. This isn't hidden. That's the point I keep trying to get across. No one is talking about it because it's not hidden at all. The DMG TELLS YOU to do this. Even way, way back when it was expected.

The difference now is that many of the things that were fudged in the past have simply been folded directly into the game and handed to the players. That's why we have things like reroll mechanics, and various spells and effects, and Inspiration or Action points. It's simply a codified version of fudging.

 

[Hussar]

An observation I've made after reading the last few pages, why is it that we as a community are so opposed to discussing fudging with our players when we have all pretty much gotten behind the use of X cards, defining Lines & Veils, and other safety tools.

These seem to me to be pretty closely related, yet their seems to be pretty unanimous consent that satey tools are a good thing and even if never used should always be available to players. Yet then we seem to have so many folks in this thread that refuse to provide a similar level of openness for fudging discussions.

I suspect there is a lot to unpack in that observation.

Where's the opposition to the discussion?

Everyone has flat out said, if you really have an issue with fudging, bring it to your DM's attention. The reason it's not talked about, generally, up front, is because the basic assumption is that the DM will, from time to time, fudge dice. It's right there in the DMG. It's not some weird, corner case, bizarre thing that no one ever does. It's common, and it's expected.

And, like your example of safety tools, we've simply made fudging a player facing mechanic. Instead of the DM turning a crit into a normal hit, you have fifteen different ways for the players to do the exact same thing. That's WHY we have those sorts of mechanics.