Forsaking Dice as GM: Going full narrative

[Professor Murder]

A post about "fudging rolls" as a GM has made me ponder.

Have you ever considered, as a GM, never rolling dice on your end. Players still roll, you don't. Things hit or miss based on your judgement for what the story needs. If you fudge rolls, you already do this in a sense. You decide that a given attack should hit or not or should do more or less damage. What if you just gave up all pretense and just decided yourself instead of letting the dice decide?

thoughts?

 

[Mannahnin]

I would want/need some mechanics to take the place of those rolls. Maybe something like Apocalypse World, where the players make the rolls?I really enjoy the uncertainty and surprise of rolling, though, so I'm not sure I could entirely do away with it.

 

[Jer]

I actually quite like systems where the players make all of the rolls. I don't run 5e this way but for 3e and 4e both it was trivially easy to just add 11 to attacks the monsters make and let the players roll with their Armor Class - 10 as their "defense bonus". Combine that with just having monsters do average damage for their dice and it works quite well.

(I don't run 5e that way because I teach a lot of kids to play D&D, so I want to play by the "right" rules so when they go to other folks games they know what they're doing. But I don't see any reason it couldn't work for 5e).

 

[Umbran]

A post about "fudging rolls" as a GM has made me ponder.

Have you ever considered, as a GM, never rolling dice on your end. Players still roll, you don't. Things hit or miss based on your judgement for what the story needs. If you fudge rolls, you already do this in a sense. You decide that a given attack should hit or not or should do more or less damage. What if you just gave up all pretense and just decided yourself instead of letting the dice decide?

thoughts?

There are game engines out there now that have that intrinsic to design - all rolls are on the player's side, and if I really wanted to not do any of the rolling, I'd shift to such an engine.

Mind you, those engines frame threats differently - Rather than having the orc and the PC have similar stats, and have them fight it out wargame style, I have an orc, and I tell the players, "The orc is coming to get you. X will happen if you don't stop it. What do you do?" And all the rolls are about how they try to manage the situation - if they manage it, X doesn't happen.

So, as GM, I still decide what happens if the PCs don't succeed, but I do it beforehand, to set up the stakes, rather than piecemeal along the way.

 

[ninjayeti]

I agree that this is the logical conclusion to fudging dice rolls - if you are going ignore the rolls that don't give you the "right" result, why roll at all? But I see that as an argument for NOT fudging dice rolls, rather than as an argument for not rolling.

Ultimately this just takes the "game" aspect out of RPGs and simply makes it collaborative storytelling. Which I am sure is fine for some groups, but not really what my group or I are looking for.

 

[clearstream]

I would want/need some mechanics to take the place of those rolls. Maybe something like Apocalypse World, where the players make the rolls?I really enjoy the uncertainty and surprise of rolling, though, so I'm not sure I could entirely do away with it.

A reasonable approach is to make calls with input from a ranking system. So if A is rank 2 with rapier and B (player) is rank 3, upon listening to player description GM would likely call in their favour but some circumstances and choices could go another way.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I agree that this is the logical conclusion to fudging dice rolls - if you are going ignore the rolls that don't give you the "right" result, why roll at all? But I see that as an argument for NOT fudging dice rolls, rather than as an argument for not rolling.

Ultimately this just takes the "game" aspect out of RPGs and simply makes it collaborative storytelling. Which I am sure is fine for some groups, but not really what my group or I are looking for.

As @Umbran mentioned there are RPGs out there that still have the players roll, with the GM setting up the consequences of those rolls, and interpreting the results. That's still a game, by any definition. There's no need to say either the GM rolls, or nobody rolls.

 

[Umbran]

I agree that this is the logical conclusion to fudging dice rolls - if you are going ignore the rolls that don't give you the "right" result, why roll at all? But I see that as an argument for NOT fudging dice rolls, rather than as an argument for not rolling.

There's a very basic fault with that argument anyway - we are not on, nor from, the planet Vulcan. We are not driven by pure logic. We humans operate on sliding scales with shades of grey and nuance.

So, "logical conclusion" does not necessarily relate to anything real.

 

[payn]

Isn't this how PbtA works?

 

[jdrakeh]

Isn't this how PbtA works?

Kind of. Players roll all the dice in most PBtA games BUT this doesn't mean that the GM just makes mechanically uninformed judgements for hits/misses as the OP suggests. Instead, the players roll dice for all that stuff. For example, if a monster attacks a PC, the player makes a roll for their character to dodge/parry that attack. It doesn't just arbitrarily hit or miss because the GM says so. Note that D&D 3.5 had an option for this (as it related to combat, anyhow), as well.