Search results

The latter depends on what definition of "fairness" one is using in a given context.

Yeah, even if something is uncommon, its a mistake to assume it doesn't exist at all in the gaming populace as whole. I've seen people say they've never seen players bring up rules mistakes the GM is making or they disagree with that worked to their advantage (i.e. rules arguments that work...

There's no reason they couldn't; nothing stops someone from going "I'm sometimes going to fudge a little when something's gone off the rails. Do you want me to just do it visibly?" I agree that's probably uncommon, but in most cases its because its taken as a given that doing that quietly is...

I do have to point out you can think its ethically OK but think there's a loss of something in the illusion of the game if its visible. I don't consider that a good enough reason, but its not an irrational or hypocritical one.

Problem as usual is this has more impact on PCs than NPCs because they're going to have a lot more dice slung in their direction across the course of the game. (Which doesn't mean I think crits are a bad idea, just that the fact they apply in both directions doesn't mean as much as I think...

That's only true if you're just rerunning it with the extent setup. If I've got to roll things back, that's probably not all I'm doing.

Well, the truth is there's a perception that players are much worse at taking the Big Picture in a game than GMs and as such, fudging on their part is liable to be, at worst selfish, and at best, exhibiting tunnel vision that doesn't do the game as a whole any favors. I think the automatic...

I suspect, at least for a time, the same GMs did the same things in other games. Once you've got in the habit, I can see it being a hard one to break even if you've decided its a bad idea. This can't be but speculation, of course. I think this is kind of an extreme comparison, and don't...

Yeah, its either spotlight-hogging in disguise, or just contrarianism.

It might be worth taking a shot at DragonQuest too. I had problems with some elements (particularly to do with how mages worth) but it was a system with some virtues.

For what its worth, I saw a lot of GMs talking about doing it back in the OD&D days though. Most of them at least claimed they were doing the thing Nevin said above and fudging to backstop really bad die roll chains, but if they were willing to do it there, its hard to see as a given they...

"Every" is doing some lifting there. Some people are willing to generate it as they go, even in a sandbox if need be.

Deception is force. Its just a subtle form of it, and that's true of a lot of forms of force. If you provide false information to people so they make different decisions than they otherwise would, its fundamentally indistinguishable from force (and perhaps worse, since with compulsion someone...

Challenge accepted. :) I'm 68 and my parents bought this house before I was born (it was built 8 years before, but I don't believe they bought it immediately; I'd have to dig out the deed to check). (Though you could argue about the years I lived away when going to college.)

I think you've hit the button; illusionism has a negative connotation because its often used to violate expectations. The cases where its sometimes expected instead are the difference between a con game and stage magic. No one likes to be conned, but some people really like stage magic.

I think the thing that makes Lanefan's campaign a notable outlier is not being a sandbox, but the length-of-run.

I still tend to do that, though the campaigns last 18-24 months because a given campaign only gets run every other week, so by the time I'm done I want something fairly different usually.

Well, that's just a normal sandbox style campaign, far as I can tell. While those aren't as common as they once were even within the D&D sphere, I'd hardly call it really unusual.

Ah, well, its something I deal with a fair bit here.

I will just note this is the card that's almost always played by someone who was sloppy with insulting someone else but doesn't want to take responsibility for it. If that's not what you're trying to do, its a bad tact to take.