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That was essentially what the player was sending me permission to do.

That can be a little odd. I've got a player in my 13th Age game who came in as the "Champion of Concord" (one of the major cities in the default setting), and that'd have been a bit odd for a 1st level character (even though 13th Age 1st level characters are probably more like 2nd Level in most...

Even in cases where that's not true, the NPC is going to spend far less time interacting with dice in general; even if events are happening off screen, few GMs are going to play them out to see how they come out).

That's one of the things about backstories; they can sometimes supply useful material to incorporate into the campaign as a whole. (But then, I spent half my gaming career running superhero campaigns, where having character backgrounds that add pretty big chunks of setting in is kind of...

Yeah, we might have been able to do that back in the OD&D days, but that's because OD&D characters were almost schematic in their structure, and the longest thing you probably had to do was picking gear. I wouldn't bother with character generation for a con game these days (though I might let...

It isn't necessarily about heroic things, but how their life lead them to be an adventurer in the first place. When I wrote the backstory for Kedric, the aasimar Champion/Bard I had in a PF2e game, the backstory was mostly family history explaining his aasimar-ness, and then a bit of story...

Yeah, this is why I wouldn't play any of the XCOMs--or almost any game where I don't have autosaves enabled--on Iron Man on a bet.

While its a risk, its not a given they'll be hostile to it. I generally have pretty substantial backstory for most characters, but if I'm a game where death is on the table, its on the table. (I wouldn't bother with that for a one-off game like a con game though; even if I had some of it in my...

Like I said, there's fairness and there's fairness. Some versions of that are harder to achieve than others.

Yet you'll still get people who deny it exists at all in the wild, just because they've never seen it personally.

Depending on their definition of "fair", it was at least an unreasonable expectation, because using some of those definitions its questionable if its even possible. There are other definitions one could use where its possible: if someone's definition is "once a situation is set up, its allowed...

He made his, I made mine. He opened the door to a gamist note when mentioning the players enjoyed getting crits.

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...