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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9397202" data-attributes="member: 6790260">But if every rule is "...unless the DM secretly decides to do otherwise," you cannot ever learn what you're doing. Every single action's consequences are branded with the caveat "...but what happens might only be what the DM decided to do."If the AI has the sensitivity and compassion to actually use the Rule of Cool correctly, it's good enough to be an actual literal person, at which point using it is slavery. Not gonna happen.Because it was not worth responding to. But yes, I genuinely do believe that a policy of fudging, even for the best reasons, even only extremely sparingly, even only under various other conditions, genuinely does render the rules irrelevant. The rules don't lead to consequences. DM choices do. Because every single time, every single result has appended to it, "Unless the DM secretly changed things and won't ever let you find out."Even if it is 1 out of a million times, how can you possibly know? Your "knowledge" of the game is necessarily conditioned, forever, on the assumption the DM didn't interfere. That the rules were cashing out as you know them. But you don't know that--and you never can. The whole point of actual fudging, amongst other things, is that it is concealed from the players, and great pains are taken to preserve that concealment no matter what. Players must never learn that the fudging occurred, no matter what.I have no idea what you're trying to say here. The person I replied to spoke of hidden information. That's irrelevant to "checking" the DM.You have a highly unwarranted confidence that the players are so easily fooled.Why not? Just because the rules are present does not mean the DM cannot still make mistakes. I would vastly prefer a human being who admits their stumbles and respects me enough to treat me like an adult, rather than maintaining a facade of perfection and infallibility and lying to my face about the times something went wrong. (Which, yes, some DMs outright do that. Matt Colville has explicitly said that he will even go so far as pre-rolling dice so he can lift the DM screen and show the result if someone questions his fudging.If you used the dice, and then decided against it, say that. Or let us know that that's what happened. Easy as pie. Then I, or any player, can know that we're going off into the wilds, rather than being deceived into thinking that the game is exactly as it's presented.What you described is ambiguous. It may or may not be fudging, because you haven't specified (a) whether the DM keeps this hidden from players, and if so, (b) whether it is meaningfully possible for the players to discover that this occurred. If at least one of those two factors isn't true--even if the players do not actually find out--then it isn't fudging, and is perfectly acceptable. Laudable, even. Fudging is neither.As long as they are given a reasonable shot at knowing, I'm content. Often I personally will just say it because that's just how I feel about things, but I don't require that of others. Now, "reasonable shot" (as noted above) needs to not be someone playing sillybuggers: no "well they had a 1 in 2000 chance of finding out, guess it just sucks to be them!", that's quite clearly not a reasonable shot. But, for example, if the party has a net (say) 85% chance and it just so happens they fall into that 15%...sometimes that stuff happens! Likewise, if they just never think to ask the question, despite the question being quite reasonable and not involving any pixelb#$%&ing, then that's on them. It behooves to err on the side of giving info rather than not, of course, but if you're already meeting them halfway and they just...don't follow through, that's not your fault. (Of course, this is best addressed by looking into why the players aren't meeting you halfway, but that's a different subject.)I think you'll find I have a decided excess of courage in my convictions, but I wouldn't do that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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