As a GM, How Often Do You Fudge Dice Rolls?

[darjr]

I don't fudge and roll out in the open. But games a far from perfect and I also make mistakes. I'll change rules as needed, but is that a kind of fudging. I'm not sure, I like letting the dice as rolled stay. Just, sometimes I'll decide things that may mean no dice are needed.

 

[Zak S]

If you change the rules, tell people, and they all agree, and THEN roll and then use that rule like that from then on-- then I wouldn't call that fudging. That's just customizing the rules.

Fudging's when a die roll is made under the assumption it'll be judged a certain way and then the way changes AFTER the die hits the table.

 

[Janx]

I don't fudge and roll out in the open. But games a far from perfect and I also make mistakes. I'll change rules as needed, but is that a kind of fudging. I'm not sure, I like letting the dice as rolled stay. Just, sometimes I'll decide things that may mean no dice are needed.

good observation.

along that line. No game is perfect, and every game session may drift from a rule set's "intended" play style.

Which means, at some point, the players, campaign, adventure, preferences, etc are out of spec with the game's design expectation.

In which case, a GM's going to adapt, because you can't change games mid campaign, let alone mid-adventure.

In such cases, Fudging is a tool in the GM's pocket. Not always the best tool. That depends on a lot of things.

 

[Janx]

Not having the sense to run away from a fight that isn't going well is a problem with the player, not the adventure, the GM, or even whether or not the GM fudges.

Unless the GM has cruelly closed all possible escape routes, or blocks them as soon as you get to them.

as a side note, there's been threads here about how D&D sucks for "running away" in that the movement rules usually don't make it likely the party will get away, thus the party concludes they have to duke it out until the bloody end.

For some campaigns, a bloody end is acceptable, even if it is frequent.

For others, that might not be. And with a little bit of fudging, the design flaw in D&D is easily bypassed.

Over the last 20+ years, my posse has run a wide variety of campaigns using D&D. it works just fine, even with a variety of play styles. Some times we run it strict "dice as they lay" for a grittier, tactical feel. other times, there's a healthy dose of fudge served to keep the story wheels running for most of the PCs to make it to the end.

We're not using the wrong ruleset. We're not playing wrong.

In fact, our 20+ year track record is a testament to the versatility of the ruleset. By turning on/off fudging on the GM, and a few other tricks, we've had heap loads of fun without having to buy and learn a hundred different games because we wanted the next campaign to be different from the last one.

 

[Janx]

To me that's like saying you went to play baseball but when the pitcher struck you out you were like "Hey! Wait!" Like, this is what the game is largely about: your ability to hit the ball. D&D is, as a skill, about risk management, paying attention to the situation, tactics and strategy, thinking ahead. There are tons of other fantasy RPGs that aren't and won't punish you for just showing up and ignoring what's going on if you're not into that.

But that's the difference. baseball is such a simplistic game, that it all comes down to whether you hit a ball. that's it. That is your ONLY task as a player. And statistically, even professional baseball hitters don't have that high of a % chance of hitting the actual ball on any given swing.

Whereas D&D has a player trying to do a lot of different things. Stuff happens. every intelligently written process includes Rule Zero: adapt to exceptional situations when they come up. Fudging is just a mechanism to that end.

As for the whole "insulating from the GM's mistake" issues--yes, that's what I said above: if you find yourself fudging, realize it's because you, the GM, made a mistake in how you set up the scenario and do a better job next time. Never include an encounter that can create an outcome your group doesn't want.

What do you do when your PC has a problem?

Reboot.

Why? because it is easier than loading in an SDK and a debugger to walk through the assembly code to see what's wrong and then hacking a patch to the code and submitting that to the vendor and waiting for them to accept it and release it to make your problem go away.

In many cases, it is far easier to simply fudge away some bad results than it is to stress about conducting a Post Mortem review on your last adventure and analyzing your next adventure for statistical design defects.

Given that your just going to make mistake anyway on the next adventure, you might as well just simply learn how to adapt your material on the fly.

Given that you wrote the adventure last night and made an encounter too hard, there is nothing so sacred to what you wrote last night, that you can't change it today during the actual game night. it's all stuff you made up and decided as the GM, regardless of when you decided it.

 

[Zhaleskra]

as a side note, there's been threads here about how D&D sucks for "running away" in that the movement rules usually don't make it likely the party will get away, thus the party concludes they have to duke it out until the bloody end.

I stand by that this is a problem with the PLAYER.

For some campaigns, a bloody end is acceptable, even if it is frequent.

For others, that might not be. And with a little bit of fudging, the design flaw in D&D is easily bypassed.

Over the last 20+ years, my posse has run a wide variety of campaigns using D&D. it works just fine, even with a variety of play styles. Some times we run it strict "dice as they lay" for a grittier, tactical feel. other times, there's a healthy dose of fudge served to keep the story wheels running for most of the PCs to make it to the end.

We're not using the wrong ruleset. We're not playing wrong.

In fact, our 20+ year track record is a testament to the versatility of the ruleset. By turning on/off fudging on the GM, and a few other tricks, we've had heap loads of fun without having to buy and learn a hundred different games because we wanted the next campaign to be different from the last one.

Again with the baseless accusations. I've already reported your hostile tone once. Now it looks like I have to do it again.

 

[billd91]

Again with the baseless accusations. I've already reported your hostile tone once. Now it looks like I have to do it again.

Baseless accusations? Hostile tone? Are you guys carrying on some conversation the rest of us aren't seeing?

 

[iserith]

I don't fudge. I roll in the open.

As DM, when I say it's time to roll a die, it's because I have determined that the outcome of the action in play is uncertain. However, what is certain is that the outcome will be fun no matter how the die lands. Thus, I see no need to fudge because I'm never going to risk the table's fun on a die roll. Success and failure with both be interesting to the players (even if it totally sucks for the characters).

 

[StormKnight]

I normally make all rolls in the open (and often even the NPC stats are in the open!) so I normally couldn't "fudge a roll" even if I wanted to, which I usually don't. However, I have absolutely no hesitation about "fudging" in one form or another in the rare cases when it is required. The entire essence of GMing is frequently "making up stuff that happens on the fly". Often, changing a value on a die roll would be a comparatively tiny change compared to the rest of the stuff I'm having to make up on the fly!

I think if you do fudge, it's just important to realize that you did because you were using a rule that included a result that wasn't actually one of the results you wanted in that situation.

So: if you fudge, it means you probably wanna rewrite that rule or not use that rule in that situation, so next time you won't have to fudge.

Not at all. No rules, no matter how good, can be sensitive to what's going on in the group. Rules don't know what you are tired of at the moment, where you want the game to go right now, or how long you have left to play this evening. Sometimes a roll stretching out an event for another hour is absolutely fine - but at the moment, you really need to end the game, so it isn't good RIGHT NOW.

Let's say, for instance, that I roll on the cultist's greater summoning table to see what kind of demon he conjures up. And I get a 7 "Gooey Oozing Blob of Death". But wait...I remember that just earlier this session the PCs ran into an end-of-the-world-ranting-nutcase talking about "the horned beast is coming for us all!" (something I just ad-libbed to add some flavor) And that for the rest of the session the PCs have been sticking in comments like "Didn't sleep well last night - I kept having dreams about a monster with lots of horns chasing me". And right there, result 8 is "The Thing with 1000 Horns". Screw it - I'm fudging the roll and having the Thing with 1000 Horns show up! This in no way means I ALWAYS want the Thing with 1000 horns to show up.

If you think 8 points of damage is a "mistake", you shouldn't have had a monster swinging a weapon that did d8 damage in the first place.

Likewise, 8 points being perfectly fine doesn't mean 8 points 5 times in a row is perfectly fine.

The players presumably showed up to play a game where the monsters have an x chance of hitting them and (once they hit) have a y chance of doing z damage. Any outcome in that range should be acceptable to them or they should be playing a different game.

I usually think I'm doing pretty good when an RPG system does a few things I want well, much less "every single element and probability of the game is what I want".

Different people have entirely different reasons for playing RPGs, and want entirely different things out of them. Even out of the same systems. Ask 5 gamers "what is D&D about?" and you'll probably get 6 different answers.

 

[Zak S]

I usually think I'm doing pretty good when an RPG system does a few things I want well, much less "every single element and probability of the game is what I want".

Then hack it.