Balancing "RP" and "G"

[Odhanan]

Let me turn that around. As a player in a game in which the DM will fudge, why worry about character building at all? "Hmm. Yeah, I could take that Dodge feat. But why? If the DM prefers I will not be hit, I won't, no matter my AC, and Vice-versa". And the same would hold true of -any- character building decision that involves numbers. Why put skill points in skills? The DM will fudge. Why take Weapon Specialization? The DM will fudge.

Fudging makes -every- choice players make meaningless, from character creation to game decisions.

Oh, so agreed! Indeed, fudging destroys any chance of empowerement of the players in terms of decision making and character choices/builds. It means that anything you do in the game is subject to partial interpretations of the DM (not just rules-wise, but drama-wise, or whatever-wise the DM chooses). The DM isn't a referee any more, he becomes judge, jury and executioner. As a player, that pisses me off whenever it happens.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

Letting the dice fall where they may can destroy a party, campaign or even a gaming group. I was involved in one of the many massive dungeon crawls out there and the DM decided he wanted it to be as challenging as possible and told us characters would die. The problem because, we were manking new characters every 2-3 sessions. Well, I am slow at making characters and soon none of us cared about our character.

That is a DMing problem, not a non-fudging problem. You can have 'open' rolls and 'let the dice fall where they may' and still role play. I've done it both as player and DM and I hate when a DM contrives a plot to allow a party to live (as happened in a 3.5 game of Secret of the Saltmarsh - we (the PCs) were all unconcious but the two NPCs we had with us just happened to suddenly be 4th level fighters and wiped out 6 pirates and the pirate captain. Boy, we felt we really earned our reward after that :\

Reynard called someone elitist, but on the other hand he was critiquing the other person for not playing strictly by the rules. Rule 0 is also a legitimate rule and give complete flexability to the GM.

I agree that there needs to be balance between mechanics and story, but I will not repeatedly kill off characters just becuase my dice were hot. The same way, I will increase HP or other stats of monsters & villians on the fly because CR is based on much weaker characters than most people play. In the end, it makes the fight more dramatic for the players if the conflicts are balanced to be more or less challenging. PCs still die, but not every session or every few sessions because it hurts the game, not just the story.

I wonder what kinds of games you run where, if the dice are followed strictly, you kill off a PC every few sessions.

Also if you are increasing the monsters stats on the fly and, I presume, fudging rolls, why on earth do you bother with dice in the first place? Just describe what happens during 'storytime'.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

Well, Greyhawk is just a setting - you could apply Greyhawk to many different systems. Take Star Wars, for example. I've seen that played under many different systems.

sure, i could recreate greyhawk in another system but thats a bunch of work. Why bother?

or perhaps put another way, consider that i am running a different system, one which is a lot like DND greyhawk, with all the rules being similar but with a "hero pt " option for the GM.

Seriously, consider... "fudging = rules-lite drama points"

Have I seen the perfect game? Well, D&D is pretty close to perfect for what it is trying to do: the D&D genre with a focus on "the game".

What D&D is not great at is doing different genres (low-magic, for one) or a game where play is about creating stories. It takes some work to get D&D to do that sort of thing. Fudging dice rolls, for one.

fudging results on the fly is very little work. Making my adversaries and challenges tie into character background and flow to form a story is fun work. I made very few changes to dnd to make my thre year game character driven and story driven and everyone had a blast.

To me, trying to create stories with D&D is like trying to play D&D, with all the genre trappings and the peculiarities of the rules, using GURPS or Palladium Fantasy or something like that. Sure, you can do it, but why not just play D&D?

We do play DND.
We just might not play book perfect DnD, altering it here and there to fit our preferences better. If a player wants a change to a class and I don't have a omplelling reason to not allow it, I approve it. if a mechanic seems screwy, I change it. If a flukey die roll sequence produces an out of reason result, I can alter it, but I rarely if ever have to. Most of my fudging comes in the way of scenario decisions, as discussed above. Its also the most effective.

Which is why people getting overly worried about dice fudging is such a disconnect with me. Your Gm can fudge in much more damatic and effective ways without ever touching a single die result, and maybe he does. Its kind of like getting worked up about the pin-hole sized leak in your stateroom, on the titanic as she is going down.

 

[LostSoul]

And for those who refuse to deviate from the rules as written for the sake of RP, preferring more of a strict gamist approach, I could ask (though as a bit of a rhetorical question):

Why play D&D, and not the minis game, warhammer40K, or something similar? The questions being asked are fair to rephrase and pose to each varying side.

For me, I guess it would be the scope of D&D. There's a lot of things you can do in D&D that you can't do in the minis game (or a wargame/boardgame) because the "board" you are playing on is huge - usually a world, possible a multiverse!

And I prefer a more story-oriented game, just not when playing D&D. When I (finally) accepted D&D for what it excels at, my enjoyment of the game shot up. Not that I haven't played (and run) story-oriented games with D&D, but it was with house rules, a familiar group, and some of the features of D&D still bothered me.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

Geez. So because we won't fudge, (yeah, I'm in that camp. I actually roll most dice in which the result will be immediately noticed (such as attack rolls) in the open) we should play a mini-game?

please note the context. This was in response to why, because we will fudge, we dont go away and play some other game.

both IMO are way off base. But there weill always be those who think changing one rule is a crime.

Let me turn that around. As a player in a game in which the DM will fudge, why worry about character building at all? "Hmm. Yeah, I could take that Dodge feat. But why? If the DM prefers I will not be hit, I won't, no matter my AC, and Vice-versa". And the same would hold true of -any- character building decision that involves numbers. Why put skill points in skills? The DM will fudge. Why take Weapon Specialization? The DM will fudge.

lets examine this from a bigger scope. shall we. And BTW if the minmaxers would get the point you would revolutionize gaming.

DND advises the Gm handing out appropriate challenges. That means you as Gm keep in mind your PC strength when you give them foes. The standard is a "win with 255 loss of resource and little chance of death" but the normal story arc list goes as far a the +4-5 or so where its a 50/50 chance of dying. They hand you CR BUT they also tell you to take into account your specific party traits and strengths and weaknesses and advise you in other places to use past encounters to modify this and that.

In other words, if one group has well optimized characters with good effective gear and coordinated tactics they will/should get handed tougher adversaries and harder challenges than a less optimized group with haphazard gear and who have little interest and use in coordinated battle plans even though they have the same classes and levels..

In short, the Gm will "fudge" the setup and the encounter, so to speak, from the get go, basing it on their abil;ity and performance.

The reason is simple, to not do this results in one group being bored with cakewalk after cakewalk or the other group getting bored or worse with continual failures.

So, YES, the question is "why bother to optimize, since the challenge will be "altered" or "scaled" by the Gm to your current strength? This is true whether that "scaling" comes at the pre-scenario pick adversaries and circumstances stage or later during the play as he picks the "are the orcs down the hall drunk" or even if he waits until the dice roll goes wonky.

One answer might well be that for some, optimizing isn't done to make his job in game easier, since he knows the Gm will provide him appropriately challenging sessions, but because to him optimizing is fun, like solving math puzzles.

But, from the get go, whenever the Gms first figured out an ancient red dragon vs first level PCs was a no-no, your question was answered.

Fudging makes -every- choice players make meaningless, from character creation to game decisions.

Nope.

 

[swrushing]

The rules help determine the outcome of choices. In other words, they are just as important as the choices in determining the path the story ultimately takes. if the rules have no bearing on what happens at the table -- which *is* the story insofar as there even is a story -- what's the point of using rules at all?

See this is the baby-bathwater side of your argument.

fudging once in a while doesn't equate to removing rules from the game.

fudging is a correct to the once-in-a-while misfire from the rules.

Look, when growing up, we often got eggs from a farm, We always broke the eggs in a bowl individually before putting them into things because once in a great while, maybe three times a year, an egg would be bad and it makes no sense to just throw the bad egg in and ruin the whole dish.

fudging, is like that. you throw out the rare bad egg (bad result) and keep all the good eggs.

your jump all the way from "dont fudge" to "dont use the rules at all" is just like saying "dont eat any eggs" or maybe "dont buy any eggs from them" because you find throwing out the once-in-a-blue-moon bad eggs somehow cheating?

Sure, we could have bought store eggs but they were more expensive and the farm happened to be a relative's.

there is a wide gap, a vast chasm, between the extremes of "go ahead and eat the bad egg anyway" (don't fudge) and "dont eat eggs" (don't use rules at all) or "go buy store bought eggs" (go play another game) that you seem willing to ignore and step over but where many people run games every day and have a blast.

 

[swrushing]

Yes, I COMPLETELY AGREE that Lucas has been making this up as he went. ::which probably shot a hole in my case:

While its clear that by the end of the six films it had become the framed as the story of vader, it seems clear to me that Star Wars (the movie, now numbered part 4) wasn't "about vader". His role in that film was barely more than "villain's prime muscle" much akin to jaws or oddjob from bond films.

end of my hijack.

 

[DonTadow]

Oh, so agreed! Indeed, fudging destroys any chance of empowerement of the players in terms of decision making and character choices/builds. It means that anything you do in the game is subject to partial interpretations of the DM (not just rules-wise, but drama-wise, or whatever-wise the DM chooses). The DM isn't a referee any more, he becomes judge, jury and executioner. As a player, that pisses me off whenever it happens.

The chance that adding a plus 1 to a roll or taking 1 ac away from a monster is going to "destroy the fabric of your game" is absurd. The DM controls a lot of factors of the game and fudges a loto f things during the game to "give the pcs" the empowerement that they are not in a stasis world that they have no effect on.

I've always said, if we play this game strickly by EVERY single rule (which no one does) we would have lengthy games that are consently hampered by a multitude of rolls and forced role playing. The DM's job is to guide the game how he sees fit to gain the maximum fun for his players. For some that means the players like to succeed a lot. For others that means a gritty campaign. In either case fudging can be used in instances that will heighten both values.

 

[The Shaman]

The secret is to never let the pcs know that there's a wizard behind the screen.

So it's okay to cheat the players, as long as they don't figure it out?

:\

The DM doesnt "play the game" like hte players do. HE runs the game.

So you don't roll to see if monsters hit, or to makes saves for NPCs? You just decide to hit the adventurers or not, to avoid a spell effect or not?

Saying that you fudge sparingly is the same as saying you cheat, but only when it really matters. It also misses the larger point: you're taking control of the players' characters out of their hands. As Barak astutely observed, there's little reason to weigh different mechanical options, since you will decide if a given action succeeds or fails based solely on your personal sense of drama or significance, or to cover your GMing mistakes in encounter design.

When I'm behind the screen, I am playing the game - I have different "game pieces," but those pieces are still govererned by the same rules as the players'. Moreover, I'm not "telling a story" - I'm setting a scene sprinkled with chances for random outcomes, then interpreting the action through roleplaying based on those random outcomes.

 

[LostSoul]

or perhaps put another way, consider that i am running a different system, one which is a lot like DND greyhawk, with all the rules being similar but with a "hero pt " option for the GM.

Seriously, consider... "fudging = rules-lite drama points"

I would rather that the game had rules for drama points instead of relying on the DM to fudge rolls to get the same effect. A house rule to this effect (or using an optional rule) would be a good one, since it's what you're trying to do but works within the rules.

That also puts power into the hands of the players, since they can decide what's worth "fudging" for.