Can the GM cheat?

[airwalkrr]

I feel I was pretty clear with rule 0 throughout the campaign. Hence my surprise to hear about this.

In most of my campaigns, I don't fudge at all. I have a screen up, but that is just to keep the players from metagaming enemy combat bonuses. This campaign was special. I attempted to create a world where the players were heroes who were nigh-unstoppable. Even the weaker heroes always had some sort of "luck" on their side. And the dice didn't really matter. But it is fun to roll dice. And it is fun to see that maximum damage roll and see the villains fall over in dismay.

I don't know what the issue really was. I think the players just didn't like my GMing style or something. I am just trying to make sense of this.

 

[timASW]

Meh, not enough information to say. Sometimes the GM fudges a few things in almost any campaign. Sometimes the GM fudges a lot.

Usually i dont fudge at all but in my last campaign 3 players were on the extra's board at the casinos, a situation not uncommon in las vegas that basically means you have to be 24/7 on call or get knocked way down the list for people who are going to be bumped up to full time. When they all turned out we had 7 players and when none made it we had 4. They would not all show or not en masse either.

So I designed encounters for 6 people and usually had to fudge a little one way or another because it was rare for everyone to be able to show.

Cheating? I dont think so. Ignoring dice rolls just for story? I wouldnt like it as a player but thats because I have to feel like every fight is one we might lose to really get into it as a player. I wouldnt call it cheating or quit over it but I would probably drink more and mess around more rather then taking the campaign too seriously.

 

[Obryn]

If the system requires the DM to fudge rolls in order for it to function properly and remain fun for all participants, there's an issue with the system, not with the DM.

-O

 

[Morrus]

I usually look on fudging as a failure to design encounters properly.

Perhaps. But IMO it's better than blindly continuing with the broken encounter or stopping/interrupting the game.

 

[delericho]

But I have to honestly ask, is it possible for a GM to cheat?

Is it possible for the DM to cheat? Absolutely. Whatever game you're playing almost certainly has rules (either those in the books or those agreed by the group around the table). If the DM breaks those rules, he's cheating.

Is it permissible for the DM to cheat? That's going to depend a great deal on the group. Some groups of players will demand a no-fudging policy because they want the challenges to be 'fair' - both in that that way they know the DM isn't deliberately out to get them, and also that they'll know that when they win it's a real victory (rather than because the DM decided to let them win). Other groups will have no issue with the DM changing rolls, rules, or whatever else on the fly.

Personally, my preference is for a no-fudging policy to apply to the game, but I wouldn't insist on it. YMM (and is quite likely to) V, of course.

My opinion is that the story trumps rules (and dice) all the time unless the campaign is specifically designed as a tournament-style challenge.

I'm always a little uneasy about "story trumps rules" as a justification for fudging. Because that suggests that the DM has a clear story in mind, which can (but, importantly, doesn't have to) lead to railroading and other forms of abuse. If the DM truly has a fixed story in mind, I'd generally rather he just write it up and email it to me.

But I feel it's important to restate: I consider that a warning sign, not a deal-breaker. Because just as I've seen that approach lead to problems, I've equally seen it turn out just fine.

If the players are playing their hearts out and everything going well Do I let some cannon fodder bad guy knock off a player just because I rolled that 1 in in 1000 crit?

Probably. It's those freak results, both for and against, that will give the players stories they'll tell and retell. The PCs are expected to win just about every combat they ever get involved in - and they'll generally not bother telling you about that time everything went exactly as expected.

Or if you suddenly find the encounter is going bad or too easy to stay the course?

If the encounter is too easy, then in general you absolutely should let the result stand. Let the players have their win, and bulk up your next encounter. Remember, you can always get another bad guy.

If the system requires the DM to fudge rolls in order for it to function properly and remain fun for all participants, there's an issue with the system, not with the DM.

I tend to agree with this. Although with the caveat that some systems are good fun apart from a few bits that just don't work right (very few games get as much playtesting as 3e, and it turns out that that's not the most robust of systems, so what does that say about the rest?). So it often is worth the DM patching up some stuff on the fly, rather than seeking for a non-existent "perfect system".

 

[pming]

Hiya.

Can a DM "cheat"? Hmmm...yes, sort of. Ex: Player says "My character leaps across the pit!"...DM replies, "Hmmm. No. You don't. I don't want your character to do that." That is cheating because the DM is breaking the rule that the PC is under the players control unless something else is at play (e.g., controlled PC or somesuch). Other than that...no, not really.

That said, players can feel cheated. Quite easily, actually.

Having read the OP's initial post, for me, if I were a player in that game...yeah, I'd feel cheated. If the DM is looking at a monsters stats and it says it does 1d6 with a claw, but then the DM announces "You, PowerCheracter#2, takes 10 points of damage" because PC#2 has lots of HP's compared to the other's...that's bad. That's one of the worst things a DM can do, IMHO; change rules based on "whim" because the DM is under some sort of delusion that "his story trumps all".

So, here are some specific points I'd like to, um, point out, that may have given the players the feeling of "being cheated".

The campaign was such that the player characters were grossly imbalanced (as I allowed the players the freedom to play whatever type of character they wanted to play) and I often made things more difficult on the player characters who were the most powerful.

Ouch! If an average monster is fighting the PC's, and said average monster is significantly weaker when it attacks the weak PC, but it is significantly tougher when it attacks the strong PC...that's pretty close to dead on "DM is cheating" material. A monsters AC, for example, should remain constant...not go up or down based on whom it was fighting.

But as I said, this game was not about power or balanced combat. In fact, combat was a side-story, usually limited to climactic, cinematic-style encounters

Then why "fudge" dice in the first place? If combat was secondary, so what if Player A has a helluva time, while Player B walks all over everything? If the characters and the stories were that engaging and important, then that shouldn't matter. I've had players of both extremes in my campaigns at one time or another. The "storyteller" player could care less if the "powergamer" player was kicking ass, and vice-a-versa. If the system is at fault (which I think you mentioned), change the system...don't change the rules willy-nilly, character to character.

My opinion is that the story trumps rules (and dice) all the time unless the campaign is specifically designed as a tournament-style challenge.

This tells a lot. Obviously, to the two players, "story trumps rules/dice all the time" is a deal breaker. I think that they may have been ok with it if it "wasn't so obvious" to them. But it was obvious you were "fudging" numbers all the time. Rules are there so players have a baseline expectation of how the world works. If the DM is going to "pick numbers" to balance everything out, then why not just have everything be a simple coin toss? If a player invests heavily into a characters combat prowess, he *should* expect to be significantly better than someone who didn't put much of anything into combat prowess. To do otherwise is to cheat the player out of his expectation of play.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[sabrinathecat]

Only as a last resort. Honestly, this shouldn't be necessary. I did recently offer a player the chance to have his character brought back by accident. (They were fighting a necromancer, PC was a revenant. Necromancer was animating bodies as a minor action. What better way to annoy the other intruders than by animating their dead comrade. Backfire! The PC is back with 1HP. Player didn't like that idea.)

The characters are that unbalanced? What game system was this?

 

[Jhaelen]

If the DM is going to "pick numbers" to balance everything out, then why not just have everything be a simple coin toss? If a player invests heavily into a characters combat prowess, he *should* expect to be significantly better than someone who didn't put much of anything into combat prowess. To do otherwise is to cheat the player out of his expectation of play.

Something like this, I guess.
Personally, as a DM I've been fudging from time to time. But I fudged without favouring particular pcs or players. If an encounter was in danger of becoming too easy or too difficult, I'd adjust the monster stats on the fly. But these changes affected all pcs / players equally. Fudging selectively strikes me as unfair.

The OPs reasoning was to use fudging to correct the imbalance in the pcs' power. This makes me wonder how this imbalance came into effect. Was it that some of the pcs had started playing earlier and newcomers were forced to start at a lower level or was it because some pcs had died (maybe several times) and were forced to start from scratch while the other players continued playing their high-level pcs?

This would be where I'd apply other corrective measures: Don't penalize new players or players whose pcs died more often than others. Let them join play at a power level similar to the others. Imho, that's a lot better than trying to fudge to achieve a similar result.

 

[Callahan09]

Can the GM cheat? It depends on what the table agrees to prior to the game in my opinion. If the table agrees to play the game as the GM decrees, it's his world and we are all just living in it, then the GM cannot strictly speaking "cheat" because the interpretation and application of rules begins and ends with the GM. That said, the GM can be inconsistent or unfair and that can be frustrating to the players, but it isn't cheating.

If the table agrees to follow certain rules, then it becomes a gray area. It is perhaps a little cheaty to go against the rules as agreed upon. But at the fundamental level, being a GM is about deciding what happens in your world and with the adventurers in your world. Even in a strict interpretation of a ruleset there will be instances where the official rule doesn't adequately explain how to deal with a situation. The ruleset will even have a built in mechanism for the GM to decide what to do and says that this is within their rights and abilities as the GM. So even then, is it cheating? Possibly not.

What your responsibility is as a GM is to provide a fair and consistent referee to the action and give your players an enjoyable session. But if your players are not enjoying themselves you can only do so much to accommodate them before you alienate other players in the group or god forbid destroy your own enjoyment of the session.

In this case it sounds like the two players who left would have demanded that they be allowed to be overpowered in comparison to the other players, which would be a case of accommodations to that end destroying the enjoyment of the other players at the table who hasn't optimized their characters. I think in this case it becomes a matter of who should be more willing to accept the other side's argument. The more powerful players should definitely be more open to letting the game world be evened than the underpowered characters should be willing to accept their characters being insignificant! Therefor your balance shift seems perfectly fair to me.

Perhaps you could have tried more to keep the powerful players from leaving the group, though in my opinion it seems they were just being bratty about not being able to be the super powered characters they tried so hard to be... But in any event perhaps you could have worked ways into the sessions to reward them for optimizing characters that they could feel powerful to wield, while still keeping the overall game balanced to include the weaker characters as important pieces as well?

In the end I don't really know how unreasonable the guys who left were truly being. But do I think you cheated? No. Maybe you could have done more creative things to keep the balance without destroying those guys' sense of power they so obviously wanted. Maybe not and this was just a group of players too disparate to all enjoy a game together. I don't know.

 

[delericho]

If the table agrees to follow certain rules, then it becomes a gray area. It is perhaps a little cheaty to go against the rules as agreed upon.

I'm surprised by this. I would have thought it was very clearly 'cheaty' to go against the rules as agreed upon. After all, they're the rules that are agreed upon!

But at the fundamental level, being a GM is about deciding what happens in your world and with the adventurers in your world. Even in a strict interpretation of a ruleset there will be instances where the official rule doesn't adequately explain how to deal with a situation.

Now that, of course, is a rather different matter. If the rules don't cover something, of course it will necessarily be up to the GM (perhaps in cooperation with the players) to come up with a suitable ruling. That's part and parcel of the game, because there will always be holes.

But there's a difference between "making a ruling to cover a hole in the rules" and "directly violating the rules as agreed". If the group (including the GM) agrees that the GM won't fudge dice rolls, and then the GM rolls a '7' and declares it as a '17', that's pretty clearly cheating, IMO.

(It's probably worth noting, though, that I don't expect too many groups to actually have that conversation. Certainly, I've never been in a group to discuss the matter, nor have I heard of a group to do so (excepting online discussions). It seems to be one of those topics where everyone just brings their own assumptions of what's going to happen to the table, and most of the time it's a non-issue. But in that very small minority of cases where it becomes an issue, suddenly it's a massive issue because people were working from differing assumptions. (c.f. Paladin threads))