D&D General Dice Fudging and Twist Endings

[EzekielRaiden]

It was never the secrecy factor that made it fudging in my eyes, you could’ve rolled in the open and clear as day in front of everyone declared you were going to change the dice and it would’ve been just as much fudging as doing it behind a screen only that then because it’s visible your players are immediately going to comment on it happening which is why obviously it doesn’t happen that way very much, but just as much in rescinding a crit as in saving ragnar’s life through divine intervention the GM has just reached in and directly altered the gamestate for the sake of the game overriding the dice which is what defines fudging to me.

I've been...really clear this whole time that my opposition is to "fudging," and that "fudging" requires secrecy.

Hell, even the OP means that (bolded for emphasis):

Given these factors, the DM has the power to control the flow of combat while never truly revealing their dice rolls to the players. This opens the door for the DM to fudge their rolls, lying about the true outcome in order to push the combat or story in a specific direction.

It’s important to know when best to fudge a number and when not to. The ability to extend an encounter by falsifying rolls is tempting, but there are more satisfying ways to accomplish this. Adding a twist to the end of an encounter is far more engaging for players than simply prolonging it by using fudged rolls.

You can't "falsify" something that is done plainly in the open. You can't have a "never truly revealing [your] dice rolls" situation. You can't (not really, anyway*) be "fudg[ing your] rolls, lying about the true outcome" if the players know what the true outcome was and that you've deviated from it.

By definition, fudging involves deception. If you are not being deceptive, by definition you are not fudging. You may still be ignoring the dice; you may still be declaring an outcome because you prefer it, and not because it's what the rules say; you may still be applying brute DM force. All of that may be true, but if you aren't being deceptive, you aren't fudging. If it is done openly, then whatever it is, it isn't fudging.

*That is, it is possible to lie to someone's face while the truth is literally, physically before them, but such lies tend to work rather poorly, if at all. Hence, you "can" in the sense that you can try, but you really can't, in the sense that it won't work.

 

[Imaculata]

In a situation where I have any concerns about character death, I'm just going to take death off the table full stop. Or at least establish at the outset of any given encounter that this one's for all the marbles or failure means capture or something other than death.

^ This.

Alternatively, what you can also do for a hard encounter, is to include opportunities in the design of the encounter, that allow the players to turn the odds in their favor.

Such as:

-Options to take cover.
-Environmental hazards that can be used against the enemy.
-Locations where they can force the enemy down a funnel.
-Giving your players the opportunity to flee.
-Options for the player to call in reinforcements.
-Allowing your players to have the element of surprise on the enemy.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I've been...really clear this whole time that my opposition is to "fudging," and that "fudging" requires secrecy.

Hell, even the OP means that (bolded for emphasis):

sorry that's definitely my fault, while i find this topic interesting the...intensity of the opinions that it brings out in people is not something that's pleasant to dredge through so i tend to skim and that particular peice i responded to stuck out me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

^ This.

Alternatively, what you can also do for a hard encounter, is to include opportunities in the design of the encounter, that allow the players to turn the odds in their favor.

Such as:

-Options to take cover.
-Environmental hazards that can be used against the enemy.
-Locations where they can force the enemy down a funnel.
-Giving your players the opportunity to flee.
-Options for the player to call in reinforcements.
-Allowing your players to have the element of surprise on the enemy.

Indeed, all this and more, though the one important "flaw" (if one can call it that) is that these things all have to be prepared in advance. Many advocates for fudging will say that the whole point and value of the technique is to fix situations that weren't prepared for, and perhaps couldn't have been. The usual examples, chosen to elicit maximum sympathy, generally center around protecting a player character against sudden, intense, statistically ultra-rare "bad luck," such as being victim to three crits in a row and thus facing death that seems undeserved that would "ruin their night" (almost everyone uses some variation of this phrase.) The other, slightly less common example, is the "DM made an accidentally WAY WAY WAY too hard encounter," with the assertion that literally nothing except altering the die rolls/values can salvage the situation.

Hence, since these are both examples that depend on preparation going away or breaking down, your suggestions (which are all very good!) will essentially be dismissed as "ah but that's not the problem fudging is here to solve."

This is why I emphasize the diegetic-solutions angle. Where they require any prep at all, it is prep that can be done far, far in advance (e.g., before the campaign even begins, or at the start of a given adventure, etc.) Or, or can be completely impromptu: either something made up on the spot based on what makes sense, or an open question, to be answered through future adventures. This path supports going beyond the dice, in situations where the DM failed to prepare for such a problem or couldn't have reasonably done so.

Robust and flexible open-ended prep; diegetic solutions to uncooperative dice; choosing and narrowing the stakes such that unacceptable results are not possible; simply being honest with your players and working out a solution out of character; and probably other methods besides. All of these things allow ways to address the issues fudging is meant to address, most of them with no more effort than fudging itself (or at least no more effort than the DM should be expected to put in), while avoiding the risks fudging entails. Since the given examples almost always hinge on the fact that they are supposed to be very rare, so the DM's intrusion is only needed in particularly unusual circumstances, diegetic solutions stand out in particular as an especially powerful alternative, since they can actually become an entertaining expansion of the campaign's story, and (by the fudging advocates' own argument) these should be rare enough such that resolving the problem diegetically won't become old or stale from overuse, because it may only occur once or twice in a whole long-running campaign.

sorry that's definitely my fault, while i find this topic interesting the...intensity of the opinions that it brings out in people is not something that's pleasant to dredge through so i tend to skim and that particular peice i responded to stuck out me.

My apologies if I have caused you distress then. You're right that emotions often ride high on this topic.

 

[tabletopreloaded]

Again, I understand that you value transparency with your players, and that's absolutely fine. I just believe that fudging--misrepresenting how my dice rolled--helps me preserve uncertainty where it matters. I see the dice as merely advisory, telling me what I could do if I followed the tides of fortune. It seems that you feel similarly, so we're on the same page there. But as DM, I like to have the ability to alter fate, so to speak In my world, it's understood by the players that I may secretly change dice outcomes to advance the bigger picture. They don't know when or how often that happens, but surely, they must know by now that I fudge sometimes. Why else would I be keeping my rolls behind the DM screen? Yet at the same time, they don't have a problem with it because it provides a seamless transition between fickle dice and the flowing story we wanted to tell. Hidden rolls keep players from having to know that their heroic feat needed a DM's intervention. Now, as you've shown, you can always improv a reason for overriding inconvenient dice. But I'd rather not be compelled to present a reason when that occasional crit does pop up. Just a different perspective on dice, I guess. Thanks for keeping the discussion civil

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again, I understand that you value transparency with your players, and that's absolutely fine. I just believe that fudging--misrepresenting how my dice rolled--helps me preserve uncertainty where it matters. I see the dice as merely advisory, telling me what I could do if I followed the tides of fortune. It seems that you feel similarly, so we're on the same page there.

No, there is a very, very important distinction to draw here.

To say the dice are merely advisory is to say that they are just suggestions. I reject that notion completely. The dice are not advisory: they (plus the rules) are the starting point. Foundational, if you will. Building something new or different off the foundation already laid is not the same as totally scrapping that foundation. Hence why I have been using a new phrase (for me, I've no idea whether it has had wider use before): "going beyond the dice."

Treating the dice as "advisory" does not mean going beyond them, it means discarding them. That's something I oppose. Going beyond the dice means you accept what the dice say, but you reject that their result needs to be terrible for the game. That's the core of all these approaches: accepting the dice, but not accepting that the dice need to cause a problem for the people at the table.

I gave a diegetic solution example earlier. A "remove the option" solution is (for example) to tell your players that character death won't take away their ability to keep telling their character's story. Hence my "no random, permanent, irrevocable character death" approach to my game. Every death will either be revocable via resurrection of some kind, temporary, or agreed to by the player. That doesn't mean characters can't die. They can. But if they do, it will either be fixed on its own (impermanent), or the party/PC will fix it themselves (revocable), unless the player decides (non-random) they would rather accept that death and start anew.

As an example of the "prepare in advance" approach, this one actually developed by my players rather than by me, there is a gold dragon NPC in my game. He is undercover as a mere dragonborn priest, secretly hunting a black dragon that fled their common homeland centuries ago, said black dragon hoping to start anew in this land that has no dragons in it. I had feared the players would find Tenryu Shen (given name second, as his culture is East Asian inspired) annoying or, worse, an unbearable DMPC, but instead they found him charming and mysterious. After they learned his true nature and agreed to help him on his mission, they grouped together and asked him if he could also aid them with theirs. I levelled with the players, saying I was uncomfortable giving too much aid here, as I didn't want this to become "Shen Saves The Day" simulator, but that their request was perfectly valid and I would figure something out. In the end, Shen and his artifice-focused Wizard fiancee, Hafsa el-Alam, took a small portion of Shen's power and forged it into a pair of earrings for each party member. One, in white, allows them to communicate with Shen and each other even over very long distances (though long ocean voyages are a bit much for them), which allows him to advise and guide them and even (when he focuses) to limitedly observe their surroundings. The other, red, is their emergency "get out of jail free" card. If it is intentionally destroyed, Shen will know that the situation has gone completely pear-shaped, and can do something to save or aid them in their hour of need.

They have never used this power, but knowing they have it has helped them become bolder about their choices (my players are mostly shy, so I have no fears of them becoming crazy gonzo chaos gremlins; it's much more about persuading them to come out of their hidey-holes and take a few risks.) Thus, for my game, I have made use of all of these techniques. Formally speaking, I cannot fudge dice themselves most times, as Dungeon World DMs roll nothing except enemy damage rolls, but I always roll in the open for those too. There is no need for fudging or deception, because diegetic solutions, tailored options so the dice cannot cause problems, and preparation in advance cover the potential issues, sometimes multiple times over.

But as DM, I like to have the ability to alter fate, so to speak

Can't you still "alter fate" diegetically? I don't understand why you need it to be deceptive.

In my world, it's understood by the players that I may secretly change dice outcomes to advance the bigger picture. They don't know when or how often that happens, but surely, they must know by now that I fudge sometimes. Why else would I be keeping my rolls behind the DM screen? Yet at the same time, they don't have a problem with it because it provides a seamless transition between fickle dice and the flowing story we wanted to tell.

What creates a seam when using the diegetic solution? "You know you should be dead, but aren't. Better take advantage of it!" As all advocates for fudging have ever told me, this sort of intrusion is supposed to be very, very rare--only a few times in a campaign, generally speaking, to the point that more than (say) twice a year would be incredibly unusual. Are you suggesting otherwise?

If so, why do you intervene so often? How does that not damage the uncertainty? The main reason most pro-fudging DMs make clear that they do it rarely is because frequent intervention so easily pushes the game toward "DM's Story, Observed By Their Players" and away from "The Story Told By These Players (facilitated by DM.)" If you intrude frequently, doesn't that risk invalidating the players' choices? And if you don't, what causes diegetic solutions to not be "seamless," if used with all and only as much care and consideration as fudging would be?

Hidden rolls keep players from having to know that their heroic feat needed a DM's intervention. Now, as you've shown, you can always improv a reason for overriding inconvenient dice. But I'd rather not be compelled to present a reason when that occasional crit does pop up. Just a different perspective on dice, I guess. Thanks for keeping the discussion civil

So you would prefer to be compelled to deceive the players...? I don't understand how that's better. If you haven't prepared in advance nor tailored the results so none of them are unacceptable, you are by definition "compelled" to do something. Why is being compelled to deception better than being compelled to storytelling? The latter is literally what you're compelled to do all the time anyway!

 

[tabletopreloaded]

I don't see the dice as binding in any way. I see them merely as one of many tools for storytelling, not a foundation of the game per se. To me, the foundation of my game is the story we want to tell and the gameplay we'd like to have along the way. As a heavy homebrewer, my games can often be very different compared to their original system. This is partly because I feel no allegiance to dice in a particular game system. If the players and I want the game to proceed in direction X, I'd rather cancel an inconvenient roll outright than find a way to nullify it. Public DM rolls just add another set of hoops for me to jump through in order to run the game that we all want to play. In a word, dice are just a means to an end at my table. Maybe this is where we differ.

Granted, it might be entertaining for players if they could watch their DM roll for combat. But just as I don't like declaring difficulty class in D&D because it reduces the challenge to mere statistics, I don't like declaring rolls publicly because it invites metagaming into my decisions as a DM. I've only altered outcomes a handful of times, but I don't regret any of them. I do regret the circumstances that led up to those dice rolls, but that's a topic for another day

So yeah, I guess I do prefer fudging over forced improv. But I don't see it as deceiving my players. The way I see it, I don't owe the dice or any other part of the game a strict application of the numbers. I do owe my players and myself a story that's entertaining for all of us, a fun story that doesn't have added twists forced into existence via one or two awkward dice rolls. And as long as I'm rolling for damage, contests, and everything else behind a screen, my players know that what happens is ultimately under my review. I'm upfront about it, so I don't see any deception--not any more than is typical of DMing, anyway.

Side note: I liked what you did with the dragonborn cleric, but I don't see how it relates to dice rolling. Improvising on the fly is great--and you handled that tough situation quite well!--but I don't want to feel obligated to cook up a workaround whenever that rare, inconvenient roll comes up. No problem whatsoever with improvising for a new direction that players venture. Just a little less forgiving for unruly dice that push the game somewhere that I'm really not feeling, haha

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't see the dice as binding in any way. I see them merely as one of many tools for storytelling, not a foundation of the game per se. To me, the foundation of my game is the story we want to tell and the gameplay we'd like to have along the way.

Are the dice not part of the gameplay? That's rather confusing, considering how critical dice are to play. I mean, the d20 is practically the physical symbol of D&D at this point.

As a heavy homebrewer, my games can often be very different compared to their original system. This is partly because I feel no allegiance to dice in a particular game system.

With all due respect, I don't consider that relevant. If the gameplay matters, it needs to exhibit fundamental consistency; the trick many people fail to understand about the famous phrase, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" is the foolish part, which is much, much more important than the consistency part. Emerson was not saying that consistency itself is bad; he was saying that adhering to consistency when doing so would make you a fool is bad. Hence, there must be a fundamental consistency, even if the day to day implementation may appear at odds. The dice are there, and we claim that they matter, otherwise we would just dispense with them entirely. Yet sometimes they tell us to do things that are not acceptable. One way to stop that is to abjure, to falsify, which means breaking fundamental consistency: the dice only matter if I feel like it. Another set of ways, one I consider far and away superior, is to accept and reframe, reframe in advance, or reject openly. The first preserves fundamental consistency in that the dice still matter, what they say still happens, but it happens in a way that does not cause a problem. The second preserves fundamental consistency by making it so the dice give results that one can accept (even if they are not always happy results.) The third preserves fundamental consistency by being clear about what one is doing: normally the dice matter, but we agree that they have led us astray. All show respect for the players as active agents, rather than as passive observers.

If the players and I want the game to proceed in direction X, I'd rather cancel an inconvenient roll outright than find a way to nullify it. Public DM rolls just add another set of hoops for me to jump through in order to run the game that we all want to play. In a word, dice are just a means to an end at my table. Maybe this is where we differ.

I don't really understand why dice being means or ends is relevant. Fundamental consistency applies to either.

Granted, it might be entertaining for players if they could watch their DM roll for combat. But just as I don't like declaring difficulty class in D&D because it reduces the challenge to mere statistics, I don't like declaring rolls publicly because it invites metagaming into my decisions as a DM. I've only altered outcomes a handful of times, but I don't regret any of them. I do regret the circumstances that led up to those dice rolls, but that's a topic for another day

I don't understand the difference between "I regret[ted] the circumstances that led up to those dice rolls" and "I don't regret [altering] any of them." There is no gap. It is a regrettable thing. Why not use a method which addresses that regret without doing something that secretly takes away player agency?

Further, whoever said you had to declare DC? I don't do that. Not even in Dungeon World, where I essentially don't roll dice (as noted, the only DM rolls are monster/trap/etc. damage.) The only thing equivalent to a "DC" in Dungeon World is monster armor (DW uses "armor as DR" type rules), and I don't tell my players how much armor a creature has. I also never change how much armor a creature has, unless I do so diegetically.

So yeah, I guess I do prefer fudging over forced improv.

I don't understand why. Isn't playing D&D fundamentally improv to begin with? Why is this bad "forced improv," but (say) a player doing something entirely unexpected is somehow good "forced improv"?

But I don't see it as deceiving my players. The way I see it, I don't owe the dice or any other part of the game a strict application of the numbers.

Certainly. But the dice, and their use, are part of the rules. The rules are what you agree to abide by when you offer to run a game. They form the baseline of interaction. Going beyond that baseline is perfectly acceptable--but it matters a great deal how you go beyond that baseline. Otherwise, we're in "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" territory.

And as long as I'm rolling for damage, contests, and everything else behind a screen, my players know that what happens is ultimately under my review. I'm upfront about it, so I don't see any deception--not any more than is typical of DMing, anyway.

Then why the need for secrecy? if the players know you can and will modify anything and everything whenever it suits you, what value does secrecy give? You're still presenting the results as though they were the real, honest-to-goodness results.

Side note: I liked what you did with the dragonborn cleric, but I don't see how it relates to dice rolling. Improvising on the fly is great--and you handled that tough situation quite well!--but I don't want to feel obligated to cook up a workaround whenever that rare, inconvenient roll comes up. No problem whatsoever with improvising for a new direction that players venture. Just a little less forgiving for unruly dice that push the game somewhere that I'm really not feeling, haha

It relates to dice-rolling by being a preemptive effort. Now, if something goes so absolutely pear-shaped that I truly cannot see ANY way around it, I have one already-made, woven into the game, that is explicitly and totally under the players' control. They get to decide when we collectively say "no" to the dice. Their agency is preserved.

 

[tabletopreloaded]

To each their own. I'll just repeat that the dice to me are secondary to the gameplay. And just to be clear, when I say gameplay, I'm referring to the experience players have within the game I don't alter player dice or override their decisions, so I don't think I'm compromising their experience. On the other hand, I don't see the need for fundamental consistency as a DM. Dice give me numbers to work with when I don't have a specific outcome in mind. It's not a contest between "the dice matter" vs, "the dice only matter when I feel like it". It's more like "the dice matter when they provide reasonable outcomes that advance my campaign". For example, when I roll for the last monster in a small encounter, I may have already ruled out a player death--the encounter is over in my book. I may just be checking whether the monster deals enough damage for a player to need a healing potion afterwards. While I could have been rolling publicly, it saves both I and the party some uninvited headache when we don't have to explain away an awkward roll like this one. This requires some judgment, of course, but I'm okay with that. My players, who know that I may course-correct dice rolls behind the scenes, are also okay with that. Considering I'm upfront about it, I don't see any harm in fudging, but you do you.

 

[Imaculata]

In my view, there are only two ways to treat your dice rolls:

-The outcome is uncertain, and should be determined by a roll of the dice. This is usually how I would treat most attacks and damage rolls in combat, and some ability checks. Once you decide to roll dice, I feel you should also accept their outcome. If you don't like an outcome, don't roll dice to begin with.

-The outcome IS certain, and shouldn't be determined by a roll of the dice. If you decide an action can't fail or can't succeed, then no roll is needed. You already know what the outcome should be. This also means that you probably shouldn't make your players roll for something, if the outcome is predetermined.

I tell my players up front what to expect. If they are considering an action, I tell them if and what they would need to roll for. If it will be an auto success or auto fail, I also tell them up front. If I fear the outcome of the dice, I may even let my players know before they roll, that it is a difficult challenge.