D&D General Dice Fudging and Twist Endings

[abirdcall]

Yes, your dogged insistence on being wrong about the intentions of people who play the game differently than you and being insulting about it has been noted.


There is no difference, other than pausing to throw a piece of oddly-shaped plastic at a flat surface in the middle of your decision-making process.


No one is saying that it is necessary. It is a choice, and a preference.

Roll purists are incapable of having this conversation without shouting down a two-stage straw-man argument, which is that if a dungeon master considers ignoring the results of die rolls acceptable, they must consider it acceptable to ignore the results of any die roll, and that by extension they must ignore the results of die rolls most of the time.

None of this is true. 99% of the time, a responsible dungeon master who ignores the results of die rolls lets the dice fall where they may. That's how the game works. A responsible dungeon master only ignores the result of a die roll when doing so would improve the table's shared narrative, which is something they can recognize and know and the dice cannot.

You are having an argument with yourself.


Again, what you are describing is a stylistic choice that you are well entitled to make.

Is it letting the dice fall where they may when it is a choice each time to change it?

Accepting the result of the roll is still deciding what the roll is if there is a choice.

It's like the trolley problem. Not switching the tracks is still a choice.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I know that as a player, I can often tell when a DM is fudging, and it severely undermines the stakes for me. We all know the signs:

The DM starts asking how many hitpoints you have left, and then as he rolls deliberately behind the screen, I can see him pondering the result and staring down the dice with frustration. Then he looks away from the dice, as if they betrayed him, and reveals a result that is not that bad at all. And I can't help but feel that I'm being lied to.

You might need to play with DMs who are better actors then. Not to mention it'd probably help with the roleplay part of your game at the same time.

 

[Oofta]

I know that as a player, I can often tell when a DM is fudging, and it severely undermines the stakes for me. We all know the signs:

The DM starts asking how many hitpoints you have left, and then as he rolls deliberately behind the screen, I can see him pondering the result and staring down the dice with frustration. Then he looks away from the dice, as if they betrayed him, and reveals a result that is not that bad at all. And I can't help but feel that I'm being lied to.

Honestly, what is the worst that could happen here? Say I do take lots of damage. I drop to 0 hitpoints, fall unconscious and have to start making death saves. But my party can still save the day. It's not like dropping to 0 hitpoints equals a guaranteed game over. Let me roll a death save every now and then! It's okay to have our butts handed to us by a strong foe once in a while.

I think this is the biggest issue I have with fudging. I feel cheated as a player; if I'm guaranteed to succeed then success is meaningless.

In my game yesterday, one of the players wanted to do something incredibly risky by "improving" the McGuffin that we needed to achieve the current goal by tinkering with it. If it had failed (and success would not have been particularly helpful), it would have meant the campaign would effectively be over. When my PC went to stop him their response was "Even if I fail I'm sure the DM will figure out a way to keep the game going." I was a bit confused by this especially when the other player kept insisting, despite the DM's confirmation that they could indeed break the McGuffin and the campaign would be over. I never assume the DM will guarantee that we win the day.

I view DM fudging dice rolls much the same way. If I didn't want a chance of failure, I wouldn't play D&D. Playing with a deck stacked so much in my favor that I cannot lose is simply not fun.

P.S. If I ask how many HP you have left, it's because I'm trying to figure out if the bad guys are going to focus fire on your PC to take one of you out.

 

[iserith]

You tell me! You're the one who said...

"I see fudging as a kludge to deal with an underlying problem. So if it is a preference, it looks to me like a preference for not going a little deeper to the source of the issue and removing it."

So by your own statement we who fudge are meant to be "going a little deeper to the source of the issue and removing it" rather than fudging. But when was it you thought we were supposed to make these deep thought considerations and "fix" these issues that are causing us to fudge later? Hmm? During the game?

You can't have it both ways. You can't tell all of us that if there are issues with our games that are being "solved" by us fudging unnecessarily that we should just "go deeper" and solve the problems first... but then claim "There's no extra prep or time before a game needed to just get ready."

I mean... why not just admit the truth of the situation? That other people do not have the same issues with the concept of fudging that you do and there's nothing wrong with other people having their own preferences? That fudging is not some moral failing or a problem to be fixed... but merely a difference in what DMs find important?

I have no idea why that's so hard for some people to accept. I mean I accept that you choose not to fudge and I'm perfectly okay with saying that your choice not to fudge is not a problem or something you need to solve. Why you can't see it back the other way is beyond me.

There's no extra work in that you're already creating stakes as situations arise in your game. It's part of DMing - everyone has to do it. It's baked into the rules. You're deciding what happens on a success or a failure on a given roll (or a given challenge). All you need do now is instead of creating stakes you can't abide by no matter which way the dice go, choose ones you can abide by. If you do that, you don't have to fudge.

As far as people's preferences not being wrong, not only is that self-evident in my view, I'll kindly remind you I've already said so in this thread. We're discussing techniques here, not telling each other we're playing wrong. There's no reason to be defensive in my opinion.

 

[Clint_L]

When I think about my own fudging, it was always motivated by a feeling that I knew best where the story should go. For me, moving to rolling in the open was accepting that I didn’t.

Edit: Emphasizing that I don't think that fudging is right or wrong, as a general rule. All I can say is that moving to rolling in the open has improved my games, and letting the dice fall as they may has empowered my players. But this is only reflective of the dynamic at my table, and has made me reflect that I was probably being too controlling. Everyone else has their own unique situation.

The other thing I will add is that I listen to a lot of actual play shows while I am painting my miniatures, and those DMs never fudge rolls, as far as I can tell. I mean, they say they don't, and their results seem genuinely random. And they are way better DMs than I am, so I figure they must know a few things that I don't.

 

[DEFCON 1]

All you need do now is instead of creating stakes you can't abide by no matter which way the dice go, choose ones you can abide by. If you do that, you don't have to fudge.

No. I don't NEED to do anything. That's the point. There is nothing to do. Fudging is not something we NEED to stop doing.

 

[iserith]

No. I don't NEED to do anything. That's the point. There is nothing to do. Fudging is not something we NEED to stop doing.

I think you may be reading me too literally. I'm not saying you, DEFCON 1, need to do a thing to correct yourself. I'm saying, if "someone" (the universal "you") wants to let the dice decide, all "someone" need do is create stakes the group is happy with whether it's success or failure. Then no matter which way the dice go, it's all good.

 

[soviet]

I ran a game of WFRP 1e last night where the group were attacked by a frenzied troll. I rolled everything out in the open and declared the relevant stats when they came up. As it played out one PC got badly hurt and then an allied NPC got the death blow on it before anything worse could happen. It felt genuinely exciting and uncertain in a way that no stage managed sequence ever could be.

 

[Oofta]

I still remember a game I ran years ago where, due to a number of lucky rolls on the part of the enemy, there was 1 PC left standing with single digit HP fighting the last enemy. The group was on the verge of a TPK. The surviving PC dove under a table to get cover (they were a caster with minimal AC), one of the fellow PCs rolled a 20 on their death save and came back to consciousness in the nick of time.

The players at the table cheered when the last enemy went down. I can't imagine that happening if I had been fudging dice. It's those encounters that are most memorable to me and it's something you don't generally get when the DM is obviously holding back.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I ran a game of WFRP 1e last night where the group were attacked by a frenzied troll. I rolled everything out in the open and declared the relevant stats when they came up. As it played out one PC got badly hurt and then an allied NPC got the death blow on it before anything worse could happen. It felt genuinely exciting and uncertain in a way that no stage managed sequence ever could be.

I still remember a game I ran years ago where, due to a number of lucky rolls on the part of the enemy, there was 1 PC left standing with single digit HP fighting the last enemy. The group was on the verge of a TPK. The surviving PC dove under a table to get cover (they were a caster with minimal AC), one of the fellow PCs rolled a 20 on their death save and came back to consciousness in the nick of time.

The players at the table cheered when the last enemy went down. I can't imagine that happening if I had been fudging dice. It's those encounters that are most memorable to me and it's something you don't generally get when the DM is obviously holding back.

thing is, these situations aren't those that i would feel that someone who does fudge would fudge for, sure they're high stakes but just having high stakes isn't enough to motivate someone to fudge, what's more a motivator is randomised unfairness, when some monster's multiattack crits 3 times in a round against a target, or in a situation like as was mentioned earlier upthread when an intimidation play attack from the giant/ogre(?) outright killed a player before initative was even rolled.