D&D General Dice Fudging and Twist Endings

[iserith]

I agree; taking your second point first; when setting up a campaign one question I always ask is "how often should we expect a character to die?" and typically I get an answer of "one or two per year of play time". I'm running Pendragon at the moment, which has a higher rate, but that is because it specifically has character death as an event that does not eliminate roleplaying.

In most games a character dying ends roleplaying opportunities. We play the game to roleplay, and you cannot roleplay a dead character in most games, so character death is essentially saying "you will no longer have any fun with this character". For some, they find that threat makes the playing of the character more fun, but I find it a tired and banal threat. If the best a GM can do to set stakes for an encounter is "if you fail your character will be taken away, then I'm honestly a little disappointed in the GM.

Pendragon has the concept of playing a family of knights though, so a character death is mitigated. You'll play the former knight's son and that character will still be a strong presence. So for Pendragon, our players are happier with increased lethality.

And that leads into your first point -- it is too terrible a burden for the GM, and it need not be so. In most campaigns if the mechanics call for a player death, I'll ask the player how comfortable they are with that. It doesn't have to be my decision. And I have mature players who, actually, are usually fine with it. Maybe one time in five they will take my alternative out.

Like many things in GMing, talking it out upfront, and then presenting players with options to give them agency in their character's fate is just a good way to go.

Great comments. In a D&D 5e context, I've run a few games where death was taken off the table because I didn't think it fit with the theme. One campaign was a very pulpy Eberron serial hero game, and the other was a D&D/supers mashup. So the rule there was that you're just taken out of the scene if you "die," perhaps with a lingering penalty to work off afterward, but otherwise, you're alive and kicking. That is, unless the player assessed the situation and thought it would sell more pulp to die (and, of course, come back in some future surprising way).

And in another game, a one-shot in this case, it was set up so that death was actually beneficial - dying honorably gave you double the points you would normally get for other milestones, which made it easier for you to get into Valhalla. So that was fun to see how players would try to have their characters die in awesome ways before the session's end to grab those points.

But also, I'm sure avoiding character death isn't the only incentive to fudge. There's also the matter of preserving a plot the DM planned in advance, whether that be the overall plot of the villains doing their thing or the subplots based around the characters' backstories. I don't do either of these things (or rather, I don't care about them be derailed), so I have no need to fudge here. And in the event I did run these kinds of games, again, I would take death off the table so that there was nothing that could prevent us from exploring those plots and subplots to their fullest.

 

[Imaculata]

When I see a player who loves their character, and has played intelligently and well, dying because they were super unlucky, it may be fair in the technical sense, but unfair in the moral sense. So I consider restoring the moral fairness by undoing the technical fairness.

Would you do the same if the reverse happened, and a player had an abnormal amount of luck?

For example, a few sessions ago I rolled a 20 around 6 times in a row, each one a confirmed crit. Absurdly lucky, but it can happen. What do you do?

 

[billd91]

Would you do the same if the reverse happened, and a player had an abnormal amount of luck?

For example, a few sessions ago I rolled a 20 around 6 times in a row, each one a confirmed crit. Absurdly lucky, but it can happen. What do you do?

There's a significant difference between a character on the player side vs the DM side here. As a DM, I've got a cast of hundreds (if not thousands) in the course of a campaign. If one of the PCs is on a lucky streak, the impact on me and my resources is minimal. No single NPC/monster of mine is subject to the same number of adverse die rolls against it as any one of the PCs on the other side of the screen.

 

[Clint_L]

Would you do the same if the reverse happened, and a player had an abnormal amount of luck?

For example, a few sessions ago I rolled a 20 around 6 times in a row, each one a confirmed crit. Absurdly lucky, but it can happen. What do you do?

I would tell you to buy a lottery ticket because there is a 1 in 64 million chance of that happening!

 

[Imaculata]

I would tell you to buy a lottery ticket because there is a 1 in 64 million chance of that happening!

Then surely I've now spent all of my luck, and I will never ever win a lottery.

But it most definitely happened. It was surreal. The rest of the party was on the ropes, and my barbarian kept going and going, crit after crit.

Such a luck streak could make short work of any well prepared boss battle. Unfortunately it got wasted on a bunch of fire mages.

 

[GrahamWills]

Would you do the same if the reverse happened, and a player had an abnormal amount of luck?

For example, a few sessions ago I rolled a 20 around 6 times in a row, each one a confirmed crit. Absurdly lucky, but it can happen. What do you do?

Almost certainly not. The goal of the game is to have fun, and an absurdly unusual result in favor of the players is almost certainly going to be fun for them, so from an overall point of view, it's a win! It's also adding a roleplaying opportunity -- which I want to do, rather than taking away roleplaying opportunities, as player death almost by definition does. In fact if one of my players is absurdly lucky, I'll likely riff to add roleplaying opportunities. In past campaigns, this has meant:

• A regular sword became a sword of wolf-slaying (absurdly lucky sequence versus wolves)
• A redcoat who saved way, way above his level became a party henchman
• One player turned out to be exactly the sort of human a demon would like to spend time with

If a player was extremely lucky at the expense of another player, then I might be tempted to ask them to mitigate the effects and let them decide, but (outside of DramaSystem) I do little PvP so that hasn't actually occurred that I can recall.

 

[soviet]

Then surely I've now spent all of my luck, and I will never ever win a lottery.

Just fudge it ;-)

 

[GrahamWills]

That's cool. It's your table and your campaign. I don't know the context or anyone involved. I point out that you are imposing yourself as the judge of what result is fair and what is not.

Oh no. This is important -- I don't decide myself, I ask the players. And typically they are happy with the result. But occasionally not and we work it out. Often these are for OOC reasons. I had a player keep their character alive as there were only a few sessions left in the campaign and introducing a new character would be a bit silly. But sometimes a player says something like "I really don't feel my paladin's story is complete" and we'll work out what happens from then.

Character death eliminates the player's agency for that character. They cannot roleplay them ever again. So I'll see if the player is OK with that before enforcing it. I've done the same with other situations. In Pendragon, there are a fair number of times it would make perfect sense for a knight to just quit the campaign (falling in love with a fae creature is a regular event) but I will always check with the player.

 

[Clint_L]

I wouldn't expect a player to quit playing a character because I think it would make more sense in the story for the character to walk away, etc.

But I feel it is important for my games that risk is real, and that events happen that we cannot control. That sometimes we literally let the dice decide. I think that is what makes D&D different from just doing improv storytelling. I think that's what makes D&D feel more real and immersive. Again, that's just for me and my players. It is super important that each group decides for themselves what they prefer, so I don't offer this as a criticism of how you do things, but as a comparison.

 

[tabletopreloaded]

I've had similar streaks happen at my tables. More likely, you weren't actually and rolling the die, but spin-rolling it. This is a common sleight of hand in informal, high-stakes gambling. There's a very small chance you rolled each of those 20s by sheer luck. However, it's very possible you inadvertently used a classic dice-player's technique for fixing outcomes, repeatedly spin-rolling the dice to recreate an outcome after one or two "true" 20's. Still fun when it happens, though