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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8955968" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.My apologies if I have caused you distress then. You're right that emotions often ride high on this topic.</blockquote>

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