D&D 5E DMs, how do you fudge?

[Blue]

I do all of my rolls in front of my players, and for anything where the character would be reasonably able to estimate the difficulty I announce the DC ahead of time.

That said, I can and have fudged. I try to do it rarely. Most common is something like someone leaves the last foe up with 3 HPs and I just say it's dead. Yes, more resources could be drained from the party but there's no real tension at that point and my efforts are toward providing the most fun in our bi-weekly time allotted. Same may happen where a crit would leave something barely up and it's more dramatic to just finish the foe off triumphantly. Again, while it may be possible that an additional resource could be used on the PCs side, it's not to change the outcome.

The other thing I can do is that I often have parts of a combat that are not obvious at the start. Reinforcements who will arrive two turns after an alarm is given. Hidden hazards or traps, etc. I can modify those without the players knowing. I think the last time I did that was over a year ago, when I seriously misjudged how a particular set of 3pp monsters would interact with the party and I corrected my numbers for the next wave of them.

That sort of thing I try to do very rarely, and it's because I went in with a firm belief in what the challenge should be and I messed up.

I don't believe all scenes should be able to become winnable fights. But I do believe that part of my job is to telegraph to attentive PCs, and also be judicious in how I use them - perhaps reasons they wouldn't give chase like protecting young, or ways to escape the foes can't follow like small caves. D&D mechanically does not have any explicit mechanisms for retreat and without some DM thought it can become punitively hard.

Just like death should be on the table, I also like throwing the occasional easy battle at PCs. Remind them that yes, they are heroes and yes, they really have been growing in power -- something not always obvious when your foes are growing at the same rate as you. But if in early levels you had a problem with an Ogre, and then a few levels later you worry about four Ogres but end up mowing through them you feel like king of the world.

 

[Maxperson]

I only end up fudging about 0-1 time a campaign(year or so). If the group makes bad decisions and ends up with PCs dying, so be it. If the group does everything right in a challenging encounter that could go either way and a PC dies, so be it. If they do everything right, but the dice gods are against them and I'm rolling crit after crit while they can't get above single digits, I'm going to fudge a bit. I'm not going to kill them just because really, really bad luck happened. The monsters will start missing or a crit will become a normal hit until it evens up a bit. Then if they lose the challenging fight and TPK, so be it.

 

[toucanbuzz]

I might fudge if the PCs through no fault of their own are just having a hard time (e.g. the DM rolls a string of natural 20s). I don't fudge rolls because I roll most dramatic rolls (saves and attacks) in front of the players. The dice rolls are the thrill of danger in the game.

However, I might soften HPs, put a recharge on enemy abilities, weaken DCs as the enemy tires, have an enemy break morale, or an evil foe decides to run with the loot and let his buddies do the fighting, and so on. Whatever it is, it must be plausible and a realistic scenario. I might do this even if PCs are not having a hard time. I just like my battles to be dynamic and ever-changing so one is never quite like the other.

 

[bloodtide]

The time they were hired to hunt down a group of hobgoblin brigands and bring them to justice? Pretty straightforward adventure hook, right? NOPE. They took the contract and hunted them down, all right. Then upon meeting the first group of hobgoblins, they asked if they could join their gang. I thought it was a ruse to get close to the leader, but nope. They were serious. On a whim, they had just decided to be bandits instead of heroes.

This has nothing to do with a predetermined combat, this is just pure role play. This is just the ebb and flow of an adventure. Maybe your confusing predetermined combat with Railroad?

That time they were fighting that gelatinous cube in a large room? Sounds easy, right? Just break out the crossbows? Nope, absolutely not. Someone mentioned that oozes couldn't fly, so the ranger and the rogue decided they absolutely must climb up onto a chandelier and attack the gelatinous cube from above. Of course, they fell...directly onto the gelatinous cube, and were immediately engulfed. Once freed, they tried again.

Again, your not describing a predetermined combat encounter here....or you are leaving out details.

Heaven help me if I mention a fireplace, torture device, or hole in the ground while describing a battlefield...it will immediately become the most urgent and important thing in the room. "Oh there's a fireplace? Well clearly we need to stuff the mimic into the fireplace and light it! Sure, it will put ourselves in unnecessary danger and use up tons of resources, but clearly the DM doesn't want us to!"

Again, your not describing a predetermined combat encounter here....or you are leaving out details.



Example- a PC orc hermit rogue Inquisitive stands very little chance of beating the orc fighter tavern brawler in a fight.
Example 2-a foe wants to capture the PCs, so he set a trap with thugs that have poisons/sleep/hold/nets/bolas and a huge tactical advantage....when the players fall for this trap, they will likely be captured.

 

[Bupp]

Monster HP.

Only if it's a secondary monster that was dropped to 1-2 HP. Then I'll just drop them.

I see that as fudging in my favor. One less to keep track of.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't fudge (fudging is cheating), but my other two votes went to "I prefer other desserts" (both because that is true IRL and because I use other methods to solve the problems people claim can only be solved with fudging) and "Other" (ditto that second thing).

To be clear: I define "fudging" as, very specifically, "modifying the statistics of, or the rolled results caused by or affecting, any creature that has actually entered the active play space."

The most common examples of doing so would be to change a monster's AC/hit bonus/save bonus/save DC after someone has already rolled an attack roll (to change a hit into a miss or a miss into a hit, or change whether a saving throw succeeds or fails), to change whether an attack is or isn't a crit, or to give or take away a creature's HP (or reduce/increase damage rolls) in order to prolong or quicken a combat. In theory, changing the skill DC for an attempt to perform some kind of action (such as "persuade the king") might also qualify, but it also might not, I have not considered that situation nearly as much as the previous examples.

I do not consider it "fudging," for example, if the DM chooses to add reinforcements to a combat already in progress. I would consider it poor form to do that if doing so would contradict established fiction, but poor form is not fudging. E.g., if the players had very carefully taken out ALL the guards before fighting, it would be a crappy move to claim that an unexpected guard patrol just returned at the right(/wrong) time, if the DM had established that there really shouldn't be such a thing (e.g. saying "alright, you've taken out all the guards, you should be much safer to attack the Count now.") If, however, the DM has said, "You know there are patrols elsewhere, so you'll need to work fast, but for now you know there's no more opposition inside the castle," then it's not only acceptable to have guards show up, I would almost consider it a wasted opportunity to not have some guards show up at some point for a dramatic interlude.

I further do not consider it "fudging" to use mediocre or sub-par tactics, though again, this can become poor form if mishandled. Characters should do what seems reasonable to them. Usually that means doing the smartest thing they can think of, but sometimes matters of principle or other motivations than "win as quickly and safely as possible" come into play. I very much try to avoid purely metagame reasons for using sub-par tactics...which is part of why I have built a world where most enemies don't go for scorched-earth/kill-'em-all tactics. (There are some exceptions, as I have noted to my players, but these are naturalistic ones--e.g., the assassin-cult generally refuses to let itself be taken prisoner, so the antagonistic faction thereof will fight to the last man and has no desire to permit the PCs to keep living.)

 

[CleverNickName]

I don't remember who it was, but there was a post on another thread about a blogger that never even tracked monster HP. They just had the monsters die "when it made sense". To me that's kind of the ultimate in fudging and would kind of annoy me as a player. Knowing that combat was predetermined like that (or that the DM openly fudges on a regular basis) would make me feel a bit cheated.

To each their own, of course.

It was right here on ENWorld, in July of 2011. The user who created the thread was "The Dead DM," and they were writing about their DM.

Keeping track of monsters hp

Okay so we've been playing D&D for a little over a year now - I mostly DM but I've handed it over to another player so i can actually 'play'. so this new DM doesn't keep track of the monsters HP and it's driving me nuts. We got into it tonight - what he does is after you roll and hit the monster...

www.enworld.org

I played under a DM who did that. It was terrible and frustrated everyone at the table.

Yeah, same here. I got really frustrated with a DM in the past about that. He admitted to us at the table that he was ignoring the amount of damage we were rolling, and would just have the monster die once he felt like it was "enough." We were all pretty salty about it. Because seriously: if the battle is going to just end whenever and however the DM decides it should end, and our actions and dice rolls mean nothing, why are we even using dice? why does he need us to show up?

 

[Maxperson]

I don't fudge (fudging is cheating), but my other two votes went to "I prefer other desserts" (both because that is true IRL and because I use other methods to solve the problems people claim can only be solved with fudging) and "Other" (ditto that second thing).

To be clear: I define "fudging" as, very specifically, "modifying the statistics of, or the rolled results caused by or affecting, any creature that has actually entered the active play space."

You can like it or dislike it, but since fudging is is okay according to the 5e DMG, it's not cheating. Not that the DM is even capable of cheating, since the rules serve him and not the other way around. He can abuse his authority, but cannot cheat.

 

[Blue]

Well, everyone plays D&D differently. What do you find so "different?"

Not the person you were asking, but I have an answer for me about this.

That comment "99% of the time what I plan happens" is where I see a difference. D&D combat is a lot of very swingy rolls because the range on d20 is usually the majority of what is needed to reach the target AC or DC. Combine that with criticals that can really have a large effect, and realize that a single battle is far to few rolls to mathematically expect a statistical average, and you find that encounters can be a lot more or a lot less deadly then expected. Not just can be, but mathematically will have some far out of expectations. Outliers exist, and they are part of the possible results.

And once characters start dropping there's a downwards spiral. The party will often lose actions from characters that are down when their initiative comes up. And that means eliminating the threat slower, so the foe ends up having more actions as well. And if that drops another it just intensifies.

So unless you always aim quite low in challenge so even a cycle of bad luck won't change the outcome, then mathematically the swinginess of combat will eventually catch up and make an even battle into a deadly one (and another one into a cakewalk). And that's a lot more common than that 1% left over from your 99%.

 

[Helldritch]

I never fudge. The players succeed or fail on their own merits and luck.

And if I were to fudge on their behalf or against them, I'd get a ridiculous amount of dice thrown at me and I'd be called a cheater.