Do you "save" the PCs?

[catsclaw227]

NOTE: I have only read 22 pages, so if this has already been addressed... then never mind.

What you quote was intended to help build a general case, in which specific cases could then be addressed. So long as "cheating causes no harm" is the predominant meme of the discussion, there is no way to discuss or describe harm done. It is dismissed.

I think that there may be an unintentional strawman here. This statement assumes that fudging == cheating. If there are multiple statements in multiple editions about DMs/Gms/Referees fudging the dice or making changes on the fly in an attempt to aid the gameplay experience, how is it considered cheating?

I disagree that the predominant meme of the discussion is "cheating causes no harm".

What do people think about fudging dice to make an encounter harder?

Piratecat raises an interesting point about fudging in both directions. While I don't fudge when I GM, I find I still have vast influence over events, even when I do stick to the rules (sometimes I don't), thru the GM's ability to control ad hoc modifiers, make rulings, and decide the actions of NPCs and the way the environment operates. Not to mention being the player's only source of information. That's massive, colossal, gigantic power right there. A power I definitely abuse, almost always to make fights closer than they would otherwise be. In other words I make easy fights harder and really hard fights, where it looks like the PCs are going to lose, easier.

In my 4e games, since I roll out in the open now, have had almost no dice fudging in the past two years. But... I have made some on-the-fly modifications to damage expressions, remaining monster hit points, and/or the secret addition or removal of a monster power.

Sometimes this is done pregame if I think the session is a player short or if the PC party is stronger/weaker than originally expected.

Sometimes I have done it mid-encounter. Players don't know about it one way or the other, but it has helped to speed up grind, add some anxiety to an encounter that has seemed to be a breeze, and once to ease up on an encounter that was way to strong for the party and I couldn't tell just by looking at the stat-block prior to actually seeing the monsters and their effects in play.

[Note: I am running Scales of War, so the encounters have been developed already.]

 

[catsclaw227]

Spotting the pieces before play sets up what the challenge is; spotting the pieces after play begins is a combination of "bait & switch" with the added insult that I decided you weren't up to the game we agreed to play.

Let me add, further, that in the case of the DM fudging, the player doesn't get a choice at the time of infraction. So, not only do I spot you the piece and insult you, but you don't get to decide to continue the game we agreed upon.

What if you didn't design the encounter and are running a module or an AP?

In some rare cases it's difficult to assess the relative strength of an encounter until you have started running it and it turns badly. Spotting the pieces in play, in this case, isn't a bait & switch, nor have the players agreed to play that particular encounter... they have agreed to participate in a game of D&D and expects that the DM will make the game engaging, exciting, fun, or whatever positive descriptor you want to use.

My players don't sign off or agree to each encounter. They simply expect me, as the DM, to give them a good game.

And in these rare cases, an on-the-fly modification is not a breach of some gaming contract, social or otherwise. It is the DM trying to bring the [insert positive descriptor] to the game. How is modifying an encounter then an "insult"? I still don't understand the insult part.

 

[Piratecat]

What if you didn't design the encounter and are running a module or an AP?

Good point. No third-party author will ever know my party as well as I do. Nor do I expect them to. Adapting a module to my group is something I'll generally do on the fly.

 

[Janx]

How about these apples - because they asked me not to tell them!

I kid you not. Because of these discussions, I explicitly asked my players if they want me to fudge or not. Nine out of nine questioned said they didn't mind if I fudged. All also stated a preference to not know if/when I fudged.

Similar to the response I'm getting, I started asking around last night.

My wife totally doesn't mind fudging (she used to also be more prone to pouting when she got hurt bad...)

One buddy I got ahold of was a bit more complex. He didn't mind fudging to save his PC occasionally. In the sense that he wouldn't remember it.

What he didn't like so much (of our long time GM), was getting put up against mega-overwheliming odds and then the fudging that would occur to save us.

He preferred level appropriate challenges, something our common DM friend doesn't pay close attention to. He felt the fudging that he was certain was happening so the 7th level party might win the battler versus epic dragons was what bothered him.

It might be easiest to say, "you'd have to play with our DM" to understand how the party ends up in such situations. it's not as simple as we got stupid and looked for trouble, or sought out the biggest dragon in the land. The chain of events ends up being we pursue a goal that seems logical to our characters, and the final obstacle is way out of our league, and running away isn't in character (or possibly even a solution).

What he does like (and PC alludes to it) is facing seemingly overwhelming odds, and through a clever solution/plan, we overcome and are victorious.

I haven't gotten ahold of all my friends, but I suspect they have similar views.

I think as players, my bunch prefers encounters be level appropriate. With the hardest being "just on the edge" of what we can take. that's not to say bigger stuff doesn't exist, only that it isn't on the logical path to the goal such that we get locked in to facing something way out of our league.

An over simplified example would be, a first level party confronts a highwayman, only to discover he's an ancient red dragon in disguise and he plans to kill them. A more "realistic" example might be the party goes to confront a dragon that's causing trouble, and when they meet him, they discover his actual size.

Now the simple counter argument is, "just run away". As a player, sometimes that just isn't an option. Just like real life. There are some problems you can't outrun. I also haven't said that we don't run. But sometimes you still gotta go back and fight it eventually.

It's also true in real life, that there are some problems that you can't beat, but I think the counter to that is "I ain't playin an RPG to suck as much as real life can".

 

[Doug McCrae]

Part of it is choice of system. If you're using a system where fights are quick, and you have a lot of them each session, then it doesn't matter if some are easier, or harder, than expected. If you only have a few, big fights but they are more significant, such as a battle against a BBEG, it's more important to 'get it right'. Such a fight needs to be challenging. It sucks, imho, if the boss goes down to a failed save in round 1. (Though I concede that the player who wins the fight with his spell probably loves it, it gives a greater feeling of verisimilitude, and the unpredictability factor is also pleasing.)

One can make a case that rpgs should have multiple combat systems, or at least options, to make 'wandering monster' type fights quick, and big boss fights long. Though another solution would be just to dispense with wandering monsters and the like altogether.

I experienced an instance where I felt the GM should've fudged*, but didn't, along these lines. We were playing a oneoff, but very long, session of d20 Silver Age Sentinels, a superhero game. We'd never played it before so none of us knew the rules very well. There had been quite a lot of fights in the session, all pretty tactically interesting, and we'd won all of them, mostly with ease. We were confronting the end-of-session bad guy, a Galactus-like space giant. The BBEG, intended to be a very tough fight, had something like 7 attacks a round, but in the first round of combat a PC with debuffing powers used them to cancel the Big G's 'multiple attack' power and reduce him to one attack per round. This single move basically won the fight for us and, imo, was very anti-climactic. I'd actually have preferred it if we'd lost the fight, there's no prob with the PCs losing at the end of a oneoff and it would've, to my mind, been a pleasing contrast to our previous success. Brought low by our overconfidence!

I think the GM should've ruled that the debuffer only reduced Galactus's attacks to 6 or something. Not useless, and the debuffer could've kept debuffing each round if he wanted. Much more interesting. We later learned in fact that we'd got the rules wrong and the debuffer couldn't have done what he did, but that doesn't matter, it's what we believed the rules to be at the time.

*I realise I am contradicting what I said earlier in this thread about never wanting a GM to fudge. It may be wisest to ignore everything I say, as I clearly don't even know my own preferences.

 

[Ariosto]

If there are multiple statements in multiple editions about DMs/Gms/Referees fudging the dice or making changes on the fly in an attempt to aid the gameplay experience, how is it considered cheating?

It is not mentioned in the Original Edition, any more than in the wargames campaign rules that preceded it. I don't recall even any mere mention in any game handbook prior to the 1979 DMG, and I never met anyone until very recently who read the advice to "let the dice fall where they may!" as meaning just the opposite of what seems plain enough to me.

As far as I can tell, this notion of such intervention "aiding the gameplay experience" originated within a subculture of the subculture of D&D, part of the experimentation that the Original set -- not prescriptive but descriptive of an experiment -- very explicitly encouraged.

So, sometimes the very simple answer as to how it is considered cheating is "as a value ingrained in us when we were very young and customs in many things were different."

On the other hand, someone who cut his teeth on Vampire: the Masquerade or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition might take for granted that it is the DM's job so to intervene.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I never met anyone until very recently who read the advice to "let the dice fall where they may!" as meaning just the opposite of what seems plain enough to me.

I interpret Gary's advice in the 1e DMG to be "let the dice fall where they may! (Mostly.)"

 

[Janx]

Continuing the concept of rules of engagement, which I think lead up to "will your PCs need saving":

for any given adventure/session, during the planning stage is the GM constained by anything?

What is the minimum CR/EL an encounter is allowed to be relative to the party?

What is the maximum CR/EL an encounter is allowed to be relative to the party?

how many CRs/ELs must the party face before being allowed a healing break (end of day, access to potions, clerics, etc)?

What guidelines do the monsters follow in determining their targets/tactics?

What non-combat alternatives must be made viable for this encounter?


I write that last one, because as a DM, I can manipulate things such that Combat is the most obvious and seemingly only viable choice, without the players even thinking to try something else. I don't even have to say "No, that won't work". Without actually shutting down anything (a railroad), I can fool the players into seeing combat as the only way out.

I suspect a lot of DMs do this unintentionally, which I raise it as a "power" of the DM, that should be used carefully, or actively countered by the DM to prevent abuse and open up options.


Let's look at all this as a problem to solve in "my" game. If something useful comes out of this, I'll incorporate it into my practices.

the problem I think I'm interested in solving, or establishing "how I should manage my game" guidelines, is that when the PCs decide to go stop the bandit leader and his gang of thugs from raiding caravans, that they don't see so many encounters before a healing break that they have no reasonable chance to survive. And that when they get there, they face a credible foe, and have a feasible chance to beat him. As opposed to undertaking a quest that they thought was "for them", getting there, and haviing to run away, and taking a hit to their reputation, all for trying to do the right thing and have a good time.

I also have an added constraint, that I do NOT like capturing the PCs. Done poorly, it leads to railroading, and awkward game play as the GM is seldom prepared to run an impromptu jail break with all the necessary security holes to let the PCs wake up, escape, so they can get back in the groove.

I also don't like having to baby 1st levels, because they have too few HP, and knocking them out or killing them all the time just slows the game down each time they have to regroup. Part of this is a game design issue (PCs need more HP), the other part is 1st levels need to face REALLY wimpy enemies that only do 1-2 damage, and anything that holds a weapon, does more than that.

I also don't like having a huge pile of house rules. But I want to keep playing 3.5e D&D. That's a picky constraint, but honestly, I suspect any DM who fudges is operating as I describe.

I can't say what'll help the conversation, I suspect some of you will have some clever insights. Some of you will go on a hostile tangent that I'm doing it wrong. Given that overall, I don't ACTUALLY have a problem with how I do things, that line of marketting ain't gonna get your proposal a sale.

 

[catsclaw227]

It is not mentioned in the Original Edition, any more than in the wargames campaign rules that preceded it. I don't recall even any mere mention in any game handbook prior to the 1979 DMG, and I never met anyone until very recently who read the advice to "let the dice fall where they may!" as meaning just the opposite of what seems plain enough to me.

Fair enough. But there are a lot of people on this board that learned with 1e AD&D or later and in these cases, there were suggestions in certain extreme cases to fudge the dice or modify the results on the fly.

As far as I can tell, this notion of such intervention "aiding the gameplay experience" originated within a subculture of the subculture of D&D, part of the experimentation that the Original set -- not prescriptive but descriptive of an experiment -- very explicitly encouraged.

And as far as I can tell, the notion of DM intervention (not just in rolls or encounter design or many other aspects of the game) was part and parcel to playing D&D, as this is how the first 2-3 DMs I learned from did things.

But then again, it is possible (and likely) that we had two different experiences with learning 1e AD&D.

So, sometimes the very simple answer as to how it is considered cheating is "as a value ingrained in us when we were very young and customs in many things were different."

On the other hand, someone who cut his teeth on Vampire: the Masquerade or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition might take for granted that it is the DM's job so to intervene.

In this we agree. If the custom learned around the your* D&D table in the beginning was that when a DM fudged dice, or modifying encounters on the fly, was considered cheating or doing it "wrong", then that is what you learned and your first statement applies perfectly.

Some people didn't learn this though...

*the use of "your" here is in the generic sense... not specifically discussing the quoted poster's D&D table.

 

[Janx]

*I realise I am contradicting what I said earlier in this thread about never wanting a GM to fudge. It may be wisest to ignore everything I say, as I clearly don't even know my own preferences.

Or, we could acknowledge that for each of us, when describing how we do things, it is a general pattern, and sometimes there are exceptions.

I got no problem with you mostly not wanting fudging, but sometimes a situation comes up that should have been fudged.