Do you "save" the PCs?

[Fifth Element]

It still doesn't make "Don't prep!" good general advice.

What's better than general advice? Specific advice.

The advice "don't fudge" is too general to be useful. Better advice is to take into account the play preferences of the DM and the players in a particular group. Advising my group specifically to not fudge is bad advice, plain and simple.

This applies to new players/DMs as well. Advising them to not do something they feel woul improve their enjoyment of the game is also clearly bad advice. Unless you think you know more about how they enjoy playing than they do, of course.

 

[Fifth Element]

(2) Are you trying to advocate that fudging can be used, but should not be?

If you still don't know what I'm advocating, despite my having it written out specifically several times, I can't help you.

 

[Raven Crowking]

If you still don't know what I'm advocating, despite my having it written out specifically several times, I can't help you.

You seem to be advocating X while advocating not-X at the same time, whenever flaws in X are brought up. Perhaps this is because context is skewing my reading of your posts. But I am trying to understand what you are advocating.


RC

 

[Jeff Wilder]

And there you go again with the misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding.

No one, as far as I can tell, is advocating that fudging should be used to prevent any and all PC death.

Talk about misrepresentation. Raven Crowking didn't posit fudging to "prevent any and all PC death." He presented specific circumstance: a critical hit that would kill a PC.

Out of curiosity, if a fudging DM would not fudge that roll, which seems to meet the criterion of "death by bad luck" so often used by fudge-vocates, why not? And what's an example of a roll such a DM would fudge?

I gotta be honest, the whole thing is starting to sound more and more like caprice, which is actually less appealing to me than the motives I had been ascribing to fudgers.

 

[Piratecat]

Gently, guys. Gently. If you're starting to get snippy, walk away for a bit.

 

[Ariosto]

No one, as far as I can tell, is advocating that fudging should be used to prevent any and all PC death. Fudging as I use it is completely discretionary. There are no rules to its application. Basically I use it if it feels like the right thing to do in the particular situation.

That is the fundamental problem, right there. If it were not arbitrary, then it would not be "fudging", would it? It would merely be adjudication in accordance with rules.

I rather doubt that anyone here would go into a game of Axis & Allies expecting that dice rolls should get changed because he or she "feels like it's the right thing to do" in a situation in which the Allies might lose.

Some of us see D&D just the same way. It does not matter how we may happen to see some other entertainment, even whether we call that other an RPG or not. Our purpose in choosing to play D&D is in keeping with its provision of the possibility of dice-rolls delivering a TPK.

Some others see D&D as something different, something in which there is such a thing as an "undesirable" result that needs to be "fudged" -- for example, a TPK. That they prefer "fudging" to adopting rules that would not necessitate it obviously indicates an ethos with considerable subtlety in its nuances.

 

[Ariosto]

The advice "don't fudge" is too general to be useful.

What could be more useful would be more "general":

Ask about the house rules.

 

[Mallus]

As DM, I don't like to fudge. Partly because no matter how story-like the game becomes, it's always rooted in a (complicated) game of chance. Mainly, though, I don't like to fudge because I want to be surprised by where the game goes, and nothing takes the game to strange new places like the right random dice rolls.

Well, nothing except the crackpot plans of the players.

On the other hand, I don't like frequent PC death. Our campaigns revolve around developing interesting, if frequently pathological, characters and sending them off on crazy adventures. In this way our games resemble serial adventure stories. Protagonist death is rare or non-existent, but failure is always knocking at the door.

Think of Whedon's Firefly... now remove most of the quality, and add in a heaping dose of surrealism. My games in a nutshell.

I don't need to fudge because I've taken PC death almost entirely off the table. PC failure leads to more playable consequences, not rolling a new character. Works like a charm for us, but I can how this kind of play would be unsatisfying if the biggest kick you get from the game is survival in a ruthless environment. Our style only works if the player's have characters whose goals extend beyond survival.

 

[Mallus]

I rather doubt that anyone here would go into a game of Axis & Allies expecting that dice rolls should get changed because he or she "feels like it's the right thing to do" in a situation in which the Allies might lose.

I rather doubt anyone would start a game of Axis and Allies and expect it to last for several years.

(Neither world I expect any of the players to start talking like Churchill. Well, actually, I wouldn't put that past some of my friends, or, for that matter, myself.)

 

[Ariosto]

I suspect that there are rules governing a given GM's "fudging", but that they are too complex for codification. The GM might not even need to formulate them consciously, depending instead on a sense of the situation of the sort that we might call "intuition". In similar manner, an athlete might not quantify in an equation the physics of a situation -- indeed, might make the wrong assessment if trying to solve the problem that way instead of trusting the "Mark I eyeball".

It should, I think, be informative that the technique is so much associated with reference to "the story". I am pretty sure that the ethos involved has to do with some perception of the process as indeed a form of fiction, and the GM in some sense as author and/or director of a drama.