Do you "save" the PCs?
- Thread starter Reynard
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Fifth Element
Legend
It would probably make as much sense as anything in this thread at this point!
pawsplay
Hero
Mostly I'm saying I don't have the book in front of me, and also that the title says enough for my purposes. Good gamemastering is, presumably, not bad gamemastering, which means Robin Laws has deprecated someone's GMing style.
Fifth Element
Legend
I guess he'd better get in line, then.
SteveC
Doing the best imitation of myself
Sure: if there is a style that's suited to "let the dice fall where they may," I'd say that sandbox play is perfect for it. I know that this style of game is immensely popular these days, but to be honest it's not for me. I think this comes from playing it to death during the summers in high school and college.
I'd never say that having fudging in a game is the only way to make it a good one (in fact, if you do it poorly, it can make the game worse) I'd simply say that it's an effective tool (one of many) for a GM's arsenal in a campaign that I would enjoy. The ironic part of my post is that I'm currently running with the dice out in the open, so I'm a fudge hypocrite, I suppose
.Since I do favor the story game more than sandbox, I'll add that I think D&D can do a good job with this format: I'm running War of the Burning Sky, which I'd call more of a story adventure than a sandbox, and it's been very popular with my group.
--Steve
Hussar
Legend
Ok, let's expand that a bit. Why is dropping an ancient red wyrm on a 2nd level party a good thing? Well, because it's not fun. Obliterating PC's is no fun for everyone.
So, basically, the judgement criteria is "What's fun for this table"? If something is not fun, then it's bad.
I can totally understand that people might find fudging to be not fun. 100% understand that.
But, since the judgement is "what's fund for this table", then can we really say that fudging is never good for the table? It's not good for your table. It probably isn't good for mine either. But, I'm not about to completely write it off as always bad either.
No. I remember my reaction to you claiming something something was, "not generally recommended". I thought I had already clarified this.
"General advice" is advice you give that is general in scope, or broad in application. "Don't sauté without some fat or oil in the pan" is general advice - it applies to pretty much any sautéing.
That which is "generally recommended" is that which is recommended by most who speak on the subject.
You effectively asserted you know what most people think, when you have no source for such knowledge, and I called you on it.
You can give general advice, so long as you admit that it is coming from you, personally, and isn't something like an industry standard.
Obviously I agree with this.
I don't agree with this. At the end of my last Rolemaster campaign (and for these purposes RM and D&D are similar enough to be interchangeable) one of the players was considering sacrificing his PC in order to trap an elder evil in the void and keep it from threatening the world. In the end, the party came up with a scheme whereby he didn't have to (they used the Soul Totem from Bastion of Broken Souls to create a duplicate of the PC's soul in a simulacrum and then have the simulacrum bind the evil entity). But up until the last moment he was ready to. And dying in that way wouldn't have constituted failure - it would have been a second-best success for the PC, and an undiluted success for the player (ie the story would have been one of heroic self-sacrifice - instead it ended up being one of the mortals tricking the gods through turning their own magical devices against them).
I infer from this experience that whether dying counts as a failure or not - let alone the ultimate failure - is heavily context dependent.
In most supers games the PCs are mortal, and death would be meaningful and important. But the action resolution mechanics mostly keep it off the table.
It could even be the case that the goal isn't known to the players except in very general terms (we want this campaign to turn out interestingly, and to be interesting in the process also!)
It could even involve combat - lots of it - provided that the combat didn't result in PC deaths that are meaningless rather than interesting. To achieve this depends upon either (i) encounter building guidelines that minimise meaningless but life-threatening encounters, or (ii) action resolution mechanics that minimise meaningless PC deaths, or both (or maybe other options I haven't though of).
When Fifth Element and other talk about fudging, I see them as talking about tweaking (ii) - ie the action resolution mechanics - because something has gone wrong with (i) - ie a PC's life turns out to be threatened by a relatively meaningless encounter.
I agree about viability. I don't agree about D&D. I think D&D - at least 4e - can be a game where death need not be on the table a lot of the time. The GM has almost total control over it (because of the knockout mechanics) and the players have a lot of control over it (because of the way the action resolution system works eg healing powers, action points, dailies etc) and the encounter building guidelines give the GM a lot of guidance in setting up encounters in the first place.
I don't think it hurts a game if the participants know that the ultimate outcome will be an awesome story. That is, I don't think the chance of boredom or triviality needs to be on the table in order for the game to be fun. I prefer, both as player and GM, to find out what that story is by helping to create it at the table - if the story is already known in advance, what's the point of playing? I know some people are happy simply to play through a story the GM has already written, but I'm not one of them (and I don't have any interest in GMing in that way either).
Agreed. But sometimes there are other constraints on choice of game (familiarity, cost, other players' preferences etc).
For a long time my group played Rolemaster because of the mechanical beauty of characters in that system, which feeds though heavily into the action resolution mechanics. But as a GM I did have to fudge from time to time at low-levels in order to stop the game being derailed by meaningless and arbitrary criticals.
Now you might object - why not just start at mid-levels where the PCs have the healing to handle those criticals? or why not introduce fate point mechancis? or ...
The answer to the first is partly tradition, and partly that RM rewards in certain ways starting a PC at 1st level, because of the organic build that takes place. The answer to the second is Well, we didn't, and maybe in future we might, but in some ways fate points don't fit that well with Rolemaster's ultra-purist simulationist mechanics.
In any event, we've now solved the problem and made fudging redundant (in our group) by shifting to 4e - but that's a consensus option that wasn't available until recently.
Raven Crowking
First Post
What a coincidence. Neither do I.
Please, Hussar, show me where I say that.
What I do say is that I think, in general, fudging makes you a "not as good as you could be" DM. That doesn't valuate where you are starting from, except as relative to where you could be. I also give specific reasons why I believe so, which you are free to accept or dismiss.
Interestingly enough, you have agreed that the purpose of fudging is to fix a problem that exists. It amazes me that you would then conclude, should you address the reasont the problem exists so that it no longer exists, your DMing would not improve. That seems to be as clear, and as basic, as logic gets.
It is my belief that, in nearly every case, there is a better solution to the problem than fudging. I agree that, sometimes, it would take a time machine to fix it in the best possible way -- the problem has occurred before you sit at the table. That doesn't mean that you cannot prevent future problems from occurring.
You may not have the time or the inclination to do so, but as discussed at length earlier in this thread, not having the time or inclination to fix a problem in no way makes not fixing the problem best practice. To quote from earlier in this thread: "I have no time or inclination" may be a reason for suboptimal performance, but that reason doesn't somehow make that performance optimal. Choosing the lesser of two evils is better than choosing the greater, but it is still not as good as choosing no evil at all.
Speaking of not having the time or inclination, I have spent some time going through this thread again, looking for one phrase I used in a low-key manner some time ago. And either I decided it was unwise then, or I am too lazy to find it now, but......
........The degree to which your goal is to make a predetermined outcome occur is, IMHO, the degree to which your "game" is not a game. Another conversation that we have had at some length, I know, and you may not disagree with me, I know. But, since we both know this, I am sure you will understand that my comments (those comments made with all those IMEs and IMHOs over pages of this thread) apply only if your "game" is a game. The degree to which your "game" is not a game (as I define it) is the degree to which, IMHO, my reasoning cannot apply.
Imagine, however, that your DM feels that the pool need be 100 chips? Or 10 chips per session? The purpose of the pool is, again, to (1) remove the intended deception, and (2) put the amount of fudging allowed in the players' hands.
Nothing more; nothing less.
Ah, good times.....good times.
Umbran, you either don't know what you are talking about, or you know what you are saying is wrong.
Go back through this thread. My posts are littered with "IME" and "IMHO" and "It is my belief that". I give my reasons for my beliefs, and invite folks to examine them, either accepting them or rejecting them as they will. Despite your attempts to interject vitriole in the thread, and despite your direct insults at times, I have avoided interaction with you as much as possible.
AFAICT, this is simply personal with you.
Even when I said that the set of GMs for whom fudging is vanishingly small, I specifically admitted the inclusion of at least one GM to that set (Piratecat), so your basis of claim of OneTrueWayism fails on all accounts. OneTrueWay cannot allow a known exception, or it is at least TwoTrueWayism.
That the set is vanishingly small, in my belief and IME, makes it unlikely that any given individual is a member of that set, and determines the bar of my skepticism. But I am not so foolish, or so untrained in critical thinking, as to imagine that my bar of skepticism means that I can parse what is in each individual case, as opposed to what I believe is likely.
But, then, that principle is used in the same way in the Philosophy of Science, and you ought to be familiar with it. The reasoning behind it has been described upthread, very well, by Jeff Wilder. That you find it necessary to pretend otherwise is beneath us both, and does no service to this thread.
IMHO.
IME.
YMMV.
As I have said many, many times over the course of this discussion.
RC
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