D&D 5E Do you want your DM to fudge?

[Pickles III]

I'm very fortunate, our DM rolls in the open all the time. It's almost a whole new mini game for our group, watching the dice dance across the table on a do-or-die roll - time almost slows down as we all teeter on the edge of our seats awaiting our fate. Wouldn't want to give up that thrilling feeling!

We've been doing this for years and it is good.

However when DMs do feel the need to fudge they start making dumb decisions rather than fudging dice, & it's usually pretty obvious, & this is my real issue.

I don't object to fudging if it's seamless & imperceptible. If I can see it happening then there might as well not be a system & we could all be just relating stories as it removes real drama tension & player agency.

I guess when I fudge it's usually to add HP to otherwise anti climactic monsters or to ensure nearly dead ones die when fights are in clean up mode & the tension has been removed. I also don't mind fudging to prevent PCs dying because of other people's stupidity but that's hard to assess.

 

[NotActuallyTim]

Why is there no 'I don't care' option?

As long as the game is good, it hardly matters what the DM is doing with the dice.

 

[Halivar]

If the DM fudges, he or she must fudge in such a way that I never, ever know. The same goes in reverse; I will never fudge in such a way that it ruins immersion for the players.

 

[Blue]

Poll Answers:
* I want my DM to fudge in a home game, and I don't want a DM to fudge is a store/AL/Con game.
* I want my DM to fudge to make things more awesome (whihc may not be in my favor) or speed up a lagging encounter, but not fudge to save me from stupidity
* I want my DM to fudge if they miscalculated (# of monsters, needed skill DCs, etc) that were under their control anyway, but nothing else.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If the DM fudges, he or she must fudge in such a way that I never, ever know. The same goes in reverse; I will never fudge in such a way that it ruins immersion for the players.

There's a reason we had DM screens back in the day.

 

[NotZenon]

As a player I am fine with fudging as long as its rare, subtle and I don't know about it!

As a DM, I rarely fudge the die rolls, usually only for new or young players and if it can be done in a way that no one knows. I roll most dice out in the open though so its pretty rare!!

What i might do a little more often, for example if an encounter is going poorly, I might have the bad guys re-enforcement's arrive a bit later, or in slightly less numbers, or the bad guys might just not be as tactically smart as I was going to play them. I guess its technically fudging since its different from what i originally planned.

Anyways...

 

[Skyscraper]

As a player I am fine with fudging as long as its rare, subtle and I don't know about it!

As a DM, I rarely fudge the die rolls, usually only for new or young players and if it can be done in a way that no one knows. I roll most dice out in the open though so its pretty rare!!

What i might do a little more often, for example if an encounter is going poorly, I might have the bad guys re-enforcement's arrive a bit later, or in slightly less numbers, or the bad guys might just not be as tactically smart as I was going to play them. I guess its technically fudging since its different from what i originally planned.

Anyways...

The answer to this would be to not originally plan anything.

 

[Pvt. Winslow]

I think that ultimately, DMs that Fudge are doing so to try to make the game more enjoyable for their players. I can appreciate that sentiment, if only because I've been in games without fudging where my character has died unclimactically and left me doing nothing for the rest of the session (such as literally being killed by "rocks fall, you failed your reflex save and die")

Despite that, I still no longer Fudge as a DM today, and prefer my DM to not Fudge when I play. I believe that part of learning to DM well is learning how to design proper challenges for your players, how to tailor the deadlines of an adventure to what they're comfortable with, and how to advise them of their choices and help mitigate death by dumb when possible.

I leave off with an anecdotal story about fudging that likely killed it for me. I was a halfling barbarian who specialized in throwing axes and had hair that covered my whole body. I was the fighting shrew. We were in an adventure where a city was overrun by undead and we needed to find the source of this Curse. Those who were bit turned, and we were running out of time. We fought our way to a castle where a mage and his black Knight lackey were orchestrating the whole affair, and had a climactic battle. I nearly died several times, and the Knight in particular hit like an ogre and took all of us to finally take down.

By the end of the adventure we all felt good about ourselves and really enjoyed it. Later, I was hanging out with my DM and we talked about the game. Then the strangest thing happened. He was a relatively new DM, and he admitted to me he didn't actually use stats in the adventure. He just went by what we rolled. If we rolled what he felt was high enough, we hit, if bad guys rolled well, they hit. He just arbitrarily decided damage, and went with his gut.

It destroyed my fond memories of the adventure. I no longer felt like we were heroes who saved a city. I no longer felt like my character was a killing machine of 3ft stature. I felt like I had been along for a ride of DM whim, like my choices didn't matter, only how the DM felt. It sucked, because before I knew that, I loved the game.

Now I'm not saying what my DM did was the norm for fudging. I know he was a particularly ham fisted proponent of fudging and isn't what people usually consider when they think of the term. But in my case, I vowed to never simulate that style of game. I wanted the Dice rolls and player decision to matter.

To me, that means no fudging.

 

[CM]

(Without reading the thread)

Absolutely, as long as it's not obvious. I'd rather fudging happen than a campaign be derailed by an accidental TPK. I'd rather have an exciting, difficult encounter than one which drags out too long or ends too quickly.

Come to think of it, doesn't agreeing to end an encounter early when the results are assumed constitute fudging?

 

[Blue]

(Cool adventure story)

By the end of the adventure we all felt good about ourselves and really enjoyed it. Later, I was hanging out with my DM and we talked about the game. Then the strangest thing happened. He was a relatively new DM, and he admitted to me he didn't actually use stats in the adventure. He just went by what we rolled. If we rolled what he felt was high enough, we hit, if bad guys rolled well, they hit. He just arbitrarily decided damage, and went with his gut.

It destroyed my fond memories of the adventure. I no longer felt like we were heroes who saved a city. I no longer felt like my character was a killing machine of 3ft stature. I felt like I had been along for a ride of DM whim, like my choices didn't matter, only how the DM felt. It sucked, because before I knew that, I loved the game.

That's not really fudging, it's winging it. He had a feel for what numbers were high enough to hit you or hit a particular foe and went with that instead of worrying about being exact. If he was fudging it would be "well, they rolled a 4 to hit, but I wanted them to hit so I'll pretend it's high enough".

I've often DM'd when the players did something unexpected and on-the-fly I needed to work up an encounter. I can easily take some foes I've written up elsewhere and reskin them, possibly adding/removing a distinctive power. But there are times I'll go "well, as written those creatures do 8 damage (we use average damage), but when I reskin them over here I want them to do 10 damage but have a point less AC because that fits the new creatures I'm skinning them as". How is that any different? I'm making up stats and damage and defenses and whole encounters on the fly to adjust for players going outside my plans. Sometimes I make something out of whole cloth because I know the average attack/damage/defenses for a creature that's on-level with my players.

I roll my dice in the open when I DM which should give you an idea about me and fudging, but there are times you need to wing it.