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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6802031" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Er...it has nothing to do with the dice being "the Voice of God" or any other such nonsense. I don't at all think that it's wrong or bad to decide, "Y'know what? This isn't a time for the dice to be used. I know better than the dice do what a good story is."I do think it is incorrect to employ the dice, AND THEN say, "Y'know what? No, I'm NOT going to use the dice." Changing your mind like that--deciding that you actually AREN'T unsure about whether a thing should succeed or not, deciding that you're going to ignore a failing roll AFTER the fact--is what bothers me. Because it means that you are never really serious when you say you're going to use the dice. A DM that fudges never really means that they're leaving it up to the dice when they say they're leaving it up to the dice, because they may at one moment 100% intend to take whatever the dice produce, and then ("magically" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />) it turns out that no, they won't take what the dice say.IF you roll, you should accept what the dice say. You asked for an impartial adjudicator, and you got one. If you never really meant to seek an impartial adjudicator in the first place for this specific action, you shouldn't have rolled the dice for it. It's perfectly fine to decide that a specific action or situation doesn't call for the dice! That's perfectly, 100%, totally and absolutely acceptable--I'm hoping if I add enough adjectives it will come across that I have *NO* problems with deciding that something just succeeds or just fails, no dice needed. My problem comes in when you *first* decide the dice ARE needed (which you decide by rolling), and then after, change your mind and decide they AREN'T needed.I'm cool with negotiating with the DM to determine success without dice. I'm also cool with the DM saying, "Alright, roll for it [implied: because I don't know if this will work or not]." I'm *not* cool with a DM saying, "Alright, roll for it [implied: because I don't know if this will work or not,]" and then *after,* and *because of,* a roll he doesn't like, him secretly thinking "actually I DO know how this will work out."Sure it does. I cannot trust that my awareness of probability, the effectiveness of my abilities, and the mechanics of the world accurately reflects the situation, because there is no situation to accurately reflect. The world is retconnable. Constantly, eternally retconnable, according to your tastes. That's not information; that's not even processable as information. The best I can do is hope I know your mind well enough to predict when you'll retcon the world.Bit of goalpost-moving, innit? I was speaking strictly of a binary pass/fail check. If you admit grades of success/failure (as in, frex, Dungeon World) then sure you could still employ the dice to determine the "degree" of the result. But for binary pass/fail--which is the most common and default kind of check in D&D--there are no such degrees. You either succeed, or you don't. If you, as DM, are of the opinion that (say) the lockpicking attempt is going to work(/not work), regardless of what a die might say, why even roll? Just say what happens. Don't waste my time engaging a resolution mechanic you aren't going to use, and don't make me think I need to manage a form of risk I don't actually need to manage.Firstly, as I've discussed elsewhere at rather great length, the odds of getting that many crits in a single encounter are fantastically low. Even with 30 attacks made by the DM's units (itself a ridiculously large number, if these crits are so bad as to put the party in danger of a TPK), the odds of getting even three(or more) crits is only 6%. For a much more reasonable 15 attacks (assuming 1-3 high-damage enemies over 3-5 rounds), the odds of getting three (or more) crits becomes only 6%. Even if you've already ended up in that highly-unlikely situation, the odds of another crit remain 5%, quite heavily favoring a non-crit. But people have gotten irate at me for throwing numbers into the discussion, so I won't discuss it further than this unless someone specifically asks.And even if this situation does arise: the DM can do many other things to "fix" it. Enemy units leave the fight for one reason or another (seek more allies, report an intrusion, some other danger is known or appears, etc.); enemies get cocky and start "playing with their food" (literally or figuratively); enemies "waste" turns trying to bring downed allies back up/"stabilize" them; etc. If another crit might mean TPK, don't engage the dice until things have equilibrated. You don't want their random influence, so don't engage them.Also: I completely disagree about the "do something stupid" thing. It's absolutely, completely possible for ANY creature to "do something stupid" and have it be justified in-world. For a dragon especially, "ARE YOU FULL OF FEAR NOW, PETTY MORTALS?" is a perfect justification for strutting its stuff and posturing. Dragons love glorying over the weak (even good ones, they just do it with pedantic 'kindness'). If a dragon is breaking face and kicking butt, already pushing the party to the brink of a TPK, why WOULDN'T it stop to gloat? And if we're talking about a more mindless or conservative creature (I dunno what specifically, but something big and powerful but incapable of "pride" in this sense), generally those only fight because they need to, not because they want to. It might do the "stupid" thing of trying to take one of your companions, unconscious and injured, as "food"--suddenly, the tone of the situation has changed, as now you need to get the animal to drop your friend before it can escape! I'm sure there are several other options (a "noble" enemy stopping to request surrender, perhaps), I slept very poorly last night so my thinkmeats aren't as thinky as they normally would be.If a situation arises where randomness isn't desired, don't use it. That simple. If you decide to engage the random system, I genuinely believe you should stick to it. Even if you don't like the results. Because that's why we use it: to generate situations we don't expect, to give us a chance of results we don't like. Throwing out some of the results because we don't like them invalidates both of those reasons for using it at all.And yes, this means that I am 100% okay with deciding a pass-fail check simply passes without rolling, while 0% okay with rolling and then deciding it passes despite a fail clearly being shown on the die.....and ignoring a proper, expected, and requested roll because you don't like the result ISN'T "throwing out the rules every time you don't feel like being bound by something"? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /></blockquote>

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