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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6803643" data-attributes="member: 996">Another way to look at it is that 'fudging' is perfectly justified when it will result in a better game, whether that's preventing the game from sucking or merely making a good game a bit better.  Why fudge to make the game worse?  Running bad games is dead easy.I have to consider it all part of the same broader phenomenon of running the game from behind the screen instead of above board.   Taking more of the game behind the screen gives you more tools to manage the experience, it dovetails neatly with DM Empowerment (because too much of that, in the players' faces, can concievably cause some resentment or some sense that the experience is less real or less 'immersive' or whatever).  Some games run fine above-board with the DM less empowered and more like a player in many ways.  5e, by design, is not one of those games.Thanks for the words of sanity, there.  Some lines have definitely been crossed in this thread - disagreement is one thing, blatant insults quite another.  To my mind, there's nothing dishonest about taking parts of the game behind the screen.  By doing so, it's clear things are being concealed from the players, and whether that's a map, the number of hps a monster has left, the results of a die roll, or whether that die roll mattered, is immaterial.Just human nature.  Good example.  It's precisely because you want to emphasize that it's a team effort that you might want to tilt the glory one way or another in a particular instance.  Some games force that kind of thing with mechanical balance, but, in 5e, as the flip-side of Empowerment, it's a responsibility of the DM.  The best way, IMHO, of keeping that kind of spotlight balance moving is to have really diverse challenges so that each PCs specialties come up at some point - but fudging a specific roll or detail in the moment might be an effective way of assuring it.  It's very different from 4e's tightly-structured class & encounter balance (in 4e, I could run with not just die rolls, but monster stats out in the open, and let players track hps, and have seen many DMs do the same - heck I could leave the 'dungeon map' out in the open, since navigating it would be a skill challenge rather than a pixel-tapping exercise), or 3.5's RAW-adherence (in 3.5, players can count on the rules being the rules and build their characters and make decisions accordingly - even if the DM invokes rule 0, the expectation is he'll do so up-front, and stick to it, same with any 'interpretations,' little respect that they might get).  In 5e the DM really is Empowered.  The rules rely on him for interpretation at every turn.  Rulings trump rules, and the game can be run in the moment, to deliver the best possible play experience to the best ability of the DM, not executed like an algorithm or negotiated like a contract.</blockquote>

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