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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6807921" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Thank you, and I'm glad you liked it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I certainly agree that being caught "on the spot" can make it difficult. At the same time, that's sort of the point. Fudging is the "too-easy" answer, the answer foregoes enduring a learning experience in order to get quick results right away. It's a disservice to the players, and to the DM herself.I've seen a DM--with 5e, to be specific--address this more or less with one of these solutions. (It's slightly different, in that what he did was basically allow a relatively lower-level Cleric spell to work in a situation slightly outside its normal bounds, due to extenuating circumstances. And, in this case, I was the victim.) There are, however, a few other alternatives too. For example, DM calls for a 15-minute break, and takes the dead character's player aside. Perhaps an interested third party--good, evil, neutral, bizarre, whatever--has intervened to prevent them from passing on to the next world. But there is a price to be paid, should the PC accept their help. Payment for services rendered and such. If the player declines, that's a pity, but understandable. If they accept, however, suddenly that (averted) death becomes the doorway to an entirely new branch of the narrative--perhaps one more interesting than the main branch, later on down the line!Well, the central examples the pro-fudging crowd (or at least not-anti-fudging) seems to prefer to hang their hats on are:1) Character fails at (or, very rarely, succeeds at) a roll when the "superior" (read: more interesting, more fun, more whatever) result would be the opposite. I still don't see a way to parse this that isn't the DM imposing their will--first, leaving it up to the dice, and then deciding they know better.2) As you noted, a character dies in combat. This is probably the hardest to address, because a believed-TPK can be turned around more easily than a believed-single-death, but I still think there are ways around it. A lot of this type of problem is best resolved by thinking about such situations well ahead of them actually happening. That, in itself, is a major example of the "learning opportunity" that fudging discards.3) Players completely demolish a fight because they got fantastically lucky, e.g. multiple crits and max damage in the first round. Personally, I see this as one of the worst offenders, because it's the clearest case where the fudging is "against the party." As with #1, I struggle to interpret this in any positive light--it seems pretty clear that the biggest frustration, in the vast majority of cases, is on the DM's side for having put effort into something that was easily brushed aside. So, whether or not it leads to an interesting/enjoyable combat, countermanding the players' fantastic/lucky success seems distinctly "selfish," in the sense of "dammit I made this monster, it's GOING to challenge them!"4) I swear there was a fourth example I was going to cite, but I can't for the life of me remember it now. Ah well. I'll edit in if I remember later.Sure. I don't deny that the DM's chair comes with responsibility, in addition to power, and that that responsibility can be tough to meet. I just see fudging--in the specific sense of clandestinely retconning the world, whether in terms of die results or internal facts--as an inappropriate tool for the task. If you can't think of a solution on your own, admit the problem to the group and try to achieve consensus (thus removing the "clandestine" part and making it "not fudging" in my book), or find a way to fix the problem that isn't fundamentally altering what the world produced (so that it isn't "retconning" proper). With the "character death counteracted by an outside force" thing, it's mostly the latter answer (with a dose of the former, except that it's secret between everyone but you and the player unless that player wishes to share). It's not that the character didn't die--they did. But someone with an agenda (which might be good or bad!) made them get better.And, in general, I genuinely believe it's better for someone to be upset about something they saw and knew and understood, than for them to be blissfully ignorant of something that would upset them if they knew. I utterly despise being treated like that: when someone does that to me, it tells me they think of me as an ignorant child, someone who can't take his lumps, someone who needs to be lied to in order to be happy. I absolutely think that plenty of people don't feel that way, but I do--and while it might not be a majority, even just 20% of players feeling that way would mean that any random group has a more than 2/3 chance of having at least one person that feels that way.I would also wager--admittedly, without data--that the degree to which someone is offended by discovering fudging (especially if they've been misled or outright lied to about it) is going to be significantly greater than the degree to which (a different) someone is offended by accepting that the dice produced an undesirable result. I'd also say that a player who cannot accept, under any circumstances, the possibility of a serious issue being produced by the dice...might need to look for a different hobby. Unless there is never an actual chance of undesirable results, those results almost surely WILL happen eventually, whereas fudging (being a voluntary act on the DM's part) never "needs" to happen.Again, I'm glad--and thank you. This discussion, across its various threads, has been a little fraught now and then, so it's good to know that at least one person has benefited from my contributions. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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