D&D 5E Fudging: DM vs player preferences

[Skyscraper]

Being anti-fudging does not inherently mean not being for the fun of the story, nor does it inherently mean wanting to strictly follow a ruleset.

Yes, like i mentioned, I am also against fudging.

Still, I think that if D&D or other RPGs were taken as a strategy board game, where "fudging" is called cheating and simply does not exist, I believe that the answers would be very different. In such games, the ruleset primes over any "story" that players might see unfolding, and the changing a die value is simply not acceptable.

The polls show me that most players and DMs accept some measure of fudging, and to me this suggests that most players and DMs see the story as more important than the ruleset. Perhaps this conclusion is a far stretch, but I don't think it is.

 

[Skyscraper]

I think it would be interesting to rephrase the original poll. Instead of asking if a player wants the dm to fudge, I'd rather see the results of a poll like this:

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Do you mind if your DM fudges to keep the game moving and to enhance the story?

(...)

This question is obviously biased towards an answer by providng "to keep the game moving and enhance the story" in the question. If you want people to answer the way you do, your question indeed appears appropriate I was not the author of the first question and my own question in the second poll intentionally mirrored that of the first poll; and I think that the original question has the merit or being more neutral. "Do you fudge?"; and "Do you want your DM to fudge?" No purpose or intention is included into the questions. Just the straight out factual question.

See, myself, while I prefer no fudging (as a DM I roll in the open), I do not mind however that others think otherwise nor does it trouble me the least to see that most players and DMs accept fudging at least in some measure, nor do I really mind playing with a fudging DM. Whether the fudging indeed allows the game to move forward, the story to be enhanced, TPKs to be avoided, players to be happy, DMs to be happy, those are all subjective questions where I could answer for example that the story is enhanced with no fudging, not the other way around. I do not see the questions being improved with such additions, on the contrary.

 

[Skyscraper]

You're putting some pretty heavy personal bias into that conclusion. "Almost Never" can also be interpreted as "Most players don't accept a much fudging."

What personal bias would that be?

The numbers say that a majority (i.e. more than 50%) of players accept some measure of fudging. "Almost never" means, sometimes, but very rarely. So it's a "yes, but rarely".

This is not aligned with my own preferences. I'm a "No, never" guy, both as DM and player.

So tell me where my personal bias comes into play in my reading of the numbers, please.

 

[Ranthalan]

At that point, why even bother rolling if you're just going to force a result?

This is why I think the "sides" are arguing past each other. I fudge, and as I mentioned earlier it's usually not with rolls.

Btw, what situation would you describe is a good time to fudge?

It's highly situational. I think the best I could answer that, is whenever something stupid would happen that would spoil the fun.

The last time I fudged was when I screwed up a random encounter. It was the first session after two players left. In my haste, I was thinking 6 characters instead of 4 and I had neglected to account that the party already had an encounter a couple hours earlier in the session and wasn't rested. When I hastily set up the encounter with 12 brigands (custom monsters at CR3), I did so thinking they were a party of 6 fresh, not 4 tired. The encounter was WAY too difficult for the situation and would've resulted in TPK. Half-way through the encounter, 8 of those CR3s suddenly became (sorta) CR1s. I fudged to fix a mistake I had made because to TPK on a random encounter wouldn't be satisfying to anyone. To the players, it looked like the leaders of the band were more powerful than the others.

Also, at least for me as a DM, my whole job is fudging. I may have a few encounters/major events/etc. planned out, but for the most part I wing it because you can never tell what a party will do. So a lot of content is created on the fly. To me this is also a form fudging.

 

[Noctem]

Why not just admit the mistake? Fix the encounter by removing a few of the bad guys or making them run away because they are cowards who were only looking for easy prey instead of an adventuring group? From my experience, being open and admitting to a mistake will help you grow more as a DM, build more trust with the group, than fudging the encounter would. The only reason you fudged is because you knew you could get away with it, if you think about it.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

The last time I fudged was when I screwed up a random encounter. It was the first session after two players left. In my haste, I was thinking 6 characters instead of 4 and I had neglected to account that the party already had an encounter a couple hours earlier in the session and wasn't rested. When I hastily set up the encounter with 12 brigands (custom monsters at CR3), I did so thinking they were a party of 6 fresh, not 4 tired. The encounter was WAY too difficult for the situation and would've resulted in TPK. Half-way through the encounter, 8 of those CR3s suddenly became (sorta) CR1s. I fudged to fix a mistake I had made because to TPK on a random encounter wouldn't be satisfying to anyone. To the players, it looked like the leaders of the band were more powerful than the others.

If I were to make that same mistake, I would handle it by not changing anything except being sure that I convey to the players and their characters that they are facing overwhelming odds - letting the players work out their own solution - and by having the brigands consider not killing a priority because the punishment for murder is more severe than the punishment for robbery, hostages might mean ransoms, and any other way to naturally change the failure result of the encounter to something besides "everyone died."

Also, at least for me as a DM, my whole job is fudging. I may have a few encounters/major events/etc. planned out, but for the most part I wing it because you can never tell what a party will do. So a lot of content is created on the fly. To me this is also a form fudging.

You are using a different definition of fudging than has ever been used by a D&D rule-book, or anyone I've ever had discussion about fudging with - "winging it" is improvisation, not fudging.

 

[Greg Benage]

The last time I fudged was when I screwed up a random encounter. It was the first session after two players left. In my haste, I was thinking 6 characters instead of 4 and I had neglected to account that the party already had an encounter a couple hours earlier in the session and wasn't rested. When I hastily set up the encounter with 12 brigands (custom monsters at CR3), I did so thinking they were a party of 6 fresh, not 4 tired. The encounter was WAY too difficult for the situation and would've resulted in TPK. Half-way through the encounter, 8 of those CR3s suddenly became (sorta) CR1s. I fudged to fix a mistake I had made because to TPK on a random encounter wouldn't be satisfying to anyone. To the players, it looked like the leaders of the band were more powerful than the others.

Why is the strength of any particular band of brigands in your world dependent upon the last time the adventurers rested? That's rhetorical -- disregard. Were the adventurers railroaded into fighting the brigands? Was there an opportunity to gather intelligence on the band and their strength? Did the players have different tactical options available to them that might have led to a different outcome? When all else fails, were they able to retreat?

I do think this was a very good, concrete example of fudging, how and why it's often used, and I thank you for sharing it. I think it's also a great example of why (at least some) anti-fudgers hate fudging.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it would be interesting to rephrase the original poll. Instead of asking if a player wants the dm to fudge, I'd rather see the results of a poll like this:

Do you mind if your DM fudges to keep the game moving and to enhance the story?

Echoing Skyscraper here: Making the question biased toward painting "fudging" in as positive a light as possible would, of course, lead to more people being okay with it. Similarly, if we phrased it in some inherently negative way, I'm sure we'd see things leaning far in the other direction.

Admittedly, the original poll should have had more options than "yes," "almost never," and "never." Perhaps something like "frequently"/"occasionally"/"rarely"/"almost never"/"never"; while admittedly that still has issues of squishy frequency terms (some people might vote "occasionally" when they do it at least once a session on average, while others might consider "once or twice per campaign" to be "occasionally," and the difference between "rarely" and "never" is pretty big.)

It seems like a trust issue to me.

I guess trust is part of it--I really don't like being lied to, and see a vast gulf between "I don't tell you every fact up front, you have to learn or experience some of it yourself" and "I do things which I intentionally prevent you from learning and will go out of my way to deceive or even lie to make sure you never learn." But I also see it as...sort of a crutch, if that makes sense. It's a crutch for the players, cushioning them against the actual consequences of their actions, even when those consequences are purely the result of poorly-managed risk. And it's a crutch for the DM, either to avoid admitting that a mistake was made, or to avoid going to the effort of learning other ways to resolve the problems at hand. Because I have yet to hear a single example where fudging was the only solution to the problem--again, given that I define fudging as either modifying a stat after it's "been used in play," modifying the *kind* of result produced by a roll (e.g. monster dies, and can't fight -> monster lives and continues to fight, not monster dies, and can't fight -> monster is knocked unconscious, and can't fight), or giving the players true/accurate information (complete or partial) only to turn around and make that information false/inaccurate at a later point.

If players trust the DM and enjoy the game experience, they'll be more likely to accept DM fudging if it happens.

Alternatively, the players trust the DM and enjoy the experience, because they know the DM will neither deceive them nor pretend the game works a way it doesn't.

On the other hand, for many players, knowing that the DM will fudge, cheapens the experience because they feel that they have less control.

Control has never had anything to do with it, for me. I can't learn from my mistakes--even the mistake of poorly managing risk--if those mistakes are whisked away when they would cause harm. I can't learn from my successes--even the success of getting lucky--if the benefits of actual good luck are removed (monster doesn't die when someone gets a lucky hit that should kill it), and I think I receive good luck when I didn't. That's not a control issue; it's a skill issue. By playing the game, building up a body of experience of what works and doesn't, what's risky and what's not, etc. I learn how to play well; but I can't do that if the body of experience contains manufactured data, aka fudging.

I can definitely see both sides of the issue.

Well, if there actually are people who feel that other side of the issue you discussed, great. But it would seem to me that you are under the mistaken understanding that there are only two sides to this issue. Yes, we can group answers, more or less, as "pro-fudging" or "anti-fudging," but that's a bit like grouping, say, religious traditions on whether they're pro-monotheism or anti-monotheism. You'll end up with weird stuff like atheists and polytheists being "anti-monotheist," and thus "the same" despite being fundamentally different (similarly, you'd end up with a portion of maltheists "on the same side" as Christians, despite their radical differences).

Personally, I'd enjoy playing with a DM that could fudge unobtrusively when it makes the game more interesting (or saves a PC from a stupid or undeserving death).

Alright, here's a question then: Would you prefer a DM that fudged unobtrusively to satisfactorily address those problems, or one who addressed them satisfactorily without any fudging at all (obtrusive or not)?

As a DM, I fudge very little, especially because all of my games are run on Fantasy Grounds and the encounters are pre-set. The urge to fudge often comes when I DM 2-3 PC parties and I don't adjust an adventure for less PCs. Likewise, the urge to fudge is also stronger when I DM for 6-7 PCs and the encounters/situations are not scaled for such a large party. I guess, it is more like making adjustments on the fly.

I've got no problem with adjusting an adventure before the fact, nor with adjusting future encounters "on the fly" (so long as the players haven't got an ironclad reason to expect specific encounters in a specific way, e.g. an accurate and recent copy of the guard duty roster for the castle they're infiltrating). I see your "urge to fudge" in either case as more accurately an urge to ensure that the adventure is an appropriate challenge for the party in question, and I believe the distinctly superior answer to that urge is to change the challenge itself, rather than interfering with the resolution system once the encounters/situations actually "begin."

---

As for the lumping together of results: it's going to be controversial no matter what you do. Leave them separate. Don't lump. Just don't do it.

Not that the percentages actually matter in any meaningful sense. Volunteer sample, can edit or retract vote later on, the possibility of sockpuppets, the unrepresentative nature.... Statistically, you can't claim a damn thing from either one, unless you restrict yourself to JUST the people who voted, which is obviously not very useful. But I've said all this a bajillion times before, so I doubt it will have any meaningful effect on attempting to "analyze" this stuff.

 

[Ranthalan]

Why not just admit the mistake? Fix the encounter by removing a few of the bad guys or making them run away because they are cowards who were only looking for easy prey instead of an adventuring group? From my experience, being open and admitting to a mistake will help you grow more as a DM, build more trust with the group, than fudging the encounter would. The only reason you fudged is because you knew you could get away with it, if you think about it.

I preferred to fudge in this situation because I could make it transparent to the player and keep it in story. The opponents running away in this situation wouldn't have made sense. In the situation, the party was easy prey for this group. Of course, I've made mistakes that couldn't be fudged away and I've apologized for making them. The last big one was forgetting to tell the party that a doppelganger reverted to its natural form after they killed it. It affected their actions and the story. That was a year ago and I'm still pissed at myself for that one.

To be clear, I don't fudge all that often. The one I mentioned was the only time in probably the last 30 hours of game play. It is just one tools that I employ as a DM.

 

[Ranthalan]

Why is the strength of any particular band of brigands in your world dependent upon the last time the adventurers rested? That's rhetorical -- disregard. Were the adventurers railroaded into fighting the brigands? Was there an opportunity to gather intelligence on the band and their strength? Did the players have different tactical options available to them that might have led to a different outcome? When all else fails, were they able to retreat?

I do think this was a very good, concrete example of fudging, how and why it's often used, and I thank you for sharing it. I think it's also a great example of why (at least some) anti-fudgers hate fudging.

It was a random encounter while traveling. A big reason for the error on my part was the haste in which it was set up. You also bring up something that is rather situational. My players SUCK at tactics*. Most of my table is inexperienced. The most experienced player, who kept them from doing especially stupid things, had to leave the group because he could no longer make the time commitment. Elsewhere, I posted the story of how they had a bad encounter with Griffons where they lost their horses, killed none of the griffons, and ended the encounter with all of them making death saves. Miraculously they all survived. We also have 3 hour sessions, which presents its own challenges for pacing.

ETA: The make up of the table has a strong impact on how I DM, and the tools I employ. What makes for fun at one table isn't necessarily the same for all tables. Also, I told them during session 0, my rolls would be hidden, and that I wouldn't fudge against the party, and it would be in the service of story.


*- In the last session, they were fighting a young black dragon in a colosseum and one character, after getting clawed and gnawed, ran to hide behind another character. Naturally, the dragon sees this as the perfect opportunity to use its breath weapon. The player is new and every monster to her is a learning experience. (Which is fun, but dangerous.) Despite the fact that she's a half-elf ducking behind a gnome, the gnome is knocked unconscious and she escapes without a scratch. We end up with some bizarre situations in this campaign.