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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 5111196" data-attributes="member: 5122">Well, basically because triumph will be easier, and unearned.  (Or, if I fudge against the players, harder than what they deserve.)  So closer to the latter, but I was talking more about the result of altering die rolls rather than focusing on the actors in the comparison.Yeah, you're parsing too finely, and able to do so because I wasn't precise enough.It's not the act of altering die rolls that has tempted me ... it's the act of producing what part of me believes will be a more desirable outcome.  More dramatic, session-stretching (or -shortening), and so on.  Fudging itself is pretty much anathema to me, which is why I don't do it.Maybe.  I'd certainly be convinced by this if D&D were (usually) less super-heroic itself.It's pretty much unrestricted.  (It is literally called GM Fiat, BTW.)  There's a small cost involved -- when you invoke GM Fiat, affected players are awarded a Hero Point -- as a signal to the players that, "Hey, the earned victory here is (probably) just being deferred, in the name of the story."  All completely out in the open, and as a comic book geek from way, way back, I revel in the power the system gives me to make the game feel like a comic book.  Well ... sort of.  Just to be clear, I don't have that much experience with it yet, but as I've used it so far, what it's done is push dramatic resolution further away.  That is, a villain was already in really bad shape, and probably on his way down, but by using Hero Points -- which do make the PCs incrementally stronger -- I can have the villain "stretch" his power set to do something cool, or decide that that last lightning blast caused structural damage which is threatening to bring a building down on civilians, and so on.</blockquote>

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