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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6027196" data-attributes="member: 1465">I am always torn between the two different approaches <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />In my early days of DMing I used to fudge the dice quite often. The reason was that I was afraid. I was never sure if I was making an encounter or a trap too hard or too easy, and I didn't trust the CR system of 3ed very much, so I often relied on fudging the dice up or down.Later I think I became more aware that the players should be responsible for their PC's fate more than the DM. If the DM throws a too hard or even impossible encounter (whether by mistake or on purpose), it's the player's responsibility to realize they are losing and get the hell out of the encounter instead of getting killed one by one by stubbornly continue to fight.The real problem is that there are situations when they don't have time to figure it out! We all know that e.g. save-or-die spells and abilities are one danger against the ability of assessing whether an encounter is too difficult.Another fundamental thing I became aware about the game is that my plan is not better than random's plan <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> If I had planned for a certain course of the story where the PCs storm castle X, kill BBEG Y and destroy artifact Z to save the world, this is actually not going to be really more fun or interesting than a course where either X, Y or Z goes wrong. Maybe some DM is as great as a movie director, but I strongly believe that 99% of us are not better than a mediocre novelist or a B-movie junior director, and our "great" campaign ideas are almost always the same 2-3 stories. Hence, letting the dice pick the course does not really makes the campaign overall worse than it is when everything goes the way I planned <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> [addendum: what makes a campaign truly great is not the story, which is always the same, it's the memorable details, descriptions, anecdotes and social situations around the table!]But the final caveat is that different people (and I don't mean just DMs, I mean different players in the same group) have different concept of fun.I was never of the idea that a game of D&D should be for me as relaxing as watching a TV series from my couch, where I expect that everything ends up nicely for the protagonists. But maybe some of my players do... maybe they don't want a challenging game, they want an easy relaxing game, perhaps some of them are even the types that regularly used cheat codes in computer games to get through the story and beat the game easily. So the hardest part for a DM is making compromises between what is everybody's different expectations and concept of fun, and this is why I haven't completely ruled out the idea of fudging.</blockquote>

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