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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 5936354" data-attributes="member: 85870">I'm going to make a confession: During last year's 8-month Pathfinder campaign, I fudged NPCs like crazy. Oh sure, I took the time to fully stat the 3-4 potential recurring nemeses the players might encounter (as well as 2 or 3 regular NPC advisors and cohorts). But for the rest of the stuff? Fudge city. I pulled stuff from everywhere. The Bestiary. The Advanced GM Guide. The NPC guide. The Pathfinder Rival Guide. Dungeon and Dragon magazine. Old PC character sheets. Oh, I tweaked some of the numbers. Changed weapon and armor proficiencies, tacked on an extra feat here or there. But really I felt no compulsion to be 100% accurate down to every BAB, skill, and bonus. In essence, I was doing what Fantasy Craft does out of the box--taking a combat challenge, and "fudging" the difficulty to match the current party level. Those CR 3 rogues from the Advanced GM guide? Tack on +5 more BAB, up the AC and HP, stack another dice of sneak damage, and add +3 to their stealth skills, and bam, now they're CR 6 or 7. (I also discovered that mostly I wanted a system that better supported my ability to do what I was already doing. But that's another post for another day.) And I guess I'm sort of interested in hearing from EnWorld on this kind of GM style. I know there's a wide variety of opinions on the idea of fudging dice. But I don't know if I've seen much discussion of this kind of encounter-building. In my experience, it was the perfect solution to Pathfinder's increasing complexity over time. If my players knew I was fudging stats, they didn't let on. And they didn't seem to mind in the least during combat (we had some great, memorable combats over that 8 months). But I'm curious to hear if what I was doing is unusual, or just "par for the course" for GM-ing.</blockquote>

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