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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Musing Mage" data-source="post: 8085849" data-attributes="member: 7025552">I'm sorry, but I just cannot get on board with this philosophy and always advise the exact opposite. Fudging anything is a fast track to players simply not trusting you as DM. Bar none.The story is partly generated by the dice, and attempting to control that diminishes the experience. Further, every time I've ever played with a DM who rolls everything in secret (and more often than not fudges rolls), it becomes obvious that our choices and actions make very little difference as the DM has his agenda of how things will go. (Another reason I am not a big fan of railroad games... though that's another topic.)In one instance of a game I played years ago, a DM was making an attack roll against the character controlled by his fiancee, who was down to 1 hit point... and he declares after confirming her HP status that he would be rolling that attack behind the screen... and that was that. No one ever trusted his rolls again and the game dissolved because it was boring AF with the tension gone, and the realization that he had a fully structured narrative that he wanted us to fulfill. In another game more recently, our characters were against a far superior enemy that should have shredded us, he rolled the dice behind the screen and we miraculously survived where we clearly should not have. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the 40 pages of story he'd written and didn't want ruined by killing off the PCs... which to me is a red flag. I'm not at the table to play out someone's novel right down to the plot points, occasionally rolling dice for the fun of it.The dice are capricious, that's the point. If you're not going to honour them then you diminish the experience. The game is at its best when anything can happen. The ideal (to me) way to DM is to have no vested interest in the outcome and be as objective as possible. Once you let go, you can watch the story grow organically, and not based on personal storytelling bias.That said, there are specific times I roll behind the screen (like stealth, reaction checks, random encounters, etc), for sure - when players shouldn't know the results. But I am fastidious in using the results. It's important to me that players trust that I'm fair and don't fudge anything for them, or (especially!) against them.</blockquote>

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