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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8985963" data-attributes="member: 4937">[USER=75787]@GrahamWills[/USER]:  I feel that you are repeatedly make appeals to two different phrases that I confess I don't understand what you mean by them.  First, you seem to be using "outcome" in a private technical sense.   What is and isn't an outcome in your mind?   Secondly, you keep saying you don't make changes to change outcomes but only to "make more fun", but I find this to be a begging the question fallacy.  You are assuming your argument in that statement, turning everything into some sort of tautology.  I don't see how you think you can make fun without changing outcomes.  I consider the following to be changing the outcome:a) Causing the fight to go shorter than it would have without the fudging, resulting in fewer resources being expended by the party - less loss hit points, less spells expended, less consumables expended, etc.b) Causing the fight to go longer than it would have without the fudging, resulting in fewer resources being expended by the party - less loss hit points, less spells expended, less consumables expended, etc.c) Causing members of either side of the fight to survive or to avoid or receive other long-term consequences such as capture, gear loss, or being maimed, where a different result would have been obtained without the fudging.d) Changes to the produced transcript of play as the result of fudging such as changes who gets the glory, kill shot, or spotlight as a result of the fight.You can do these things by fudging.  For example you previously stated things like: All those things to me either actually change the outcome or potentially change the outcome.  You seem rather oddly focused on questions of whether or not the party wins or loses.  And yes, changing the outcome to the extent that wins become failures or failures become wins is the most extreme case, but you are still effecting the outcome of the fight even when you go to a lesser extreme.   But more to the point, if you are in a fight with 10 goblins and in turn three the goblins are down to 4 goblins and you are like in your head thinking, "This fight has not been challenging enough.  It's a walk over.  Let's have 3 goblins show up as reinforcements to make it more fun.", you can't know whether or not the next round you're going to roll two natural 20's for the now 7 surviving goblins and confirm criticals, and now suddenly you have two different players that are dying, a player that has to spend their turn keeping allies from dying, and the party is now down 75% of its offensive power and you've got a situation where one PC is taking on 5 goblins solo to try to protect the party and suddenly those 3 extra goblins feel a bit overwhelming.  My suspicion is that if that happens, well you just fudge the fudging at some point and everything becomes fudge all the way down.  My point about fudging to make things more fun is you as a limited person with limited insight into the future can't always predict what is going to make things more fun.Similarly with things like upping hit points.  Upped them too much?  Well fudge them back down again.  Eventually it all becomes this big illusionary dance.  You say: But how much harder?  And even having opposition run away can have unpredictable effects in the sandbox.  Fleeing monsters can be hugely problematic - much more of a problem than the monsters standing and fighting.  Consider if for some reason you are running something like 'Glacier Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl".  Now the structure of this module is that Gygax has subtly weighted the things in favor the players by having a whole army of Frost Giants split up into small separate encounters that don't intersect.  If the PC's had to face the whole army outside of the Glacier Rift, the PC's wouldn't stand a chance.  The whole purpose of the fortress is to cripple the monsters and make it almost impossible for them to defend themselves!  It's a deliberately terrible fortress.  If you decide, "The monsters are going to try to run away", there is good chance that you are going to TPK the PC's.  Because what actually then happens is sort of like extra pulls when running a raid instance.  Your fleeing giants pick up more giants until you have an overwhelming number of giants in some later fight.  I just don't agree that you can know what is going to be more fun in the general case.  If you up the monsters damage early in the fight to have a bigger impact, you don't know if the whole party is going to roll like 8 or less on every attack for a round (it happens) and then suddenly your party is struggling more than you intended.  Is that more fun?  Do you fudge again if it isn't?From my perspective you are just saying, "I'm altering outcomes in ways that I think will be more fun."   You can alter outcomes (see definition of outcomes above) but there is no magic "fun" button to push that makes things more fun without altering outcomes.  I don't see how you think it is a strawman to say that you modify outcomes.  It's not so much that I think that the only reason to modify combat is to change outcomes, it's just that I think changing outcomes is the inevitable side effect of modifying combat.  "To have more fun" is the why, but it's not the tool.  The tool is altering outcomes.  "More fun" is your intended result.If you kill steal my PC's moment of awesome because you've decided it would be more fun if another PC gets the glory, don't expect me to necessarily agree with your ideas about what is fun.Yes.See I don't even see the above statement as having meaning.  It comes back "Does not compute".   Rewriting to something that is a true statement looks something like:"Modifying the encounters mid-flow so as to change the outcome with the purpose of making the encounter more enjoyable is something can be considered a GM's style, neither inherently good or bad."And, yeah, that's rewrite is a true statement, but it comes with a big caveat.  It's only functional GMing if it happens to be that you don't have a party where any player cares about Illusion of Success and so basically has a "do not care" around the process of play, and only cares about the produced transcript of play.   And further, you probably don't have anyone in the party that is overly concerned about their agency so that they don't mind having less room to express themselves compared to how much they enjoy the story you are giving them.  So for example, most parties I've ran are going to not have more fun if they learn you stole an important kill from a PC to give it to a different PC you felt was more deserving.  The PC that missed out on the kill is going to be disappointed, and the PC that got the kills is going to feel it was unearned and so both will feel you robbed them.Absolutely.  And like, I think if you do this you'll find that the more you reveal about the Illusion by lifting the curtain up, the more feedback you'll get from most groups that they prefer you stop with the Illusion.  Illusionism typically only works and is fun if it isn't seen through, which is yet another reason it should be rare.</blockquote>

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