D&D General How do players feel about DM fudging?

[Ovinomancer]

Wait, you tell your players every time you roll for wandering monsters? Since that's what I was referring to.


That or they think your explanation was insufficient.

This is terribly useful. Are you defending @Hussar because you think they cannot answer, or are you trying to say my argument was insufficient? If so, please elaborate rather than drive-by.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yup. Time to move on. This is just spinning wheels which can be fun for a while but not really productive.

We’re just not speaking the same language. When fudging is considered a major hack and compared to murder, it’s just not possible to have a conversation.

Neither of those things were said.

 

[Eric V]

I think it's more about motive. If the GM fudges a roll to avoid a crit on a hapless PC, I can understand (though the game already kind of takes this into account with how hard it is to die).

If the GM fudges a roll because the villain "needs" to get away, or because it's more dramatic, or somesuch reason...well, are you SURE it's more dramatic? There are 4 other people around the table who have their own ideas about what good drama is, and maybe taking down the villain in one round, or preventing his escape is part of it.

Most games have adjusted their rules so that the kind of fudging in the first example is no longer necessary, and so it seems, IME, that only the second type of fudging really happens...and it shouldn't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I tend to agree with Hussar that there isn't anything further to say, given how much we are at loggerheads simply over terms. But this one bit, I felt, warranted a response.

If I tell the players I'm changing a crit to an ordinary hit so as not to kill off Falstaff it is fudging every bit as much as if I do the same thing and don't tell them.

And yet, as I have demonstrated, a significant number of people (whether they favor or oppose "fudging") agree that secrecy is pretty key.

You are absolutely still changing the roll. I am not, at all, challenging that. I am saying that defining "fudging" as "merely changing any modifier or roll" is not only useless, it's actively degrading the ability to discuss these categories. There is value in having a term for secretly changing the rolls (or modifiers, which is mathematically equivalent to changing the roll), particularly when such secrecy is advocated in almost every source I can find, including the 5e DMG.

So. People really do actually use this term in a way that both implies and explicitly expects secrecy. Defying that secrecy--especially if there is an explicit mechanic (not simply a "this is a thing you could do if you like, we won't judge" but "this is the official rule for doing X thing")--seems like such a RADICALLY distinct category of behavior that I truly struggle to understand why it's so offensive to use "fudging" for the secret thing and some other word, like maybe "rerolls," for stuff that isn't secret.

Fudging = arbitrarily changing a die roll from something undesired to something desired. Whether or not you tell anyone about it is irrelevant.

Who says so? Is it just the way YOU use the term, or does this reflect some effort at the usage of the term more widely? Because I am basing it on how the term has been used, whether it be "in this thread" or "in discussion overall."

Like, we can play a war of definitions but it will just end in frustration. Or we can try to pass over this gap of definitions and actually talk about ideas rather than the words we label them with.

I'm not interested in talking about official, explicit, encoded-into-the-system reroll mechanics. I don't think there's anything interesting or relevant to say about them in this context. I think focusing on them is a spurious distraction that waters down terminology for no gain (equivalent to debating whether pizza and hot dogs are sandwiches when having a discussion about ways to make better sandwiches).

Conversely, I think it is both interesting and productive to discuss the controversial (as this thread has demonstrated, pretty highly controversial) practice of secretly, non-diegetically modifying rolls or statistics of creatures that have already entered play. I find this interesting not because that specific practice is interesting, nor because the controversy is interesting, but rather because it seems there is a great deal of misinformation and ignorance regarding alternatives to this practice. That is, there seem to be a lot of people who insist that this practice of secret non-diegetic modification of rolls or stats of creatures already-in-play is in fact unavoidable, that it is a necessary component of producing certain kinds of experiences, when that is simply not true, and in fact there are plenty of ways to avoid it, many of which center on evading at least one of those three components (open, diegetic, or before things enter play).

Reroll meta-mechanics are just sanctioned fudging IMO, and are thus poor design. Edit to add: poor design in an RPG. In Yahtzee where re-rolling is a built-in part of the structure of the game, it's fine.

I mean, this can still have value. Although I strongly dislike the RAMPANT overuse of it (exactly as I predicted back during the playtest), Advantage and Disadvantage are effectively reroll mechanics, and are quite effective at the desired goal of making an intuitive and powerful bonus or penalty on a roll.

Also, see how you're invoking exactly the distinction I made earlier? A "built-in part of the structure of the game" vs (presumably) an ad-hoc "well, you can do this if you want" sort of thing. That's exactly what I'm saying "fudging" fails to be: it is not "a built-in part of the structure of the game," whereas things like Advantage, or Inspiration, or a Diviner's Portent, or a variety of explicit, well-defined mechanics present in (at the very least) every WotC edition of D&D.

It is useful to have a term for a forced override (whether it be a reroll or a "I reject your reality and substitute my own" explicit choice of result) that is conducted secretly. Actual usage reflects that "fudging" usually--not always, but quite commonly across a long span of time--refers to exactly that, whether it be applied to actual die-rolls, or to modifying statistics (HP, defenses, hit rolls, etc.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

We need to de-normalize 'play a different game' and 'you're playing a different game' as responses to playing in a way one doesn't approve of.

Even if you think you're being helpful.

Especially when you think you're being helpful.

While I agree its overused, I'm never going to stop telling people when I think they're pounding nails with a wrench.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Maybe you should try another game?" can be a valid suggestion if a person has issues with their current game and is not satisfied with it. But if they're happy with it but you just think that they're playing it 'wrong' then it is way less valid.

And that I agree with.

(Though when they go into detail about what they're doing, and its very obvious they've got a convoluted kludge just so they can still keep using--or at least say they're using--game X as the basis, I reserve the right to say so, just as they should reserve the right to completely ignore me).

 

[Irlo]

While I agree its overused, I'm never going to stop telling people when I think they're pounding nails with a wrench.

If I want to both pound nails and tighten nuts, and if I can only use one tool, I’ll gladly chose a wrench over a hammer.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If I want to both pound nails and tighten nuts, and if I can only use one tool, I’ll gladly chose a wrench over a hammer.

Or, you could get a multitool. You know, something designed for doing both.

 

[billd91]

Or, you could get a multitool. You know, something designed for doing both.

To pile on to the increasingly attenuated analogy. We already are using a multitool. But like most multitools, it doesn't fit all jobs perfectly. But it is close enough.

Are we done yet?

 

[Thomas Shey]

To pile on to the increasingly attenuated analogy. We already are using a multitool. But like most multitools, it doesn't fit all jobs perfectly. But it is close enough.

Are we done yet?

I disagree that D&D is a multitool. It may not be super-focused, but its still not particularly well suited for things beyond the style of games it was build for.