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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8597276" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Again, I don't see what is controversial about "change things, but be diegetic." It achieves literally exactly the same end (shaping the result to the desired form, rather than what the dice or numbers say), but without deception. Being diegetic doesn't require you to be all up in players' faces about it. Just means it's really "part of the world" and can be learned about and understood within the world. It's not secret in the sense of being actively concealed from the players, but it could end up never being investigated (or failing to pass a check) and thus an unknown purely by coincidence. And absolutely none of that requires any kind of explicit "I'M FUDGING THE RESULTS, GUYS" flag.Well....that kind of touches on what I said earlier. This is unhealthy. It creates the expectation that DMs need to be perfect, and if they can't live up to that expectation, they must cook the books so that they maintain the illusion of perfection. That's not good for DMs and contributes unrealistic and unreasonable player expectations.And here we have a great issue.Why do the rules only serve the DM? Aren't they supposed to serve everyone? Plus, who the hell cares if it's officially supported? You cannot tell me that if the books were silent on this subject (as they are on the prospect of "player fudging") that you would suddenly abandon any thought of DMs being able to fudge. In fact, I am 100% certain that even if the books were explicit and thorough about denouncing fudging as an inappropriate tactic, you would openly say that that was stupid and every DM could and should ignore that section. Appeals to authority when you have made it extremely clear that any authority that disagrees with you is worthless don't do you any favors.No, no, no, and (most likely) no, no, and no. You keep inventing these examples to make it sound as though there must be an infinite variety of things that all have to be judged individually. There aren't. I have very clearly defined a clean, simple definition of fudging. Does it cover all possible forms of DM overreach or inappropriate DM behavior? Heck no, no definition could ever do that. But it is very clear about what it is: changing the statistics or random number generators applied to, or caused by, a creature that has already entered play. The only possible grey area is "what if it's on the board but has not acted or been acted upon?" And frankly at this point I'm even willing to say "okay, fine, whatever, if it has literally not done anything at all yet, nor had anything at all done to it yet, then sure, maybe some minor tweaks--a couple points of AC, shifting its HP within its rolled options--is not the absolute worst thing ever.And my main reason for allowing that is LITERALLY NO ONE HERE TALKS ABOUT THAT, except as a gotcha "well what about this, huh?!" Because immediately before and after asking that, people will go right back into what they actually use it for: keeping a creature alive/active when it should have fallen or killing/disabling it when it should still be standing (meaning it has taken hits already), or turning the fifth crit in a row into a miss, or lowering monster damage because the party is getting wrecked, or...It's all post-interaction examples whenever people give serious ones. So fine. Pre-interaction, go for it. But if it's been interacted with, don't pretend like it's some horrible crime for a player to be upset about you manipulating things when they have very much gotten information about it already.Do you really want to commit to the line that fudging is in fact necessary? As in, it MUST be used? Because I strongly suspect that you do not.</blockquote>

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