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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8172955" data-attributes="member: 6790260">If having the players believe they have agency us vitally important, why not take the easiest possible route to supporting that belief? That is, why not have them actually have agency?As I've said, there is no objective (that isn't deception in and of itself) which can be achieved with fudging but cannot be achieved without it. Speedy play? Just SAY "y'know what, I don't like that result, I'm just going to say what happened," or "eh, shouldn't have rolled, this is what REALLY happened." Preventing a TPK? You have loads of options: divine (or merely powerful-entity) intervention, mysterious magic, unexpected behavior from a signature item, distraction inserted into the story, internal conflict with the monsters, sudden arrival of backup, environment suddenly changes... I'm sure I could come up with more if I sat down to think about it. And this approach also works for altering monster stats, too. Correcting a trend of bad rolls? Give the players opportunities to leverage their abilities and invent unexpected circumstances that weaken the monsters. Get a cool idea (possibly from the players themselves!) midway through a situation? Take a fiver if you need it, and actually build some justification for the shift. Give the players the chance to learn about the thing before you drop it on them, and they'll feel smart for figuring out a threat before it manifested for real.All of these things fix problems with rolling when you aren't actually okay with accepting the brute, baseline consequences of a failed roll...and yet all of them respect player agency rather than blowing it off so long as you can lie to them well enough that they falsely believe they have agency.Why rely on an illusion you must maintain and a deception you can never allow to be revealed, when you can reject the dice WITHOUT denying player agency?Why do something that, if a player ever discovered it, it would ruin their fun, so that you HAVE to lie to their face when they ask you if you do it?Why make DMs deceiving players not only acceptable but necessary, while making players deceiving each other or the DM a horrific offense?</blockquote>

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