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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brimshack" data-source="post: 3139914" data-attributes="member: 34694">Is it necessarily robbing a player if you throw a random variation at them? I guess to me it depends on whether or not the random event has some probability assigned to it. Simply deciding to change the situation after a key roll would strike me as unfair, but giving a plan-foiling twist a chance to occur seems quite reasonable.Say a rogue does sneak past a group of sleeping gaurds with a successful move silently roll. The posibility that one of them gets up to take a piss is real enough, and it adds a certain flavor to the game. Too often I have seen players design very complex plans which rest on the assumption that all the enemy will be exactly where their assigned posts are at any given moment, and that no-one will be out of place whatsoever. But gaurds aren't (usually) robots; they are (usually) humanoids and that means they often do unexpected things. A little random variation in enemy behavior helps to keep the best laid plans in perspective.Now, how to do it? It seems to me that at least part of the discussion over DM cheating a player out of a roll falls on the question of just how fuzzy is the GM thinking. I've seen a lot of GMs, and I know I've been guilty of this in the past, tell a player to make a roll and then decide what the results are afterwards. This is particularly tempting with social rolls such as Gather Information and Diplomacy. The player rolls a gather information, just looking for local gossip, and say gets aresult of  13. So the GM decides that's enough to learn that there is a plot to kill him but no more. If the player rolled a 19, would the GM give him more? Or would he decide that such an excellent result would mean he learned exactly the exact same amount of information? Trying to get into a castle, your Paladin rolls a Diplomacy check and gets a 12, so the GM decides that's good enough, they let you in. Were you to have rolled a 21, the same GM might have decided that was so excellent that the gaurds decide to let you in. ...the problem is the GM is deciding after the roll, and that increases the odds that the roll will simply confirm his own preferences with respect to what he wants to happen in that situation.What I have been forcing myself to do lately is sketch out the results in shorthand, or announce the possibilities, if there is no call for secrecy, even if it takes a minute or so before making the player roll the dice. In the gather information and diplomacy examples above, I would scribble down a different result for DCs of 10, 15, 20, and 25. The result of 25 would usually be the optimum result central to the plot line, and if the player managed a 30 I would add something extra (which would then be made up). This wouldn't be shown to the player, but it's essential to me that I decide the results in advance of the roll, just so confirmation bias doesn't lead me to assign the same result for a broad range of die rolls. I think a lot of GM cheating the dice comes from just making the judgement calls after the dice is rolled.When it comes to a completely random variation such as a gaurd being somewhere or doing something random and inconvenient, I would probably assign about a 10%-20% chance for something along those lines, perhaps even announcing it to the players, and roll it. This way the decision is above board and will cause less suspicion if a disaster comes up, plus it effectively reminds the players that they do live in a world where people go take a piss, suffer insomnia, or wake up for no apparent reason. The players will need to take such things into account, and if they fail to do so, I don't think it is necessarily robbing them to throw a twist that way from time to time.</blockquote>

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