And then we have the more hybrid: "Provide rules support to elevate referee performance" school.
I don't have much to say to the rest of your post, but this stood out.
This is the school I belong to. You might (or might not) have seen previous posts of mine where I talk about this, about things I really do consider to be rules-as-tools.
Rules, in the TTRPG sense (though also in other senses), are inherently teleological; they are designed in order to achieve some end. (Laws, for example, are designed to achieve some set of required, favored, permitted, disliked, or forbidden behavior.) Hence, a good rule must
have some particular definable end, even if that end is not something that terminates (e.g. the rules of writing don't
terminate writing, they guide you in how to write
better, however much you might write.) By having a definable end, we can test whether or not a given rule achieves its particular end with reasonable consistency; in the case of TTRPG rules, that usually means "up to the level of randomness introduced by the dice" or other probability-generators (cards, for example).
When the rules are not useful, they should not be used. This is not the same as saying that they should be
broken. This is saying that they should be invoked when they are needed, and set aside when they are not. The simple example, which I'm pretty sure everyone here generally agrees with, is when a player proposes a course of action which simply
should succeed (or should simply fail, but I prefer to pick the positive example here). The purpose of, for example, a skill check or an attack roll, is to determine a result when we
don't know what the result should be. But in those cases where we already know that an action simply should succeed, flat, no questions asked, then....the rules for checks are therefore irrelevant in that moment. There is no need to invoke the associated rules; this is not
breaking them, it is respecting that the situation at hand has not actually called for their use. Likewise, if it is very obvious that the party simply cannot lose a battle anymore, but it might take a dozen rounds to resolve by slowly whittling down the remaining stragglers, openly asking, "Should we just call this fight over?" is not
breaking the rules of combat, it's saying, "We know what the rules will produce. Do we need to go through all the steps, or can we skip them?"
The place where this principle is most put to the test is, in my not-so-humble opinion, when the GM
strongly feels that a certain result should (or should not) happen, but the rules have already been invoked and clearly produced that outcome...but only to the GM. That is the moment when "fudging" is a temptation. "Fudging", at least as I define it, is the act of
secretly (the secrecy is extremely important) breaking the rules in order to
disregard result A (the one the rules indicate) in order to create result B instead (the one the GM prefers, for whatever reason), and then
concealing this fact from the players so they cannot find out that the rules were not actually followed.
If any of these three elements--the secrecy, the disregarding, or the concealment--are not actually done, then the action isn't "fudging" (as I define it). So, for example, a GM looking down at the die someone rolled and realizing they shouldn't have asked for a roll at all? If they just come clean and admit this, and propose an alternative, that's not fudging--it's admitting that the rules should never have been invoked, and thus weren't appropriate to begin with. Or, if the GM swallows their dislike and lets the result stand, obviously that's not fudging. Or, if the GM does change the result, even non-openly, but makes it practically possible for the players to learn that and how it happened (not merely theoretically; the players
really could find out that something changed), then it is not fudging--it is instead inserting new diegetic elements which change the situation.
My standard examples for this are "the party kills a boss-creature 'too quick' and the GM wishes for the boss-creature to last longer" and "the party has TPK'd, especially in an utterly unforeseeable or ridiculous way, and the GM wants to do something about that". The former is not a positive for the PCs (a fight they "should have" won is not over yet) while the latter is (a fight which "should have" terminated them produces a different result). IMO, there are three alternatives to fudging in these situations which still achieve all of the results of fudging (and more!) without any of the downsides thereof. They are:
- Simply admit the issue to the group and propose an alternative. This is generally not a great choice, but sometimes required if nothing else will suit, or if the group doesn't have time to do something else. More or less, it's an admission of "garbage in equals garbage out", that the GM screwed up in some way and things need to be put right again.
- Prepare, in advance, diegetic solutions which address the problem. This is often the best option....if you've done the work to make it make sense. Its natural fault, of course, is that these sorts of situations are a lot more likely to happen when you haven't already done prep work to forestall them; can't really fix a problem via preparation if you didn't prepare for it.
- Make clear within the world that something mysterious and weird has just happened: make the divergence from the rules' result diegetic. E.g., "The goblin-priestess took a lethal blow, you KNOW it was a lethal blow, she should be dead. But then she stood back up again, bleeding profusely from her sternum, eyes aglow in violet, babbling madness in Abyssal." Now it's a mystery--but, importantly, a mystery you as DM have time to build a good, well-constructed answer for.
