Ok, now I am curious!
Classic scenario: Battle is almost over, but characters are low on resources. Behind the screen the enemy's last desperate attack shows a crit. You know honoring it will kill a character. You know fudging it to a hit will bring the character to unconscious, and the players will manage to tidy up the situationion and patch them up.
Importantly: You know turning it from crit to miss via fudging will make the players feel the triumph of having won a deserved and hard fought victory against tough odds. In this scenario, how do acheive this particular feeling of triumph without fudging?
Well, firstly, I find this a little contrived. For this to happen, we have to have had:
- A combat which depleted most of the party's resources and put at least one character in mega mega danger zone, but not in a way they feel like is them in mega mega danger, which is...a strange thing for a player who knows they're one hit away from instant death to do.
- Player's character is apparently going to die outright in one hit, from an ordinary attack late in the combat? That's a very strangely-designed monster, given how huge its damage output is.
- The crit is "guaranteed" to kill, which at least in 5e is unlikely. In 4e that would be more plausible (since crits do flat higher damage + bonus dice), but
- The crit has, in fact, happened, so this is already a 1/20 event even given all of the preceding
- A single character dying will completely destroy the feeling of victory and make it so they feel completely defeated instead, even though...they actually did win?
I call this out not because I'm not going to respond, but because I consider this situation so fantastically unlikely, I'm really not sure anyone should worry about it.
If such a perfect storm comes together where every bad thing that could happen to ruin something does in fact come together perfectly, I am of the opinion that it is a
harmful thing to negate the dice-determined result, and thus preserving that effect would not count in what I was speaking of. I should think we agree that the way I phrased what I said clearly indicated that I was referring to all of the same ends but excluding the harmful ones, yes? If so, then this incredibly rare situation is just an unfortunate alignment and should be accepted for what it is.
But now I will just take the scenario as stated. The very last enemy gets a crit. There are three possible pathways I can see which, I believe, would preserve at least
the vast majority of the feeling of triumph. To make it easier, I'll refer to them as hobgoblins. Something that could be tough for low-level characters, but could also be highly trained variants and thus still dangerous even to middle-to-high level characters. And I'll assume they don't have access to
revivify or similar which would invalidate most of these concerns to begin with.
First possibility: I, as GM, have already prepared at least one deity or prominent power (e.g. an archangel or guardinal or whatever) that specifically smiles on noble sacrifices and desperate last stands. As a result of the character's incredible bravery, their willingness to risk death in order to do something truly good and noble, said deity has been done a great service. As a reward for both the service and the sacrifice, the character will be restored to life--but the deity can't directly just send them back in the moment, due to limits on how deities are allowed to interfere with the world. I would strongly consider taking the player aside for a personal conversation, in order to play up the drama and coolness of their return to life after their death--transforming the
temporary feeling of defeat ("our friend died doing something noble") into a long-term feeling of
awesome ("our friend gave their life without knowing it would be worth it, and cosmic justice showed it was, just this one time"). I'd be especially prone to offer this if the character in question
wasn't generally a super moral person, and thus this would be a huge reward for them choosing to walk a more moral path.
Second: I haven't prepared anything specific or special...so I improvise. I tell the player that they feel a surge of power run through them...at the exact moment that the final hobgoblin stabs them directly through the heart. "You
know you died. You
felt yourself die. And yet...you're still here. Something happened. You don't know what yet...but you have a feeling it's <insert idea here that makes for interesting new hooks>." For example, it could be "you have a feeling something evil has tried to lay claim to you". Or it could be "your warlock Patron/deity/etc. isn't done with you yet--they've spent a lot of power to preserve your life, and they're going to want something in return." So, they still feel all of the triumph, but now a shadow has been cast across it somehow, or it's indebted them to someone--probably someone they don't want to owe anything to.
Third: An NPC arrives in short order who can provide a
revivify or the equivalent, perhaps a pre-prepped one, perhaps a supremely convenient coincidence. Said character is clearly grateful for the characters' actions, and thus quickly fixes the problem, allowing only the triumphal feelings, only the tiniest brief period of sad feelings. This would only be a last resort for me, if I genuinely couldn't think of anything that would actually add any new hooks and am aware that the players just want to move on with things.
Yes, I know that feeling is false. Yes, I know if done excessively it will cheapen the game. Yes, I have long time ago decided I would never ever do this myself. But your claim seem to be that this could indeed be achievable without fudging - and in that case I really want to know how! More reliably providing this feeling is one of the things I have accepted I have to sacrifice for my stance. If that sacrifice is indeed unnecessary, that would really mean something to me.
On reading your most recent thing, it definitely sounds like we were talking past each other. I don't see a meaningful difference
in this context between "total unmitigated victory, absolutely nothing bad actually did happen" and "total, but not unmitigated, victory...except then the mitigating factors were swiftly removed thereafter." A temporary dip in enthusiasm followed by an awesome recovery is, yes, a subtly different feeling--but the overall/ultimate/
functional result is, as far as I am concerned, identical.
So, if I may rephrase to avoid confusion (since I don't actually see this as different from what I said):
"There is nothing
beneficial you can achieve with fudging, that is
in any substantive way different, that you cannot achieve without fudging." Obviously with fudging you can achieve "piss off your players when they discover your deception", which is different but I think you would agree not worth pursuing. Hence "nothing beneficial". Subtantive difference would need to be something like...achieving victory
at all with fudging but being unable to do so without it.
Looping back to the contrived nature of the example:
is this feeling of utterly unmitigated triumph even real? You seem to be recognizing that it's still going to feel like unmitigated triumph if the at-risk character was simply knocked unconscious, rather than actually killed, so you recognize that a dip in the hype and victoriousness isn't in and of itself enough to make it different. Is "your character really did die for a brief time, and then came back to life in a blaze of glory, honored by the God of Heroes himself" really such a downer that this feeling is now completely different, when "you were beaten within an inch of instant death....but not actually over the line, so you survive"? Seems to me that that's just a more intense moment of tragedy and then turnaround--same feeling, just dialed up a notch or two.
