D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

generally the fudging I've seen with DM's has possibly messed up the encounter, or just had a stupidly long string of ridiculous rolls, and I don't want to break thier game, kill the player etc.

Regardless: you can fix this problem without resorting to fudging. Given fudging is known to be quite controversial, and players generally respond very badly to learning that the GM has engaged in fudging, even for good reasons? I'm not really sure why it's worth doing when there are pretty easily implemented alternatives. If it really is a case of "very inexperienced GM goofed and wanted to fix the problem quickly and simply", then I would say they should use that example as a reason to never resort to such tactics again. More or less, a deleterious quick-fix patch that can be forgiven when someone faces a sudden and unexpected problem they haven't faced before, and thus haven't developed intuitions for addressing such a problem yet. The equivalent of hot-wiring around a fuse in order to get something working so you can save lives: dangerous, something you should never ever do if you have any choice, but which can be forgiven in extreme circumstances, as long as you then redouble your efforts to never ever do it again.

I think you are in general talking about handwaiving of trivial things which is not the same as fudging dice, which generally seems to happen in a big moment with big consequences where perhaps the DM doesn't want to allow random bad luck to decide how it went. I've seen more tables fall apart over the DM sticking to Die rolls no matter what than the DM fudging.

Whereas I have, in fact, actually seen fudging cause issues at the table, but I have never seen a GM sticking to rolls and also engaging with players result in any negative consequences for the group at all. Far from it! When such moments are used to build more story, rather than allowed to just be lame unpleasant (literally) dead ends, they bring the group closer together instead.

But this is not a thread where anyone's mind is going to be swayed in any way by anything anyone says so on we go into mud to beat that dead horse some more.

On the contrary, there are at least two people I feel I've persuaded quite a bit in this thread. So I feel it has been time comparatively well-spent.

 

[Enrahim]

If the PCs are going to win anyway then in that case I wouldn't change a thing: the crit happens and the character dies. As a group they still get that same feeling of triumph of having won a hard-fought victory, only that victory came at a cost.

The context of my post was that @EzekielRaiden claimed "I'm very much of the opinion that there is nothing you can achieve using fudging, that you cannot also achieve without using it." I assume you agree that the feeling of triumph at a cost is different from the feeling of a triumph without such a cost? That is you have achieved something similar, but not the same.

 

[clearstream]

generally the fudging I've seen with DM's has possibly messed up the encounter, or just had a stupidly long string of ridiculous rolls, and I don't want to break thier game, kill the player etc. I think you are in general talking about handwaiving of trivial things which is not the same as fudging dice, which generally seems to happen in a big moment with big consequences where perhaps the DM doesn't want to allow random bad luck to decide how it went. I've seen more tables fall apart over the DM sticking to Die rolls no matter what than the DM fudging.

The words I bolded put the question in mind of how accurate GM prep is expected to be? And what is right for GM to do if they see that it wasn't accurate? Can they fix it in live? If they fix it in live, how much ought they to disclose about that to players?

For what its worth, I saw a lot of GMs talking about doing it back in the OD&D days though. Most of them at least claimed they were doing the thing Nevin said above and fudging to backstop really bad die roll chains, but if they were willing to do it there, its hard to see as a given they wouldn't do it for other reasons if they told themselves they were benign.

The bolded words led me to speculate about how it would carry over to other games those GMs decided to play? Which led to thinking about more broadly about whether GM ought to feel any broad obligation to keep play healthy for players that would lead to intervening in live processes?

Say Addy the player were going to lose a finger unless I pressed the emergency stop button on the machine I had thought was safe for Addy to use? Suppose Addy were going to feel it unfair and suffer some dismay unless I compensated for down an overtuned foe in live play? Should I do so, or should Addy just toughen up?

Reflecting on sorts of questions above it seems right to observe that GM can make mistakes, in prep as much as anywhere else, and GM is allowed to care about players' enjoyment of the game. (One might even feel that GM ought to care about players' enjoyment.)

That makes me wonder if the question is not whether GM ought to intervene in live play, but only how? I think there may also be a difference between openess about deciding to intervene, and openess about enacting the intervention.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

 

[clearstream]

Oh, I'm in complete agreement on replacing fudging with either pre-prepared answers, or improvised diegetic (and thus discoverable) ones.

I'm very much of the opinion that there is nothing you can achieve using fudging, that you cannot also achieve without using it. This does entail a small amount of extra GM work, but that extra work is a price well worth the prize earned.

I agree, and see that work as also falling on the game designers. For example, games often now incorporate death moves that relieve GM from worrying about critical hits, or are structured to mitigate or even obviate overtuning in prep.

I do notice Daggerheart has this

When planning your session (or even midsession), you can adjust an existing adversary’s stat block to fit the needs of your battle.​

​

(Emphasis mine.) Is re-tuning adversaries midsession fudging?

 

[clearstream]

Evidence produced:

To me the testimony in comments is stronger evidence than the numbers themselves (a public forum with no validation that voters are unique individuals).

I'm not gonna punish my players because I naughty word up the balance of an encounter.​

​

I fudge very rarely and only to preserve fun. Usually for new players who would be actually very sad if their character died in the first session.​

​

The only circumstances I have ever fudged my dice as a DM were in fights where I committed big mistakes with my balancing and made it far more difficult and deadly than intended.​

​

I feel like the D&D designers might have retained the text I quoted upthread because they confess to significant difficulty creating reliable encounter building rules. A function of the diversity available in D&D rather than designer skill! They want DMs to feel authorized to fix it in live.

 

[Maggan]

Woot! A new tangent!

When I am a player, I support the DM and if the DM feels the need to fudge to make a better game for me and the rest of the players, so be it. I don't feel betrayed, it's been part of my roleplaying experience since I started. It has changed in nature, sure, today the DM rolls the dice in the open for greater suspense, which we didn't when we got started.

Of course, there is a spectrum here, as in everything. But we don't normally fall on the extremes of that spectrum, so it all works out in the end.

 

[Enrahim]

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.

I have twice had players actively putting themselves in front of a charging boss while low on HP. Situations where characters can survive a hit, but not a crit is not that rare in D&D pre 5ed. 5ed sort of fixes this, which I now realise sort of invalidates my example - though I have witnessed something similar happening in 5ed with disintegrate.

• 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.

Brute bosses or high leutenants tend to have quite brutal single attacks, and are often the one left standing toward the end of an epic battle? But yes, in 5ed it would need to be really huge, something I didn't account for.

• 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

Granted. Given my above observations.

• The crit has, in fact, happened, so this is already a 1/20 event even given all of the preceding

I think everyone arguing for use of fudge emphasises it should be very rare indeed. 1 in 20 attacks are at least 2 orders of magnitude more often than what I think anyone would find acceptable.

• 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?

And this is the critical one. I have felt the contrast between a big victory without a character death, and a big victory with a character death. They cannot be compared. The victories with death has felt like a bitter moment. Everyone are down. There are absolutely no trace of the cheering and the high high five-ing that come with the big victory. Any revelry would feel like insulting the dead. It might not be a complete defeat TPK style, but it has invariably been a moment of mourning and not rejoice when I have experienced it.

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.

The problem with all of these 3 suggestions is that all of them are going to be recognised as the deus ex machina they are. They might be fine band aids to get rid of the mourning - but they are not going to produce the experience of triumph a hard won and deserved victory brings along.

In the disintigrate example mentioned above was in a one shot. One of the players characters sacrificed their personal trinket to gatter the dust of the disintegrated person. The group proceeded to complete the mission. There was no rejoicing. The GM put in Elminster resurrecting the dead character in the epilogue. This lightened the mood a bit, but the after talk felt more like a retrospective on a failure than a victory celebration.

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.

I have felt and seen the energy of a real triumph. The posibility to get to experience that feeling is one of the things that attract some people to the hobby. I really think you need to twist the meaning of beneficial to something quite useless if you are going to exclude providing this experience.

The contrast to what you get with a death or a deus ex machina help is enormous. These cannot be considered the same. It doesn't help if the deus in question is an actual god.