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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9725666" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As stated, that does not to me sound like there is unfairness in the combat. The GM made a mistake, doing something stronger than they intended. It sounds like the GM is adding unfairness--beneficially for the players, detrimentally for their opposition--by putting their thumb on the scale.So, either the secret change is there to conceal that the GM made a mistake, thus preserving their appearance of being mistake-free, or it is there to control the players' experience secretly, rather than allowing the players to experience the game as it actually happens. Which are the first and second points I made previously.As stated: there is nothing you (as GM) can achieve with fudging that you can't achieve without it, at least, nothing that is not inherently a deception (such as the aforementioned "players believe they deserved a win when they didn't" scenario). I prefer not fudging, because when you do that, it really does mean that every victory is earned, and it means that every failure, even really nasty ones, builds into more story, rather than being either extreme of "an uninteresting dead end" or "smoothed over so nothing actually bad happens".I've previously described my GMing style as "chiaroscuro". Light and darkness. Allow the darkness to entirely swallow the light, and you're left with a bleak, uninteresting nothing. Allow the light to swallow the darkness, and you're left blinded, without contrast or depth--again, an uninteresting nothing. By having both entirely earned overwhelming triumphs and entirely earned freak defeats, the players' experience retains an authenticity that is always lost when one brings fudging into the picture. Yes, this means sometimes they will have locally unpleasant feelings. Given I don't permit (as I have said before) deaths which are all three of random, permanent, and irrevocable, those local unpleasant feelings are never a dead end unless the player prefers them to be so--at which point, who am I to take that from them?Others have said that the techniques used to achieve this without fudging are "deus ex machina" and thus in some sense distasteful. My response is simply that fudging is always that, but it adds deception in addition to being such. If you are going to be doing a deus ex machina either way...seems to me the better choice is to do so without adding deception on top.</blockquote>

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