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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9543855" data-attributes="member: 6779196">You know, it’s funny cause while I am staunchly opposed to DM fudging and never do it myself, I mostly don’t really care if the players fudge when I’m DMing. Like, in theory players roll in the open, but I’m not actually bothering to look at the players’ dice to confirm that the numbers they’re reporting are shown on the die, because I don’t really care. If a player’s enjoyment of the game is so tied to their character’s success (or failure) that they’re willing to mis-report the results of their rolls to insure a specific desired outcome… I’m just going to let them have it.I do think your heuristic of “if you wouldn’t be ok with the players fudging their rolls, maybe you shouldn’t fudge yours” is a useful one. But I think the reality is a bit more complex than “you’re either ok with fudging or you aren’t.” And that comes down to different roles and responsibilities between players and DMs. I suspect that folks who are ok with DM fudging but would not be with player fudging probably feel that way for the same underlying reason that I am opposed to DM fudging but not to player fudging. Specifically, that the DM bears a greater responsibility for the group’s fun than any individual player does. Pro-fudgers generally argue that fudging is a tool they can use to enhance everyone’s enjoyment of the game, whereas I as an anti-fudger am skeptical of that argument because I don’t think the DM should have unilateral authority to decide what is best for everyone’s enjoyment of the game. Both of those positions come from a place of recognizing that the DM has a great deal of power over the other players’ enjoyment of the game, and their decisions can make or break the experience for everyone else.In contrast, while a problem player can ruin the game for everyone else, and a gracious player can enhance their fellow players’ experiences, we tend not to place the same responsibility for that experience onto players. A player who really makes your play experience better is something we may appreciate, but it’s not the typical expectation, and we tend to forgive a certain amount of disruptive behavior from players, until it crosses a certain line. And I think that’s also why player fudging feels different than DM fudging. To me, player fudging is less of a big deal than DM fudging, because the player doing it probably isn’t hurting anyone else by doing so, unless they do it so often and so blatantly as to strain other players’ sense of the game’s integrity. And likewise, I think to most pro-fudgers, player fudging would feel more problematic because they would perceive the fudging player as doing so only for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the group. We both recognize that the impact of a player fudging has a smaller scope than the impact of a DM fudging does. We just disagree about whether the impact of fudging is positive or negative.</blockquote>

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