See that seems infinitely worse to me, because you're breaking the reality of the game in play, in front of the whole group. They know you're not playing straight with them. It seems patronizing and an excuse for a roll of the dice you didn't like. Better to not fudge or make up reasons why an attack didn't hurt and just let the dice fall where they may. IMO, of course.
I'm not just "making up reasons." I use the world-building and rules. Draw on established but unexplored things, or leverage DW partial success rules. I've actually only had to do this once in four years. In that fight, I'd prepared for such an event (rather, I
intended it to be too strong, since I wanted to know what was "too much" for the party), and I based the changes on the players' choices of how to fight. (Specifically, they got jumped by bound "shadows" left by the assassin cult. Fight went south, too many targets, too little area damage. They chose to focus fire the one big shadow rather than flee, which forced it to drain its lesser minions and run instead, holding its continued existence/mission higher than defeating one set of interlopers. Shadows like this were already known to have life-stealing powers, so this wasn't a stretch in the least.)
I'd much rather be honest with my players than deceive them, but yes, you're correct that I would rather never do any such in-battle modifications at all. As I said, I almost never actually do this. Having the occasional "disappointing" fight or the occasional fight where the players must retreat from something that shoud've been easy is not a bad thing. My players still, to this day, talk about that time they made my dramatic molten obsidian golem a completely trivial event--not because they were
disappointed, but because being able to outsmart the DM and easily defeat a powerful foe was, in and of itself, a worthy experience.
Too many DMs, despite speaking so highly of the importance of
stakes and how choices have
consequences etc. seem rather precious about making sure that every fight goes according to plan, such that they'd rather deceive their players than allow a fight to be an accidental curbstomp (whether for or against the players.)
Would that make it less terrible to you?
That's pretty much what I advocated, just a little less flashy, so yeah, that would be just fine. I tend to like pulpy action-adventure with most of the drama and excitement centered on "explore this fantastical culture/location" and "face difficult questions of morality and values that have no right answer." As a result, especially now that my group is
four years into this game (and if you cut out the breaks, we've had easily three years' worth of back to back weekly sessions), I tend to favor the flashy and dramatic because they've
earned flashy and dramatic.
In the interest of Mr. Coleville's suggestion that we share what drives us to make conversations easier: I find "zero to hero" is often, in practice, "mostly zero, little to no hero," and that's really boring to me. Zeroes failing and failing and failing until eventually they get a lucky break doesn't feel fun or heroic or adventuresome to me. It feels frustrating and far too much like a reminder of an awful lot of real-life things I would really, really rather not be reminded of in the middle of my leisure-time activities. That doesn't mean I don't want character growth, nor that I want characters who can instantly defeat everything immediately, because that would be boring too! I just want characters that DO succeed at some things (but NOT everything) to start with, and slowly grow the scope and scale of that success until, by journey's end, they may look back and wonder how they ever thought that hunting giant sewer rats was a challenge.
This makes it more clear. You meant mathematically equivalent, not "precisely identical." But this is untenable because the DM making the same change while designing an adventure is also mathematically equivalent to this. So it's not just the math that matters, unless you want to argue that a DM making any changed to a published monsters is cheating.
I mean...I explicitly referred to doing it
in play ("once battle is joined," which I said twice) so it feels more than a little unfair to skewer me on "but clearly this can happen BEFORE play!" Statistics that haven't entered play yet are not inviolate. I have no problem with that. I am
specifically and exclusively talking about modifying a creature's statistics or rolls
during combat.
No, that's absolutely valid to do. He's discussed this more in-depth in other videos, but it basically boils down to the fact that he (and a lot of other DMs) design a lot of monsters and encounters and playtest them in their main campaigns, which they don't want to completely destroy by a single encounter.
If you accidentally homebrew an overpowered monster for your players to fight or end up adding too many enemies to a single encounter (which could lead to a TPK), it is perfectly valid to adjust their stats mid-combat and fudge die rolls to make them a more appropriate challenge for the party's specific level and class composition.
Again, I reject this. I have never--
not one single time--needed to fudge a single roll or secretly alter a single creature's stats, in four years of gaming (with a fair number of "we need a week off" breaks now and then, but definitely not a full year's worth of them). It is not necessary to do this, and it is absolutely deceptive to do it. Coleville himself openly said he will
fake dice rolls so he can "prove" that the die "really" rolled what he said it did, even though it didn't. That is actively deceptive and, thus, cheating.
