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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2223780" data-attributes="member: 5171">Or, optionally, figure out the way that works best for your group, and do it that way, and try to ignore anyone who declares that the way you've decided is best for your group, based on the type of game you and the players want, the psychological makeup of the players, and the story requirements of the game you and the players have agreed to run, is somehow invalid because you aren't following a rule in their game. Then, when they follow up with, "Do whatever you like, but I will never sit at your table," breathe a quiet sigh of relief and, if possible, avoid replying with "Deal!"For the record, I have players who are on the record as asking me never to fudge to save their characters, and players who are on the record as preferring not to die in random encounters or non-major-plot battles, and would feel frustrated, and not in a good way, if it happened. I try to accomodate both. I agree with:a) The notion that there is no such thing as complete impartiality. Fudging the dice is one way to change things, but so is picking the monster's attack strategy, deciding how many monsters will show up in the next area after this fight is done, and coming up with the story elements that the players will react to are all forms of fudging. Realistically, based on the content of many of these games, the GM has to be at least somewhat partial, or the world would have ended sometime after the third session. "Yeah, I didn't want to fudge things by having the evil lich lay in wait until you were 15th level, so I rolled randomly for when he would wake up and start raising monsters to make evil spawn, and it turned out that he woke up last month. And he summoned a wraith, who made a bunch of spawn wraiths, who then made a bunch more spawn wraiths, and, well, this world has just been destroyed, but if you like, I can show you the completely non-fudged roll I used to wake up the lich."b) The idea that players' characters would know what the bad guys were rolling, and what their ACs were, at least to a point. Unless there's a compelling monster-specific reason not to (the monster has defenses that are subtle and are designed to mess up players who think they're hitting), the guy who has dedicated his life to martial combat knows whether he just swung well or poorly, and how well he'll have to connect to get through the scaly armor of the thing he just attacked. That guy also knows how skillfully a monster is swinging at him. So I have no problem, in 95% of my fights, letting the players know what defense they're aiming at after the first few attacks.</blockquote>

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