D&D General Thread about fudging dice rolls

[AlViking]

What does "meaningful in the fiction" even mean? If I'm watching an old Rocky movie, Rocky gets punched a lot and while we don't know exactly what that means, if it's a fight early in the movie we know that it means that eventually he's going unconscious. The fact that as we watch the movie that we don't know if opponent boxer X rolled a 17 and did 8 points of damage isn't relevant, the punch lands and hurts.

The requirement of D&D to track specific numbers doesn't really change the fiction.

 

[Reynard]

I think damage exists in the fiction, but like in action movies it doesn't MATTER until the last hit point. We watch Brice Willis get kicked around and we appreciate the blood on his t-shirt. That exists in the fiction and it has an audience impact. But John McClane is still just as badass until he goes down. I think to say those 8 hit points of damage aren't represented in the fiction is wrong, or at least the result of a lack of imagination.

 

[pemerton]

I think damage exists in the fiction, but like in action movies it doesn't MATTER until the last hit point. We watch Brice Willis get kicked around and we appreciate the blood on his t-shirt. That exists in the fiction and it has an audience impact. But John McClane is still just as badass until he goes down. I think to say those 8 hit points of damage aren't represented in the fiction is wrong, or at least the result of a lack of imagination.

I don't think anyone's disputing (in this thread, anyway) that there is no literal representation of "17 vs. AC hits; -8 HP" that, like, floats above one's head like you'd see in a video game, so let's look at what "I rolled a 17, hit the enemy's AC of 12, and did 8 damage" must mean in the fiction.

If there is no video game-style popup or stat display or whatever, yet there is some meaning in the fiction when "a death is involved", that sounds to me like the hit and damage has been depicted/telegraphed/translated from the game meaning. So if "I rolled a 17, hit the enemy's AC of 12, and did 8 damage" has translated meaning some of the time (death), what precludes it from having meaning more of the time (injury)? IMO: nothing.

The fact that we have to talk about the last hit point - which is a property of the target of the attack, not the roll to hit and the roll to damage - shows that (at a minimum) the "meaning in the fiction" is not carried by the attack and damage roll. It is carried by the attack roll, the damage roll, and the adjustment to the target's hit point total.

The further fact that we can narrate the effect on the target pretty much however we want, provided that it is not death or unconsciousness (unless they lose the last hit point); and that the game keeps working fine even if we don't narrate the damage (because as far as resolution is concerned, only the last hit point matters); puts some pressure on the idea that even the adjustment to the hit point total has meaning in the fiction.

It opens up a possibility of narration, but I would say that's about it. Compared to, say, moving a miniature on a battle map, which obliges the participants to agree that the character has moved from here to there. (Although there may be some uncertainty about when they moved, if we're using a "freeze-frame" resolution system like modern D&D.)

 

[soviet]

I think damage exists in the fiction, but like in action movies it doesn't MATTER until the last hit point. We watch Brice Willis get kicked around and we appreciate the blood on his t-shirt. That exists in the fiction and it has an audience impact. But John McClane is still just as badass until he goes down. I think to say those 8 hit points of damage aren't represented in the fiction is wrong, or at least the result of a lack of imagination.

You didn't understand the point being made. No-one said that hit point loss isn't represented in the fiction as a retrospective or cumulative effect (although it often isn't). The point being made ws what you conceded in your second sentence, which is that the attack rolls and damage rolls that build up to the last hit point loss

"I rolled a 17, hit the enemy's AC of 12, and did 8 damage" but the enemy has more than 8 hit points remaining = just a flesh wound, a scratch, a near miss that caused him to expend energy, a near miss that drained his luck, a loss of positioning, a drain on his morale, a distraction, wearing away the tread on his footwear, the sting of embarrassment, or anything else you could imagine

"I rolled a 17, hit the enemy's AC of 12, and did 8 damage" but the enemy has less than 8 hit points remaining = he's dead

Until the results of the player's dice rolls are correlated with the hit point total on the GM's notes, the effect or nature or target or impact of the incoming attack is entirely unknown. Even a miss might be a hit and might be fatal!

 

[bsss]

What of game states that are driven by hp and not a strong binary dead-or-not-dead state? I'm thinking of situations such as the half-hp bloodied state in 4e, which could trigger a variety of PC or monster powers and conditions, or the sahuagin's blood frenzy, which gives it advantage on targets that have lost hit points, or the power word spells, which have special conditions for targets with fewer than certain hp totals.

I admit that those conditions do not have obligatory narrative representation, but I think those situations and ones like them at least suggest some consideration for narrative representation, to attempt to explain why the myriad conditions apply to some entities and not others. I don't think it's just that last hp, only the last hp is an obvious one.

Ultimately though, you're not wrong, I understand your points to be that not every hit point loss has a strict fictional representation, and I can't really argue with that. I mostly just want the door open for more than the last hp ("death") having more meaning than "nothing", even if it's voluntary, and I think there are some interesting situations that prompt it (at least in the bloodied case, which comes up very often in that game --- though maybe that only means there's two obligatory points there?).

 

[SableWyvern]

Do people still use random monster charts much any more? I may have situations where it's random as to whether the PCs will encounter a challenge, but those are all from a list I made for the area they're in.

If the PCs are in the far north they could face appropriate monsters native to the area, NPC that may or may not be hostile, avalanche if it's in the mountains, snowstorm and so on. But if I don't have wooly mammoths in my world, it's not going to be on the list.

Curated encounter tables are always preferable, but they obviously take more time and effort to my make. It seems to me that this has always been the case -- I don't think it's a question of now vs then.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

"The Wet Wench"

The Wet Wench is now a permanent fixture in any game I run in the future.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

The requirement of D&D to track specific numbers doesn't really change the fiction.

The main problem in D&D is that the numbers don't actually map onto the fiction in any meaningful way. You are free to narrate that 8 HP of damage in any way you want and it really doesn't matter. All that actually happens you subtract 8 HP from the target's current HP total.

So claims that not fudging die rolls somehow invalidates the fiction fall rather flat to me. The die rolls (other than a few very specific ones) don't ever generate any fiction. Not really. We just spackle over that fact and ignore it. Make a grunting noise and say, "the baddie takes a hit" and move on. Really, the old "numbers above the head" thing in old Final Fantasy games is probably the best representation of how D&D combat works generates any actual fiction.

To give another example, I was playing in a game some time ago and my character (as well as the others) had to climb up a wall. So, I picked up my die and started to make an Athletics check. The DM stopped me and asked, "How are you climbing this wall?"

"I have no idea," I replied. I honestly know next to nothing about free climbing a wall. "Left arm over right?"

Now, here's the thing. This turned into a rather lengthy discussion about the need to narrate actions. At the end of the day, I had two main points. 1. Nothing in the mechanics or the game requires any narration for this. Make the check, climb the wall, move on. And, 2. (and probably more importantly) not only did I, the player, know absolutely nothing about how to climb a wall, neither did the DM! He had no free climbing experience. He didn't know anything about how to climb either. So, any narration I made, was largely pointless because he had no meaningful way to judge my narration.

Which all rolls back to the idea of needing to narrate die results. Considering that none of us has likely ever been bitten by a dragon, what narration could you make that is any more or less plausible than any other narration? The mechanics don't care one bit if you narrate the results or not. We do the narration to make ourselves feel better and make the game more fun, but, let's not pretend that the narration actually impacts play.

IMO, when DM's forget that narration doesn't actually impact play and start insisting on narration that they have zero actual means of judging, the game really suffers because there becomes a widening gap between what's going on in the DM's mind and what the player's are envisioning.

 

[AlViking]

Curated encounter tables are always preferable, but they obviously take more time and effort to my make. It seems to me that this has always been the case -- I don't think it's a question of now vs then.

If I'm prepping for for a session I always try to have a good idea of what the PCs could encounter, even if it's just a quick list. So creating a curated encounter table isn't a big deal, it's just a little bit of work ahead of time. Besides if I'm grabbing monsters more or less at random does it matter when I pick them?

Whether there actually is an encounter at all is a random chance, usually based on passing time and potentially where the PCs chose to go.

 

[pemerton]

What of game states that are driven by hp and not a strong binary dead-or-not-dead state? I'm thinking of situations such as the half-hp bloodied state in 4e, which could trigger a variety of PC or monster powers and conditions

That seems no different from dead/dying/unconscious (depending on rules details) at zero hp - it just introduces a second fictional moment that is relative to the interplay of damage dealt and current hp tally.

the sahuagin's blood frenzy, which gives it advantage on targets that have lost hit points

To me, this seems rather wonky if taken literally.

Clearly, the implication is that a person/creature who has lost hit points is bleeding into the water, thus sending the sahuagin into a frenzy. But what if the hit point loss was due to vicious mockery - why would the person be bleeding? Or what if the person/creature has 140 hp, and has lost 3 of them? That is probably no worse a scratch, to that person, than a scratch that would not even be tracked as hp loss if suffered by a NPC who has an overall hp total of (say) 3 hp.

I think trying to draw inferences about the representational nature of hp, from this sort of corner case, is not going to work.

the power word spells, which have special conditions for targets with fewer than certain hp totals.

Another instance of this sort of thing is the 4e D&D Warlock spell Spiteful Glamour, which does 1d8 + Charisma modifier psychic damage, or 1d12 + Charisma modifier psychic damage to a target at maximum hit points.

I think it's very hard to get a coherent story going about these effects, if they're treated as in-fiction. I think the threshold makes more sense if it is thought of purely through a metagame lens.