D&D 5E To fudge or not to fudge: that is the question

[Rod Staffwand]

If a player maneuvers their character into a position to win without a roll, I'd just go ahead and let them win without a roll. "Congrats, mighty adventurer, you are the master of your fate." The maneuvering is the test, not the roll.

As a player, I once went through the massive, climactic battle of an epic campaign and didn't even get my dice out. It's one of my finest gaming achievements.

 

[RobotElder]

I used to fudge, back when I did a lot of DMing, mostly to keep my players alive and sometimes to ensure that my "precious" plot goes as I wanted it. Now that I am 99% a player, I am glad that my dm rolls in the open and fudges nothing. Let the dice do their magic!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Is it the position of some posters that "fail forward" (or D&D 5e's "progress combined with a setback") is fudging?

I cannot agree with such a position.

Er...yeah, if people mean to include "fail forward" in "fudging" then there's a huge disconnect of definition here.

Things I do not consider to be fudging:
- Fail Forward
- Changing an encounter before it happens/the combatants appear
- Deciding a roll isn't necessary
- Granting a situational bonus/penalty (for whatever reason)
- Having a combatant retreat, or use sub-optimal tactics
- Allowing a character other than the one who reduces an enemy to 0 HP to be the one that "kills" it

Things I do consider to be fudging:
- Secretly modifying any stats of a creature/object, without in-world justification, once that creature/object has been instantiated
- Rolling a die, and then deciding to ignore its meaning
- Presenting information about a person, place, or thing, and then later, secretly modifying that information

All of the former things are either (a) behaviors of actors "in the world," and thus a perfectly cromulent place for things not being universally consistent, or (b) information that the players could not yet know, and thus "changing" it has no impact on the players' ability to make choices. The other big things I'll note are the secret and without in-world justification aspects of the fudging thing. If you make these changes openly, and people don't mind? Well, more power to you, though my (largely unfounded) belief is that they won't be fine with it. But it's perfectly fine to modify something's stats, if there is a reason why those stats would be modified, even if you don't explicitly call it out. It doesn't even necessarily need to be a reason the players already know of, but it needs to be one they could have known about in advance of the change, if they'd tried to find out. In a real pinch, I MIGHT--and I stress *MIGHT*--allow a situation where the act of changing the stats is announced, becoming the way that the players learn about this effect, but I hesitate to give even that an endorsement.

The big, big things I care about are players being empowered to make informed choices, and players being able to rationally adapt their future choices (both in terms of character-build, and in terms of actions-in-encounters, combat or not) based on the results of their past choices. If their information can change beneath their feet, even in their favor, they can no longer make informed choices--you have denied them that ability. If the consequences of their actions are ultimately controlled by what you as a DM "like," rather than ultimately following from their choices (including, yes, a bit of risk-assessment due to the presence of randomness!), you have denied them the ability to rationally adapt to those consequences, regardless of whether those consequences are good or bad. They cannot "learn" how to play well, nor how to avoid unwise play, because the real determiner of victory (or defeat) is "What do I as DM want to see happen right now?" and not "What is the resolved consequence of this situation?" The DM just happens to want to see what the dice say, some of the time.

Edit:
Another way of putting my issue here is the way people present a lot of their example stuff. Like the Thief who gets a one-HP-less-than-the-guard's-max roll, or...say a Bard whose player comes up with an awesome, stirring speech and gets a nat 2 for the Persuasion check. In every single case, the presentation is something like, "I asked for a roll, to see what happened. Then, when I saw what happened, I ignored it." If the play is sufficiently "good" that you will ignore a failure and only consider success, don't ask for a roll. It's that simple. Only ask for a roll when you ACTUALLY think there's a possibility of success AND a possibility of failure, no matter how small either one is. If there's no meaningful chance of success, then just don't roll--say it fails, or (better yet) advise the player that that idea sounds unwise, preferably through some in-character information (e.g. "You know how to read people, even if you aren't really trying, and this guard doesn't look like the kind easily fazed by honeyed words, though you do notice that his gear seems a little worse for wear, as though he's had trouble maintaining it.")

And, as I noted above, if it would be more dramatic for Player X to land the killing blow on BBEG #1, rather than Player Y, don't narrate Player Y as killing them! Make the "killing blow" ACTUALLY a story event, outside the bounds of combat, so that it doesn't matter whether Player X or Player Y drops them to 0 HP. You won't be denying Player Y anything they would have retained under the "fudging" method, but you'll avoid denying their ability to make informed choices and to adapt for future challenges. You also avoid needing to juggle numbers in your head, or hide rolls from the players. As far as I can tell, nothing is lost, but something meaningful is gained.

 

[Azurewraith]

Another way of putting my issue here is the way people present a lot of their example stuff. Like the Thief who gets a one-HP-less-than-the-guard's-max roll, or...say a Bard whose player comes up with an awesome, stirring speech and gets a nat 2 for the Persuasion check. In every single case, the presentation is something like, "I asked for a roll, to see what happened. Then, when I saw what happened, I ignored it." If the play is sufficiently "good" that you will ignore a failure and only consider success, don't ask for a roll. It's that simple. Only ask for a roll when you ACTUALLY think there's a possibility of success AND a possibility of failure, no matter how small either one is. If there's no meaningful chance of success, then just don't roll--say it fails, or (better yet) advise the player that that idea sounds unwise, preferably through some in-character information (e.g. "You know how to read people, even if you aren't really trying, and this guard doesn't look like the kind easily fazed by honeyed words, though you do notice that his gear seems a little worse for wear, as though he's had trouble maintaining it.")

Quoated for truth

 

[Tallifer]

The rules are only there to facilitate our fun and our shared story. I improvise constantly. I reward creativity, dissuade cruelty and indulge colourful behaviour. I also nudge things in certain more interesting directions.

 

[Imaculata]

From a game standpoint, if you already know that the players ARE going to win, and shuffle numbers around so that it happens when you think it most most appropriate, then you have already robbed the players of their victory.

Without a possibility of defeat, there can be no victory with any meaning.

I didn't say there was no possibility of defeat. I also didn't say that I know the players are going to win.

What I did say, was that how tough the fight is, is entirely in my hands. I can reduce the difficulty during the fight, by having a monster make a decision that is not entirely in his favor (such as, choosing to not continue to attack a player that is down). I can also increase the difficulty, by having reinforcements show up, or by secretly increasing the maximum HP of the monster a bit.

When I say that I'm on the side of the players, that doesn't mean that I stretch the rules of the game to always make them survive. What I do mean by it, is that all my monsters and npc's are considered expendable. I will never fudge the dice in their favor. If the dice say they don't get away, they don't get away, no matter how badly I want the reoccurring villain to make a dramatic exit.
But I will occasionally fudge in favor of the players. If a monster has 1 hp left, then I might just declare it dead for dramatic effect. Because maybe one of the players just had an awesome role playing moment, and the death of the creature would be the natural outcome if this were a movie or book. That's pretty much my approach to storytelling in D&D: The players are the actors, and I am the director. I may choose to have a monster pick on someone else, instead of going in for the kill, because it might be more fun that way. Not always, but sometimes.

For example, in one of the sessions of my pirate campaign, I had a cannibal try to drag a player character into the jungle after the player's character went KO. I could have let the cannibal just kill him. But I decided that it was more fun to give the other players a chance to save him. If the cannibal had gotten away, they might have had to go find the village, and rescue him from becoming dinner. And a new quest could have emerged for that. Fortunately for them, they were able to track down the cannibal, and stop him before that happened.

In a boss fight, I had a giant spider ignore the player who was down, in favor of other players who were uninjured. I reasoned that the spider wasn't very clever, and thought he was dead, since he had stopped moving. Plus there were other enemies attacking him, which was enough excuse for it to be distracted. This was more fun for all players involved. I wanted all players to have fun fighting this thing. I also gave him a little bit more hit points during the fight, because I had underestimated how much damage they could do. I didn't want the boss fight to be over in just a few rounds.

 

[KaptainRon]

I am an very experienced player, but a novice DM, so I have been reading this thread with interest to pick up some points of view I may not have thought of myself.

I have fudged along the way. I have done the bump up the HP if the encounter is going too quickly. I figured that I might not have built the encounter properly, and adjusted. Now, I plan it a little better, and will have contingency waves of combatants depending on the flow of the encounter. I have reduced HP if it made the scene better, i.e. reward a character for doing something incredible, or to get rid of the last few minions after the Big Bad is down.

I really try to not fudge die rolls, but I sometimes see exceptions that make me want to do so. One of my first times running, in 4th edition, my dice could not stop criting. One character in particular had 5 crits against him in two early encounters. He was dropped early both times. Now comes the big encounter, and he gets two attacks against him, and they crit as well. I changed those to hits, simply because he would be down again early, and his night would have been spent doing almost nothing in any of the combats. I know he definitely wasn't having fun at that point. He did go down eventually, but he at least got to do something before that happened. He managed to pull off a maneuver that was impressive, and he was happy with that. Sort of like a really nice putt in golf can help you forget all the slices you did beforehand. I would like to think that may have been a proper time to fudge. I just wish my dice would roll like that when I am on the other side of the screen.

 

[Maxperson]

I only fudge rolls when extreme bad luck happens to the PCs. I'm okay with most random chance holding sway, but when those times of extreme luck hit and I'm rolling crit after crit, or the players are missing their 80% chance to hit 80% of the fight, I will fudge things a bit to even up the fight and give them a chance to survive. A TPK because the group had unavoidable bad luck is a no no in my book.

If the party gets in over their heads through bad decisions or bad tactics, no fudging will be had.

 

[Maxperson]

Er...yeah, if people mean to include "fail forward" in "fudging" then there's a huge disconnect of definition here.

Things I do not consider to be fudging:
- Fail Forward
- Changing an encounter before it happens/the combatants appear
- Deciding a roll isn't necessary
- Granting a situational bonus/penalty (for whatever reason)
- Having a combatant retreat, or use sub-optimal tactics
- Allowing a character other than the one who reduces an enemy to 0 HP to be the one that "kills" it

Things I do consider to be fudging:
- Secretly modifying any stats of a creature/object, without in-world justification, once that creature/object has been instantiated
- Rolling a die, and then deciding to ignore its meaning
- Presenting information about a person, place, or thing, and then later, secretly modifying that information

There are different kinds of failing forward. The kind where if you fail, you can find another route to success is not fudging. However, the kind where you either succeed or succeed with a cost is fudging. The die roll is success/failure, not success/success with cost. If you're going to change failure into something other than failure, you are fudging.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There are different kinds of failing forward. The kind where if you fail, you can find another route to success is not fudging. However, the kind where you either succeed or succeed with a cost is fudging. The die roll is success/failure, not success/success with cost. If you're going to change failure into something other than failure, you are fudging.

At that point, I think it sort of depends on what you intended to do with the roll. Did you always intend for it to be a "do things get complicated?" roll, or did you intend for it to be a "can you do this at all?" roll and then switch to merely asking whether things get complicated? Because that certainly sounds like it meets the "I wasn't sure it would work, so I asked the dice to tell me. Then, when the dice told me something, I ignored it" criterion.

Though, when we get to that kind of thinking, I do more understand where the pro-fudging crowd is coming from (and this is saying a LOT, coming from me). That is, when the difference between "fudging" and "not fudging" is what you meant to do with a roll before it happened, the two seem more like slightly different shades of the same color, rather than orange-vs-blue.