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

[Hussar]

When you're as good as I am at gauging what the party can handle, there is little room for bad luck and the extreme bad luck that you won't notice in your much weaker encounters will be devastating to my players' PCs.

That's probably why I see it and you're blind to it. My encounters are designed differently. They aren't too hard, but they have little room for the more extreme variances that will be encountered during a typical campaign.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...dge-that-is-the-question/page16#ixzz3vTqUWazV

See, the major difference i'm seeing here is that I lack your... confidence in gauging what the party can handle. Then again, you're presuming "much weaker" encounters, which is a fairly big presumption on your part. To me, if your encounters are so poorly designed that a couple of rounds of bad rolls is the difference between success and TPK, necessitating you stepping in and "correcting" the math, then that's on you. That's not the fault in the system, that's just poor encounter design. Or, rather, what I would consider to be poor encounter design.

A well designed encounter should never need the DM to step in and "correct" the math. Not in a game as well designed as 5e. Now, if we were talking something like 3e? Sure, I can see that. The crit rules in 3e were extremely swingy, where you had relatively small creatures being able to do massive damage on a fairly regular basis. An orc dropping 20+ points of damage wasn't terribly rare. All it took was a crit and fairly standard damage. It meant that 3e was an extremely lethal game if you played RAW. Which was fine if you like that sort of thing. I wound up having all sorts of mitigation house rules to smooth over that sort of thing.

Funnily enough, i have zero problem with putting fudging in the hands of the players. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. Things like Action Points, or Bennies, or Inspiration, or even 4e's reactive Reroll powers, or 5e's reactions like Shield spells or the fighter defensive shield thingie that lets you grant disadvantage to attacks against an ally don't bother me at all. I actually quite like them. I'd much rather just put that sort of thing in the player's hands and make it a manageable resource. You want to succeed on this check? Go right ahead, just know that you won't be able to affect the next die roll. Love that sort of thing.

I just refuse to do it on my side of the DM's screen.

 

[Maxperson]

See, the major difference i'm seeing here is that I lack your... confidence in gauging what the party can handle. Then again, you're presuming "much weaker" encounters, which is a fairly big presumption on your part. To me, if your encounters are so poorly designed that a couple of rounds of bad rolls is the difference between success and TPK, necessitating you stepping in and "correcting" the math, then that's on you. That's not the fault in the system, that's just poor encounter design. Or, rather, what I would consider to be poor encounter design.

I'm presuming much weaker encounters because they absolutely must be much weaker encounters or you'd slaughter your PCs each session. You run more encounters nightly than I do. When I run a challenging encounter like this, there's only one for the night or the PCs would die. I also run many, many of them, so your assumptions at a "couple of rounds" of bad rolls being the difference is a bad one. If that were the case, I'd be seeing 20-30 per campaign, not 2-4.

A well designed encounter should never need the DM to step in and "correct" the math. Not in a game as well designed as 5e. Now, if we were talking something like 3e? Sure, I can see that. The crit rules in 3e were extremely swingy, where you had relatively small creatures being able to do massive damage on a fairly regular basis. An orc dropping 20+ points of damage wasn't terribly rare. All it took was a crit and fairly standard damage. It meant that 3e was an extremely lethal game if you played RAW. Which was fine if you like that sort of thing. I wound up having all sorts of mitigation house rules to smooth over that sort of thing.

So to you a well designed encounter can never be a hard single encounter where the PCs will run through most or all of their resources. That makes all of your encounters easy. They can only be hard when you have multiple encounters added together. My players and myself don't like when all encounters are easy like that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If he's getting 2-4 TPKs per campaign, he's probably making encounters too tough, in order to provide a challenge, then fudging to prevent defeat - which means there wasn't really any challenge in the first place. Better to have easier fights that are a genuine challenge than fake difficulty IMO.

I was unable to assume the bolded bit, because there were two constraints placed on the situation in question: (a) it must be an enemy/group that the PCs should be able to defeat easily, but (b) purely because of luck, and explicitly not because the DM or PCs did anything "wrong," they TPK instead. If we remove the "DM didn't do anything 'wrong' " restriction, then of course all of my calculations would go out the window.

This is something that I was thinking about the other day regarding fudging at another level. When you create an encounter you create it towards the players/characters ability. But by doing so, a DM interrupts the flow of the world by creating little quest pockets that the rest of the world is somehow avoiding. I mean, is it not fudging to put higher CR creatures in a module made for low level characters? For me, the fantasy has to have some realism. Can you fudge fantasy realism?

I wouldn't call that fudging - it's easy to expand a term until it becomes meaningless.
That said, I find 5e really doesn't need tailored encounter design after the first few levels, it plays a lot like 1e AD&D that way.

I'm with S'mon on this one, Miladoon--we can't allow "fudging" to expand too far. I have no problem with changing the details of a fight before it happens--that's no different from the DM choosing geography of places that haven't been defined yet. "Fudging," for me, is when you change the fundamental (mechanical) nature of something after it would already be "known"/"witnessed" by the party, without an attendant in-fiction explanation for the change. So, for example, let's say that picking a particular partially-magical lock is a DC 20 check. But the party Arcane Trickster rolls an Arcana check (with Expertise) and does really well, enough that they can identify the magical nature of the lock easily (e.g. they roll a total of 25+, a REALLY good result)--and, as a result, the magical protections of the lock pose no impediment, reducing the lock DC by some amount (maybe down to 15 or even 10). That's a player-driven example of an "in-fiction" explanation for why the mechanical representation of an action or entity changes.

Edit:
So, here's an example of a way someone could do three of the most commonly cited "fudging" things, without them being "fudging" in my book.

Invoke a deity of Luck or Fate (or one of each, "competing" with each other). Both of them think Heroes "belong to them." Both of them want Heroes that are challenged, that are "worthy." And both of them get annoyed when their "game-pieces" fail to perform as expected--above OR below.

So when the monsters crit weirdly often? Goddess of Luck says, "Nah bro, that's no crit. Can't let you rely TOO much on my power!" This is a known, understood phenomenon--sometimes, for her own fickle reasons, Lady Luck smiles upon someone (and not just PCs--though more commonly PCs) and they escape unscathed from a killing blow. When a monster falls in a single round because of a beautiful confluence of Luck and Skill, the God of Fate points his finger and says, "I give you another chance--DO NOT disappoint me," and it is filled with preternatural endurance, able to take even more punishment.

"Chances" that would've been cooler if they'd just happened to have succeeded. Narrative-based restructuring of the randomness of combat to make things "more interesting." And it's something the PCs know, in-world, as a thing that happens.

It would still annoy me. I'd still be miffed that the "game" part of RPG is being neutered into "visual novel" (in my opinion). But it wouldn't be fudging anymore, not by my standards.

 

[Maxperson]

I was unable to assume the bolded bit, because there were two constraints placed on the situation in question: (a) it must be an enemy/group that the PCs should be able to defeat easily, but (b) purely because of luck, and explicitly not because the DM or PCs did anything "wrong," they TPK instead. If we remove the "DM didn't do anything 'wrong' " restriction, then of course all of my calculations would go out the window.

The bolded is incorrect. That isn't a requirement.

I'm with S'mon on this one, Miladoon--we can't allow "fudging" to expand too far. I have no problem with changing the details of a fight before it happens--that's no different from the DM choosing geography of places that haven't been defined yet. "Fudging," for me, is when you change the fundamental (mechanical) nature of something after it would already be "known"/"witnessed" by the party, without an attendant in-fiction explanation for the change. So, for example, let's say that picking a particular partially-magical lock is a DC 20 check. But the party Arcane Trickster rolls an Arcana check (with Expertise) and does really well, enough that they can identify the magical nature of the lock easily (e.g. they roll a total of 25+, a REALLY good result)--and, as a result, the magical protections of the lock pose no impediment, reducing the lock DC by some amount (maybe down to 15 or even 10). That's a player-driven example of an "in-fiction" explanation for why the mechanical representation of an action or entity changes.

Fudging it outside of the game fiction. There is nothing in game that represents it in any way. Say the DM rolls a critical and it would kill the PC and he decides to reduce it to a normal hit. In the game world there was never going to be a crit. There was only going to be a hit, so no in game fiction has to represent the change that never happened.

 

[Hussar]

I'm presuming much weaker encounters because they absolutely must be much weaker encounters or you'd slaughter your PCs each session. You run more encounters nightly than I do. When I run a challenging encounter like this, there's only one for the night or the PCs would die. I also run many, many of them, so your assumptions at a "couple of rounds" of bad rolls being the difference is a bad one. If that were the case, I'd be seeing 20-30 per campaign, not 2-4.

See, and this is where we hit the wall of math. You are running less encounters total than I am. Fair enough. That means that you have less rounds as well - simply because unless every one of your encounters is twice or three times as long as my presumed 4 rounds, you have to run less rounds of encounters.

Now you are also postulating that it requires more than at least two rounds of bad rolls to make the difference. But, in order to have three or more rounds of bad rolls for the players and good rolls for the DM, you are reducing the chances of that event significantly for every round of combat. First off, you need to have combats that last that long in order to have that many rounds of bad rolls - something that is very problematic in 5e considering that with bounded accuracy, the chances of having multiple rounds of several players including the DM having runs of luck, good or bad, is less and less likely.

IOW, this is why I seriously question your perception. The odds say that you should not be having this experience. This should not be happening this often. You simply don't have a large enough sample size for this to occur 2-4 times repeatedly across multiple campaigns. Sure, I'll buy that 1 in 10000 event occurring. That happens. What I don't buy is that 1 in 10000 event occurring multiple times in such a small sample size. There is obviously something else going on here.

So to you a well designed encounter can never be a hard single encounter where the PCs will run through most or all of their resources. That makes all of your encounters easy. They can only be hard when you have multiple encounters added together. My players and myself don't like when all encounters are easy like that.

You are free to believe whatever you like. That's fair enough. But, we're not talking about how hard or easy an encounter is. We're talking about the odds of the events you describe occuring. You are talking about having events that are 1 in about 10000 occurring multiple times in a sample size of hundreds. Thus, the comments of confirmation bias.

 

[Maxperson]

See, and this is where we hit the wall of math. You are running less encounters total than I am. Fair enough. That means that you have less rounds as well - simply because unless every one of your encounters is twice or three times as long as my presumed 4 rounds, you have to run less rounds of encounters.

Now you are also postulating that it requires more than at least two rounds of bad rolls to make the difference. But, in order to have three or more rounds of bad rolls for the players and good rolls for the DM, you are reducing the chances of that event significantly for every round of combat. First off, you need to have combats that last that long in order to have that many rounds of bad rolls - something that is very problematic in 5e considering that with bounded accuracy, the chances of having multiple rounds of several players including the DM having runs of luck, good or bad, is less and less likely.

Rounds are not the deciding factor. Number of attacks are. If you have a 10 round combat with 2 creatures getting 20 attacks, and I run a 3 round encounter with an 10 headed hydra, I will have 50% more attacks than you do.

The odds say that you should not be having this experience. This should not be happening this often. You simply don't have a large enough sample size for this to occur 2-4 times repeatedly across multiple campaigns. Sure, I'll buy that 1 in 10000 event occurring. That happens. What I don't buy is that 1 in 10000 event occurring multiple times in such a small sample size. There is obviously something else going on here.

Unless you believe the extremely shoddy math put forth, the odds are nowhere near 1 in 10000.

You are free to believe whatever you like. That's fair enough. But, we're not talking about how hard or easy an encounter is. We're talking about the odds of the events you describe occuring. You are talking about having events that are 1 in about 10000 occurring multiple times in a sample size of hundreds. Thus, the comments of confirmation bias.

We are in fact talking about how easy or hard an encounter is. Why? Because the harder the encounter, the less extreme the bad luck it takes to throw off the balance. It may be 1 in 10000 for your easy encounters, but the odds are much, much lower for my challenging encounters because the numbers don't have to be as severe for my group.

You want to throw out combat difficulty and believe the bad math so that you can be right. Your confirmation bias is showing again.

 

[Goemoe]

I see my job as a DM mainly as a moderator of a game we play to have fun. If everything runs well, great. If luck or unusual stupidity sets in, I 'moderate' to keep the game fun or to ease players again. Nobody wins, if everybody leaves the table in an angry mood, but you did do everything as written in the rules.

 

[Hussar]

Rounds are not the deciding factor. Number of attacks are. If you have a 10 round combat with 2 creatures getting 20 attacks, and I run a 3 round encounter with an 10 headed hydra, I will have 50% more attacks than you do.



Unless you believe the extremely shoddy math put forth, the odds are nowhere near 1 in 10000.



We are in fact talking about how easy or hard an encounter is. Why? Because the harder the encounter, the less extreme the bad luck it takes to throw off the balance. It may be 1 in 10000 for your easy encounters, but the odds are much, much lower for my challenging encounters because the numbers don't have to be as severe for my group.

You want to throw out combat difficulty and believe the bad math so that you can be right. Your confirmation bias is showing again.

Actually, I think you may have a very good point here. You are designing encounters which are very much outside the baseline for encounter design in 5e. 5e isn't designed to have one big assed encounter. The system isn't meant for that.

So, that might go a long way towards explaining why you need to prop up the math so often. I wonder if there is a correlation here between those that answered "yes" to fudging and those who deviate strongly from the baseline of encounter design. My gut says that that is probable.

 

[S'mon]

I will often design a single encounter to push their limits, rather than have 3+ encounters a night. When you have 3+ encounters a night, the extreme bad luck that I am talking about (not the absurdity that Ezekial put forth) won't mean much other than using up some extra resources. When you're as good as I am at gauging what the party can handle, there is little room for bad luck and the extreme bad luck that you won't notice in your much weaker encounters will be devastating to my players' PCs.

That's probably why I see it and you're blind to it. My encounters are designed differently. They aren't too hard, but they have little room for the more extreme variances that will be encountered during a typical campaign.

Thought so - if you routinely have encounters that are 'Deadly' per the 5e XP budget you are
certainly going to see frequent TPKs if you don't fudge. 2-4 per campaign is unsurprising.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I wonder if there is a correlation here between those that answered "yes" to fudging and those who deviate strongly from the baseline of encounter design. My gut says that that is probable.

It is for me. I'm a 'little to no prep' DM and thus just guesstimate things. I guesstimate DCs for all checks, I guesstimate numbers of enemies, I guesstimate the abilities to give to enemies outside the statblock to make them weaker or more powerful, I guesstimate how the PCs will probably do in fights, I guesstimate the number of successes or failures the party needs before something unexpectedly awesome/horrible occurs, etc. etc.

In other words... I improvise.