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

[AaronOfBarbaria]

In other words... I improvise.

I improvise too, but I don't fudge. I also deviate from the baseline of encounter design, but not in a way that seems likely to be fitting the description of "strongly" (I'm not actually sure of that, however, since my deviation mostly revolves around that I don't bother checking the numbers at all)

Of course, I am saying this to show others that might mistakenly think otherwise that improvisation is not inherently going to involve fudging, not to argue against anything already stated.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

It's not just 5e. Every edition has been like this. Whenever you push the envelope like that, the closer to making an encounter that is at the edge of what the party can handle, the less bad luck is allowable before it will wipe the party.

I will fully accept that our playstyle contributes to the need for me to fudge rolls, and that if I were to design a multiple easy encounters the need would go away almost, but not quite entirely as you would need more extreme bad luck to throw things off. However, it would also destroy my game to make things that easy.

I also want to throw out there that when I fudge, it's not to allow the group to win, but only to equalize the fight again. They can still lose when I fudge rolls.

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.

It could be. Lots and lots of groups house rule and change things in the game and those changes have consequences, even as they at the same time increase the enjoyment of the group.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

To me a deadly encounter is one that is likely, but not guaranteed to kill the party even if the party expends all resources. An encounter that the party can handle with full resource expenditure is just dangerous. Easy multiple encounters aren't even dangerous until the last one of the day that requires the last of the party resources.

 

[iserith]

I frequently set Deadly challenges (or beyond) - by the numbers, anyway - before the party. I also do not fudge. I do not give a single flumph if a PC dies as I am already prepared for that eventuality with backup characters. In a well-designed challenge, smart play decreases the difficulty of the challenge anyway.

I see no good reason to bring the game system into play to resolve uncertainty if I'm not going to abide by the results. The DM decides when there is or isn't uncertainty and what the stakes are. There's no need to set the stakes in such a way that one of the results of the die roll will not be fun.

 

[Maxperson]

I frequently set Deadly challenges (or beyond) - by the numbers, anyway - before the party. I also do not fudge. I do not give a single flumph if a PC dies as I am already prepared for that eventuality with backup characters. In a well-designed challenge, smart play decreases the difficulty of the challenge anyway.

My players tend to invest heavily in their characters. While the will have other concepts they want to try, I don't want to force them to try one over nothing more than bad luck. They will still greatly feel the loss of the character.

I see no good reason to bring the game system into play to resolve uncertainty if I'm not going to abide by the results. The DM decides when there is or isn't uncertainty and what the stakes are. There's no need to set the stakes in such a way that one of the results of the die roll will not be fun.

I do. That reason is that the system is not perfect, so it can't handle all situations. A greater than normal amount of bad luck is something that can stretch or break the system, and blindly following the system just because I decided to use it is a disservice to the players in my opinion. I need to be able to recognize when the system is failing and step in to prop it up.

You also use a different playstyle than I do. My players aren't going to want to discuss stakes and buy ins in order to resolve the situation.

 

[iserith]

My players tend to invest heavily in their characters.

They will still greatly feel the loss of the character.

So do mine.

While the will have other concepts they want to try, I don't want to force them to try one over nothing more than bad luck.

Smart play means mitigating or removing the role of luck in the outcome. If a player loses a character due to bad luck, that is generally because of how he or she tried to overcome the challenge i.e. via approaches with uncertain outcomes. Rolling is bad in my view. Never leave your fate to the dice if you can avoid it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

Uhm...

This is a poor example. Here is a good one: The players fight against an enemy which they should be able to defeat with ease. But due to insanely bad luck, the players keep rolling 1's, and the DM keeps rolling 20's for his monsters. The players are starting to get annoyed, and clearly feel that this isn't fair.

As I recall--and please correct me if I'm wrong--you had entered the conversation in order to provide a practical example of what Imaculata had spoken of. Since you are now saying that that is not the case, is it any wonder that your situation is significantly different from the one I was trying to quantify?

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.

If we are making "fudging" definitionally meta-fictional, then I may always be opposed to it. Players can't know it's happening (because that's part of the premise for the "turning a crit into a normal hit" or "adding HP to a monster that hasn't triggered its trap card yet"), but it warps the results of their choices. Whether it is used for or against them, it corrupts the player's information--they are making decisions based on data that is not only false, but which they could not, even in principle, know was false. This will, inevitably, lead to making mistaken choices--either in the moment (wrong choices from wrong data), or in the long term (treating a pattern as though it is real, when it is ephemeral, dependent purely on DM whim for good or for ill).

 

[Maxperson]

Uhm...

You made the claim, so prove it. Prove that bad luck can only happen to and impact easy encounters, and not hard ones. I'll wait.

 

[Hussar]

You made the claim, so prove it. Prove that bad luck can only happen to and impact easy encounters, and not hard ones. I'll wait.

That is so not what he showed.

His point was that the odds of bad luck turning a fairly standard encounter into a tpk are so remote that fudging isn't necessary.

The fact that you are designing encounters far beyond design assumptions didn't come out until quite a bit later.

 

[Endur]

I guess there could be levels of fudging:

1) Fudge a die roll to increase fun;
2) Fudge a die roll to prevent a PC or monster from dieing;
3) Fudge a die roll to prevent a TPK or an entire encounter from being killed

Now having said that, I don't understand how you fudge a die roll to prevent a TPK (I guess you could fudge an AOE spell to do half damage or something, but most die rolls can't result in a TPK).

Personally I'm against all three levels ... I prefer to let the dice fall where they land... that being said, some of my intelligent monsters are more likely to take prisoners than kill their enemies. Heck, even my poisonous spiders will web up a poisoned victim and leave the victim for later (as Shelob did with Frodo and the spiders in Mirkwood did with the dwarves).