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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4710413" data-attributes="member: 80487">When we bring "fudging" into the game is when a character death indicates that the GM wanted that character dead. Otherwise, the GM could have "fudged" the death away.In such a game (if one can call it that), it is as Majoru Oakheart wrote: "Everything that happens in the game happens because the DM wants it to happen."I'm pretty fond of the view that "the GM is the rules," but there are limits. I'll leave it to each to impose those limits on himself, but I think that a certain amount of honesty from all parties is essential to fairness.If something is unacceptable, then I think the wisest course is to state that plainly and make a rule against it. There's no more need for furtive fudging behind the screen: the referee can openly apply the rules of the game by which everyone has agreed to be bound.That leaves the course of the game again in the hands of players no longer dependent on the GM's breaking of rules.It might be a game in which the outcome is foreordained, but there can be interest in choosing how to get there. It seems essential that the players be willing to accept some less than optimal results, a range of somehow "better" and "worse" possibilities selected at least in part by their own meaningful choices.At least it can be a genuine game of some sort!Back to the game of D & D as it was formerly known:To the extent that we DMs are concerned with verisimilitude, we're likely to consider that the world -- and other people -- existed before the PCs came along. If an environment is too dangerous for the PCs, then it is too dangerous for normal folks. So, some "straw dragon" scenarios may be too improbable for consideration.At the same time, we cannot neglect to provide the necessities for such as "a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."In a game in which one hit has a 50% chance of killing an average 1st-level PC (yea, even in one a bit less harsh), no particular freshly-minted adventurer's life is likely to be a great saga. But each one must have the opportunity, so that eventually such worthies are forged.That means treasures worth the getting, and toils and perils enough to have kept them from having been gotten already. As we have set them in the world to the end that doughty souls might seek them, so we have hardly made their legends so obscure as never to be learned! Indeed, we have so shaped the world that there is adventure aplenty to be found by any who would but quest for it.Risk is part of the game. If your notion of good role-playing is saying, "Dungeons and dragons are too dangerous, so I'll just stay in Town," then maybe the game is not for you. Initiative is the mark of the potential hero, the leader, not the follower. If for some reason you "don't know what to do" and waffle around waiting for someone to tell you instead of GOING OUT AND DOING SOMETHING, then maybe the game is not for you. It's a game of "swords & sorcery," for the love of Leiber! Adventure is an end in itself! When there's a shortage of trouble, swordsmen and sorcerers make some.And more often than not, trouble leads them to an early grave. Then we pick up dice, paper, and pencil ... roll up a new persona ... and come back swinging into the game that has no end, no final defeat. Fight on!</blockquote>

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