D&D 5E Would you change a monster's hit points mid-fight?

[wedgeski]

I would do, have done, and intend to do so again!

For me, everything behind the screen is up for grabs when the game is *clearly* made better for all involved. Sometimes that judgement is difficult, and at other times, it's so easy as to barely even register. It'll also change based on the players at the table, and the game being played. For the people with whom I most often roleplay, a little DM fiat to ramp the drama is the *least* they expect me to do.

I understand, even if I don't agree, that some DM's feel a story isn't worth telling if it isn't told by the book. It's not for me though.

 

[pukunui]

Oddly enough, while I don't mind fudging rolls and changing monster HP on the fly, I don't think I would ever roll back/retcon an encounter if something unforeseen happened. When the dice have been cast, there is no way back, for good or bad.

I did it once when running a Star Wars game and the players weren't so keen. Any time I've ever even mentioned it as a possibility since, the players have all said no, let's just keep going forward.

 

[Pickles JG]

I have characteristically mixed views and I do fudge a fair bit.

Sometimes I give a monster a few more HP to let it survive long enough to do its cool schtick this is for fun rather than threat. The risk is I thwart players who are playing well so I try to only do this if I feel t would be fun, rather than to increase drama.
Often I don't roll out combat for the last couple of critters. This is to avoid the last few minutes of a trivial fight - we do not play long sessions & so the time is precious & it can be tedious. I do not do this for important villains or nemeses or when the players obviously want the satisfaction of doing in the villains & deserve some sort of closure.

I do hate being fudged at though. I hate it when the difficulty of an encounter starts getting harder eg reinforcements arrive when the players start doing well then the monsters start playing badly when the DM realises he's overcooked it then the PCs get on top again so the monsters suddenly start to have more HP than the previous wave did etc.

This is a perceptual thing though - if I don't see fudging of the numbers, or of the tactics or quantities of opponents then I don't even know its happened (duh!) & don't care.

If it's transparent then it feels fake. The PCs are robbed of the rewards of their successes or are not punished or their mistakes. It is why I have argued that sport is better drama than plays - it is not scripted, you do not know who is going to win before the end & the bad guys may get away with it (boo Ireland Rugby!)

So I prefer my dramatic scenes to be real not scripted but if fudging is done subtly I am fine with it.

 

[ExploderWizard]

This is the problem with so many of the responses in this thread. You make it seem like it is the DM vs PCs and in order to make it 'fair' you roll in the open, so regardless of the outcome you can just throw your arms up and say "well I didn't cheat!" D&D isn't a tabletop wargame. There is no such thing as cheating.

You are correct that D&D is not a contest of the players vs. the DM. It is a contest of the players vs. their environment. The DM is the referee and not in competition with the players. D&D features two key roles to play; player and dungeon master. Only players can 'win' the game. In the case of a TPK the DM does not 'win' because there was never a competition with the players to begin with, but the players in this case DO lose and need to roll up new PCs to play again.

In case you were not aware, D&D is directly descended from tabletop wargaming. It is essentially a tabletop wargame in which players each command a unit of one. A lot of cool role playing grew out of this but the game is still very much a type of tabletop wargame.

Is it cheating to play with Legos and not build what is on the outside of the box?

Is it cheating to play with Play-doh and not make what is on the outside of the package?

Of course not. Legos and Play-doh are toys not games. They are simple objects to use as you please.

D&D is a game of make believe. Treat it as such. Again, it isn't DM against PCs, it is a bunch of friends hanging out having fun playing make believe.

It is a game of make believe, but some people still play it as a GAME. A game has rules. The rules don't have to match what is in the published materials, they can be whatever the participants agree to use. Part of the DMs job is to mediate between the desires of the players and the application of the rules, and setting considerations. Without any rules and a social contract to use them, a DM isn't required. Players can just take turns telling the story of the adventure.

I can't help but notice the join dates of people in the die hard "omg that's cheating!" camp and wonder if this attitude is mostly prevalent in the 4E/WoW generation.

No. I started in 1980. It is prevalent in anyone who plays D&D primarily as a GAME. Stories are grown from events that transpire during play not something you focus on building DURING play. So fudging to move things in a desired direction because it better fits with the desired narrative is the antithesis of game play, unless of course telling a story is your object of play. A different animal completely than D&D was originally designed for.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No. I started in 1980. It is prevalent in anyone who plays D&D primarily as a GAME. Stories are grown from events that transpire during play not something you focus on building DURING play. So fudging to move things in a desired direction because it better fits with the desired narrative is the antithesis of game play, unless of course telling a story is your object of play. A different animal completely than D&D was originally designed for.

Or a simulation. Fudging may be even more antithetical to simulation play than to game play.

 

[DEFCON 1]

No, I've been playing since 1983 and it feels like cheating to me.
I think the fudge-for-story assumption is most common with people who started in the late '80s and especially the 1990s, when it seemed to be all about the GM's 'story' and ensuring it played out as intended.

I don't know if we could ever really pin down a time period per se for when most "story first" players started versus "game first" players started, and I don't even know whether it's worth the bother. There are dozens of potential reasons why players and DMs have evolved their style in playing RPGs.

I do not disagree with you at all that players whose first RPG was the Storyteller game system might lean in a different direction when playing D&D than someone who started playing D&D in the 70s and evolved directly out of the miniatures wargaming fad. And people who started with 3E probably lean a bit different than those who started with 4E. Those who really love Fiasco probably lean differently than those who love Rolemaster. And at the same time, you have people like myself who started playing with the Red Box as a teen and have played every D&D edition since then... but who also has been studying, performing, and directing improv for going on 20 years. So someone like myself, or people who have studied and perform theater, or people who also LARP, might possibly lean in the direction where the drama and the story of a scene in an RPG usually takes precedence over the mechanics and dice. And that has nothing to do with our ages or which games we started with.

So all of us have developed and evolved our styles, and thus no one manner of playing D&D is more "right" or "natural" than any other.

 

[The Human Target]

DMing as purely refereeing is an impossibility unless you were to only read verbatim from a pregenerated adventure made by someone else.

God that would be boring.

 

[ExploderWizard]

DMing as purely refereeing is an impossibility unless you were to only read verbatim from a pregenerated adventure made by someone else.

God that would be boring.

Referee is only one of the many hats the DM wears while running a game. The more fun parts (to me) are getting to role play everyone else in the world besides the PCs.

 

[LostSoul]

I am seriously have an issue understand what you think on this. If I said went to see a SF movie and it was so boring would ask me well if you find this one SF movie why would go see another movie.

My point of view is that, if the system is delivering results that bore you out of your mind, the easiest thing to do is to change the system. With your example about the two natural 20s in a row, what if the DM said, "Ugh, this guy has something that will block that damage, but that's lame. How about we put in a house rule that, if the PCs roll two natural 20s in a row, you deal HP damage like normal but you get some other special effect - like blinding or otherwise maiming the target. In this case, how about this: your arrow knocks loose the brooch the dark elf is wearing and the arrow sinks deep into its flesh."

When we play 3E we have an unwritten house rule about initiative - if the stop-motion turn order makes no sense, you can take your actions simultaneously. e.g. If you're jousting you don't have one guy move half-way down the list and wait there for the other guy to charge at him and get an attack (or have one guy charge all the way down and hit the guy while he stands there, unmoving); you both take your turns at the same time and meet in the middle. We did this because we didn't like the results that the system was generating.

98% of the time the game is fun it why I have been playing for +30 years.

That was the sort of response I was looking for - the game is almost always fun, so there's really no need to change it.

The reason why I suggest changing the system instead of fudging on the fly was covered in a previous post:

I believe that it has to do with player agency. As a player you make choices about what to do in the game based on how the mechanics work. Changing HP based on meta-game considerations means that it's difficult for the players to make concrete choices, because those meta-game facts are not as clear to the players as the mechanics written down in ink. If they are that clear, then that's something else (welcome to game design!).

Being bored would be one of those meta-game considerations. The DM would have to determine how many players are bored and how much and if it's worth fudging to fix that, which I don't think are easy decisions to make along with everything else a DM is dealing with; and you also create a perverse incentive: "When we're bored the DM ends fights quickly, so if I want a fight to end quickly I should look bored." As a player you don't know if you're going to have to use a limited resource (cast a spell, drink a potion, use a charge of a magic item) or if you should hang on to it because Alice and Bob are making dice towers and doodling.

 

[The Human Target]

Referee is only one of the many hats the DM wears while running a game. The more fun parts (to me) are getting to role play everyone else in the world besides the PCs.

Absolutely!

I guess my point is, I don't see much difference between swaying the game via a DM's roleplaying or exposition (which all DMs do whether they mean to or not) and swaying the game with some creative accounting.