In other words, the difference between you and someone who modifies hit points on the fly is really just a matter of the scale at which modification happens. You look at the encounter that has been started as being a fixed entity and not to be messed with but are willing to change a dungeon or adventure site on the fly once the PCs have engaged with it. Those of us willing to adjust the encounter on the fly do something very similar, just the encounter level rather than adventure site level.
I don't see it as a 'scale' difference at all, and I think another poster covered my ideas much better than I did:
Adding more new monsters to a scene doesn't re-write history, it changes the future.
As I see it, the DM is responsible for determining the nature of future events up until the point they actually "happen," at which point they "exist." Things that exist shouldn't change SIMPLY because anyone--even the DM--just WANTS them to change. There should be a reason for it within the fiction. Believe it or not, this means I'm not unequivocally okay with extra monsters showing up either! There needs to be plausible reason for it. For example, just about ANY outdoor fight could draw a nearby hungry animal--sufficient hunger is usually enough to make even a skittish predator take a risk, and if there are already bodies on the field, one might try to scavenge something and abscond. In a dungeon environment, you have some amount of natural creatures, some crazy weirdo dungeon denizen beings (like gelatinous cubes), "typical" guardian type things like golems or skeletons/zombies/etc., and very likely not-fully-known numbers of OTHER humanoid occupants who got there first (e.g. orcs, goblins, kobolds, etc.) If the party has any kind of reputation at all--which I expect them to have once they've gotten at least one adventure under their belt--urban environments are always potentially dangerous because they're full of people, and people are bloody dangerous.
Thus, unless the party has been EXTREMELY careful and HIGHLY observant, I think it's very unlikely that they could nail down enough of an unexplored dungeon, open wilderness, or nighttime alleyway to be CERTAIN that additional monsters couldn't come out. And all those same arguments can be turned to happier ends too. Just as an unknown alley might hold a cutpurse or some thugs, it might hold a watchman on the beat. Some forest-dwellers are good, or might answer to a local druid who knows the score. Dungeon-dwelling things can be indiscriminate, or perhaps hold a special grudge for the entities that kicked them out in the first place (if they have some smarts, anyway). Traps in dungeons are similar: unless the players have an accurate floorplan of the dungeon, there's pretty much no way for them to know the number or location of traps, so they don't "exist" until encountered. And some of those traps might have stopped working in the years(/decades/centuries/millennia) that the dungeon was abandoned, been set off by intruders or happenstance, or fail to recognize the party as a threat (frex, if it's an old Arkhosian armory and there's a dragonborn in the party, a magical trap might "recognize" the "base's commander" and thus remain inert until a true "threat" appears).
Perhaps an analogy will help. Let's say you're playing a chess-like game, but all of your opponent's pieces LOOK the same to you (let's say they're all perfect cylinders, like a bunch of lipstick/chapstick tubes). Your pieces, however, are plainly visible to the opponent, and their exact capabilities and movement patterns etc. are known to both of you. Let's call your opponent's side red, and your side green. In order to play as the red player, your opponent must agree to describe his pieces to you, and what it is they do each time they do something. The red player is not required to exactly describe every (or even any) piece; part of the entertainment of the game, for some players anyway, is figuring out what red's pieces are and how they work. This is of course simplified, and possibly extremely so, since chess-like games don't allow for complex states like "I tried to attack and failed, thus *I* was captured rather than *making* a capture!" but the idea is roughly the same. Red has pieces. They do something. Green doesn't know what Red's pieces do (and while it's not a RULE that Green lack this knowledge, it is also not a rule that they must have it, either). Red's responsibility lies in communicating the actions of the red pieces as they move.
But the analogy holds, I feel. If Red modifies the pieces *once they are on the board,* then the player is inherently operating on knowledge that is no longer valid, and they have no possible way of knowing this. If we then add the further stipulation that Red will *deny* modification when asked, and *conceal* it from being discovered, how else can it be parsed other than Red intentionally deceiving the player? Red's responsibility (by the rules!) is to describe a piece's state, and the actions it takes. If Red then changes those actions in the process of performing them, or changes those states after having described them, and *hides* the existence of these changes, that communication responsibility cannot be met. However, if additional pieces appear on the board, that communication responsibility can be upheld; and if the changes to the monster are communicated when they happen in a way that reflects the change, then it can also be upheld.
Again: I'm NOT saying that fudging itself is inherently dishonest, I'm saying that
concealing fudging is dishonest. I, as a player, VERY VERY PERSONALLY find fudging extremely distasteful, as I consider it...for lack of a better term, "disrespectful of the relationship between DM, world, and player," but "distasteful" is not at all the same as "dishonest." A group which knows that fudging can and will occur, and accepts that, is a group I can support
even if I wouldn't want to be in it. A group which does not know about it, but which discovers fudging later, desperately needs an open and diplomatic conversation about it, because it is very likely that at least one person will be upset by it. Not guaranteed, to be sure, but very likely. A group which does not know about it, but discovers later that the DM does it and actively hides it and denies doing it when asked, is a group that's probably (NOT guaranteed, but probably) gonna lose somebody or even fall apart completely.
Please tell me how shaving off a few HP to speed up the end of combat is cheating how is the DM gaining an advantage? Also please tell me if I have a monster go down at 3 HP instead of waiting until 0 how I have undone everything the players have done before?
If I have used the term "cheating" before, it is only in reference to those times where the DM ratchets up the challenge because "the party's getting it too easy." I do, however, still think both things--letting the party off easy, and making their experience more difficult--are still distasteful. Victory becomes more a function of "how much did the DM (dis)favor us/our plan this time?" and less a function of "did our plan, and the situation we executed it in, work out?" I want to own my victories and my defeats as much as I possibly can, aka I want to make rational, informed decisions based on the knowledge my character should possess (combat skills, the history of the world, the facts or opinions the character-group gathers over time, etc.) and the values and personality of my character.
I want those decisions (mine and the other players') to be the deciding factor shaping my/our contribution to facing the challenges of the game, and those contributions together with an element of the unexpected (read: dice) should jointly *and exhaustively* determine the result. If the DM then re-configures the world, whether to support these decisions or to thwart them, my (and my group's) choices were not actually the deciding factor(s). The DM's rewrite is the deciding factor. That disappoints me. It tells me that the DM is the important person at the table, and that I am along for the ride. I can do whatever I like--but the only things that happen are the ones the DM wants to happen. Hence my previous comment: "The DM giveth, and the DM taketh away."
I have a question those of you adamantly opposed to ever fudging where do you fall on the player type according to Robin's Rules of Good game mastering? As a player are you more of power gamer or tactitrcan as opposed to a method actor or story teller?
I find it difficult to place myself on many of the "player psychology" breakdowns, mostly because I like only select elements of the categories. I can generally say I'm not much of a Butt-Kicker or Casual Gamer; I'm definitely NOT there just to kill things, nor to just spend time with friends, though both can be entertaining. As for the others:
[sblock]- Powergamer. Most of the description of this is NOTHING like me (I consult charop forums for advice, but don't give a crap about being THE VERY ULTIMATE BEST). I did years and years of freeform text-based RP before I started playing D&D, so if I wanted nothing BUT pure story, I could have it easily. So I do want to "put the 'game' back in 'role playing game' " but not to the extreme that Mr. Laws describes for this type.
- Strategist. I do not find characterization a distraction, whatsoever--it's extremely important to me. I actually prefer that people make character-fitting but tactically-unsound choices; however, when characterization is not a concern, I want myself and others to be empowered to make tactically-sound choices as often as possible. I do care that things are internally consistent, specifically to the fiction, and that the rules work reliably in the majority of circumstances, so that I can make informed decisions.
- Specialist. I do favor a character type (Paladin who is Team Dad), though I've begun to vary that with time. I do very much appreciate having my character choices woven into the story of the world.
- Method Actor. This is sort of the reverse of the Strategist problem: I don't think it's that important to make radically new characters, but I do love the ability to express myself through my characters. I do not, at all, consider the rules a necessary evil; I consider them an important good which should only be set aside for principled reasons.
- Storyteller. Exploring the story of each character is very important to me. Deepening backstory, finding the narrative links to other things, responding to the trials and tribulations of the adventuring life. Again I like rules, much more than the given description though, especially consistent ones that require minimal intervention to work properly.[/sblock]
So, after going through all that, I'd say I'm probably a Storyteller-Strategist with a strong Specialist bent (I just love Paladins so damn much.) Which...kind of makes a lot of your argument difficult to process, because I literally occupy BOTH sides of your proposed dichotomy.
So as a DM don't you think part of your job is to identify what your players like best and try and accommodate them to some extent. There has been a lot of talk about dishonesty here and one thing I consider very dishonest is a DM who is not upfront with players and does not comes out and says I think your style of role play is badfun and I have no intention of ever accommodating you as a player. Because that is what I am reading here with words like cheating and cheaters being thrown around to describe rule O.
I don't think that there is a badfun way to play the game I do acknowledge that there are different play styles.
Well, again as said before, several people have explicitly stated that these changes should be hidden, denied if a player asks, used both to favor and oppose the players, and that *all* DMs *should* use them as a weapon of first resort. You, obviously, are not advocating any of these things. Although I could be mistaken, the majority of the cries of dishonesty have been focused specifically on the "do it, cover it up, and deny it" side.
Also, uh...I have to ask: Is fudging
really so critical to the "storytelling"/"method acting" playstyle that it is
completely impossible to use that style without fudging? Because that's...really surprising to me, that a HUGE swathe of playstyles hinge, fundamentally, on one single DM behavior (that is, the DM ignoring numbers/rules/precedent/whatever and unilaterally declaring things.)
One of the biggest issues when it comes to players and DMs having issues that ruins the fun for them is based on miscommunication. I consider it a huge miscommunication when a DM does not acknowledge that maybe because of their own prejudice on styles of play that they should not be the DM for certain players. Just talking to players is often enough to get an idea on what they want out of a game. If you can bring yourself to bend to allow a certain playstyle in your game then you need to be honest and say that.
For myself I hate DMing for casual players I will play with them but I am upfront that as a DM they annoy me and are not a good fit for my table. I will also be upfront that if you are mainly a butt kicker looking for a game that is mainly butt kicking then you most likely won't have fun in my game. This is not a judgement that they play wrong just that they play differently.
And as I have said, both earlier in this post and in prior posts: If your group is on board with you, and the expectations are known or understood, more power to you. If I were to join your game and
not be told these expectations, only to discover later that the only reason my Paladin defeated the demon lord Zaagrah is because you turned my critical fumble into a critical hit because it was "better story" or the like, I *would* feel deceived, and I think I would be justified in feeling so. How would you respond in such a case?
