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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6593758" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, multiple people have specifically said that you *should* do it, perhaps even frequently, and conceal that you are doing it, and tell the players you don't do it if you are asked about it. So...it may not be your position, but it's definitely *a* position that's been held in this thread.Then, as I have seen several other people say, and as I have myself said: awesome, you have your group's buy-in, and that is all that matters. But, as I've said before--if I joined your group, ignorant of this occurring, and later found out about it, I'd be upset, and I think justifiably so. If the rest of the group already had explicit buy-in, then doing something about it is in my court, certainly. But if it was never stated--so I *couldn't* have known and thus couldn't have done something about it earlier--then I'd say it's in your court for being not clear about your DMing methods, especially on a contentious issue like this one.Well, uh...as others have said, I'm not really sure why, if the negative result is expressly not wanted, you should even consider rolling. Like, what actually IS the difference between "I rolled...it's a bad roll...I'm going to ignore it and say it's a good roll" and "I'm not going to roll, I'm just going to say it's a good/neutral/nuanced result."? Because both of them result in the same thing--the DM declaring a result--but the former gives a distinctly false impression (that is, the impression that it COULD have gone badly).If you feel a need to codify this, just think of it as: "good play is a +30 to the roll." Then it (almost surely) doesn't matter what you roll anyway; it'll end up "right." Admittedly, this doesn't quite cover situations like "I have rolled four consecutive crits," but such situations should be vanishingly rare in actual play (0.05^4 = 1 in 160,000 rolls).I believe we have. The issues I have are (1) people saying *every* DM *should* use it, (2) that there's never ever in a million billion trillion years even the slightest thing wrong with it, and (3) that it is not dishonest to do it and then conceal it (especially from a group that would be upset by it).You Game Your Way. Just don't try to sell it as a method that everyone SHOULD use (a normative statement), nor as something completely free of contextual problems or that can be used without group buy-in. Note: I am not saying you in particular are saying this, but it has been said more than once in the thread.I see a distinct difference between "I am not telling you everything, in order to preserve a sense of mystery, suspense, or surprise" and "I am going to actively modify the facts of the world and the consequences of actions (and--for many posters in this thread--then deny doing so when asked)."The example that comes to mind to illustrate it is, again, a blackjack dealer. If people knew the exact order of upcoming cards, there wouldn't really be a "game" anymore. But there is a clear difference between "don't show all the cards" and "modify the deck (often: whenever and however the dealer wants) to control who wins and who loses." In a very real sense, for me, blackjack of this kind would cease to be a game as well; I'm instead playing "hope your dealer favors you more than she challenges you."Converting this back to D&D, a DM who explicitly spells out the function of every NPC, plot element, monster, trap, etc. is doing something I wouldn't appreciate--removing most of the appeal of the game, in fact. But hat "better story" means is entirely in the eye of the beholder and probably going to have different interpretations from literally every person at the table. So a DM who fudges--particularly one who fudges regularly--is acting basically on whim. It may be relatively "principled" whim (that is, it may not be totally random), but it's still the things that strike the DM's fancy. The game becomes, to some extent, "the DM giveth, and the DM taketh away"; the things that do/don't happen--good or bad--are due to whether the DM decided to interfere, and not whatever the players+world would have produced.</blockquote>

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