Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6597743" data-attributes="member: 2011">Precisely.You have to remember, pemerton, that not everyone analyzes all aspects of the game (and gaming in general) as carefully and brilliantly as you do. While you see something as covert, someone else sees it as fudging (or even the more derogatory term cheating).As a DM, I feel uncomfortable with changing hit points or fudging a die roll. In the case of the latter, dice rolls are the action resolution determinants of the game system. So changing the roll feels unfair to me personally as a DM, hence, I do not do it. If we did not need a die roll for the DM to make a given determination of action resolution, why is he rolling a die behind the screen? He's doing it to continue the illusion to the players that the normal action resolution mechanic is being used when in reality, it is not. Some people consider that misdirecting the players. But it is not always misdirecting them as to the scenario, rather to game mechanics. The game mechanics are the game mechanics and the DM changing them or ignoring them completely to purposely alter the course of events seems biased. That just feels wrong to me and I think you probably expressed it better than I could.Note: there are times when the DM should pretend to be using the game mechanics when he is not to misdirect the players to the scenario, but those should be limited to unusual circumstances like when a PC is mind altered and the PC/player thinks he is doing one thing while the PC is doing another or some such. In other words, the scenario is not what the players think it is and following the normal game mechanic would give information to the players that they did not gain from the senses/skills of the PCs and should not have.But adding hit points behind the scenes, in reality, is no different than saying that the earlier hits on this foes by the PC, didn't actually hit. Your earlier actions meant nothing. Your earlier damage meant nothing. Your earlier decisions meant nothing other than using up resources. Why? Because I as the all powerful DM has just erased that damage from the history of the game. Adding 20 more hit points to the monster is no different than subtracting 20 hits points from the damage that the PCs did to the monster earlier in the encounter. This is what it seems like, to me, when DMs modify the game mechanics (like adding hit points or fudging).As a DM, if I am going to alternate the scenario on the fly, my preference is to do it like you mentioned, overtly, not covertly. That way, the players can see the change and react (and gain XP for the increased number of monsters or whatever).</blockquote>

Verification