Not fudging rolls is superior.
One of my players confessed to fudging dice twice, "I needed to do more damage in order to save the party." I killed their character the next session. Fuck 'em, dirty cheaters.
>>97056413this
>>97056365The dice always tell a better story
Victory is not satisfying without the possibility of failure.
>>97056365>Not fudging rolls is a basic assumption and anybody who disagrees is a triple nigger.ftfy
>>97056365Superior to what?If you fudge rolls you're not even playing a game, and you're betraying the trust of your friends and fellow players.
Why not just roll in the open?
>>97056365true, sometimes the player eat shit, sometimes I forgot they had death ward up
>>97060236open roll can still be fudged by deciding the modifiers after the roll
>>97060281If you're not playing with mathlets, players will calculate the modifier you applied to the guy pretty easily in 2-3 rolls. I was blessed/cursed playing with math autist, we usually knew AC/attack mod of all enemies in the first 2 rounds of combat.
Only the GM should ever be fudging rolls. No reason to have your players all die because the enemy's dice were hot that session. I recall one game where the giant barbarian I had as a boss couldn't stop rolling crits with his battleaxe. Back to back nat 20s. And he already took out the fighter.
>>97056365If you play to win, you already lost.
>>97060361thisfudging is a useful tool for the gm's arsenal (though you really shouldn't overuse it, it's a sometimes food) but players should try to follow the dice (unless instructed otherwise by the rules or the gm)
>>97060281No? The first time you roll any given trait, the players know the trait rank based on how many dice were rolled, so they'll know if you change it.
>>97060361try not playing shitty systems that have no way to gracefully handle player defeat
>>97060507In the example I gave it was really funny the fighter being one shot by a giant's crit battle axe. I was staring at the dice in horror as it technically did the same to the rogue and wizard. I just turned the cits into normal hits; the fight was still close.
>>97060361>No reason to have your players all die because the enemy's dice were hot that sessionfuck you
>>97060723What's the point of showing up at all if you can't die? They might as well use only unarmed attacks every round. None of their decisions matter.
>>97060361>Only the GM should ever be fudging rolls.If the GM cheats, at best nobody will trust the GM, at worst everyone will cheat.
>>97060295>He gets a bonus because of this feature he has
>>97060746Who are you quoting?
>>97060740I kill my PCs from their own choices. If they want to try and fight a boss handicapped, then I am not gonna hold back. if you roll all dice straight, then you are no different from an AI. I am the GM, I decide what the odds are.
>>97060723What are you talking about? The possibility of unexpected results is the whole point of using dice. The enemy vgetting a lot of good rolls is of course a reason for players to die. In fact, in a physical combat with no spells or unusual circumstances, vstrong dice results is THE reason players die.
>>97060786Choosing not to run away or to search for an alternative victory condition when the enemy is performing well in a fight is an example of player choice, yes. Why would you want to take that away from them?
>>97060786Wrong. The rules system decides what the odds are.
>>97060744it's not cheating if the gm does itsorry liberal, rule 0
>>97060822False.
>>97060777Me, as the DM explaining why the numbers are different without just telling the player cry more fag
>>97060822True
>>97060858lol seething retard
>>97060809The enemy wasn't performing well. The enemy rolled 5 nat 20s in 3 rounds.
>>97060904Then they were performing well.
I'm fresh from a session where I rolled many natural ones in a row. For the party, this meant a snowstorm, followed by setting up on a frozen lake, followed by the ice breaking with the players atop it, followed by harsh winds.I didn't kill any of them, because dying of hypothermia a few hours out of town while laden with a dungeons worth of loot would be awful. I didn't fudge, I didn't even roll. "Uhm... Yeah nah you totally beat the hypothermia in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. Roll for how many extremities you lose to frostbite."
>>97060935system issue
>>97060946Nah I made it all up. Consulted no tables. DM issue.
>>97060960you don't even understand why it's a system issue LOL
>>97060361>>97060723If you didn't want the party to get crit to death by a battle axe, then why did you put them in a situation where they could get crit to death by a battle axe?
>>97056365>Not fudging rolls is superior>Posts the guy who made his fortune by cheating at chessBait taken
>>97056413>"I needed to do more damage in order to save the party.""Then you should've rolled better, fag"
>>97061092>why did you put them in a situation where they could get crit to death by a battle axe?But I didn't because I can just fudge to get them out of it?
>>97061297Yes you did. Answer the question.
>>97061756>Yes you did.Nah I can just fudge so they were never in that situation, ez.
If you had to fudge they were in the situation, you lose.
>>97056365Well yeah, you shouldn't fudge rolls. But this also means that you should always be aware of what could happen if the dice fall in whatever way. You generally don't want to set players up for a situation where chance-based failure is absolutely catastrophic, though setbacks and complications can be very interesting and fun.
>>97061966Answer the question.
>>97060935When would dying not be awful? Isn't the point of dying that it's not something you want to happen?
Anyone who's afraid of a dm fudging ever once in a while it's an autist sorry I don't make the rules
pro-fudgers just need to write fanfiction together, you don't want to play the game at all
>>97061982What question? OP didn't ask a question. They just asserted their opinion, and then I commented my own thoughts on the matter.
>>97061167The whole point of rolling is that you aren't in control of it.
>>97062323Answer the question.
>>97062327My answer is Yes, I would like to go ass to mouth with your mother. Thanks for offering!
>>97062374Answer the question.
>>97056365Dice fudging is okay if it's the GM doing itsource: 1e DMG, pg 110
>>97060361If you have to fudge a diceroll, then you made a mistake. It's okay to make mistakes, but you shouldn't make a habit of it.
>>97062477Gygax is such a fucking hack.
>>97056413I had a player fudge once. In the moment, I pretended it was fine. But when night came, I snuck into his house. I severed his head with a rusty handsaw. I stabbed his parents to death and burned his sister alive. Then I raped his cat. I've had good games since.
>>97063430Holy based, sieg heil fellow chud!
>>97060047>fuckingFor weak people, conflict is too overwhelming without the certainty of success.
>>97063454Who are you quoting?
There's a possible argument to be made for fudging rolls IF the official challenge-designing metrics of the game are poorly balanced.If the game tells you something will be "medium difficulty" in theory but you quickly realize that even with average rolls, it's going to easily TPK your party, do you just let the incompetence of the game designer make you kill all your players and have to start a whole new campaign from scratch, or do you re-balance it on the fly by changing some rolls?I believe people who will say "No you NEVER fudge under ANY circumstances EVER or you're not even playing a game!" are ironically no-games themselves who don't understand what actually sitting down and interacting with other people is like.
>>97062477All of the osr fags that fudge to save their players unironically would be better off playing some pbta fluffy bullshit time game. At least then they wouldn’t have to lie to their players to just make up a story with no stakes together. Seriously, why play these lethal games with high variance if you’re just gonna ignore the variance anyways?
>>97060361This is definitely the best case to start fudging dice yeah. It's not fun or narratively satisfying to have some random midboss (or worse, a mook) just nuke the party because the dice decided to hand them 5 crits in a row.
>>97060361>the giant barbarian I had as a bossNever give NPCs player levels. This is always a bad idea, as evidenced by your encounter.
>>97063531bad system.
>>97063502I've never fudged in any game that I've run.Why are you using a system that's poorly designed?
>>97063528You're not going to let the players die when they face the final villain either. So why are you playing at all?
>>97056365As a GM I only fudge rolls every once in a great while. What I'm more apt to do is change encounters I had planned. Maybe reduce the health or number of enemies. But I really only tend to do either when I fuck up and underestimated the previous encounters, or am rectifying some other mistake that I made, not my players. Still, both situations are pretty rare as I trust my players, and they all handle character death pretty well.
>>97063547No, you're just being a retard for not engaging with the system's actual mechanics.
>>97063573(You)
>>97063528>but m-m-muh NARRATIVE!Unironically just tell a story to your group. Why the fuck are you even using dice?
>>97063528>or narratively satisfyingI'm fine for fudging rolls every once in a while, but what you're saying isn't always the case. There's inherit drama to the dice rolls, and having an enemy do something like that to a player can always be spun into something narratively interesting.
>>97063608nope.
>>97063611Well?
>>97060822based and redpilled
>>97062477>Gary the motherfucking OG said it's OKanyone who is opposed can just suck my greasy pepperoni farts into their mouths
>>97062380Answer the question.
>>97064042>gary the mercurial cokehead who made shit up as he went says to make shit up as you gogyg
>>97063520For as much as we harp on system issues this is also a player issue.Everyone has a different goal for their sessions.The trick is finding the right group that matches your play style.I don’t mind dying in a game, but I also didn’t mind dying in Oregon trail either.Some people don’t want the bad guy to win.Some people care about the fate of their level 19 mage they’ve played with for over 5 years (that died because of a fucking giant spider).Whatever your goal for the game, thematic or theatric changes may need to be done on the side of the DM to keep the story going.If a player fudges the dice and the goal is to keep the players alive and have them be heroes then they aren’t letting the story unfold (because those games wouldn’t have a tpk but a total party capture).
>>97063421Every RPG since then includes the same game mastery guideline.
>>97063502If you realized part of the system doesn't make sense why are you fudging over houserule? It sounds like a lot more effort to constantly disregard the dice instead of invoking rule 0 to fix it.
>>97063573Who said that the players can't die to the final boss? I will fudge the results and the dice to keep things going; that's it.
>>97063531I can admit it was a bad encounter. I made it back when I was a teenager and was still early into the hobby.
>>97062019Losing is a normal part of a game. If you think it's 'awful' you really shouldn't be playing games, just passively consoom books and movies and games with a difficulty slider you can bottom out.
>>97066927Nope.
>>97067040You aren't going to let them die to the final boss. Do not attempt to lie. I can always tell.
>>97067207You're wrong desu yo
>>97056365He says while posting a series notorious for characters cheating using special powers, making up rules or just outright cheating.
>>97067241nah.
>>97062477I guess Gygax is a racist nazi after all
>>97062477Why didn't you provide the whole quote? It doesn't change the opinion, but it still fleshes it out more meaningfully.>However, it is your right to control the dice at any time and roll dice for the players. You might wish to do this to keep them from knowing a specific fact. You might also wish to give them an edge in finding a particular clue, e.g. a secret door that leads to a complex of monsters that will be especially entertaining, You do have the right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player character with your actions.tl;dr, Gygax did say you can fudge the dice if you want to, but not if it actually really hurts anyone.
>>97060236Because players should not be privvy to the mechanical nature of the opposition, or the ongoing decision-making process.
>>97060361>the GM should be fudging rollsWrong, faggot.
>>97060935If they would have planned appropriately, dying in a snowstorm would not have been on the table to begin with.By not having them suffer the consequences of bad decisions, you have undermined the key central aspect of the game itself, and rendered future good decisions and outcomes meaningless as well as superfluous.Fucking idiot.
>>97066911>Some people care about the fate of their level 19 mage they’ve played with for over 5 years (that died because of a fucking giant spider).You should care. That's why it needed to die to that spider.
>>97068674Yes, Gygax was a retard. We know.
>>97068683yes they should
>>97069963Wrong. We're here to roleplay, not metagame.
>>97070022nah
>>97070150Retarded time-waster.
>>97068712>planned appropriately>ignoring that anon stated the weather was due to a series of bad rollsWhole thread full of disengenious faggot like you, holy shit.
>>97060361It is unironically better to explicitly tell your players "Your characters will not die unless you choose for them to, however there will be consequences if you're all taken out in a fight."For some people, losing a character ends the game for them. If the people you like playing with are that kind of person, that's fine, but you can absolutely come up with more interesting consequences for failure than just death. If failure equals death but you refuse to let your players' characters die, yeah, there's no point. Instead, you should come up with other failure states that they then have to contend with.
>>97067082It is awful, and that's why it's great incentive to play well.
>>97070185seethe :)
>>97070348Yes, weather is unpredictable. That doesn't prevent you from preparing for it.
>>97066927>But whatever you say sits in accord with the rules, even if you interpreted those rules for this moment. If the rules say that a character suffers injury, they suffer injury. If the rules say that a character's treasured piece of equipment breaks, it breaks. And if a character reaches the end of the line at the sword of an enemy...that's the end of that character's story.Play better games.
>>97063502If a game is poorly designed the correct course of action is to allow the tpk to happen and then simply play another game
>>97063520Maturity is accepting that they got it right.
>>97073274No theyre fucking retards and this shit is what ruined apocalypse world too.
>>97066927
>>97073356So I take it you just lie to your players so they can’t die unless you explicitly allow it?
>>97063520>pbta fluffy bullshit gameI dont know about you, but I haven't been in a PbtA game yet that was especially "fluffy." The last time that I ran one, it was high on political tension, violence, and I honed in super hard on every player characters' personal shit and made one of them experience some pretty extreme trauma.
>>97060361Honestly yeah. While I take my homebrew system seriously, I understand that my consistent groups aren't as autistic as I am, so I'm more willing to just allow certain things in part of the "rule of cool/comedy".
>>97073835"Fluffy" as opposed to "crunchy". Driven by flavor and narrative, rather than simulationist rules.
>>97073786No. AW doesn't let PCs die unless they consent to it.
Why would you use a system whose rules you have to ignore to do cool things?
>>97073477That's where I stand in this matter. I would also add this: you don't have to roll when you already decided what should happen. Just describe it without rolls. Accept your authority as DM to do it openly. Don't be afraid of your own friends questioning, arguing, bargaining or whining. Just look them straight, call them by their character names and ask: This happened as I described. Now, what will <your character> do?"
I don't decide what happens.
>>97056365GM can fudge rolls and health numbers and whatever else as much as he wants and the players will never knowYes, the actual health of my enemies is merely a suggestion and they die when I decide it's dramatically appropriate for them to die. What are you gonna do about it
>>97074315This is understandable. Though, since not all PbtA games are the same, some do happen to have some crunchier conflict rules. They're still a bit open-ended on the narration so you can tell the fight story with some interpretation, but tracking things like exhaustion from fighting so damn much and debilitating effects can legitimately be done.
>>97075162>>97060361>>97062477Doesn’t really make a difference who’s doing it. I’ve been cheating as a player for months now. Not to deal more damage and be selfish, but to make the session more fun for the rest of the group. If this isn’t ok but somehow the GM doing literally the same exact thing is, then you’re a retard.
>>97075162Nope, you lose.
>>97074326Genuinely, why is this a bad thing? Would you prefer they just die at the whims of the dice and the GM?
I'll cut the players a break every now and again if they're showcasing they actually know what to do. If they're being a shit head and die because they were being retarded then yeah fuck em. I'm not callous but meet me part way.
>>97075162>I decide it's dramatically appropriate for them to dieThere's nothing dramatic about slogging through the recommended 6-8 encounters per adventuring day in you-know-what-system.
>>97080842At the whims of the dice, yes. That's why you roll dice. To determine outcomes.
>>97056413>I killed their character the next session.You shouldn't try to fix out-of-the-game problems with in-the-game solutions.Also, killing the character implies intent, as in perhaps fudging the situation to get the desired result. I am not quite sure that is significantly better than fudging dice.
>>97076164>If this isn’t ok but somehow the GM doing literally the same exact thing is, then you’re a retard.This.
>>97063430Extremely based, but the cat did nothing wrong.
>>97060361Skill, issue the party should have come up with a better strategy. It's not like it was a breath attack 1 shotting the whole party as soon as they open a door or something, and even in that scenario they should have sent a scout ahead
>>97082086Sure. But that doesn’t mean you should roll dice to determine everything. There are times where it’s ok to just let the players choose instead of rolling.
>>97075162>the players will never knowThe players always know, you're just oblivious to them realizing and subsequently not taking fights seriously.
>>97056365DMs should only ever roll dice, and they should never fudge the dice.
>>97095050Gross. The point is to have fun. If the DM isn't in charge of what happens down to rolling dice then just play something like kingdom death which uses dice as God.
>>97056365Only if the rolling mechanic doesn't spit out garbage.
>>97060361Playoids will seethe at this, but you are right in principle.
>>97073477Not from a real game.
>>97087415it was an accessory to murder (of trust)
>>97056365I don't fudge rolls, I give "forgotten" advantage, so they have a chance to get themselves out of the hole. But if they fail both rolls or it's an enemy roll that one-shots them, oh well.I've been DMing digitally recently anyways, so unless I start doing secret rolls I can't really fudge by lying about a result anyways.
>>97087415
>>97103052From a real game.
