So that my players see me roll the dice. As long as they believe the illusion, the roll is real to them, and so their experience is meaningful and memorable; at the end of the day, that's what matters most to me as a DM.
Play a system that accounts for this.
Fate gives you fate points to spend when you do t like a roll. It also gives you "succeed at a cost" if your fate points are exhausted or not enough.
You can still just roll with it (pun intended) and die to a random goblin if that's fun. But you also have agreed upon procedure for not doing that. "It looks like the goblin is going to gut me, but (slides fate point across the table) as it says on my sheet I'm a Battle Tested Bodyguard, so I twist at the last second and he misses (because the fate point bumps my defense roll high enough)"
This is pretty easy to import into DND, too, if you like the other parts of it
I don’t fudge rolls, but I do dynamically adjust enemy’s max HP depending on how well my players are doing.
Yeah, I'm not big on fudging rolls, but that's one thing I will do. In my last campaign, I had statted up the first real villain for my players to fight, and they knocked him out in one punch. I would have made him one level higher, but then his own attacks would have been strong enough to one-shot some of the players. Level 1 woes.
There is a reason why the D&D 5e creatures have their HP written in dice values (4d6+10).
It allows for variation within the stat block. But it also gives a maximum and a minimum HP they can have.
Most of the time you use the average. But if the game is too slow, you can lower it to the minimum HP. And if they are steamrolling an encounter, you can just increase the HP to the maximum.
This makes encounters more dramatic and fun.
Rule #1: Maximum Game Fun
rule of kul (fun in swedish)
rul o kul?
I’ve definitely fudged rolls so something hilarious would happen, and our kittens are named after one of those scenarios.
To newer DMs: Never admit to your players whether or not you fudge rolls. As the DM, The only thing you need to do to maintain the integrity of your game is to shut your damn mouth when you bend the rules. The players just need the illusion maintained.
I'm a first time DM and I struggle with this a lot haha. There are times where I feel a roll is appropriate, so I do it, and whatever is supposed to happen fails, then I realize.. "what the hell is supposed to happen if that doesn't work?" so it just kinda happens anyways.. IDK if my players have caught on..
You could just skip the roll, because if failure is unacceptable then it isn't appropriate.
That's where my problem comes from. I'm not experienced enough to know immediately where failure is acceptable or not; rather, I don't always have backup plans or ideas for when things that should be able to fail, fail. So I roll, and it fails, and it should fail, but I've got no idea what happens when it does. So it doesn't fail.
I think I'm getting better at improv-ing events and making backup plans. It's still difficult for me to find the balance between the story I want to tell/ have prepared vs the story that my players wind up creating, but checking in with my party here and there tells me everyone's having fun and only rarely does anyone feel gipped or abused by dice rolls.
I learned in my first adventure that what I've prepared to happen might just be stupid and unrealistic, so I'm never too attached to it. If the dice say it doesn't happen, they know better than me, so I just toss it. If I lie about the dice to make it happen anyway, I'm making a worse experience for everyone.
If a failure means a path is unavailable, see if you can open up a different path. If there are no other paths, just let them have this one for free.
i'm kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i'd wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it's just "i'm gonna skip this last encounter because we're already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow" or even just "wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace" but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that's part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i'm ok with them using fudging when they feel it's warranted so long as they're not abusing it to the point where there's no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we're all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they're doing, and if we're not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table?
Dice are terrible at making battlemaps, and don't get me started on their awful faux-Scottish accents.
Bro paragraphs are your friends.
What I found in the TTRPG community is that a lot of GM's like to hear themselves talk. They write these huge paragraphs of sentences stringed together jumping from one topic to the next.
You can even notice this in the way the D&D books are written. Instead of using easy to navigate bullet points, it is just walls of text one after the other. Trying to find some specific knowledge in that is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
As a data nerd, I can't stand it.
if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table?
Well... If the story is so important why have players at all?
Where 2 RPG players meet there are 3 opinions
If my players need plot armor, they can spend their hero points on it.
When we played PF2e (for 2.5 years), the amount of times we used a hero point to reroll into a natural 1 was statistically unlikely.
Same with mine and Bennies. You can't take them with you after all.
Rules are important, but they aren't the most important thing as a GM.
The 2 things that are more important are: pacing and fun.
Not fudging dice is important, but if it is in the way of fun, then I either just not roll or only pretend to roll.
Same with pacing, if a roll is going to bog down the games pacing, making everything take longer for no reason other than the roll, then that roll does not matter.
I agree with this. I've always seen the rules as a framework to assist in collaborative story telling and keep things impartial and surprising. At any point where they begin to do more harm than good, we can change them.
I got down voted for saying this elsewhere, but to my mind there's a huge difference between the GM unilaterally changing the rules, and the group deciding.
Scenario: the goblin rolls a crit that'll kill the wizard. This is the first scene of the night.
Option A: GM decides in secret that's no good and says it's a regular hit.
Option B: GM says "I think it wouldn't be fun for the wizard to just die now. How about he's knocked out instead?". The players can then decide if they want that or would prefer the death.
Some people might legitimately prefer A, but I don't really want the GM to just decide stuff like that. I also make decisions based on the rules, and if they just change based on the GM's whims that's really frustrating and disorienting.
There's also option C where this kind of thing is baked into the rules. And/or deciding in session 0 what rules you're going to change.
My 2 cents is that at the low levels, players need a bit of a buffer. A Lvl1 wizard with +0 CON can be one-shot by a goblin rolling a crit, to say nothing of the bugbear boss of the first encounter in Lost Mines of Phandelver (many people's first introduction to DnD 5e)
So minor selective fudging to keep the characters alive long enough for them to at least be wealthy enough to afford a Revivify seems like a small and harmless enough concession to me
It is the reason why I prefer starting at lvl 5
Also the classes all feel and play the same below that level.
Yeah, our sorcerer got one shot by the goblins. Later on a mage wanted to punish whatever attacked him with magic missile and accidentally killed him. Now bro's a meme for dying in the first round.
Speaking of the bugbear, we were all at 1 hp at the end of the fight, and only because we managed to turn goblins to our side (and Kelemvorism).
If it's a 1st level character is there any harm in simply letting them be killed by a goblin? Depends on what you're looking for in a game but an early death can lead to some nice storytelling
Sometimes You roll dice just to make them think something’s up.
DM: Roll a perception check
Player: Nat 20
DM: There's nothing there.Wait, what took the air away?
"Oh fuck, that must mean something was there before, keep rolling perception checks, whatever it is must be around here somewhere"
As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They're a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.
Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.
How to tell if someone likes writing more than improv:
How dare you cut a thread short, that could have gone on for pages and pages of bikeshedding, with your one truthful and incisive comment.
Don't write on me.
Depends heavily on what you and your players want out of the game. In all the campaigns I've been in the focus has been storytelling and character growth, so having a character die to some random happening would be counterproductive.
There have been situations within those campaigns where we've done things knowing that character death was a possibility, though, and in those cases we've carried through if the dice fell that way. The key is having buy-in from both player and DM on those particular moments of risk. Even a regular combat could turn into one of those if the player decides to press forward into danger.
Yeah. I can see I'm clearly in the minority, but I do want my character to be able to die at any moment.
As long as you're not going super hardcore, I don't see the problem with just letting the truth of the dice decide whether a character receives a 'fatal' blow, only to find after the combat encounter that the character is barely alive, and the rest of the group needs to focus all their resources on triage and emergency evac.
Getting out of a dangerous place with a barely conscious character can make for a pretty tense situation.
Some games have this built in and you don't have to fudge it.
Fate, my go to example, has important but simple rules around losing a conflict.
At any point before someone tries to take you out, you can concede. That's a player action and not a character action. If you concede, you get a say in what happens to your character. That's where you as a group say "maybe they stab me but leave me for dead in the confusion" or "maybe the orcs take me prisoner so you all can rescue me next week". Whatever the group decides is cool goes, but you get a say. You make this call before the dice are rolled. You also get one or more fate points, which is nice.
If you instead push your luck and let them roll, and their attack is more than you can take, you're done. The rest of the table decides what happens but you don't get a say beyond what was agreed to in session 0.
This would also be pretty easy to import into DND or most other systems.
That's why revivify is for. What you did here is taken away a meaningful moment from a player, just because you wanted them not to make a different PC. If you want that moment, write it into the story with an NPC. Don't keep someone alive "just because". Playing "hardcore" has nothing to do with this - that's about balancing enemy encounters. Don't throw a dragon at an unprepared party sort of things.
Otherwise people will either be annoyed that a moment was taken away, come to the conclusion that their choices don't really matter, or they would expect of you that every time a character dies, they become "half concious". Suddenly you have a "why didn't my char do that???" moment at the table. It's the same with fudging dice, but when that happens, you are behind a GM screen so you are less likely to be found out. Still a shitty thing to do though.
It's all about what sort of group you're playing with. I run a group for some kids at my school and I know they would be heartbroken if I just straight up killed them.
I've only had to do this once though. I made it a lesson about caution. The player was being reckless, and they 'died'. Seeing how distraught he was, I decided after the encounter, that the other players should roll for a perception check, and noticed the character still breathing slightly. It was nice to see the kid perk up immediately afterwards.
Well when you arn't sure if the encounter is balanced from the beginning and the dragons breath would tpk in one hit its kinda better to turn the cone into a line and half the damage so you only have one player down.
The GM just rolls dice because they like the sounds they make.
i love how these threads are just people discovering the principles of game design on their own lmao
To give the illusion that fate was on their side.
I make a point not to kill my players unless they make a habit of doing dumb shit, or it's "almost" happened a couple times already.
Especially if I get several good rolls or they get several bad rolls in a row.
The game should be fun for everyone, and if even one player goes home upset with the session I will have considered my night a failure as DM.
Not that I consider it a failing or even "bad" if someone else kills off their players. Everyone has different expectations from games and I've seen fantastic role playing of deaths before.
One player ripped their heart out of their own chest, chugging a health potion to stay alive long enough to place it in their spouse who had just died died, and another player healed the spouse.
They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.
They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.
Rule of cool trumps all.
What stakes do you have in your games? What does your prep look like?
Answer: to give the players the illusion of fairness while I reach behind me to grab the plot gaf.
Fear, fear and suspense.
Fudging removes the joy of surprises and working through failures, or is a band aid to poor planning if failure isn't an option.
a band aid to poor planning
you think you can plan around your players' actions?
I know that I can, based on experience. It is often an outline and can be revised, but having that as a starting point makes rolling with the unexpected easy enough.
Like having a route and planning on how to handle unexpected roadwork or changes in train schedules. It isn't necessary to plan every detail or how it will pan out, just major things that need to be handled until the end of the session and there is time to hash out the details before the next.
I don't agree but I like the meme, upvoted!
I prefer games with player-facing rolls. I also prefer emergent gameplay so I'll roll on random charts, but that's it. Stakes are stakes, and character death should be something in the forefront of player minds imo
Roll in the open, fuck narrative first gameplay, it's a game.
This+rescale the dice rolls so they make sense. A 20 for them does not have to mean they crushed the challenge. They might just have gave it their all, had brief hope, and narrowly avoided death, or not.
-Sam Riegal refusing to use his free advantage except the one time where it would fuck with the rest of the table
Fudging a roll is for when I, the DM, realise I made a mistake. No, I didn't realise this creature got a sneak attack until after I rolled that 20!
I just like the sound they make. Low key asmr
Chance is an illusion. You cannot escape your fate.
I have just the die for such an occasion...
Legit, I don't fudge rolls because it's not fun for me.
If a roll would fuck up the session/adventure/campaign, I just straight up tell the players I'm making a call and override the results. It doesn't happen often, and it's really only when rng just screws things, like when you get multiple nat 1s in a session, way out of line with what makes sense without some kind of gymnastics to explain things in game.
That's exactly what fudging rolls is though... "I'm not fudging, I'm just changing the result of the dice when it isn't fun"
Nah, fudging is slightly different.
Fudging is saying "the roll was 19" when it was actually 18, and 18 was a fail. That's a form of lie.
Straight up saying that the roll is being ignored totally, or that the person should roll again isn't fudging because it's open and honest.
I think the difference is being transparent about it. This is saying "I know that shouldn't hit, but I'm saying it hits anyways." Traditional fudging is "That... hits, yeah, totally."
