Fudging dice rolls in tabletop RPGs

[Darth Roxor]

I do, I live for the moment I get to annihilate one of my players.

dis

the most satisfying moment a gm can get is finally wiping one of these smug piece of shit munchkins off the face of the earth

the day you start thinking 'oh i should cut my playas some slack' you have failed as a gamemaster, and that's a fact

We've had many threads like this already, and I will reiterate what I always say. If you fudge dice, you are a faggot. If you fudge dice, that means you either can't come up with a compelling failure scenario, or you are so far up your ass that you can't allow the playas to miss even the slightest bit of your GENIUS NARRATIVE! I guess I know where Obsidian writers come from now.

Also, true fact - very long ago, when my playas walked into a lethal encounter like a bunch of dumbasses, I did try to "cut them some slack". And the playas themselves knocked me upside the 'ead, saying that if they were dumb enough to find themselves in this situation, then they deserved what was coming to them. Fudging and undue leniency ruins the fun for everyone, you're just too dumb to realise this. Unless, of course, you play with snowflakes who can't live with the prospect of failing.

 

[Lacrymas]

Then fudge dice in the other direction.

 

[Darth Roxor]

why are you so dumb

 

[Lacrymas]

What you are saying makes no sense. If you are against fudging the dice in order to give advantages to the player and prefer to see munchkins die, then fudge them in the other direction.

 

[Darth Roxor]

where's the satisfaction from winning by cheating?

 

[Lacrymas]

If your headspace as a DM is to "win" against your players, then I don't know what to say.

 

[Darth Roxor]

it's an eternal struggle where the playas fight against the gamemaster and the gamemaster fights against the playas

how could you possibly not want to win against your players

 

[Lacrymas]

I'd say it's very easy to "win" as a DM, even in early 5E official modules where the encounters were a bit underpowered. Then there's Death House, where the vast majority of groups won't make it if you play the mobs as well as you could and didn't fudge dice or underpower them in some way. As a DM, you have unlimited power even if you don't fudge dice, so you don't have an even playing field in the first place if your concern is "winning without cheating".

 

[Darth Roxor]

have you perhaps considered that given your unlimited power you should also strive to have all the combat situations be fair enough to be manageable for the players

It's a game. You match the playas' power level to the power level of a potential encounter and you try to outplay or outsmart them. Putting them against impossible odds consciously is cheating just the same as fudging dice rolls.

In fact, I can only wonder why you'd ever even run any combat if your instinct isn't to kill the players. You add a terrible monstrosity of horrible deff at the end of the dungeon - what is its purpose? To me, its purpose is to shank gits dead. To you, its purpose is... to be scary and add DRAMA? Must be some shitty drama in your games if nobody can die.

Also, all your posts about "needing" to fudge dice etc. only suggest to me that you're either bad at balancing your combat encounters or have bad knowledge of the rules, or both.

 

[Lacrymas]

When I started DM'ing, I started with official modules, so it wasn't I who balanced encounters when I felt the need to fudge dice and not play the monsters to their full capacity. And I'm not the only saying this, NJClaw said the same thing. Like I said before, an adventure has to be a well written story on top of everything else, not having a tension arc is bad in the context of conventional storytelling. You also have to keep in mind every tabletop game is an ironman run, the vast majority of people can't complete an ironman run in a video game RPG even with metagaming, let alone a blind first run.

Besides, are you some kind of Sawyerist balancefag? We don't use the word "balance" in this forum.

 

[Darth Roxor]

You also have to keep in mind every tabletop game is an ironman run

if you're using an inferior system without fate points maybe

 

[Matalarata]

Some like to DM. Some like to force upon the players their "narrative". I've been Dm'ing for over 25 years now, I very rarely fudge rolls, can't remember last time I did so. If I really, really, need to make a combat easier, I usually alter some other parameter like HP, number of ability use or item charges and potions and I do that before the combat starts. Once in combat I could roll morale a bit earlier, if the enemies are subject to that and I feel like the players have been unjustly punished by the dices. That's rare, very rare, both players and GM need to live with the consequence of their action, otherwise we're just playing make-believe like childrens.

There are systems which are more narrative driven, if one wants to play such games. I did and had fun with them. There's no reason to use any D&D derivate as anything different than the tactical and exploration game they are, the number of non-combat related rules, spells and skills is seriously limited (compare it with Call of Cthulhu or any golden age WoD like Vampires). If you think you're injecting any kind of delicate and mature "narrative" into such a game and it cannot withstand a bad roll or twelve, sorry but in my book you're not worth playing with. You're narrating me your story, not writing one alongside the players. Alter the game not the rolls, have them find one additional healing or restoration potion, have friendly NPCs show up to help with the fight or after it, use other monsters turf battles. That's all within your power as a GM.

Personally, what I do is prepare the world, factions, culture and singular entities and then move them around my "board" in reaction to what the players do. This doesn't force me into a single narrative but allows me to discover the story arc alongside the players. I know what the end goals of all major actors is but I cannot foretell what the players will decide to tackle first or confront at all. The biggest drawback is you need to have everything ready beforehand. All significant maps for regions, buildings and dungeons. All the spell and items lists. All the significant NPCs stats or at least a little who's who about every corner of your world. I'm privileged because, after over two decades of gaming and about 12 years or so of digital pnp, I have a huge amount of spare maps, NPCs and adventure hooks I can use to spice up an unforeseen diversion from the players. I also very rarely use pre-written modules or campaigns, I feel like they are on-rails the majority of times and the writers usually make a lot of assumptions about how the PCs will behave. The first thing a good GM learns is that no fine-tuned adventure or scheme will ever survive confrontation with the players and their whacky "solutions".

 

[spectre]

I think you guys are talking at cross purposes here.
The only way you "win" as a GM is when your players tell you "holy shit dude, that was something" after the game. I think that one's a given when discussing tabletop.
If you need to creatively interpret a roll or two to achieve this, so be it.
What Roxorowicz is (perhaps) saying isn't really "RPG is about who wins, the players or the DM",
but when you're roleplaying and adversary to the group, it's your job to pull no punches within the established context of that particular encounter,
what is available and the rules framework you're using.

This discussion is as old as RPGs. On the one hand you put out effort as a GM and design a lot of content, so you don't want the players to miss it by dying to the first bunch of rats you throw at them.
On the other hand, if the players expect to have their way all the time; if the possibility of death and failure isn't there, how are you supposed to achieve tension and drama?
Players get lazy and start to expect that you bail them out whenever it hits the fan. That's bad as well. I could justify it with new players, where you can do a little bit of hand-holding,
but I don't suppose it would fly with more experienced groups.

When I was discussing this with my players, the conclusion was this: rolling dice is a special, iconic act in this hobby. Alea iacta est. It means your fate is now being decided and you will submit to its judgment.
Sure, there's some leeway for interpretation of marginal successes and failures, perhaps add a supplementary die roll, but the result needs to stand, otherwise you fucked something up along the way.

Fudging dice is akin to divine intervention for damage control, like with every damage control it's sometimes necessary because you're only human and sometimes shit happens.
Still, you need to have a hard talk with yourself to see if it could have been avoided. Are you using die rolls for unnecessary shit? Maybe you needed some kind of a contingency? Or perhaps you need to narrate more.

Combat is a special case. The whole point of using dice here is to achieve uncertainty, with the possible outcome being death and injury. This possibility needs to be real, or else why bother with combat at all?
Sure there are conventions such as heroic fantasy where it's not as clear cut, but I think it's a good baseline approach to adapt - combat should be approached like a life and death situation.
If you can't accept that, you really need to rethink the design on this encounter. Perhaps you are relying too much on a single entity to carry the narrative? Perhaps you need to come up with some alternatives?
The underlying problem here is player character death always throws a wrench into session continuity because you now have a guy that cannot participate
A lot of folk seem to forget, a combat encounter can end in a defeat without death. And there are systems in which dying doesn't mean the end. In the end, it's up to your creativity.
Being captured, maimed (or otherwise hampered in your efforts) joining the undead army but retaining consciousness, perhaps a third party intervenes? All those make for nice adventure seeds.
Heck, a lot of people forget that simply running away is always an option. I'm blaming cRPGs for it.

 

[NJClaw]

If you fudge dice, that means you either can't come up with a compelling failure scenario, or you are so far up your ass that you can't allow the playas to miss even the slightest bit of your GENIUS NARRATIVE!

A perfect summary of what I've been trying to say for 2 pages. After all, there must be a reason why the most important verse of the Italian national anthem expresses solidarity for our Polish brothers.

Firstly: without failures, you can't have meaningful successes.

Secondly: since you probably aren't Tolkien, you shouldn't force your predetermined story on your players. Ignoring the dice because you didn't expect the characters to fail an encounter is no different than saying that a player can't succeed his Bluff check only because your "plan" doesn't work if that specific NPC gets deceived.

If you are fudging roll, you are using the wrong tool to solve your problems.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

OK.

You should always respect the Dice Rolls.
If a GM fudges die roll to avoid failure states then he is weak and disrespectful to RNGsus.
What makes a great DM is how he leverages failure states dynamically to evolve the scenario and make it fun for the players.
If all you want is a scripted scenario, then might as well play some shitty bioware / obsidain title or something.

Some of my most fond memories of college PnP games are related to failure/char death which the DM wove into a fantastic campaigns whose memories I savor even more than a decade later.

 

[Darth Roxor]

A perfect summary of what I've been trying to say for 2 pages. After all, there must be a reason why the most important verse of the Italian national anthem expresses solidarity for our Polish brothers.

Marsz, marsz, Dąbrowski
Z ziemi włoskiej do Polski

Fun bit of trivia: the Italian and Polish anthems are the only two ones in the world that both refer to each other's countries in a positive context.

 

[Grunker]

Here's the Codex' previous debate on the subject btw:

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/grunker-vs-zombra-is-fudging-rolls-in-pnp-acceptable.97624/

 

[Lacrymas]

If you fudge dice, that means you either can't come up with a compelling failure scenario, or you are so far up your ass that you can't allow the playas to miss even the slightest bit of your GENIUS NARRATIVE!

A perfect summary of what I've been trying to say for 2 pages. After all, there must be a reason why the most important verse of the Italian national anthem expresses solidarity for our Polish brothers.

Firstly: without failures, you can't have meaningful successes.

Secondly: since you probably aren't Tolkien, you shouldn't force your predetermined story on your players. Ignoring the dice because you didn't expect the characters to fail an encounter is no different than saying that a player can't succeed his Bluff check only because your "plan" doesn't work if that specific NPC gets deceived.

If you are fudging roll, you are using the wrong tool to solve your problems.

In the context of "we rarely play" (because I'm in a different country) and "I don't do resurrections or ersatz-characters", all of this is kind of moot. We don't have the time to fail extremely basically. I do KO them constantly and it's up to them to roll their death saves, or have someone use a medicine check on them, or force a healing potion down their throat. That means they don't die completely basically ever, but they don't know that I'm guardian angeling their asses and coming up with house rules for them to not die. If this starts becoming a problem, which I don't think it will, I'll start brutalizing them.