Fear, fear and suspense.
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!
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.
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 just like the sound they make. Low key asmr
The GM just rolls dice because they like the sounds they make.
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.
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.“Oh fuck, that must mean something was there before, keep rolling perception checks, whatever it is must be around here somewhere”
Wait, what took the air away?
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.
i love how these threads are just people discovering the principles of game design on their own lmao
Answer: to give the players the illusion of fairness while I reach behind me to grab the plot gaf.
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”
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.”
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.
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 are real, but remember, NPCs don’t have to follow player character creation rules
Yeah, I learned that too. I had come up with a villain later on who had a very defense/counterattack focused stationary fighting style combined with sundering armor, and I thought I could make him a big threat, but then he ended up completely flopping because there just wasn’t support for building that style and making it strong. Now I’m playing looser, and stealing lair actions from D&D (minus the lair part most of the time) to make my loner villains work.
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.
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.
I definitely dislike the idea of stopping the action and suggesting a direction. For my games I always try to aim for immersion, and this would really take me out of it.
I think you might have gotten the wrong idea about how I approach it, though. Part of keeping things surprising and impartial is avoiding changing things all the time secretly. That being said, I don’t believe in a hard and fast rule of never fudging anything.
Here’s an example where I would consider it. The players have been trying really hard to overcome an obstacle, and have had many setbacks already. They come up with an exciting and novel solution, but a bad roll happens on my end that would end this great idea in another failure. Because they’ve earned it by this point, and it will make for a more exciting game, I would likely fudge that roll and give it to them. I would do this in secret, because calling attention to it deflates the experience for the players.
I see the GM as a storyteller and entertainer, whose primary goal is to immerse the players into a story, and to create an exciting and unpredictable experience. Not everyone will view things like I do, and that’s fine, but I wanted to clarify what I mean anyway. Hopefully that makes more sense now.
For your example, I’d probably still ask if the players wanted me to let the dice decide or not before rolling. My players once had a clever idea of setting some poison traps and using earthbind to deal with a wyvern. The thing made all of its saves and nothing worked. I could’ve lied, but we’d already agreed to openly roll and abide by it. Would lying have made it better? Maybe. The game carried on and that arc had a thrilling climax later.
Alternatively, if we’d been playing a game that has a “succeed with a cost” / “fail forward” mechanic it could have been satisfying. D&D and close relatives are especially prone to disappointment because of how random and binary they tend to be.
Anyway. All of this I think it reveals a difference in how RPGs are enjoyed by different people.
On one hand, there’s going for immersion. The player wants to be in the world, be in the character, and feel everything there. It’s very zoomed in.
On the other, where I hang out, it’s more like a writer’s room. I’m interested in telling a cool story, but I’m not really pretending to “be” my character. My character doesn’t want a rival wizard to show up, but I as a player think that’s interesting (and maybe want the fate point, too) so I can suggest that my “Rivals in the Academy” trouble kicks in now. I enjoy when I can invoke an aspect and shift the result in my favor, or when I can propose a clever way I can get what I want at a cost.
Neither’s better or worse than the other, so long as everyone’s on the same page. It can be bad if half the table wants to go full immersion and just talk in character for two hours and the other half doesn’t.
I definitely agree that the beauty of ttrpgs is how many different things they can be to different people. We’ve got very different styles, but I think it’s great you’ve found a way to play that works for you and your table!
Me when my players in a cyberpunk game are all on death’s door after a firefight goes bad: “Skill issue, I would simply not have been shot”
