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If you need to fudge things to tell a better story, don't let on that you're doing it. Telling the players how you went easy on them, takes away from the story, IMHO.
'you' being a general-ism and not PCScipio specifically.
If you aren't going to say when you cheat on things that's only alright in my opinion if you have also disclosed that it may occur and people are OK with that. If you don't then it's much much worse as now you're lying.
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I think a broad disclaimer of "Sometimes I'm going to improvise things, in order to make sure that the game is more fun and more fair. Sometimes this will just involve plot and tactics, and sometimes it's going to involve numbers. Ideally it's not going to happen, but I'm not perfect and sometimes what I prepare will fall short of my own expectations so I'm going to have to fix it in the moment." is going to cover a whole lot of things.
If someone is so vehemently anti-fudging that they take exception to that, and absolutely never want me to change the number of guards in the next room so as to make the fight more winnable/challenging, I probably want to figure that out before we start so I can suggest that person find a different game.
One other note: Remember that a character falling unconscious in a battle is not necessarily the right time to fudge things. Characters will almost never go from living straight to dead dead in the early levels, and at higher levels death is generally non-permanent if the party is well-prepared.
This is a good point. Particularly since monster types tend to move on to other targets once they've dropped one. Tactically, this makes sense for the party to do the same as well.
If someone is so vehemently anti-fudging that they take exception to that, and absolutely never want me to change the number of guards in the next room so as to make the fight more winnable/challenging, I probably want to figure that out before we start so I can suggest that person find a different game.
That. Or just Tarrasque. ;)
Yeah I thought this one would blow up. This type usually does. I say do what works for you and take peoples advice at face value. Then throw it away and go with what works for you.
Sometimes, if you're doing a good story you have to cheat. You, for example, can't have someone gasp out their last message to their loyal student as they pass from a cowardly attack from another of his students.
Key bad guys should have a feat. Something like "Dying Monologue", which allows them to perform a James Bond villain style speech before they expire. <Grin>
All villains have the feat Endless Exposition: Though speaking is a free action, a villain with this feat may expound as much expository text as the DM feels is necessary without expending their free action for the round. The recitation of War & Peace may be accomplished in a single six-second round if need be.
Pfft just make a spell
Mordenkainen's Endless Monologue: While the caster speaks all status effects are suspended on listeners and no-one but the caster can take any action. The Speaker cannot take any offensive action during this time.
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Specifically with the case HWALSH's laid out, it seems to be more of a case of a Player not adhering to whatever social contract that's was laid out.
He laid out to the player that this is the kind of game we are playing please don't do X. Player Did X, HWALSH again asked the player to stop that behaviour and the player refused.
As the player refused to play nice with the other players (who voiced concern / grievances) he's left with only a few options.
If not 1 then 2 or 3 should be chosen as leaving the majority of players unhappy due to a new player is just dumb. Also the functional difference between 2 and 3 is more or less the same with 2 just being a hell of a lot more work. But yea it's an issue of a player being a right -un-nice word-.
Specifically with the case HWALSH's laid out, it seems to be more of a case of a Player not adhering to whatever social contract that's was laid out.
Exactly -- and, as you point out, to my mind there are much better ways of dealing with that than by changing all his dice rolls.
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I'm always fond of linking this
Perfect!!!
Different strokes for different folks.
I'm a narrative GM, I don't sandbox. Sometimes, if you're doing a good story you have to cheat. You, for example, can't have someone gasp out their last message to their loyal student as they pass from a cowardly attack from another of his students.
Why? Pathfinder's rules forces them to be unconscious before they can die and restoring even 1 hp stops it dead in it's tracks.
You seem like a sandboxer, which is fine, but it's not my style.
And this is perfectly fine if this suit your party... Once again I think that everything a GM does is fine as long as the players have fun... I'm now Gming "Sandbox Style" but before that I was a player and our GM was a Narrative, which suited me fine, his stories were interesting, but the others weren't happy about it...
After much discussion, the GM not wishing to switch to Sandbox GMing they decided to switch GM, giving me the role of GM... ;)Now they're much more happy and the other GM has found himself a player's group that enjoy his Narrative GMing very much...
Everyone's happy :p
THat's how it should be, if you're GMing don't match your Player taste and vice versa then it's time to change something so everyone can enjoy themselves...
In a game that will last for years it's important ;)
I also once GMed for a party of players used to Narrative GMing and who liked this kind of game very much... Needless to say it was a catastrophe and that I only GMed once at their table, quickly reverting to being a player... :p
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I'm a bit torn on that issue. On one hand, I don't think that the rules themselves are too important to roleplay. It's perfectly fine for me to use RAW, RAI, a 200 page book full of house-rules or even just "let's have fun and only refer to the rules to solve conflicts we can't simply agree on a hand-waived solution". Ultimately meaning that rules shouldn't be sacrosanct because they are not what the game is all about.
On the other hand, I see the problem that fudging against the players should never be done (think that we can all agree on that), but fudging in favor of the players is not necessarily the way to go either. Especially if it means that you essentially take any risk out of the game, because that will lead to the players stop caring about their characters the way they do when there's actual risk that they might lose them.
My solution (during 3.X times) used to be to memorize as much rule stuff as possible because that enabled me to basically run the game without any fudging. But while I'm still convinced that the better your grasp on the rules is, the less is the risk that you run unprepared into a situation where you might feel the need to fudge, I've learned the hard way (severe case of GM Burndown) that I'm personally much better at running games much more free-form.
So in the meantime it has come down to me adhering to the rules as far as I easily remember them, but to avoid looking them up during game as much as possible. Which probably means that, in live games, I'm fudging more than I'm aware of myself meaning that I'm continually making up my own rulings to solve a situation and not giving a damn about what's in the book. Exception being PbP games because there you mostly have the time to look a rule up if you need it. I won't hide that behavior from my players, so if they can't stand it they can opt out of the game before it begins. But I also will modify my style only to a limited degree to accomodate players' wishes, so rule lawyers may have a really hard time to evn try and enjoy a game run by me.
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I say it every time one of these threads comes up, Hero Points. Hero points are the solution since it lets the player decided to "fudge". The player decides if the fight is hard enough to need help. When you fudge as the GM you never know if next round the wizard was going to drop a spell to incapacitate the opposition or if you accidentally lined up the enemy for the fighters newest feat to be able to kill 1/2 of them.
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I also advocate hero points over DM fudging, but all the "DM should lie about fudging!" people HATE them because they're (a) too transparent, and (b) under the players' control.
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Hero Points is a wonderful suggestion! Our group has been using them for years and it's really made a difference in player agency.
On the other hand, I see the problem that fudging against the players should never be done (think that we can all agree on that)
I don't know about that, I think if the PCs have been rolling exceptionally well, and are basically full up on resources even having been in several fights already, if the next room is "one elite opponent and a handful of henchthings" then increasing the number of henches in the next room before the players open the door is all well and good.
You probably shouldn't change die rolls against the players, but I feel like most of the fudging I do is in changing things behind the scenes before the scene it's in plays out.
As a player, I don't want to know. I want to assume that the GM occasionally fudges but if it is blatant it spoils the fun. Anything overdone will sooner or later become apparent to your players.
I am trying to think of a single battle we won in the RotR campaign we played. The goblins and a certain annoying guy in the second book. The rest of the bad guys committed suicide, teleported out, retreated for no apparent reason (two of us are unconscious, one is dead and the rest are at 5hp, why are they leaving again?), got killed by dmpcs or we woke up in prison or unconscious
I tend to only fudge rolls if it would result in the death of a PC and then only if it only happened because of the massive swing a d20 provides. Like, if a minor enemy can only hit the tank with a twenty, and somehow I roll three twenties in a row (which all the games I've played in houserule as if it was a coup de grace), I would probably only treat it as a critical with no chance for instant death. Although, I also don't really care for the fact that everyone always has at least a 5% chance to hit someone. Like, I doubt that a enemy who has trouble hitting the wizard with 14AC could somehow actually damage the paladin with 25AC. But, that's a discussion for another time.
No cheating is ever acceptable, however what is considered "cheating" will vary by the group. Some know and expect for a GM to fudge dice for and against them. Some want the dice to be the sole decider even if it means their characters die.
PS: Some also want the GM to "cheat", but they don't want to know about it.
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I don't know about that, I think if the PCs have been rolling exceptionally well, and are basically full up on resources even having been in several fights already, if the next room is "one elite opponent and a handful of henchthings" then increasing the number of henches in the next room before the players open the door is all well and good.
I agree, but I also do not consider that as fudging against the players.
If I make a mistake in the players favor - they keep it.
If I make a mistake against the player - I'm likely to change the outcome unless it's long past.
Outside of that I try to let the dice roll where they do 99% of the time - and we get plenty of good stories. It does make me less likely to say a save was made when it wasn't - sometimes the party will go up against that ogre barbarian with a human bane weapons - and it just get's greased out of his hands making him a chump.
I once ran a Fudging poll...
Unfortunately all it told me was that players want very different things. It's probably impossible to please everyone.
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Killed 10 or 12 characters...something like that but well, I usually don't fudge dice much, so bad rolls happen.
But it's okay that basically what my players want(most played AD&D when they were younger). Once I did try to fudge the dice a bit...they definitely didn't like it to save one of them.
So at the end of the day, it depends on your audience.
I have definitely played with a group who have much the same mentality, but in those same campaigns it entirely fell apart momentum wise when people started dying, and the deaths definitely came early (3 over 4 sessions is really hard to establish interesting party cohesion, don't you think). I get that the meat grinder appeals, but consistent story telling is difficult when heads are rolling every session, and it's meant to be focused on a single party.
What I mean is that, while I get the idea of preserving the threat of death or worse, but also understand why fudging someone's death away would be bad form, I definitely feel like that meat grinders either need to have a campaign where a rotating cast can work (like an adventuring guild with a high turnover rate aiming for a common goal), or you need to implement some system to punish 'death' without actually having a character die, and allow for defeat to be a complication instead of an end of a story. TPK's definitely should be where an adventure ends, but I've found this to be a better system than otherwise fudging dice, since while the threat of death is a big deal still, the player doesn't have to shoehorn in a reason for a new character. It's just Big Joe the Fighter now has less limbs, or might have contracted something diabolic, or seems more insidious than normal and nobody knows why sometimes he goes away from camp and starts chanting backwards in Aklo to rotten tree stumps.
It is natural to want to see the 'monsters' you create have their moment to badass things. Perhaps to instill a touch of fear into the hearts of your players before they ultimately defeat the enemies. That can go wrong when you inadvertently create a challenge that is beyond the capabilities of the adventuring party. You are new to this, and it is going to take some practice to create challenges that are as difficult as you mean for them to be. Plus there are always unforeseen happenings. If you are responsible for creating a challenge that is too difficult for them and then simply let them all die because "oops I'm just following the rules" then I feel that is wrong. You did well to recognize what was happening early on and then modify the encounter. If you think that the modification was clumsy, well that's OK. You are new and will get better at it.
I think cheating sucks
How do you define GM cheating? Every table I have played or GM'd on has a rule that supersedes all others, that being: the GM's decision is final. Makes it difficult for them to cheat.
How do you define GM cheating?Going back on their word.
That removes retcons from the equation, a very useful part of the GM toolkit.
So I have to respectfully disagree with you on that one.
What I am asking about is a definition of cheating. What you are describing sounds more like a policy or philosophy, although I tend to agree with what you are saying to a large extent.
And that definition is?
Thinking out loud here: I can accept the idea of the GM cheating the players (and themselves) out of an enjoyable game by being a jerk. However the GM has far more to consider than simply the roll of the dice. Sometimes the result of a die roll conflicts with an important storyline, player agency, homebrew rules, world consistency, character immersion or player fun. In those cases the GM should sometimes overrule the dice. I don't see how overruling equals cheating. Ideally the GM shouldn't roll at all in those circumstances, the problem is that GMs are human and therefore imperfect and sometimes they don't know what the correct decision is until they roll an undesirable result.
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I don't see how overruling equals cheating.
It is, if and when the GM explicitely stated, that he wouldn't do so beforehand, more so if the players explicitely stated that they don't want the GM to do so.
If one the other hand, the GM announces that he might do so, if necessary, for sake of everything you listed, and the players accepted that, then it's part of the group treaty and by definition not cheating.
And the thing is, that there is only one valid reason not to tell the players beforehand and that is if the players made clear that they don't want to know if fudging belongs to the GMs arsenal. I which case players should simply tell the GM before he even mentions that topic.
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I don't "fudge" rolls, but I play with my kids so we allow a liberal amount of rerolls. :-)
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I don't "fudge" rolls, but I play with my kids so we allow a liberal amount of rerolls. :-)
That just gave me an idea for when I game with my kid (if I ever back to that). At each session I'll give her a few tokens she can turn in to re-roll things.