Katydid's page

So the consensus here is that whether or not fudging is cheating is up to the players to decide?

For me, the takeaway is that players and GMs should discuss how they feel about the subject, just like they talk openly about all other aspects of the game. Some GMs might think that they know what is best and don't need to respect the wishes of their players, but I think most aren't like that.

Certainly nothing wrong with that. But then, the magus did set himself up for it by blindly running off the edge of the tower.

Yeah, and I think that's kind of a key difference in play styles. We very often do crazy things if we think our characters would do them, and we are fully prepared to pay the price.

Another example is that we attacked an NPC at a point several levels before we were supposed to finally confront him. Our DM stopped and flat out told us that we weren't supposed to attack him yet and didn't stand a chance. We decided that our characters would have attacked him so we attacked him. The DM didn't want to cause a TPK, so he had the bad guy throw some lower level spells at us and had the town guard come down the road, causing the bad guy to take off. He pulled his punches, and he made it obvious.

So I think that, with your example, with our group of regular players, we would have preferred the rogue getting snacked on while everyone else gets to run away. All the more reason to get revenge against the beast.

But I understand that wouldn't be right for everyone, and that it makes more work for the GM to cycle through characters. I wouldn't be against playing a game where the GM did what you did. Like I've said (despite my regretfully snarky comment about Hama in my last post) I just believe that the GM should do it in a way that let's players know it's happening. That's my issue. If I know a GM is going to fudge, then I will play a class that doesn't rely on spells and abilities that depend on the whim of the GM to be effective, and I would hope that he would make it obvious when he fudged to help a player. Otherwise, how would you know if you actually won a fight or if you just got a gold star for showing up?

And again, other people might prefer never knowing that the GM saved their life. It's just a preference.

Side A: Let's stop trying to ignore the fact The rulebook suggests to GMs to fudge rolls. It doesn't say "warn your players if you're doing this." The fact it's printed there on the page implies that unless anyone says otherwise, the GM is going to assume they're free to fudge rolls. Your own dislike of that particular guideline doesn't suddenly make it something that needs announcing first, the onus is on the individual to bring up the suggestion of removing that option if you want it removed from the game.

Side B: Get it into your heads that not everyone wants to play that way, and that "change anything you don't like in this rulebook in order to have fun" also applies to that particular guideline.

(There, now both sides can direct their hate at me :P)

I deleted a post I made. I think we are arguing over matters of personal preference, so it's kind of pointless to keep it up. I agree with this post. When I DM I don't fudge. I don't believe that the guy who trades off DMing with me fudges either, although I could be wrong. I hope he doesn't.

Personally as a player I don't like fudging, especially if I'm playing one of the classes most harshly penalized by fudging.
But obviously different groups are different. In our group we all have backup characters that we have worked into the plot so that we can pick them up if our current character dies. If my witch dies, I have a bard who has helped the party research some locations of ancient ruins. So in our group we are prepared to transition characters if some unlucky rolls are made. Obviously not everybody plays that way, and a DM might be more averse to letting bad luck kill a character if it means a lot of disruption.

I think that the most memorable moments I've played are when unlikely or crazy things have happened due to funky dice. If I wanted a scripted narrative I would read a book. For me the fun of gaming is that it is unpredictable, and the bad guy could anticlimactically fail, or a lone hobgoblin could, against all odds, wipe out half of the heroes. That's the kind of thing that separates a game based on the roll of dice from a movie based on the monomyth and a formulaic "Save the Cat" beat sheet.

A druid that constantly asks the barbarian if he knows how many iron elementals had to die to make that greatsword.

In addition to what son of the veterinarian said, don't assume players won't connect two things that actually are unrelated. I was running a group who came to a small village to figure some stuff out. In order to add some flavor and detail to the town I mentioned the hanging tree at the edge of town. I used one too many of the kind of words that make players assume the GM is trying to drop hints, like "forlorn" and "haunted." So for the rest of the time in the village every time the players hit a wall they would go back to the tree and look around. Or they would be interviewing someone and they say "don't forget to ask him about the tree," "oh yeah, I ask him about the tree." I let it keep going because it was really funny for me, but in retrospect it was probably really frustrating for the players who believed they were following general campaign plot conventions.

So I guess what I'm saying is find the perfect balance between running the campaign on rails and crafting a fully-realized, intricately-defined sandbox world.

Yeah it sounds like making a summoner would do your group a lot of good. It can actually melee, and all the casters can baby it with their buff spells. It could be your school mascot.