I’m still a pretty new player, but I’m fairly certain that in my group’s second combat encounter, our DM saw that we were going to struggle, so a few rounds before he thought we’d die, he started hinting that people on the street were hearing us. He didn’t play around with his rolls at all, which meant us getting hit by some very powerful (even permanently crippling) critical hits, and some of us rolling awfully on his critical miss table. As we started to go down, one by one, the door was getting battered, and when the crew was down to 1 member alive, the city guard arrived and intervened, scaring the remaining mobs and healing up the three of us on the floor.
To me, it meant that he cared about the dice rolls and wanted consequences and actions to feel real, but also he didn’t want our journey to end on the first night. But he didn’t make the entire encounter feel like a victory, and our characters had to deal with the repercussions of that encounter.
Sometimes that’s what it takes for new players to really feel and understand the consequences of their actions. Combat might not always be the best solution and escaping a battle is always on the table.
Not necessarily true as there are entirely different reasons for doing each. Only a bad GM would fudge a hit that actually penalized you. A good GM might fudge a hit to take the story in an interesting direction. Fudging rolls is just another tool in the box.
The point is to tell an exciting story - there’s no right or wrong definition of what that means for you.
The dice’s purpose is to take you down paths you might not have chosen deliberately but the goal is still to have an exciting story. If the DM wants to be like “I recognize the dice have made a decision but given that it’s a stupid ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it” then he has my full support.
Maybe a cleaner way would be to decide up front: which outcomes am I ok with? and simply cap the roll at that. You know the paladin only has 17 HP left and you don’t want the paladin to go down so the maximum roll you want is 16. So if you have roll 4d6 damage. You do: roll 3 roll 8 roll 12 roll 18 16.
If you don't mind dying, tell them and tell them they needn't save you. I would tell tree and ask them not to do that, at least with me. I'd prefer if they wholly didn't but meh
These days I play more 13A and it explicitly discourages such behavior too
Normally I enjoy BOL’s articles, but this one felt like the author was just summing up the Wikipedia article without any brief research. For example, Minsc and Boo met long before they arrived at Baldur’s Gate, in Rashamon, didn’t they? And isn’t it ambiguous at best if the new Minsc is actually the real Minsc or just a statue animated/given life by a wild magic surge?
If they want to pretend they’re not doing it, sure, I’ll pretend I don’t see it. If I think they’re fudging the dice too much, and it bothers me, I might bring it up with them privately, or I might suggest a group discussion, or I might just leave.
In general, I try to evaluate a GM as the whole package, rather than just the individual choices they make. If I like their campaigns, there’s no point in picking on individual decisions (beyond obligatory mild grumbling, of course, lol). Sometimes, they’re going to get results using techniques I wouldn’t choose, which is fine. If I don’t like their campaigns, there’s still no point in picking on individual decisions. I would rather drop out as soon as I realize something isn’t working out than stick around, lose my temper, and say something I will regret.
Agreed. Fudging should always be on the table, because sometimes an encounter will play out in an incredibly unsatisfying way, such as the DM accidentally making combat way too hard. In that case, you could easily fudge a roll and say “yup half the minions failed their saving throws and are killed outright” to get them off the table.
I would let him know that he has a tell, yeah. As for whether or not rolls should get fudged, I guess it depends on what you’re trying to get out of the game. For me and my players, my emphasis is on the continuity of the story I’m telling, so I tend to fudge rolls to keep things moving along.
Yeah we always played the same, number one focus was on the story. So if a dice roll was likely to completely trash the story continuity, everybody kind of accepted a little fudging now and then. But only for that very specific reason.
Fudged dice ruin the mood for me. If I'm playing, I'm there to figure out how to make crazy things work in spite of the risks. If I can't have that, I'd rather just read a book.
I don't usually talk about it in the middle though - I believe arguments at the table should be reserved for serious conflicts (rudeness between players and so on), not personal preferences. This is more a reason I'd check out of a campaign gracefully, and it's also one of a hundred reasons I really prefer to GM instead of play.
My DMs have rolled in the open, I kind of like it that way keeps the intensity in the game and combat, but they are nice enough to not attack us while we are downed.
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