Sometimes I can tell when my current DM fudges a roll to miss an attack or reduce damage. He has a tell in the specific way he pauses and breathes before announcing the roll, then tries to hurry to the next turn, which only seems to happen when someone is in a life-or-death scenario, but “luckily” survives.
Should I let him know he has a tell? Will it be less fun (or more stressful) for him if he knows I know?
As a DM, I ask my players at session zero, do you want me to fudge rolls to make the game more fun/interesting, or let the dice fall how they may? I’ve never had a table ask me to not fudge the dice.
Wait, so every table you’ve had has been fine with you fudging dice? That’s honestly wild to me.
In 22 years and close to probably 100 games that I have ran, not once have I been aske not to fudge. But also, I’ve not been asked to reveal when I do. Which is actually pretty rare. I’ve probably only fudged maybe a dozen rolls in that time.
That’s seriously crazy to me! Wow. It’s one of the things I would definitely say ‘do not do’ if a GM asked me that. Obviously I know everyone doesn’t feel as I do, I’m just surprised that in so long, no one has really cared.
I hate to say it, I think you might be in the minority here.
My take has always been that D&D isn’t an adversarial game - the DM isn’t trying to ‘win’, they’re just trying to keep things entertaining for the players.
The trouble with random is that it doesn’t always follow story beats, and doesn’t always feel fun.
A big boss not getting any hits in due to bad rolls deminishes the perceived threat, and the ultimate value of the victory. Stupid zombies that just won’t stay down despite the fact that everyone is now bored with them can easily be kept down.
As long as you know when to do it, it can be super useful for everyone.
As I mentioned, I understand there are different tables abd thoughts on this, and as such, different DM styles as well.
For me, while it’s the DMs job to help keep things entertaining (though that’s everyone’s job in my mind), it’s also the DMs job to be consistent in the world, since they essentially are the world. I personally don’t like fudging because half of the reason my tables play is for things to be determined by the dice, not the DM. I get that other tables play for story and are fine with fudging.
In my experience, this isn’t a thing you can discuss to try and convince people otherwise. This isn’t me trying to tell people fudging is bad and they should feel bad. I honestly just think after 22 years and hundreds of games, it’s crazy that no one cared about it. That’s all.
Shouldn’t be downvoted just for liking things differently.
sometimes the dice need to hit… and sometimes they don’t ;)
As a player, I make a point of telling my GMs that I dislike fudged rolls and I’d rather roll a new character than claim a false victory.
As a GM, I will always at session 0 tell my players that I don’t fudge rolls and often prefer to make my GM rolls out in the open whenever there’s a chance they could kill someone or end an encounter. My attitude is that when the players can see my rolls and I tell them in advance “if this is higher than X it’ll hit so-and-so”, we’re all on the same side as we watch the roll play out.
IMO it’s not the job of the GM to tilt the game system itself towards the players, but rather to balance encounters and challenges to be beatable, and then see what happens right alongside the players.
To answer your question, tell him if it affects your experience of the game. Don’t let it ruin your fun in silence, no GM wants players to do that.
IMO it’s not the job of the GM to tilt the game system itself towards the players, but rather to balance encounters and challenges to be beatable, and then see what happens right alongside the players.
IMHO, the GM’s role is a lot fuzzier than that and is wholly dependent on your specific party’s (and their own!) preferences. I’d say this is simply what you prefer to do as a GM, rather than what a GM should be doing.
Right. I was just expressing my personal philosophy in my previous comment, not prescribing how everyone should play every game. At least, that was the intent.
to balance encounters
…and sometimes that has to happen on the fly.
Sometimes I’ve made a fight too easy so I need to provide the goblins with some backup.
Sometimes the backup was always planned after round 2 but maybe it’s a little less than I planned because they’re already near death. Maybe it’s a little more because they’ve killed most already. Maybe the party was stealthy so less backup. Maybe the party was overly loud so there is more.
Also sometimes the pause to “save” a character comes from determining/calculating if the action is “fair”. Why did they just take that “stupid” action. Maybe I undersold just how powerful this NPC was. But maybe I did describe them as having an otherworldly glowing set of armor and you watched them wrestle a bar full of orcs and slice off one their heads in a single blow.
Perhaps you’ve reached a point between player and DM where this isn’t necessary anymore, but I don’t fault anyone who might fudge a roll to keep the game fun.
I just personally try to balance things without ever taking away from the results on the dice themselves. The changes of plan you listed are all fair game in my mind for balancing encounters. There’s nothing wrong with balancing on the fly, I just think if you’re at the point of lying about the results of individual die rolls, at that point you’re disrespecting both the players and the game system. There’s risk embedded in the system by design. If you don’t want that, play a different system where you can handwave risk away and railroad events without cheating.
That said, this is all just my personal philosophy about GMing and games in general.
FYI to any GM who wants the best of both worlds; fudge the DC and roll out in the open. BBEG normally has a +9 to attack? Well, now he has a +2.
Still won’t save people from any super high rolls, but at least you can (secretly) decrease the risk while keeping tensions and attentions high.
Sure, and you can even improv a reason why that might be the case. “Normally he has a +9 to hit but he was distracted by how the barbarian just decapitated his minion in a single strike on a nat 20”
@MrMusAddict @entropicdrift during our campaign for big rolls our DM rolls on the table I’m sure he BS’S some of the DC’s but like hey it does help with the suspense
My DM once fudged something and I didn’t question it at all. It was in curse of Strahd, the party was level 3. He was using the RAW rules in the adventure for random encounters, one of which says the party can get jumped by 3d6 wolves. He rightly surmised that us getting ganked 10 wolves wasn’t a very interesting conclusion to our story, so he made up some dumb deus ex machina, and I was 100% there for it. If WOTC can’t make a balanced random encounter table, why should we be beholden to it?
Exactly. Encounter building/balancing doesn’t stop at initiative.
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.
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.
Long time DM currently running Curse of Strahd for my group. I think I’m in the minority but I actually publicly roll everything. I use Foundry and let my players see all of my results. I also insist on seeing all of theirs. I find it actually kind of fun.
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.
Since I’m from the OSR niche, fudging dice is a big no-no for me. When I GM I roll in the open and would prefer if my GM would do the same.
For me, fudged dice cheapens any victory and makes me less enthusiastic about the game. The stakes are gone.
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.
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
1816.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
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.
I haven’t noticed that in my games, but if I was your DM, then I’d rather know that I had a tell
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.
Of course I notice, and then I drop out of future sessions.
