I love fudge, but too much of it isn’t pleasant.
Rule #1: Maximum Game Fun
rule of kul (fun in swedish)
rul o kul?
I’ve definitely fudged rolls so something hilarious would happen, and our kittens are named after one of those scenarios.
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.
I’m a first time DM and I struggle with this a lot haha. There are times where I feel a roll is appropriate, so I do it, and whatever is supposed to happen fails, then I realize… “what the hell is supposed to happen if that doesn’t work?” so it just kinda happens anyways… IDK if my players have caught on…
I learned in my first adventure that what I’ve prepared to happen might just be stupid and unrealistic, so I’m never too attached to it. If the dice say it doesn’t happen, they know better than me, so I just toss it. If I lie about the dice to make it happen anyway, I’m making a worse experience for everyone.
If a failure means a path is unavailable, see if you can open up a different path. If there are no other paths, just let them have this one for free.
You could just skip the roll, because if failure is unacceptable then it isn’t appropriate.
That’s where my problem comes from. I’m not experienced enough to know immediately where failure is acceptable or not; rather, I don’t always have backup plans or ideas for when things that should be able to fail, fail. So I roll, and it fails, and it should fail, but I’ve got no idea what happens when it does. So it doesn’t fail.
I think I’m getting better at improv-ing events and making backup plans. It’s still difficult for me to find the balance between the story I want to tell/ have prepared vs the story that my players wind up creating, but checking in with my party here and there tells me everyone’s having fun and only rarely does anyone feel gipped or abused by dice rolls.
Prior to rolling, think about what will happen if the roll fails or succeeds. If you are worried about failure at all, that is a good sign that failing is probably not an option. Basically, if you are able to make the decision to fudge it when it happens you had the same time frame to decide notnto risk that need to fudge in the first place.
Over time with more experience you will find ways to make failure a bump in the road to fun tims.
if you don’t even roll, then you’re robbing your players from the feeling of a near miss
also taken to its extreme, your players will probably just work out that they aren’t going to die at all and start taking stupid risks that they shouldn’t
and yeah, at that point you can punish them, but you’ve been responsible for them getting to that state in the first place, so you’re essentially punishing them for your own mistakes
RPGs depend on mutual respect. If you think your players will metagame you and you need to punish them then it stops being a collaborative roleplaying game.
okay then, for you the game ends here:
your players will probably just work out that they aren’t going to die at all and start taking stupid risks that they shouldn’t
you can’t just not metagame
if you know a choice will result in a certain outcome, you can no longer make that decision neutrally
in fact, you literally can’t take a risk when you know what the outcome of a choice is, because there’s no risk to take
not even bothering to roll is barely a step removed from just telling your players “i’m not going to make the enemy roll to hit you because then you might die and you haven’t found your long lost brother yet”, and if you can’t see that that’s a garbage scenario for roleplaying i don’t know what to tell you
I’m all for rolls that make sense. If it’s an encounter, of course you should always roll. I roll in the open and players know what hit them and whatnot. The consequence is damage and/or death. But if you’re a thief and want to open a simple lock and nobody’s is trying to defenestrate you at the moment? No need to roll, failure is meaningless. You just killed a dragon? No need to persuade the king to help you. That’s a reward for doing something beforehand. But oh my if an orc swings at you with his axe I’m gonna roll the dice right in front of you so you know that critical was not fudged.
I skip rolls if players are either super prepared or their failure will not mean anything. But as I said earlier, it needs trust between players and the GM - I don’t make their lives harder as a punishment, I do that for the storytelling. And they don’t try to work around me because we skipped a roll for athletics when they had a full day to climb a tree.
Oh but that reminds me. I was metagamed recently. When the team tried to decide what to do with a defeated enemy one of them said “let him live, he will come back as a sidequest. When we kill him then that plotline is dead as well”.
Well he was not wrong but that needn’t to be said.
This is another thing I fear, that causes me to do probably unnecessary rolls. I want the story/ gameplay to have at least some semblance of believability, so I don’t want everyone risking their life on a curiosity because they know I won’t kill them, but I also don’t want to “punish” players every time they take a step off the walking path.
I’ll admit it right here: sometimes I roll the dice just to give the illusion of risk, when in reality I’m buying time to make up the results of what someone just did.
You can roll some dice but it doesn’t need to be a skill check (or whatever the naming is in your system of choice). When I don’t know what should happen, I may roll a die. If it’s high then it should be something good and if low, maybe it will give me inspiration to think about some new lurking danger. But I may discard the result and go with the gut feeling. Whatever, it was an “oracle roll” as I like to call it. Not tied to anyone’s statistics.
I like to use a deck of cards as well. In Savage Worlds, it is used to determine a random encounter. Clubs indicate an enemy, hearts a friebd, diamonds some good omen and spades obstacles. I like to draw a card so it inspires me on what should happen next (of course as long as it makes sense with the world)
I may discard the result and go with the gut feeling
this is fudging rolls
I occasionally roll dice as theatre myself. In my last session, I had a troupe of traveling performers that I rolled for on each act to see if they did well or not, with each roll hidden from the players, and I would then describe the outcome to them. Most of the rolls were real, but some performers I had already decided would fail from the beginning, because they were plants for the enemy faction and had a plan going on in the background that depended on their failure at the act. But of course I still had to roll to not set off any alarms. Going to be fun when my players later piece together “oh, that hypnotist didn’t actually fail, they just used mass suggestion to make everybody believe they did so they don’t come under scrutiny.” If a player catches on - one actually did pretty quick - then great, let them have the victory, but in general it’s one of the ways I like to create expectations so I can subvert them or use them to sneak things by. The enemy faction is very guerilla-oriented, so it fits their MO pretty well.
On a more general scale, when it comes to hidden rolls, if I really need something to succeed, I’ll make the roll not a matter of whether they succeed, but who succeeds. Keeps the story moving if I realize too late that that roll shouldn’t have happened because a failure brings the game to a halt.
I really like the “who succeeds” idea. In events where I roll a fail and have no idea what to do with it, I can just have the outcome only happen for certain characters, or tweak the “success” so that it isn’t quite so successful. Haha.
There are more better ways to make a player fear for their character other than death.
Like killing a beloved NPC, making the situation much worse, taking away their valuables, making their god angry, being hunted by assassins, making them wanted across the kingdom.
Death isn’t the only punishment a GM/DM has at their disposal.
sometimes allowing an outcome that should mechanically via the rules of the game and logically via the rules of common sense has more downsides than upsides
it doesn’t have to refer to exclusively player death
Thanks for spelling it out like this. I think I’ve been too focused on “doing something” and keeping the game going, that I don’t stop to think before doing some things. Ie rolling before I know what will happen with a failure. I’ll try to take more quick pauses to think things through, and worry about smoothness of play later.
It might be a little bumpy at first, but should speed up with a bit of practice and the practice of thinking about failure will happen more often!. Plus the more you think about it the better you will get at coming uo with ideas for failure and that will let you being back the random rolls!
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Fudging removes the joy of surprises and working through failures, or is a band aid to poor planning if failure isn’t an option.
a band aid to poor planning
you think you can plan around your players’ actions?
I know that I can, based on experience. It is often an outline and can be revised, but having that as a starting point makes rolling with the unexpected easy enough.
Like having a route and planning on how to handle unexpected roadwork or changes in train schedules. It isn’t necessary to plan every detail or how it will pan out, just major things that need to be handled until the end of the session and there is time to hash out the details before the next.
If my players need plot armor, they can spend their hero points on it.
When we played PF2e (for 2.5 years), the amount of times we used a hero point to reroll into a natural 1 was statistically unlikely.
Same with mine and Bennies. You can’t take them with you after all.
Depends heavily on what you and your players want out of the game. In all the campaigns I’ve been in the focus has been storytelling and character growth, so having a character die to some random happening would be counterproductive.
There have been situations within those campaigns where we’ve done things knowing that character death was a possibility, though, and in those cases we’ve carried through if the dice fell that way. The key is having buy-in from both player and DM on those particular moments of risk. Even a regular combat could turn into one of those if the player decides to press forward into danger.
Yeah. I can see I’m clearly in the minority, but I do want my character to be able to die at any moment.
I don’t agree but I like the meme, upvoted!
How to tell if someone likes writing more than improv:
How dare you cut a thread short, that could have gone on for pages and pages of bikeshedding, with your one truthful and incisive comment.
Don’t write on me.
-Sam Riegal refusing to use his free advantage except the one time where it would fuck with the rest of the table
My 2 cents is that at the low levels, players need a bit of a buffer. A Lvl1 wizard with +0 CON can be one-shot by a goblin rolling a crit, to say nothing of the bugbear boss of the first encounter in Lost Mines of Phandelver (many people’s first introduction to DnD 5e)
So minor selective fudging to keep the characters alive long enough for them to at least be wealthy enough to afford a Revivify seems like a small and harmless enough concession to me
Yeah, our sorcerer got one shot by the goblins. Later on a mage wanted to punish whatever attacked him with magic missile and accidentally killed him. Now bro’s a meme for dying in the first round.
Speaking of the bugbear, we were all at 1 hp at the end of the fight, and only because we managed to turn goblins to our side (and Kelemvorism).
If it’s a 1st level character is there any harm in simply letting them be killed by a goblin? Depends on what you’re looking for in a game but an early death can lead to some nice storytelling
Because it takes longer to roll up a new one than a table really needs as an interruption.
Purely practical imo. You don’t want things derailed that early. Later on, a death can be worked with, made part of a story. In the first three sessions? It’s just a pain in the ass
That’s when we find out the player’s wizard character, Ehariel, has a long lost brother named Aharial with a suspiciously identical set of stats and backstory
He also has been looking for his brother for years only to conveniently find the party minutes after his brother dies
It is the reason why I prefer starting at lvl 5
Also the classes all feel and play the same below that level.
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!
i’m kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i’d wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it’s just “i’m gonna skip this last encounter because we’re already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow” or even just “wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace” but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that’s part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i’m ok with them using fudging when they feel it’s warranted so long as they’re not abusing it to the point where there’s no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we’re all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they’re doing, and if we’re not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
Bro paragraphs are your friends.
What I found in the TTRPG community is that a lot of GM’s like to hear themselves talk. They write these huge paragraphs of sentences stringed together jumping from one topic to the next.
You can even notice this in the way the D&D books are written. Instead of using easy to navigate bullet points, it is just walls of text one after the other. Trying to find some specific knowledge in that is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
As a data nerd, I can’t stand it.
i’ve been writing a pretty big RPG module for years now and feel the same. in the beginning i was all about the prose and beauty of the written document. now, i’m just like “bullet points. go.”
if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table?
Well… If the story is so important why have players at all?
Where 2 RPG players meet there are 3 opinions
if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table?
Dice are terrible at making battlemaps, and don’t get me started on their awful faux-Scottish accents.
Actually, dice have a better scottish accent than me by virtue of not having one at all. But you don’t join my table for quality scottish accents.
Laddie, ye betterrrrr develop ain, afore ye git strung up by yer playerrrrrs.
To give the illusion that fate was on their side.
I make a point not to kill my players unless they make a habit of doing dumb shit, or it’s “almost” happened a couple times already.
Especially if I get several good rolls or they get several bad rolls in a row.
The game should be fun for everyone, and if even one player goes home upset with the session I will have considered my night a failure as DM.
Not that I consider it a failing or even “bad” if someone else kills off their players. Everyone has different expectations from games and I’ve seen fantastic role playing of deaths before.
One player ripped their heart out of their own chest, chugging a health potion to stay alive long enough to place it in their spouse who had just died died, and another player healed the spouse.
They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.
What stakes do you have in your games? What does your prep look like?
They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.
Rule of cool trumps all.
