Fudging rolls and player agency

One thing about boxing is that you have to get punched in the face. Nobody likes it and it’s going to happen and that’s just part of it. So punch them in the face the first time, I say. Punch them pretty hard. Let them know that this is for real and it’s only going to get harder from there. No amount of jump rope, bag or glove work is going to prepare you for being punched hard in the face so might as well get over it.

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Where my analogy and your idea of “punching them in the face pretty hard from day 1” falls flat is that you can not eventually, successfully box or spar without getting punched at least a little. But you can! play RPGs and even an OSR-style game without needing to make it super lethal and stick to the rules and their consequences 100% time, no matter what players experience level is or what the situation is. Hell, even on this forum, there is Chiquitafajita, she is super interested in / busy using OSR, but is looking for a game that is very low on darkness and combat and very cosy, I think that is a totally viable and possible way to do Old School gaming. High lethality is only one of five-ish components that make up an Old School experience for me.

(New) RPGers can absolutely learn how to play the game and have a ton of fun and be extremely challenged without the GM needing to be 100% strict from the get go. After a few sessions (when the newb players know at least the basic rules!) you can of course make a breaking point and be like: “From now on stuff gets real, we are going to play more strict and your PC might die, often even. So let’s all make another back-up character and remember to play more carefully.” You gotta make them want to come back! And perhaps ramp up the difficulty based on their experience. Otherwise you run the risk that OSR becomes what old D&D originally was accused of: only for nerdy people, really hard to learn and by definition dark or violent. I don’t agree with that assessment of D&D, but I do want to reassure new people of that by showing them.

Even in boxing, there is no! reputable boxing gym in the world who would do that! -> Punch a total newb hard in the face during the first lesson ever. Hell, most won’t let you spar or even in the ring until you have a decent amount of lessons = know the rules/basics! If you can not defend yourself or know the rules, it is not fair to apply the rules to the max or to make you play (box) at full tilt with people that will demolish you. Then there is also weight classes, innate aptitude/athleticism etc, that a good trainer would 100% consider.

Hell, some of the most respected boxers of all time and some current champions are so respected because they get hit extremely little, Mayweather, Fury. Never mind fairly recent knowledge on CTE/brain damage, most professional fighters spar at 60% of power or less, with headgear, even with extremely experienced opponents.

To bring it back to RPGs and even OSR a little more, some people box or play RPGs to relax, or to get fit / a bit better at it, some people are going for hyper realism and rules as written, all the time. Neither is “wrong”. But I do think if you don’t tailor your game a little! to the experience of your group (whether that is using way too many rules and overpowering them because 5e book says to do that) or making them feel like they fail or suck at DnD by being super harsh, 100% of the time from the first second they play,… I think in both cases it might miss the point. The point is to have fun. When the style of play or rules get in the way, you throw it out the window. Even Gygax was a huge proponent of that, it is in the DMG, nonwithstanding how harsh he liked to play.

And he played super harsh with experienced roleplayers and wargamers or people that knew exactly! what they were getting into because Gygax had that reputation. Other than co-inventing RPGs it was what he was and is most famous for.

Even in certain OSR systems, with inspiration or action points or advantage, those are all really arbitrary decisions the GM makes. When you give them, why, how good a player needs to describe things or how good the plan must be before you give them those boons,… it is not hard and fast and set in stone at all.

I might give a total newb player advantage or more likely inspiration if she grasps and successfully uses a bit complex mechanic for the first time ever and proceeds to roleplay that action rather well, but an experienced player I would expect a heck of lot more off, before I gave them advantage or inspiration.

At the end of the day, if your players are having a lot of fun and feel very challenged and keep wanting to play with you, you are doing it right! I just always try to remember that what is very challenging and fun for one (old hand), is likely nigh on impossible and even severely demotivating for another (newb). But yeh it does appear we might have to agree to disagree. :smiley: Everyone has their own experiences and preferences and style.

I see your point, but I also extremely disagree to that for a simple reason: if they don’t know which rolls you fudged before they have no idea about how hard the next part is going to be. Maybe you made a single critical hit a normal hit, maybe you halved the damage from the dragon’s breath just once, maybe you did it more.

I think there are three ways to approach what you are trying to do:

  1. What Skerples did in The Tomb of Serpent Kings (take a look especially to the “false tomb”): progressively ramp up the difficulty, keeping clear patterns and without changing the rules. I’ve run the Tomb with people who never played an RPG before and not only they loved it, they learned from it. They have tackled far more lethal dungeons without much trouble. In fact, if your main concern is how to introduce new players in the OSR style of playing, you should read Skerples’ post on the Tomb. He did a very good work at addressing the topic and, whether you choose to follow the same lines or not, it will be helpful.
  2. Roll the dice and the be explicit when you decide to overrule them. Tell the players what the consequences of the dice roll would be and why you are changing the result. This way, when you decide to tell them “now things get serious” they have a nice grasp of what is going to change.
  3. Stick to dice but throw them lifelines: “the Ork hits you with his axe but…”. I don’t like this solution as much as the two above, but, again it has the nice advantage of giving agency back to the players. Things have gone bad, but they can somehow salvage the situation if they think smartly.

In general, the problem with fudging rolls is that you change the rules in a way that is both unreliable and unknowable to the players. When they decide to take a risk the have a more or less precise idea of the success chances. If you start changing those chances (and maybe you don’t do it the next time) you are impairing their judgment. That’s why most games, when talking about rulings, state that you should tell the players immediately when you make one, write it down and apply it consistently. This way the players know how it’s going to work and can rely on the rules to make their decisions.

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Fair points. :slight_smile: And I agree with you. And I disagree too. XD

I like Tomb of Serpent Kings a lot! Only issue I have with it, it is a long dungeon with many chambers. It could easily take a group of new players 2 or 3 sessions of 4 hours each to tackle that. To me, in the first few sessions I want to introduce players to most aspects of RPG. Not just dungeon delving. I want them to go into town, to talk to friendly NPCs, to forge a bond with one or two perhaps, to trade and buy things in shops, to traverse a few different areas and terrains, both wildernis, dungeon, city and perhaps more. I can’t do that if I am spending all my first 3 sessions running a dungeon.

Or I could, but would have to let them know that it is fine to return to the dungeon after going to town etc. As much as I advocate that GMs have a duty to teach their players the game and the rules, I also feel they should be able to tell part of the story, do different and varied things, some of which require no game mechanics much less exploring a dangerous area etc. One of the best sessions I ever ran involved the PCs getting involved in the fish and sausage selling business, we spend half of a session on this. It was 100% unplanned and unscripted by me, there were 0 rules from the book that applied, no rolls were needed and yet we had the most fun and the players learned a lot. For instance, they learned one of the most important things and feelings I associate with RPGs, that they can do anything, and that the game is about story-telling and cooperative world-building and character development as much as it is about rolls, combat, and rules.

In that hour I also learned at least as much about their preferences as players and their character’s trait as I did during any combat encounter or dungeon delve session.

I think we are conflating two things. Fudging a single truly critical/life or death roll once every few years! in extremely unusual circumstances vs fudging (important) rolls on the regular or every session etc). I have done the former, I never do the latter. The issues in your last paragraph are non-existent or miniscule when we are talking about the former, and that is what I have been advocating since the start of this thread.

When I wrote “without the GM needing to be 100% strict from the get go” I did not at all mean fudging dice results! I meant being slightly lenient when players do not know how certain rules work, what their characters can do and a few other things. The discussion is interesting but has veered off from the initial premise. Which is cool! But I thought I should clarify a bit.

Lastly, I play very rules light, my players seem to prefer that. They trust me to make fair and consistent ruling, and so the two problems you mention: the rules being unreliable or unknowable that has never been a problem. The 20 or so rules I / we do use in 85%+ of the time, all these are in printed out and given to every player days or weeks before the first session. They are very clear and applied very consistently by myself and players.

I am not saying I am “right”. Certainly not! How I play might not suit every player and definitely not every GM. But I do base it on GMing (only, I have only played 20 or so sessions as a PC), for 30 years and for over a 100 persons, vast majority of them newbies. My ideas are very akin to a GM with 40 years experience and a far better GM than I, Professor Dungeon Master. He for example advocates for not even bothering to roll damage for monsters, but to know/estimate the average that they do and simply apply that if they successfully hit with an attack roll, except of course if it is at a critical juncture or roll, then you do use the dice. He has his very, thoroughly considered reasons for this, check his Youtube videos on the rules he (does not) use.

That is not even the most extreme thing he does. He has no initiative as such, he doesn’t do skills of feats at all, there are no bonus actions, no two attacks and on and on. Some of his players have been with him for 30 years, some started with him not that long ago. People love his videos and Patreon. By that I mean to say his way of playing, with way more GM discretion and setting target numbers rather than relying more on written, unalterable rules, is very viable. Now if this way of playing is something you would hate as a player or GM, I don’t blame you one bit! But myself and my players love it. So I think we perhaps disagree because we have a fundamentally different way of looking at the game and rules, how we GM situations and what we consider a succesful and well-run game. And we might both be right! :slight_smile: In fact, I highly suspect so. The fact we write so much on these topics is because we obviously care! That is great sign I think for any person who is GMing.

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I’ve split the discussion in two other topics, because you raised some very interesting points (I’m loving this discussion, we are at the third generation of topics starting from your post) which are not related to the “fudging rolls” part.

I agree that this is less of a problem, and I have done it sometimes, but in the last months I’ve decided against it anyway. Since it’s still a pretty recent decision for me (I’ve been doing as you do for 10+ years and stopped like 6 months ago), I hope that the reasons that prompted me to stop are still clear enough in my mind to be exposed here.

Player agency

Unless there are communications problems (like they misunderstood the situation, you didn’t tell them something or such), they decide to do something while accepting the risks. If they charge the goblins instead of slowly working their way around them, they are accepting the risk of being clubbed to death by some green weirdos. While it can sometimes be an anticlimax, being hit by the consequences is part of the game. Maybe they did even count on that.

Long and not completely useful story about that time I wanted my character to die

This was the first time I started thinking against fudging. I was playing Vampire: Dark Ages and had been growing tired of my character. He was a very interesting character in a lot of ways (and is still one of my favorite characters ever), but he was starting to be out of place in the adventure. He had less and less motive to stay in the coterie and the rest of the group was becoming more and more aggressive, while he was a vegetarian scholar. So I’ve decided to retire him - or just have him killed.

Before I could speak with the GM about my plans, the character got involved in a very dangerous fight. He had no chances of survival, but the only reason he was sticking with the group was on the other side of the battlefield and pretty much in danger. I decided to make him charge across the fight, shoving vampires and vampire hunters away in his last, desperate attempt to save his favorite human. It was a very epic and satisfying way to get rid of the character. Being pretty good at maths, I knew his chances of survival were non-existent.

He survived. After that, the GM told me he had fudged a couple of rolls to reduce the damage he took because he thought it was too powerful a scene to have it cut down. I felt somewhat robbed. I had taken a calculated risk because I wanted that character to go down that way, and instead he was saved. I could have told him what I was planning straight away, but I was relying on the fact that there was no way in hell that, playing along the rules, I would have needed GM’s intervention to get what I wanted.

Removing the consequences or reducing them reduces the players’ agency, because their actions have less impact on the game world.

The role of the dice

As a GM, you have the authority to call for rolls or to simply decide when something happens. Since I’ve stopped fudging rolls I’ve started questioning more when a dice roll is required and when it’s not - or when some actions from the monsters are a good idea and when they are not. If you accept that the dice response is final, you too (as the players already do) start thinking in ways to call it only when necessary and when you are ready to accept the results.

To make an example: the Fighter enters a room with a trap. What I would have done before was just to roll for the trap (saving throws, damage, whatever) and then, if I was really disappointed, just fudge the roll. What I’m doing now is think about the possible outcomes before:

  1. They Fighter, with no way to know it, triggers a trap. Roll for everything (it may be lethal, am I ready to kill off a character at this point?)
  2. I could just remove the trap, maybe placing it a couple of steps inside the room, to give the Fighter a chance at spotting it
  3. I could give some warning, maybe giving the whole party a chance for a perception check or another way to search for the trap.

More often than not I just go for option 1, which is the most streamlined (and why did any character enter a room without checking it?) but sometimes I go for 2 or 3. Maybe the Thief’s player was too slow to react and the Fighter took the initiative - instead of deciding what’s going to happen I can get the Thief’s attention back (“As Fighter enters the room you notice a slightly different tile in the floor”) and put the decision-making process in the players’ hands.

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I fudge rolls some of the time each session but I am careful about when it happens. The priority is the story and how engaged players are. I also believe in GM fiat. Part of the social contract we all share is having fun. As GM, a lot is on my shoulders to ensure a fun experience. If fudging one number means that the enthusiastic Halfling gets to live against all odds, and everyone cheers, then I have no issue with it.
I allow players combat rolls, damage rolls, and initiative rolls. Other rolls, like Thief skill checks are done by me behind a screen. Allowing the player those rolls tends to highlight the mathness of the experience, and I’d rather stick to narrative and character.

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To quote Last Year In Marienbad, if someone can’t lose, it isn’t a game. Even life is a game in those terms. No fudging, no “DM screen”. Characters should all come with exciting and interesting backgrounds created quickly and easily based on the concepts behind their class and the imagination of each of the players, including the person telling the story or part of the story.
If character creation takes hours then of course players will be very frustrated if actual play kills them off in minutes. That is a fault of the game system and its inherent lack of balance. Dungeons and Dragons itself has constantly tried to find ways other than the most obvious way to get around this problem because it incorporated the murderousness of wargaming with the story telling of Braunstein and at a certain point the owners decided to stop evolving. Then newer editions have simply added fudging and various other forms of cheats and hacks without ever really addressing the underlying game problem.

2 posts were split to a new topic: The role of the GM

Total Gravedig of this topic.

Wanted to revisit it because for about two or more years I roll every roll out in the open and I don’t think I have ever fudged any roll (and it was already extremely rare when I posted about it even 3 years ago). And the funny thing is I play Shadowdark now, which has far fewer hit points and is more lethal than any game I have played so far.

The reason why I stopped fudging -and highly doubt I ever will- is because I have gotten better as a DM (I don’t really ever have to “correct” something that was unfair or really off) and my players have gotten way better and really far away from 5E expectations and very much into OSR thinking. In the OSR scheme of things, they really don’t even die often at all, despite me becoming more “hardcore”,… and they seem to relish the prospect or at least the possibility of death and handle it great when it happens. It certainly doesn’t hurt that rolling up and starting to play a new PC is faster and easier than it has ever been for my group.

So, I really have 0 regrets about the very few fudges I did! But had I known before my first session what I know now,… I think I would have switched to OD&D ish rules, done everything in open, never fudged and simply managed my players expectations. I never really enjoyed running high power level games, at all, but I -and many of my players way back- pretty much had no idea that there was a better, and ultimately much more fun, way to RPG. :grinning: Better late than never!

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