Do the BEST GMs fudge their Dice?!
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
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D&D, and any other TTRPGs that use their own means to randomise the results of actions, rely on chance and randomness to determine the future. And you might eventually come to the conclusion that the dice... are working against you!
Fudging the dice rolls means that you can simply ignore the dice and decide what happens instead of only describing the results of rolls. Some consider this to be an anathema, since these games are all about going on an adventure together! Fudging the dice therefore means that the GM is less like a player who is also discovering the journey together, and more like a director of this movie that they want to bring about. However, you can fudge the dice to curate the experience and fix mistakes... SO, is Fudging Dice Rolls Actually Good for Your Game?!
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and with broken games like DnD 5e, sometimes you need to fudge rolls to fix the broken system and massive level imbalances that they've never fixed
Fudging dice is increasingly necessary when the game system has a particularly terrible encounter building system. D&D5e CR system is really bad, and it's very hard for DM's to put anything together and have any confidence at all that the challenge will be what they expect. In a system like Pathfinder2e, where the math is really tight, you can actually trust the encounter building math. I've learned to embrace fully rolling in the open in almost every case with Pathfinder2e - and it plays out very well. Yes, moderate encounters occasionally are quite nasty when I can't roll below a 15... and some severe encounters are trivialized, because I can't roll above a 5. All of it is part of the joy of a D20 based game.
I think there is an unexplored assumption in the argument for fudging dice. It seems intuitive that encounters should default to a medium difficulty. I propose that you lose something by going with that assumption. A combat that was a breeze because the GM couldn't roll well if their life depended on it is a memorable experience and the realization that things can go really well or really badly are something that adds tension to the game.
However: I do think that D&D5 often requires you to fudge dice because the design philosophy overemphasizes randomness. Comparing this to pathfinder, pathfinder has more situations where a roll is either very unlikely to succeed or very unlikely to fail because the bonuses to those rolls differ greatly. When everything comes close to a coin toss, randomness can feel overwhelming. My advice for those cases is to just play a different system. Fudging the dice can create the illusion that the game is working as it should - but this illusion easily breaks if players notice that the Gm is fudging dice. Just as being under the total control of the dice feels bad, so does being under the total control of the GM - in any case, it feels as if your decisions do not matter, even if the GM may be a significantly more benevolent overlord than the dice.
One approach to solve this is the Cypher system. First, the GM can not fudge dice because only the players ever actually roll on anything - and because the GM tells them the difficulty before they roll. However, player characters can use their various health pools to exert themselves in order to get better chances of success. Another approach comes in Blades in the Dark, but it has to be said that it is directed at a specific tone. Blades in the Dark uses a dice pool system where only the highest roll matters - and you can get additional dice by accepting stress (basically damage) or by accepting another negative consequence the game master decides. The system is geared towards partial successes due to the genre it tries to emulate. I highlight those examples because they are player facing. This is because the game master has tremendous powers to deal with bad luck.
So let us say that the palyer characters managed to make complete fools of the pirates. Okay, in a later scene, the captain of the pirates makes an entrance, investigates what went wrong, punishes those who made the mistake, fixes holes in security and makes it his mission to take the characters down to save the reputation of his ship. What about if the BBEG looks like a fool? A former henchman uses the moment of weakness to usurp power and the players soon notice that the former BBEG was the lesser evil. This is all assuming that the GM wants to keep their villains as a major threat. It can be great for a game if those pirates return as somewhat incompetent recurring villains - a sort of team rocket of the campaign. Or maybe those pirates take their defeat as a lesson and become scarily competent.
While I do see merit in fudging dice in the players favor, I do think that doing so to save the dignity of villains misunderstands that a big part of being a GM is rolling with the punches instead of just telling a prewritten story.
So you have a PF2e book - have you played before :D just curious!
my take is that i think about what are randoms elements in the game space that need dice rolling (i.e separate whats random then what isn't)
im thinking skills as narrative keys that player just have access to what it does.
exceptionally fair take
Some times, theres a few moments the players " roll a nat 20" and theres barely any hype like other times looks suspicious to me xD
I will sometimes fudge damage dice if an encounter I expected to be fairly easy turned out to be much more deadly then I planned. But I don’t fudge hit rolls. This happenes especially at early levels (1-3)
I roll in the open. Let the dice decide
Just don't roll or find a narrative way to sway the battle.
Reinforcement, or a Deus ex machina always ready.
I'm gonna end this debate right now. THE GM DOESN'T NEED TO ROLL. They are not playing a game, or at least not playing the same game. Its not unfair for them to ignore the dice, because they control the entire world... It was never fair. Just don't favor some players over others, or prevent them from doing stuff just because you want them to do it your way. A room full a Bards all rolling nat 20's probably wont convince a Dragon to kill itself, or hand over all its gold, but a good roll and a well timed distration might convince them they someone else is here to kill them, and being their devote follower, you are willing to wtcher over their gold while they hunt down the intruders.
It's never good. If you throw out one rule you'll start fudging more rules, and worse if a player realizes it. It breaks the trust between player and GM.