On accident, misreading bonuses, but never on purpose. Why use dice if I'm going to ignore them?
Why use a system at all then? Just sit around and RP. That's just as valid. If you want to resolve something with RNG toss a coin. Or use PbtA. Would probably fit your style better.
Well... That is actually sad. Also makes sense. Most of 5e players don't know most of the rules. That's why "it's rules light". It's not. It has a lot of rules for a lot of stuff that people don't know even exist.
I wish. I have tried so many times to get them to play other systems, but they ONLY want to play DnD. The worst part is tgat me, the guy who barely gives a shit about following the rules, understands the rules better than all of them.
I also did not keep track of my spell slots when I was still trying to play DnD mainly because my DM at the time was a major pussy who would never punish us for cheating openly.
Im not saying they were a bad DM, they just had a major crush on a player and because that player made a lot of mistakes, the DM made a point to never punish the lot of us for fudging things.
What type doing is hindering your role playing tho.
The math is there for a reason: so that you know when you are things are getting dire, and can react accordingly.
You might be acting all the time in a way that makes sense for the speed your resources should usually be spent, but you're losing out on the variability: some times you would have lost more, sometimes less, and it would have informed your role playing.
Missing on all that makes you a WORSE player.
Yes, but I fully accept it was a bodge-job fix on a n earlier GM frickup I made.
It's never a good thing to do, but sometimes it's the best option left on the table.
Yes, I have. But I've been following Angry GM's advice since.
You are literally god. If you want your roll to succeed or not, why even roll? If you want a certain thing to happen, you could do X number of things that don't involve blatantly lying to your players.
It makes sense if you're just teaching a game to someone. If it's their first session and they still don't know how the things exactly work is good to give them some help (maybe forgive the crit the city guards did with the bow when they insulted them, just knock them over and send them to jail), if they're been playing for a long time, then yes, no training wheels.
I fudge rolls, don't keep track of my spell slots, and regularly lie about my HP. I'm at the table to roleplay, not do fricking math.
That math is roleplay, and when you realize that you'll have a lot more fun doing it. Until then, enjoy the company of DMs who agree with you and don't keep track of numbers either!
It makes sense if you're just teaching a game to someone. If it's their first session and they still don't know how the things exactly work is good to give them some help (maybe forgive the crit the city guards did with the bow when they insulted them, just knock them over and send them to jail), if they're been playing for a long time, then yes, no training wheels.
Teaching them how failure and probability works from an early point is a lot better than teaching them that bad things can't happen to you at any point, in my opinion. Teach players that failure can be fun!
Having your character die on the first hour you have ever play is hardly fun or educational. since all you would do is make another character, all you learn is that characters are expendable. I prefer for them to learn that doing things have consequences since character dead can happen at any point anyway.
What do you mean it isn't educational? Do they get inundated with the knowledge and experience of failure states by space magic?
Besides that, haven't you ever played out a death that was fun?
I think even in the scenario that I wanted somebody to learn the game for the first time, I'd see an unexpectedly high damage roll or critical hit as an opportunity to give them experience with those mechanics. After all, what happens when they leave my "tutorial" and it happens to them for real? How long do we fudge fate for? I think if you really stop to consider it, there's no good answer to that because there wasn't a good answer for fudging it to begin with.
It just seems to me like the most obvious way to convey consequence is consequences occurring.
>It just seems to me like the most obvious way to convey consequence is consequences occurring.
Nice, sure. Imagine expending a bunch of time creating your first character only to play it less of an hour for some unlucky roll. Sometimes you need to first introduce them to the concept of a ttrpg before you can tell them about character death, you don't need to show everything in their faces when they're still trying to learn the mechanics of the class they're playing.
How much time is "a bunch"? I don't imagine you spend more than forty minutes on character creation with a newbie, and in which case they spent just as much time playing the character as they did creating it. They can always get to know the character creation system a little better by making a new one, probably in half the time it took them to do their original.
If you really wanted them not to die, of course, you could always simply fiat that they did not die from the attack without fudging the roll. You could go through the experience of death saving throws or whatever failure state your TTRPG uses, tell them how things would proceed from there, and then once they've learned that tell them you aren't going to kill them here.
How is that not a better way of solving your concern than fudging the roll?
>Imagine expending a bunch of time creating your first character only to play it less of an hour for some unlucky roll.
Then you make a new one or, if it's really early into the campaign, just reuse the one you made with minor changes or none at all.
But you can be damn sure that this player will now think twice when he approaches anything, and if they don't well, we usually call them "scrubs" and if they can't git gud, they get kicked from the table.
>Besides that, haven't you ever played out a death that was fun?
Also, this is another thing to remember. Characters dying is an important moment that shouldn't be wasted. It allows others to rally and come together, it allows for so many, many situations down the road. To protect the player-characters is to deny everyone involved everything that can come from a good (or even a bad!) death.
Death is probably the most important event that can happen in a TTRPG. Without a chance of death what is the point of rolling dice in the end? Reward without risk is a hollow victory that invalidates all the thought and work the party otherwise did to overcome the obstacles along the way. Any GM unwilling to kill their players fundamentally misunderstands the game they're playing.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Death is probably the most important event that can happen in a TTRPG. Without a chance of death what is the point of rolling dice in the end? Reward without risk is a hollow victory that invalidates all the thought and work the party otherwise did to overcome the obstacles along the way. Any GM unwilling to kill their players fundamentally misunderstands the game they're playing.
I feel like I've lost sight of this. I just keep making excuses for myself saying: "Oh, nobody has time to reroll characters" and "I'd lose a major plot point if this character died!" The best parts of my games of old where trying to handle the fallout of a beloved character dying. It gave the game some actual weight, and fudging the dice feels like a disservice to the players in the end. They might b***h about it, but is playing consequence free theater with math really what they want at the end of the day?
>Besides that, haven't you ever played out a death that was fun?
Death is only fun if it is rare, because if everyone dies every 5 seconds there's literally nothing special about it. The only times I've ever straight up killed a player character were in filler games for when someone couldn't show (where it doesn't matter because the characters aren't important) or it was planned out to retire a PC. >there's no good answer to that because there wasn't a good answer for fudging it to begin with.
If PCs in your system die to a stiff breeze, then it's a dogshit system. >It just seems to me like the most obvious way to convey consequence is consequences occurring.
Consequences can be good or bad, and if you constantly inflict bad consequences on your players don't be shocked when they stop making characters and start making builds and ignore the RP in RPG entirely in favor of trying to use your obsession with RAW to frick you six ways to sunday with the most broken, OP shit they can find online.
>Death is only fun if it is rare >only times I've ever killed a player when it doesn't matter or it was planned
What's the point then, if there's no physical danger to the characters for dangerous activities? >it's either rollplay or roleplay
False dichotomy, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Death is only but once consequence, losing a limb and getting a penalty can be just as interesting. We used it a lot on Forgotten Lands.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>What's the point then, if there's no physical danger to the characters for dangerous activities?
They might be super powerful badasses but their friends, family, and the bystanders are not. >BUT HOW DOES THAT MATTER
Because it's a ROLEPLAYING game, the characters should behave as if they were real people in the setting and should give a frick about what happens to their loved ones. >False dichotomy, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
They absolutely are. If you're rolling numbers with no care for what your character would be doing logically in this situation and refusing to speak for them in a way that makes sense you're a rollplayer and there is no in-between in that regard.
Death is only but once consequence, losing a limb and getting a penalty can be just as interesting. We used it a lot on Forgotten Lands.
Losing a limb or any sort of functionality to a character is worse than death, you might as well retire the character at that point because they're as good as dead.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>it's not a false dichotomy
In-built assumption there, rolling numbers for no care. You're stating that it's not possible to roll numbers while caring for your character. That's wrong.
I'm sorry you've been playing with shit people. Never had a problem with folks both making mechanically functional characters and staying in, and acting in, character.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>You're stating that it's not possible to roll numbers while caring for your character.
I'm stating that if death or maiming are the only meaningful consequences in your game (which you assert), then there's zero reason for the players to give a shit about their character because they're a disposable tool rather than a person in a fictional world. >Never had a problem with folks both making mechanically functional characters and staying in, and acting in, character.
Is a lie you tell yourself. A good system makes it so that all characters are mechanically sound, there are no mechanically bad characters. HYTNPDND?
8 months ago
Anonymous
>False dichotomy, the two aren't mutually exclusive. >They absolutely are. If you're rolling numbers with no care for what your character would be doing
That is exactly what you stated. Again, try not playing with shit people. Or maybe not be a shit person yourself.
8 months ago
Anonymous
meant for
>You're stating that it's not possible to roll numbers while caring for your character.
I'm stating that if death or maiming are the only meaningful consequences in your game (which you assert), then there's zero reason for the players to give a shit about their character because they're a disposable tool rather than a person in a fictional world. >Never had a problem with folks both making mechanically functional characters and staying in, and acting in, character.
Is a lie you tell yourself. A good system makes it so that all characters are mechanically sound, there are no mechanically bad characters. HYTNPDND?
8 months ago
Anonymous
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
8 months ago
Anonymous
RPGs are for murder and loot moron
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Oh cool, now I'm fantasy rich
8 months ago
Anonymous
Yes.
8 months ago
Anonymous
No, skirmish games are for murder and loot. TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING games are for cooperative emergent storytelling where uncertainty is decided by the roll of a dice.
You are That Guy who shows up to the table with some busted "build" he found on reddit that has no character attached to it.
Is all fun until you end with people playing GTA and doing dumb shit because "it's just a character bro, who cares". When consequences don't matter, verisimilitude is completely lost.
>Is all fun until you end with people playing GTA and doing dumb shit because "it's just a character bro, who cares".
That doesn't happen unless you let them get away with not making characters. >When consequences don't matter, verisimilitude is completely lost.
Which is exactly why you should let characters die. If players are starting to behave as if they can simply respawn with everything intact, you suck as a GM and/or your friends suck as players.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>respawn with everything intact,
You mean starting equipment? Even if you let them have a naked character they will not care if they see it as expendable.
The rule here is: players should ACCEPT if their character dies, but it should WANT their character to live, and for that they need to see it as a living person, not an expendable avatar.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>That doesn't happen unless you let them get away with not making characters.
Why would they bother making characters instead of statblocks when they're just going to scrap those sheets 10 minutes later because you get off on killing PCs? >Which is exactly why you should let characters die.
Again, moronic extreme. If PCs are dropping like flies, nothing matters at all. Why bother trying to achieve anything when failure is inevitable? >If players are starting to behave as if they can simply respawn with everything intact, you suck as a GM and/or your friends suck as players.
And if they behave like none of the things they achieve matters, then you also suck as a GM. That's what happens in high-lethality games, nothing the player characters do matters because they're all going to die in the end and are viewed as disposable. This is why TSR/OSR is dogshit and nobody plays it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
You're taking the opposite extreme. That anon just said that if they die, they die, and you shouldn't fudge a roll to prevent player death. That in no way suggests that they're going to be dropping players like flies.
>That math is roleplay
No it isn't, it's rollplay. Roleplay is playing the role of your character, which includes speaking as them within the context of the game world and not acting on meta knowledge, even to the point of doing things that your character would do which are detrimental to them and the party if it fits who they are. >Teaching them how failure and probability works from an early point
Failure is fine, unless it isn't. As for probability, means frick all in a TTRPG. Dice are fickle, and you can say "oh there's a 39.5% chance of rolling X" all you want but when the dice say you're rolling three failures in a row that percentage means frick all. Luck is a factor in dice-based games. >bad things can't happen to you at any point
moronic dichotomy. >Teach players that failure can be fun!
Constant failure is not fun for anyone at the table unless you're That GM and you get off on flexing your infinite, limitless power on the players. The GM should always want the players to win but make them feel like they're one step away from death at all times.
>>That math is roleplay >No it isn't, it's rollplay.
What about the component of roleplay that involves playing out the reactions of the character to the uncertain and risks circumstances they find themselves in?
HP going up or down isn't roleplay, but players making declarative statements with full agency isn't either; that's worldbuilding. The point of the dice is to alter the state of the world in a nondeterministic way that the players and player characters then have to react to.
>What about the component of roleplay that involves playing out the reactions of the character to the uncertain and risks circumstances they find themselves in?
That's got nothing to do with the dice. How they react is roleplaying. >players making declarative statements with full agency isn't either
It straight up is. >The point of the dice is to alter the state of the world in a nondeterministic way
The point of the dice is to be rolled when the outcome is in question. If the outcome is not in question, there should not be any dice rolled. GMs who make the players roll for everything like it's fricking QWOP are the worst. >the players and player characters then have to react to.
The reactions of the PCs do not include the mechanics unless there are roleplaying-focused mechanics involved such as Aspects or some sort of similar mechanic.
When I first started DMing I didn't have access to any actual player's guide or materials. I got a single d20 as a gift and the entirety of the game was me and a few friends rolling it to determine general success levels while telling a story together. No character sheets. We selected classes based on concepts we thought sounded cool, assigned HP totally arbitrarily, and I told people modifiers for a roll just before they did it.
In those days it was hard to fudge rolls because without a DM screen, all we did was roll on whatever surface was available. As a DM, I checked every roll a person made as it happened. When I rolled, however, I did sometimes stray to a position where others couldn't see the outcome, and I did fudge that outcome according to whatever I wanted out of the interaction.
Years later, it's funny looking back on those games and thinking about how many faux pas and trespasses of the genre my friends and I got up to while we practiced what could be best described as a theater-kid facsimile of actually playing TTRPGs.
These days, I don't believe in fudging rolls ever. Verisimilitude lies in a variety of reasonable outcomes taking place, for good or for ill, and the fun players have overcoming genuine adversity is far greater than the fun they'll have succeeding because I've willed it to be so. More to the point, it undermines the strategic elements of the game that so many play it for, and I like to believe my tables strike a balance between roleplayability and actually functionally playing systems.
No. I've only ever played on roll20 and don't use hidden rolls, so everything's out in the open for players to see. I've given successes to players when they shouldn't really have won, or given them on the fly bonses, because they had a great idea and I wanted it to succeed (we're all narrativegays so we tend to reward each other for stuff like that) and I've run boss encounters where I wasn't actually keeping track of the boss's health, just let the fight continue until it felt like my players had hit it enough.
I used to do it all the time when I was running games in high school. To the point where whole combats would be fudged to create "cinematic" action scenes. It was always a bad idea--apart from cheapening the fun of the game, I put way too much burden on myself to "make the game fun".
Picked up DMing again after years, and it's much more fun to let the dice fall where they may. Using a simpler system makes the math much more transparent to the players, and they have to make the cost/benefit calculation about getting into fights without plot armor.
There's a stereotype that OSR games are le instant death funnel but I'm actually kinda surprised at how much dumb stuff they get away with.
I think it's mostly because they're afraid of delving deeply where the real dangers (and treasures) are. Lots of noodling around in safe areas picking fights for no particular gain. Last time they tried it, a character was killed and they got stomped and robbed.
I don't like to "punish" players to drive their behavior, but logic of the setting dictates that eventually they'll draw too much attention and get got.
I can say, unironically and with full honesty, that I have never knowingly fudged a roll, as far as I can remember.
As a player I've tweaked my stats to fit my character better (which has technically been cheating), and as a GM I have voided or waived rolls, made wild eyeballing calls, gone completely against whatever fricking rules may have pretended to be relevant, and I have completely and utterly obliterated players on numerous occasions just by sheer accident, fricking up encounters; I don't care much for "balance" but these were cases were the encounter was clearly just way crazier than I ever intended. I have done all these things.
But I have never fudged a dice, and I never will. I always hide my rolls unless it is necessary to show them for the flow of the game, but I never fudge the dice.
I don't fudge rolls, but I usually also have like 5 safety nets in place for the players in case I overtune an encounter. Which really, given I don't play games with monster manuals, is to be expected.
Last night. Players are interested in an npc (they want to recruit him for their squad), They got into a fight, and the diceroll said he had to take 5 damage out of 6HP.
Decided to give that damage to another NPC instead, who ended up dying from the bleeding. The NPC the players liked instead got a cap in his ass for 1d6-1, which after Diceroll was 0 damage.
In years of play, I fudged a single roll to ensure a key NPC couldn't be interrogated and reveal critical plot info. I kinda regret it, since it wasn't that important in retrospect.
I fake HP pretty often though - NPCs can have +/-50% HP in order for them to die at the most dramatic moment. During the most complex fights, I barely track HP, honestly. But I don't try to influence the outcome of the fights per say (and combat is pretty rare), so I don't think it's that bad.
I've fished a couple where I legitimately forgot to add correctly and filled in a die but I've never fudged just to fudge. What's the point? People who do this constantly only look like morons to anyone who knows basic probabilities.
I do. Not often, though. End of the day, I understand dramatic tension and pacing better than a random number generator does. There are some times when a dice roll is necessary but putting a finger on the scale will turn an ok session into a legendary one. And in those few instances, I have no problem with a fudge.
>Confess dammit, have you ever fudge a roll?
I usually DM, so half of the time I roll dice it's because the sound keeps the table on edge. Dunno if rolling for nothing counts as fudging a roll though.
That said, almost all of the times I change outcomes it's for the sake of keeping the game going smoothly and not in the interest of any sort of fairness. Sometimes (note: SOMETIMES) instead of a character being shrekt by an extremely lucky attack at an inconvenient time I'll cut the damage in half and destroy a randomly chosen piece of armor or equipment instead. Most of the time life is easier if you make the wizard go get a new staff instead of making the party go get a new wizard.
Once I had ongoing fire damage that should have killed my character at the start of my turn. Everyone else had made their save to get rid of it, I had failed three saves in a row, so I was the only one still taking damage. Then the DM introduced the boss monster and forgot (or pretended to forget) to tell me to take fire damage, and I didn't remind him. Then I unloaded all my encounter powers and we won, but we should have lost, our glory was built on a lie. I think I'm always going to feel bad about it.
There was another time in MtG where I swung with a 16/2, and the guy didn't think he had any blockers, but he had an eldrazi spawn token and he forgot that he could block with it, and I didn't remind him. Feels bad man. If it had been an official game of any sort then I would have called it a skill issue, because I know I'm going to make those mistakes too sometimes and no one will forgive me for them, but this was a casual 3v3 and I had no reason not to be helpful.
I would never fudge a roll as a GM, but I also wouldn't judge a GM harshly for fudging rolls, that's a style-of-play thing. Players who fudge rolls in their own favor are definitely trash. In a way it's not as bad as cheating at a competitive game, but I think there are a lot of not-complete-trash people who would cheat at competitive games and yet would never cheat at D&D, the kind of person who wants to cheat in D&D and who doesn't feel stupid after cheating is the kind of person that you don't want around.
Yes, if I think a player is having a particularly bad streak of luck I've been known to tip things slightly in their favor. I will never admit this to them
I fudged one roll when GMing a fight during a session earlier today to prevent a monster from failing a saving throw. I feel bad about it but the players would have trivalised the fight otherwise, and I needed it as filler because of a scheduling problem.
I roll as a suggestion, often keeping the roll makes for a better time for my players and so I keep the roll. But I'm not beholden to my rolls, and frequently just ignore them if I don't like the outcome for the players.
That said, that's only for NPCs and other DM-side rolls. Player rolls are absolute, because otherwise it turns into "my sword turns into a lasert, my laserproof forcefield blocks your laser gun, my laser is stronger than your forcefield..." etc.
I don't care if this is bad. I have no intention to change. I also eat Thai Food with a fork and don't put on underwear when I swim.
The tought of fudging never passed through my mind until some 5 years ago when I started seeing people complaining about it, so I decided to do it because you know, "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and use it for an entire campaign...by the end it really didn't change things that much, it was as "lethal" and there was as much "drama" as any other campaign, he effects are marginal at best...these days I put together with arguments about rolling vs point buy or about quantum ogres being good or bad...just virtue signaling
I don’t fudge rolls. I used to, but then I realized that the dice are a component in the story as well and they have their own story they want to tell. I don’t call for rolls nearly as much as I did when I fudged the dice though. I reward my players for role playing, the dice reward my players for roll playing.
Maybe once or twice to allievate some wounds loss against my mobs and even towards the pc's.
Now I make a point to roll almost everything in the open in combat. In some niche case (perception/insight check, among other things)
Being a DM and lying to your players about a roll just makes me think of that old Dexter's lab episode where he was playing DnD with his gay friends and being the worst DM ever.
Bad GMs fudge because they don't want to "lose" a cooperative storytelling game where the GM has absolute power anyway.
Good GMs fudge because they are human and make mistakes and have overtuned an encounter, or realize that the narrative is more interesting if a certain attack misses or hits.
Good GMs never fudge and instead find ways to move the game forward in a way that aknowledges both the player desires and dice results.
Short term profit is never the answer.
A healthy relationship is based on trust and handling problems together, not handwaving them away. Whatever situation you're fudging for, chances are it will happen again. Will you fudge then too?
I used to go easier on my players but I've learned to trust in them. Today I only do ONE bit of fudging and I'm not even sure it counts. When a player does a great deal of damage to a wounded enemy that reduces it to 1 HP, I often just sa, "good job, you killed it." It's been through more than one anticlimactic battle where the wind went out of the players when they turn the tide of battle and reduce the enemy to that point, and then nothing happens. Just drags it out for one more round in a very unsatisfying way. Especially if that next attack ends up being very little damage. YMMV
I'll fudge if the laws of probability are more of a suggestion. Recent CP2020 game had every single one of my players roll a critfail in a row, and every single combatant on the table roll a critical success, all in the same combat round - and two of those crit successes were headshots. >inb4 "you must accept the random dicerolls otherwise there's no point to playing the system!"
To an extent, that's true - but a TPK in a single combat round based exclusively on extraordinarily bad luck grinds the game to a complete halt while everyone stops and rerolls characters and I have to figure out how to adapt the game to factor in the fact that not a single party member survived.
optimising my dice rolls is part of the satisfaction. i'm not going to lie about my rolls because i want them to matter. i chose a feat or made a stat sacrifice or whatever, to get an extra fricking dice or modifier. you're going to eat my extra numbers on your creatures health and you're going to like it, and its not going to be a lie. and if another person is lying i will try to slash their tyres before the session ends if i can get away with it. and you'll thank me for that too.
>My character is sooo powerful. I am such a good powergamer haha >Is actually just blatantly cheating or "misinterpreting" rules with hopes that no one knows the system well enough to call them out
I 1000% fricking HATE people like this. I'm right there with you. I ALWAYS piss in the cereal of people like this and instantaneously call out their bullshittery at the table.
There are homosexuals at the LGS that refuse to play at a table with me because they know I will call them out.
at least they are ruining their own fun. they are the kind of losers who quicksave 500 times in a videogame and then actually use most of their spare time sitting there looking at loading screens trying to get a skill check that is actually just as satisfying to fail as it is to win.
If someone makes a choice in how a character is built or functions, meaning they sacrifice something else in that 'slot', then yes, it should work - unless it's a banned / problem ability, but that should've been discussed prior to the start of the game.
You're assuming that because someone is an optimizer they're a cheater and deliberately misinterpreting rules. That isn't always true. You can be a roleplayer and a rollplayer, despite what some of the homosexuals say in this thread.
>You're assuming that because someone is an optimizer they're a cheater and deliberately misinterpreting rules.
No. I have no problem with optimizers; if you can do something within the rules then more power to you. I only call people out when I am 100% certain they are cheating or misinterpreting the rules. I wait until I have concrete evidence.
I barely understand how the game system I'm DMing for beyond the fact that it's a roll under d100 system. I've been at this for months and I don't think the players have noticed.
Never. Neither as a player nor as a DM. And I have been playing regularly on both sides for 10 years. If something fricked happens, then something fricked happens.
My b***h ass cousin would physically turn the game console off if you were about to beat him in a video game. That shit soured me against people who avoid consequences for the rest of my life.
Only once that I can think of. First fight of a fresh game and this guy spent days building his character and he would have gotten critted to death before he even got to move. In retrospect, he should have just died right there, because he ended up quitting the game later anyway. I haven't fudged rolls after that. If you die, you die.
I fudge dice constantly. All the damn time. Sometimes I just roll dice to make the players think what is about to happen will be random, rather than being predetermined weeks ago when I took my notes.
A lot, almost every session. I want my players to have fun and since we dont play very often, it's a waste of time in killing them. I often make it do they lose valuables or think they are on edge but always manage to save themselves.
Never as a player, a few times to help the players when I was a DM for PF/5E.
Now I referee OSR and the dice results are a part of the player characters fun.
I only override the dice if the result is absurd to the point of verisimilitude breaking.
no, I have not. I've had the enemies do dumb things though, on purpose to give my players a better chance. Like a Stalker going for a charge attack instead of firing weapons, and afterward I said it was because his heat was high.
ITT >you shouldn't fudge dice >SO YOU MEAN CHARACTERS SHOULD BE DYING EVERY 10 MINUTES HUH!? HUH!?
what the frick kind of system are you mfs playing that homies be dying every 10 minutes if you're not there to change the rolls to save them?
While DMing, I'll roll for things behind the screen... just to make the sounds of rolling dice; I'll ignore the roll, however, because I've already procedurally determined all outcomes in my mind -- in fact, the *entire* game and the world it's set within runs entirely within a tiny corner of my mind, and I don't write anything down, or consult any maps or charts, or anything else, because it's all in my mind.
Used to when I was a teenager
Only in games that use straight line probability and usually having some metacurrency to keep it under control.
I fudge rolls, don't keep track of my spell slots, and regularly lie about my HP. I'm at the table to roleplay, not do fricking math.
On accident, misreading bonuses, but never on purpose. Why use dice if I'm going to ignore them?
Why use a system at all then? Just sit around and RP. That's just as valid. If you want to resolve something with RNG toss a coin. Or use PbtA. Would probably fit your style better.
My group refuses to play anything except DnD, despite not understanding half the rules.
Well... That is actually sad. Also makes sense. Most of 5e players don't know most of the rules. That's why "it's rules light". It's not. It has a lot of rules for a lot of stuff that people don't know even exist.
>I'm at the table to roleplay, not do fricking math.
Join a fricking improv group then you brainlet
Sounds like he and his group would enjoy fiasco.
I wish. I have tried so many times to get them to play other systems, but they ONLY want to play DnD. The worst part is tgat me, the guy who barely gives a shit about following the rules, understands the rules better than all of them.
At least you tried. I apologize for calling you a brainlet and will promote you to Midwit in recompense.
Have you tried not playing- actually no you seem like a perfect match keep at it.
The sad part is, you're unironically entirely correct.
I also did not keep track of my spell slots when I was still trying to play DnD mainly because my DM at the time was a major pussy who would never punish us for cheating openly.
Im not saying they were a bad DM, they just had a major crush on a player and because that player made a lot of mistakes, the DM made a point to never punish the lot of us for fudging things.
>I can't do math cause i'm stupid
What type doing is hindering your role playing tho.
The math is there for a reason: so that you know when you are things are getting dire, and can react accordingly.
You might be acting all the time in a way that makes sense for the speed your resources should usually be spent, but you're losing out on the variability: some times you would have lost more, sometimes less, and it would have informed your role playing.
Missing on all that makes you a WORSE player.
Yes, but I fully accept it was a bodge-job fix on a n earlier GM frickup I made.
It's never a good thing to do, but sometimes it's the best option left on the table.
Nope. But I've double drawn, stacked my deck, and switched face-down cards in play.
Cheating in card games makes way more sense than cheating in made believe fantasy game.
Yes, I have. But I've been following Angry GM's advice since.
You are literally god. If you want your roll to succeed or not, why even roll? If you want a certain thing to happen, you could do X number of things that don't involve blatantly lying to your players.
It makes sense if you're just teaching a game to someone. If it's their first session and they still don't know how the things exactly work is good to give them some help (maybe forgive the crit the city guards did with the bow when they insulted them, just knock them over and send them to jail), if they're been playing for a long time, then yes, no training wheels.
I've never had to fudge dice while teaching players.
Nearly 25% of my rolls are fudged. It's for plot purposes.
Keep improving. You'll grow out of it.
That math is roleplay, and when you realize that you'll have a lot more fun doing it. Until then, enjoy the company of DMs who agree with you and don't keep track of numbers either!
Teaching them how failure and probability works from an early point is a lot better than teaching them that bad things can't happen to you at any point, in my opinion. Teach players that failure can be fun!
Having your character die on the first hour you have ever play is hardly fun or educational. since all you would do is make another character, all you learn is that characters are expendable. I prefer for them to learn that doing things have consequences since character dead can happen at any point anyway.
What do you mean it isn't educational? Do they get inundated with the knowledge and experience of failure states by space magic?
Besides that, haven't you ever played out a death that was fun?
I think even in the scenario that I wanted somebody to learn the game for the first time, I'd see an unexpectedly high damage roll or critical hit as an opportunity to give them experience with those mechanics. After all, what happens when they leave my "tutorial" and it happens to them for real? How long do we fudge fate for? I think if you really stop to consider it, there's no good answer to that because there wasn't a good answer for fudging it to begin with.
It just seems to me like the most obvious way to convey consequence is consequences occurring.
>It just seems to me like the most obvious way to convey consequence is consequences occurring.
Nice, sure. Imagine expending a bunch of time creating your first character only to play it less of an hour for some unlucky roll. Sometimes you need to first introduce them to the concept of a ttrpg before you can tell them about character death, you don't need to show everything in their faces when they're still trying to learn the mechanics of the class they're playing.
How much time is "a bunch"? I don't imagine you spend more than forty minutes on character creation with a newbie, and in which case they spent just as much time playing the character as they did creating it. They can always get to know the character creation system a little better by making a new one, probably in half the time it took them to do their original.
If you really wanted them not to die, of course, you could always simply fiat that they did not die from the attack without fudging the roll. You could go through the experience of death saving throws or whatever failure state your TTRPG uses, tell them how things would proceed from there, and then once they've learned that tell them you aren't going to kill them here.
How is that not a better way of solving your concern than fudging the roll?
>Imagine expending a bunch of time creating your first character only to play it less of an hour for some unlucky roll.
Then you make a new one or, if it's really early into the campaign, just reuse the one you made with minor changes or none at all.
But you can be damn sure that this player will now think twice when he approaches anything, and if they don't well, we usually call them "scrubs" and if they can't git gud, they get kicked from the table.
>Besides that, haven't you ever played out a death that was fun?
Also, this is another thing to remember. Characters dying is an important moment that shouldn't be wasted. It allows others to rally and come together, it allows for so many, many situations down the road. To protect the player-characters is to deny everyone involved everything that can come from a good (or even a bad!) death.
Death is probably the most important event that can happen in a TTRPG. Without a chance of death what is the point of rolling dice in the end? Reward without risk is a hollow victory that invalidates all the thought and work the party otherwise did to overcome the obstacles along the way. Any GM unwilling to kill their players fundamentally misunderstands the game they're playing.
>Death is probably the most important event that can happen in a TTRPG. Without a chance of death what is the point of rolling dice in the end? Reward without risk is a hollow victory that invalidates all the thought and work the party otherwise did to overcome the obstacles along the way. Any GM unwilling to kill their players fundamentally misunderstands the game they're playing.
I feel like I've lost sight of this. I just keep making excuses for myself saying: "Oh, nobody has time to reroll characters" and "I'd lose a major plot point if this character died!" The best parts of my games of old where trying to handle the fallout of a beloved character dying. It gave the game some actual weight, and fudging the dice feels like a disservice to the players in the end. They might b***h about it, but is playing consequence free theater with math really what they want at the end of the day?
>Besides that, haven't you ever played out a death that was fun?
Death is only fun if it is rare, because if everyone dies every 5 seconds there's literally nothing special about it. The only times I've ever straight up killed a player character were in filler games for when someone couldn't show (where it doesn't matter because the characters aren't important) or it was planned out to retire a PC.
>there's no good answer to that because there wasn't a good answer for fudging it to begin with.
If PCs in your system die to a stiff breeze, then it's a dogshit system.
>It just seems to me like the most obvious way to convey consequence is consequences occurring.
Consequences can be good or bad, and if you constantly inflict bad consequences on your players don't be shocked when they stop making characters and start making builds and ignore the RP in RPG entirely in favor of trying to use your obsession with RAW to frick you six ways to sunday with the most broken, OP shit they can find online.
>Death is only fun if it is rare
>only times I've ever killed a player when it doesn't matter or it was planned
What's the point then, if there's no physical danger to the characters for dangerous activities?
>it's either rollplay or roleplay
False dichotomy, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Death is only but once consequence, losing a limb and getting a penalty can be just as interesting. We used it a lot on Forgotten Lands.
>What's the point then, if there's no physical danger to the characters for dangerous activities?
They might be super powerful badasses but their friends, family, and the bystanders are not.
>BUT HOW DOES THAT MATTER
Because it's a ROLEPLAYING game, the characters should behave as if they were real people in the setting and should give a frick about what happens to their loved ones.
>False dichotomy, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
They absolutely are. If you're rolling numbers with no care for what your character would be doing logically in this situation and refusing to speak for them in a way that makes sense you're a rollplayer and there is no in-between in that regard.
Losing a limb or any sort of functionality to a character is worse than death, you might as well retire the character at that point because they're as good as dead.
>it's not a false dichotomy
In-built assumption there, rolling numbers for no care. You're stating that it's not possible to roll numbers while caring for your character. That's wrong.
I'm sorry you've been playing with shit people. Never had a problem with folks both making mechanically functional characters and staying in, and acting in, character.
>You're stating that it's not possible to roll numbers while caring for your character.
I'm stating that if death or maiming are the only meaningful consequences in your game (which you assert), then there's zero reason for the players to give a shit about their character because they're a disposable tool rather than a person in a fictional world.
>Never had a problem with folks both making mechanically functional characters and staying in, and acting in, character.
Is a lie you tell yourself. A good system makes it so that all characters are mechanically sound, there are no mechanically bad characters. HYTNPDND?
>False dichotomy, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
>They absolutely are. If you're rolling numbers with no care for what your character would be doing
That is exactly what you stated. Again, try not playing with shit people. Or maybe not be a shit person yourself.
meant for
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
RPGs are for murder and loot moron
>Oh cool, now I'm fantasy rich
Yes.
No, skirmish games are for murder and loot. TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING games are for cooperative emergent storytelling where uncertainty is decided by the roll of a dice.
You are That Guy who shows up to the table with some busted "build" he found on reddit that has no character attached to it.
>all you learn is that characters are expendable
Good. This is something all players need to learn and ideally should learn early.
Is all fun until you end with people playing GTA and doing dumb shit because "it's just a character bro, who cares". When consequences don't matter, verisimilitude is completely lost.
>Is all fun until you end with people playing GTA and doing dumb shit because "it's just a character bro, who cares".
That doesn't happen unless you let them get away with not making characters.
>When consequences don't matter, verisimilitude is completely lost.
Which is exactly why you should let characters die. If players are starting to behave as if they can simply respawn with everything intact, you suck as a GM and/or your friends suck as players.
>respawn with everything intact,
You mean starting equipment? Even if you let them have a naked character they will not care if they see it as expendable.
The rule here is: players should ACCEPT if their character dies, but it should WANT their character to live, and for that they need to see it as a living person, not an expendable avatar.
>That doesn't happen unless you let them get away with not making characters.
Why would they bother making characters instead of statblocks when they're just going to scrap those sheets 10 minutes later because you get off on killing PCs?
>Which is exactly why you should let characters die.
Again, moronic extreme. If PCs are dropping like flies, nothing matters at all. Why bother trying to achieve anything when failure is inevitable?
>If players are starting to behave as if they can simply respawn with everything intact, you suck as a GM and/or your friends suck as players.
And if they behave like none of the things they achieve matters, then you also suck as a GM. That's what happens in high-lethality games, nothing the player characters do matters because they're all going to die in the end and are viewed as disposable. This is why TSR/OSR is dogshit and nobody plays it.
You're taking the opposite extreme. That anon just said that if they die, they die, and you shouldn't fudge a roll to prevent player death. That in no way suggests that they're going to be dropping players like flies.
>That math is roleplay
No it isn't, it's rollplay. Roleplay is playing the role of your character, which includes speaking as them within the context of the game world and not acting on meta knowledge, even to the point of doing things that your character would do which are detrimental to them and the party if it fits who they are.
>Teaching them how failure and probability works from an early point
Failure is fine, unless it isn't. As for probability, means frick all in a TTRPG. Dice are fickle, and you can say "oh there's a 39.5% chance of rolling X" all you want but when the dice say you're rolling three failures in a row that percentage means frick all. Luck is a factor in dice-based games.
>bad things can't happen to you at any point
moronic dichotomy.
>Teach players that failure can be fun!
Constant failure is not fun for anyone at the table unless you're That GM and you get off on flexing your infinite, limitless power on the players. The GM should always want the players to win but make them feel like they're one step away from death at all times.
>>That math is roleplay
>No it isn't, it's rollplay.
What about the component of roleplay that involves playing out the reactions of the character to the uncertain and risks circumstances they find themselves in?
HP going up or down isn't roleplay, but players making declarative statements with full agency isn't either; that's worldbuilding. The point of the dice is to alter the state of the world in a nondeterministic way that the players and player characters then have to react to.
>What about the component of roleplay that involves playing out the reactions of the character to the uncertain and risks circumstances they find themselves in?
That's got nothing to do with the dice. How they react is roleplaying.
>players making declarative statements with full agency isn't either
It straight up is.
>The point of the dice is to alter the state of the world in a nondeterministic way
The point of the dice is to be rolled when the outcome is in question. If the outcome is not in question, there should not be any dice rolled. GMs who make the players roll for everything like it's fricking QWOP are the worst.
>the players and player characters then have to react to.
The reactions of the PCs do not include the mechanics unless there are roleplaying-focused mechanics involved such as Aspects or some sort of similar mechanic.
The plot is whatever happens in the game. You don't need to fudge.
When I first started DMing I didn't have access to any actual player's guide or materials. I got a single d20 as a gift and the entirety of the game was me and a few friends rolling it to determine general success levels while telling a story together. No character sheets. We selected classes based on concepts we thought sounded cool, assigned HP totally arbitrarily, and I told people modifiers for a roll just before they did it.
In those days it was hard to fudge rolls because without a DM screen, all we did was roll on whatever surface was available. As a DM, I checked every roll a person made as it happened. When I rolled, however, I did sometimes stray to a position where others couldn't see the outcome, and I did fudge that outcome according to whatever I wanted out of the interaction.
Years later, it's funny looking back on those games and thinking about how many faux pas and trespasses of the genre my friends and I got up to while we practiced what could be best described as a theater-kid facsimile of actually playing TTRPGs.
These days, I don't believe in fudging rolls ever. Verisimilitude lies in a variety of reasonable outcomes taking place, for good or for ill, and the fun players have overcoming genuine adversity is far greater than the fun they'll have succeeding because I've willed it to be so. More to the point, it undermines the strategic elements of the game that so many play it for, and I like to believe my tables strike a balance between roleplayability and actually functionally playing systems.
> overcoming genuine adversity
> in a game
Why am i responding to AI generated babble
never
No, because I play games.
No. I've only ever played on roll20 and don't use hidden rolls, so everything's out in the open for players to see. I've given successes to players when they shouldn't really have won, or given them on the fly bonses, because they had a great idea and I wanted it to succeed (we're all narrativegays so we tend to reward each other for stuff like that) and I've run boss encounters where I wasn't actually keeping track of the boss's health, just let the fight continue until it felt like my players had hit it enough.
I used to do it all the time when I was running games in high school. To the point where whole combats would be fudged to create "cinematic" action scenes. It was always a bad idea--apart from cheapening the fun of the game, I put way too much burden on myself to "make the game fun".
Picked up DMing again after years, and it's much more fun to let the dice fall where they may. Using a simpler system makes the math much more transparent to the players, and they have to make the cost/benefit calculation about getting into fights without plot armor.
There's a stereotype that OSR games are le instant death funnel but I'm actually kinda surprised at how much dumb stuff they get away with.
They are lucky or you are not throwing enough monsters at at them or even enough traps at them or enough wandering monsters...
You should be using more funky traps like the ones from Grimtooth's Traps.
I think it's mostly because they're afraid of delving deeply where the real dangers (and treasures) are. Lots of noodling around in safe areas picking fights for no particular gain. Last time they tried it, a character was killed and they got stomped and robbed.
I don't like to "punish" players to drive their behavior, but logic of the setting dictates that eventually they'll draw too much attention and get got.
All the fricking time my slight of hand has turned a 1 into a Nat 20 a few times
I can say, unironically and with full honesty, that I have never knowingly fudged a roll, as far as I can remember.
As a player I've tweaked my stats to fit my character better (which has technically been cheating), and as a GM I have voided or waived rolls, made wild eyeballing calls, gone completely against whatever fricking rules may have pretended to be relevant, and I have completely and utterly obliterated players on numerous occasions just by sheer accident, fricking up encounters; I don't care much for "balance" but these were cases were the encounter was clearly just way crazier than I ever intended. I have done all these things.
But I have never fudged a dice, and I never will. I always hide my rolls unless it is necessary to show them for the flow of the game, but I never fudge the dice.
Dice are boring, and I avoid them, so no real opportunity to fudge them.
Does it count as fudging a die when the number on the roll is so high (or low depending on system) you don't even fully math out the modifiers?
No, fudging is altering the outcome the dice dictated. If you don't add the math because you all know it succeeded or failed, you're all good to go.
I don't fudge rolls, but I usually also have like 5 safety nets in place for the players in case I overtune an encounter. Which really, given I don't play games with monster manuals, is to be expected.
How many threads about fudging rolls you plan to post this week? Because it's Tuesday and we already had 5
Yep. Been a while. Dice didn't want any form of challenge whatsoever.
No but as a GM I have
>calculated damage
>realized the player is dead
>let them stay alive and reduce the damage so he’s just barely conscious
how is fudging a roll even a 'confession', its not a sin or mistake or anything.
I did.
Last night. Players are interested in an npc (they want to recruit him for their squad), They got into a fight, and the diceroll said he had to take 5 damage out of 6HP.
Decided to give that damage to another NPC instead, who ended up dying from the bleeding. The NPC the players liked instead got a cap in his ass for 1d6-1, which after Diceroll was 0 damage.
As a DM? Yes,
I also killed monsters that still had HP and gave extra hp to monsters that should've been dead.
In years of play, I fudged a single roll to ensure a key NPC couldn't be interrogated and reveal critical plot info. I kinda regret it, since it wasn't that important in retrospect.
I fake HP pretty often though - NPCs can have +/-50% HP in order for them to die at the most dramatic moment. During the most complex fights, I barely track HP, honestly. But I don't try to influence the outcome of the fights per say (and combat is pretty rare), so I don't think it's that bad.
Not once.
I've fished a couple where I legitimately forgot to add correctly and filled in a die but I've never fudged just to fudge. What's the point? People who do this constantly only look like morons to anyone who knows basic probabilities.
I do. Not often, though. End of the day, I understand dramatic tension and pacing better than a random number generator does. There are some times when a dice roll is necessary but putting a finger on the scale will turn an ok session into a legendary one. And in those few instances, I have no problem with a fudge.
>Confess dammit, have you ever fudge a roll?
I usually DM, so half of the time I roll dice it's because the sound keeps the table on edge. Dunno if rolling for nothing counts as fudging a roll though.
That said, almost all of the times I change outcomes it's for the sake of keeping the game going smoothly and not in the interest of any sort of fairness. Sometimes (note: SOMETIMES) instead of a character being shrekt by an extremely lucky attack at an inconvenient time I'll cut the damage in half and destroy a randomly chosen piece of armor or equipment instead. Most of the time life is easier if you make the wizard go get a new staff instead of making the party go get a new wizard.
Once I had ongoing fire damage that should have killed my character at the start of my turn. Everyone else had made their save to get rid of it, I had failed three saves in a row, so I was the only one still taking damage. Then the DM introduced the boss monster and forgot (or pretended to forget) to tell me to take fire damage, and I didn't remind him. Then I unloaded all my encounter powers and we won, but we should have lost, our glory was built on a lie. I think I'm always going to feel bad about it.
There was another time in MtG where I swung with a 16/2, and the guy didn't think he had any blockers, but he had an eldrazi spawn token and he forgot that he could block with it, and I didn't remind him. Feels bad man. If it had been an official game of any sort then I would have called it a skill issue, because I know I'm going to make those mistakes too sometimes and no one will forgive me for them, but this was a casual 3v3 and I had no reason not to be helpful.
I would never fudge a roll as a GM, but I also wouldn't judge a GM harshly for fudging rolls, that's a style-of-play thing. Players who fudge rolls in their own favor are definitely trash. In a way it's not as bad as cheating at a competitive game, but I think there are a lot of not-complete-trash people who would cheat at competitive games and yet would never cheat at D&D, the kind of person who wants to cheat in D&D and who doesn't feel stupid after cheating is the kind of person that you don't want around.
Yes, if I think a player is having a particularly bad streak of luck I've been known to tip things slightly in their favor. I will never admit this to them
I fudged one roll when GMing a fight during a session earlier today to prevent a monster from failing a saving throw. I feel bad about it but the players would have trivalised the fight otherwise, and I needed it as filler because of a scheduling problem.
>combat as filler
You are the problem.
Just cancel the session or play something else.
That was my first suggestion but the group wanted to play due to previous recent disruptions.
I roll as a suggestion, often keeping the roll makes for a better time for my players and so I keep the roll. But I'm not beholden to my rolls, and frequently just ignore them if I don't like the outcome for the players.
That said, that's only for NPCs and other DM-side rolls. Player rolls are absolute, because otherwise it turns into "my sword turns into a lasert, my laserproof forcefield blocks your laser gun, my laser is stronger than your forcefield..." etc.
I don't care if this is bad. I have no intention to change. I also eat Thai Food with a fork and don't put on underwear when I swim.
The tought of fudging never passed through my mind until some 5 years ago when I started seeing people complaining about it, so I decided to do it because you know, "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and use it for an entire campaign...by the end it really didn't change things that much, it was as "lethal" and there was as much "drama" as any other campaign, he effects are marginal at best...these days I put together with arguments about rolling vs point buy or about quantum ogres being good or bad...just virtue signaling
Well, never as a GM.
I don’t fudge rolls. I used to, but then I realized that the dice are a component in the story as well and they have their own story they want to tell. I don’t call for rolls nearly as much as I did when I fudged the dice though. I reward my players for role playing, the dice reward my players for roll playing.
No, I roll in the open like a civilized person.
It's not a story and you're not the author.
Maybe once or twice to allievate some wounds loss against my mobs and even towards the pc's.
Now I make a point to roll almost everything in the open in combat. In some niche case (perception/insight check, among other things)
Being a DM and lying to your players about a roll just makes me think of that old Dexter's lab episode where he was playing DnD with his gay friends and being the worst DM ever.
Most DMs fudge in favor of players, tho
Bad GMs fudge because they don't want to "lose" a cooperative storytelling game where the GM has absolute power anyway.
Good GMs fudge because they are human and make mistakes and have overtuned an encounter, or realize that the narrative is more interesting if a certain attack misses or hits.
Good GMs never fudge and instead find ways to move the game forward in a way that aknowledges both the player desires and dice results.
Short term profit is never the answer.
A healthy relationship is based on trust and handling problems together, not handwaving them away. Whatever situation you're fudging for, chances are it will happen again. Will you fudge then too?
Never.
I used to go easier on my players but I've learned to trust in them. Today I only do ONE bit of fudging and I'm not even sure it counts. When a player does a great deal of damage to a wounded enemy that reduces it to 1 HP, I often just sa, "good job, you killed it." It's been through more than one anticlimactic battle where the wind went out of the players when they turn the tide of battle and reduce the enemy to that point, and then nothing happens. Just drags it out for one more round in a very unsatisfying way. Especially if that next attack ends up being very little damage. YMMV
I'll fudge if the laws of probability are more of a suggestion. Recent CP2020 game had every single one of my players roll a critfail in a row, and every single combatant on the table roll a critical success, all in the same combat round - and two of those crit successes were headshots.
>inb4 "you must accept the random dicerolls otherwise there's no point to playing the system!"
To an extent, that's true - but a TPK in a single combat round based exclusively on extraordinarily bad luck grinds the game to a complete halt while everyone stops and rerolls characters and I have to figure out how to adapt the game to factor in the fact that not a single party member survived.
I am a straight white male. Of course I have never fudged a roll before.
I don't fudge rolls but sometimes I let the players "load" to an earlier part of the story to retry or change their approach
Yeah usually when I introduce a homebrew monster and made it too tough or too weak.
optimising my dice rolls is part of the satisfaction. i'm not going to lie about my rolls because i want them to matter. i chose a feat or made a stat sacrifice or whatever, to get an extra fricking dice or modifier. you're going to eat my extra numbers on your creatures health and you're going to like it, and its not going to be a lie. and if another person is lying i will try to slash their tyres before the session ends if i can get away with it. and you'll thank me for that too.
>My character is sooo powerful. I am such a good powergamer haha
>Is actually just blatantly cheating or "misinterpreting" rules with hopes that no one knows the system well enough to call them out
I 1000% fricking HATE people like this. I'm right there with you. I ALWAYS piss in the cereal of people like this and instantaneously call out their bullshittery at the table.
There are homosexuals at the LGS that refuse to play at a table with me because they know I will call them out.
at least they are ruining their own fun. they are the kind of losers who quicksave 500 times in a videogame and then actually use most of their spare time sitting there looking at loading screens trying to get a skill check that is actually just as satisfying to fail as it is to win.
If someone makes a choice in how a character is built or functions, meaning they sacrifice something else in that 'slot', then yes, it should work - unless it's a banned / problem ability, but that should've been discussed prior to the start of the game.
You're assuming that because someone is an optimizer they're a cheater and deliberately misinterpreting rules. That isn't always true. You can be a roleplayer and a rollplayer, despite what some of the homosexuals say in this thread.
>You're assuming that because someone is an optimizer they're a cheater and deliberately misinterpreting rules.
No. I have no problem with optimizers; if you can do something within the rules then more power to you. I only call people out when I am 100% certain they are cheating or misinterpreting the rules. I wait until I have concrete evidence.
I only fudge rolls as a DM if someone comes up with something really cool and I want to see it happen
I barely understand how the game system I'm DMing for beyond the fact that it's a roll under d100 system. I've been at this for months and I don't think the players have noticed.
I do it constantly but if I don't the party would wipe. Sometimes I don't even roll and just give them the win.
as a dm yes, as a player never
then again, i'm cool with my char dying, but my group would throw a shitfit if it happened to their snowflakes
Never. Neither as a player nor as a DM. And I have been playing regularly on both sides for 10 years. If something fricked happens, then something fricked happens.
My b***h ass cousin would physically turn the game console off if you were about to beat him in a video game. That shit soured me against people who avoid consequences for the rest of my life.
Only once that I can think of. First fight of a fresh game and this guy spent days building his character and he would have gotten critted to death before he even got to move. In retrospect, he should have just died right there, because he ended up quitting the game later anyway. I haven't fudged rolls after that. If you die, you die.
I fudged when I was still a beginner GM, but eventually it was time to get rid of the training wheels.
I only fudge as a DM if I feel the players are having too easy or hard of a time. Never as a player.
>ever
lol
lmao
I fudge dice constantly. All the damn time. Sometimes I just roll dice to make the players think what is about to happen will be random, rather than being predetermined weeks ago when I took my notes.
A lot, almost every session. I want my players to have fun and since we dont play very often, it's a waste of time in killing them. I often make it do they lose valuables or think they are on edge but always manage to save themselves.
When I was GMing as a teenager I faked rolls for like on session and then realized it was entirely unnecessary.
I have on multiple occasions, the thing is I don't do it to succeed I do it to ensure the story progresses or that others have fun.
Never as a player, a few times to help the players when I was a DM for PF/5E.
Now I referee OSR and the dice results are a part of the player characters fun.
I only override the dice if the result is absurd to the point of verisimilitude breaking.
No, never.
No, but I see character deaths as comical most the time. Keeping it straight makes clutch moments all the better too
no, I have not. I've had the enemies do dumb things though, on purpose to give my players a better chance. Like a Stalker going for a charge attack instead of firing weapons, and afterward I said it was because his heat was high.
The Stalker, btw. You can see why a melee attack wouldn't be the best option.
ITT
>you shouldn't fudge dice
>SO YOU MEAN CHARACTERS SHOULD BE DYING EVERY 10 MINUTES HUH!? HUH!?
what the frick kind of system are you mfs playing that homies be dying every 10 minutes if you're not there to change the rolls to save them?
While DMing, I'll roll for things behind the screen... just to make the sounds of rolling dice; I'll ignore the roll, however, because I've already procedurally determined all outcomes in my mind -- in fact, the *entire* game and the world it's set within runs entirely within a tiny corner of my mind, and I don't write anything down, or consult any maps or charts, or anything else, because it's all in my mind.
No one has ever complained about my games.