So that my players see me roll the dice. As long as they believe the illusion, the roll is real to them, and so their experience is meaningful and memorable; at the end of the day, that’s what matters most to me as a DM.
I don’t fudge rolls, but I do dynamically adjust enemy’s max HP depending on how well my players are doing.
Yeah, I’m not big on fudging rolls, but that’s one thing I will do. In my last campaign, I had statted up the first real villain for my players to fight, and they knocked him out in one punch. I would have made him one level higher, but then his own attacks would have been strong enough to one-shot some of the players. Level 1 woes.
I would have made him one level higher, but then his own attacks would have been strong enough to one-shot some of the players
Level 1 woes are real, but remember, NPCs don’t have to follow player character creation rules
Yeah, I learned that too. I had come up with a villain later on who had a very defense/counterattack focused stationary fighting style combined with sundering armor, and I thought I could make him a big threat, but then he ended up completely flopping because there just wasn’t support for building that style and making it strong. Now I’m playing looser, and stealing lair actions from D&D (minus the lair part most of the time) to make my loner villains work.
Play a system that accounts for this.
Fate gives you fate points to spend when you do t like a roll. It also gives you “succeed at a cost” if your fate points are exhausted or not enough.
You can still just roll with it (pun intended) and die to a random goblin if that’s fun. But you also have agreed upon procedure for not doing that. “It looks like the goblin is going to gut me, but (slides fate point across the table) as it says on my sheet I’m a Battle Tested Bodyguard, so I twist at the last second and he misses (because the fate point bumps my defense roll high enough)”
This is pretty easy to import into DND, too, if you like the other parts of it
Baldurs Gate does a good job of this with the inspiration
Inspiration is already in DnD!
Inspiration in raw DND is extremely under baked. Bg3 expanded it a little by letting you hold more than one, and actually using it. Most tables I’ve played at don’t use it, or it’s pretty rare.
Fate by default starts you with 3 fate points per session. It expects you to use them and has clear ways of getting more.
I really tried to get my old DND group to use then more, but it didn’t really click. I wasn’t a good fit for that group really.
Also scrolls of revivify are so common, and even without them you can revive an ally for 100 gold with no strings attached
To newer DMs: Never admit to your players whether or not you fudge rolls. As the DM, The only thing you need to do to maintain the integrity of your game is to shut your damn mouth when you bend the rules. The players just need the illusion maintained.
If my players need plot armor, they can spend their hero points on it.
Same with mine and Bennies. You can’t take them with you after all.
When we played PF2e (for 2.5 years), the amount of times we used a hero point to reroll into a natural 1 was statistically unlikely.
I’m a first time DM and I struggle with this a lot haha. There are times where I feel a roll is appropriate, so I do it, and whatever is supposed to happen fails, then I realize… “what the hell is supposed to happen if that doesn’t work?” so it just kinda happens anyways… IDK if my players have caught on…
You could just skip the roll, because if failure is unacceptable then it isn’t appropriate.
That’s where my problem comes from. I’m not experienced enough to know immediately where failure is acceptable or not; rather, I don’t always have backup plans or ideas for when things that should be able to fail, fail. So I roll, and it fails, and it should fail, but I’ve got no idea what happens when it does. So it doesn’t fail.
I think I’m getting better at improv-ing events and making backup plans. It’s still difficult for me to find the balance between the story I want to tell/ have prepared vs the story that my players wind up creating, but checking in with my party here and there tells me everyone’s having fun and only rarely does anyone feel gipped or abused by dice rolls.
Prior to rolling, think about what will happen if the roll fails or succeeds. If you are worried about failure at all, that is a good sign that failing is probably not an option. Basically, if you are able to make the decision to fudge it when it happens you had the same time frame to decide notnto risk that need to fudge in the first place.
Over time with more experience you will find ways to make failure a bump in the road to fun tims.
Thanks for spelling it out like this. I think I’ve been too focused on “doing something” and keeping the game going, that I don’t stop to think before doing some things. Ie rolling before I know what will happen with a failure. I’ll try to take more quick pauses to think things through, and worry about smoothness of play later.
It might be a little bumpy at first, but should speed up with a bit of practice and the practice of thinking about failure will happen more often!. Plus the more you think about it the better you will get at coming uo with ideas for failure and that will let you being back the random rolls!
I learned in my first adventure that what I’ve prepared to happen might just be stupid and unrealistic, so I’m never too attached to it. If the dice say it doesn’t happen, they know better than me, so I just toss it. If I lie about the dice to make it happen anyway, I’m making a worse experience for everyone.
If a failure means a path is unavailable, see if you can open up a different path. If there are no other paths, just let them have this one for free.
As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They’re a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.
Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.
Sometimes You roll dice just to make them think something’s up.
DM: Roll a perception check
Player: Nat 20
DM: There’s nothing there.Wait, what took the air away?
My 2 cents is that at the low levels, players need a bit of a buffer. A Lvl1 wizard with +0 CON can be one-shot by a goblin rolling a crit, to say nothing of the bugbear boss of the first encounter in Lost Mines of Phandelver (many people’s first introduction to DnD 5e)
So minor selective fudging to keep the characters alive long enough for them to at least be wealthy enough to afford a Revivify seems like a small and harmless enough concession to me
Yeah, our sorcerer got one shot by the goblins. Later on a mage wanted to punish whatever attacked him with magic missile and accidentally killed him. Now bro’s a meme for dying in the first round.
Speaking of the bugbear, we were all at 1 hp at the end of the fight, and only because we managed to turn goblins to our side (and Kelemvorism).
If it’s a 1st level character is there any harm in simply letting them be killed by a goblin? Depends on what you’re looking for in a game but an early death can lead to some nice storytelling
Because it takes longer to roll up a new one than a table really needs as an interruption.
Purely practical imo. You don’t want things derailed that early. Later on, a death can be worked with, made part of a story. In the first three sessions? It’s just a pain in the ass
That’s when we find out the player’s wizard character, Ehariel, has a long lost brother named Aharial with a suspiciously identical set of stats and backstory
He also has been looking for his brother for years only to conveniently find the party minutes after his brother dies
How to tell if someone likes writing more than improv:
Look if someone’s having a bad time, it don’t cost much to throw em a bone. Like sure, that last attack killed them a round early because everyone has had a moment to feel proud today but you. Or like the spellcaster who is feeling a bit shitty because every monster has saved against their spells by some fluke today.
Like if they aren’t having fun, what am I doing here?
Video games do this shit all the time. Famously the first GoW gave new players a small boost in multiplayer. It led to a community and better engagement in the long run because people had more fun. BG3 has that goofy ‘karmic dice’ system, which is on by default. Fire emblem lies. etc etc
the problem with flubbing is the dishonesty and unilateralness. You can play a different system that doesn’t create the situation your players don’t like so easily.
Or honestly just import Fate points and “succeed at a cost” into dnd. The dice system still sucks but that would help tremendously.
Fudging isn’t unique to DND, though I agree that people would be better off trying anything else.
The system is a means to an end. No system captures its tone perfectly through mechanics.
Well when you arn’t sure if the encounter is balanced from the beginning and the dragons breath would tpk in one hit its kinda better to turn the cone into a line and half the damage so you only have one player down.
i love how these threads are just people discovering the principles of game design on their own lmao
Fear, fear and suspense.
To give the illusion that fate was on their side.
I make a point not to kill my players unless they make a habit of doing dumb shit, or it’s “almost” happened a couple times already.
Especially if I get several good rolls or they get several bad rolls in a row.
The game should be fun for everyone, and if even one player goes home upset with the session I will have considered my night a failure as DM.
Not that I consider it a failing or even “bad” if someone else kills off their players. Everyone has different expectations from games and I’ve seen fantastic role playing of deaths before.
One player ripped their heart out of their own chest, chugging a health potion to stay alive long enough to place it in their spouse who had just died died, and another player healed the spouse.
They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.
What stakes do you have in your games? What does your prep look like?
