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.
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
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.
There is a reason why the D&D 5e creatures have their HP written in dice values (4d6+10).
It allows for variation within the stat block. But it also gives a maximum and a minimum HP they can have.
Most of the time you use the average. But if the game is too slow, you can lower it to the minimum HP. And if they are steamrolling an encounter, you can just increase the HP to the maximum.
This makes encounters more dramatic and fun.
Rule #1: Maximum Game Fun
rule of kul (fun in swedish)
rul o kul?
I’ve definitely fudged rolls so something hilarious would happen, and our kittens are named after one of those scenarios.
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!
if you don’t even roll, then you’re robbing your players from the feeling of a near miss
also taken to its extreme, your players will probably just work out that they aren’t going to die at all and start taking stupid risks that they shouldn’t
and yeah, at that point you can punish them, but you’ve been responsible for them getting to that state in the first place, so you’re essentially punishing them for your own mistakes
This is another thing I fear, that causes me to do probably unnecessary rolls. I want the story/ gameplay to have at least some semblance of believability, so I don’t want everyone risking their life on a curiosity because they know I won’t kill them, but I also don’t want to “punish” players every time they take a step off the walking path.
I’ll admit it right here: sometimes I roll the dice just to give the illusion of risk, when in reality I’m buying time to make up the results of what someone just did.
I occasionally roll dice as theatre myself. In my last session, I had a troupe of traveling performers that I rolled for on each act to see if they did well or not, with each roll hidden from the players, and I would then describe the outcome to them. Most of the rolls were real, but some performers I had already decided would fail from the beginning, because they were plants for the enemy faction and had a plan going on in the background that depended on their failure at the act. But of course I still had to roll to not set off any alarms. Going to be fun when my players later piece together “oh, that hypnotist didn’t actually fail, they just used mass suggestion to make everybody believe they did so they don’t come under scrutiny.” If a player catches on - one actually did pretty quick - then great, let them have the victory, but in general it’s one of the ways I like to create expectations so I can subvert them or use them to sneak things by. The enemy faction is very guerilla-oriented, so it fits their MO pretty well.
On a more general scale, when it comes to hidden rolls, if I really need something to succeed, I’ll make the roll not a matter of whether they succeed, but who succeeds. Keeps the story moving if I realize too late that that roll shouldn’t have happened because a failure brings the game to a halt.
I really like the “who succeeds” idea. In events where I roll a fail and have no idea what to do with it, I can just have the outcome only happen for certain characters, or tweak the “success” so that it isn’t quite so successful. Haha.
You can roll some dice but it doesn’t need to be a skill check (or whatever the naming is in your system of choice). When I don’t know what should happen, I may roll a die. If it’s high then it should be something good and if low, maybe it will give me inspiration to think about some new lurking danger. But I may discard the result and go with the gut feeling. Whatever, it was an “oracle roll” as I like to call it. Not tied to anyone’s statistics.
I like to use a deck of cards as well. In Savage Worlds, it is used to determine a random encounter. Clubs indicate an enemy, hearts a friebd, diamonds some good omen and spades obstacles. I like to draw a card so it inspires me on what should happen next (of course as long as it makes sense with the world)
I may discard the result and go with the gut feeling
this is fudging rolls
There are more better ways to make a player fear for their character other than death.
Like killing a beloved NPC, making the situation much worse, taking away their valuables, making their god angry, being hunted by assassins, making them wanted across the kingdom.
Death isn’t the only punishment a GM/DM has at their disposal.
sometimes allowing an outcome that should mechanically via the rules of the game and logically via the rules of common sense has more downsides than upsides
it doesn’t have to refer to exclusively player death
RPGs depend on mutual respect. If you think your players will metagame you and you need to punish them then it stops being a collaborative roleplaying game.
okay then, for you the game ends here:
your players will probably just work out that they aren’t going to die at all and start taking stupid risks that they shouldn’t
you can’t just not metagame
if you know a choice will result in a certain outcome, you can no longer make that decision neutrally
in fact, you literally can’t take a risk when you know what the outcome of a choice is, because there’s no risk to take
not even bothering to roll is barely a step removed from just telling your players “i’m not going to make the enemy roll to hit you because then you might die and you haven’t found your long lost brother yet”, and if you can’t see that that’s a garbage scenario for roleplaying i don’t know what to tell you
I’m all for rolls that make sense. If it’s an encounter, of course you should always roll. I roll in the open and players know what hit them and whatnot. The consequence is damage and/or death. But if you’re a thief and want to open a simple lock and nobody’s is trying to defenestrate you at the moment? No need to roll, failure is meaningless. You just killed a dragon? No need to persuade the king to help you. That’s a reward for doing something beforehand. But oh my if an orc swings at you with his axe I’m gonna roll the dice right in front of you so you know that critical was not fudged.
I skip rolls if players are either super prepared or their failure will not mean anything. But as I said earlier, it needs trust between players and the GM - I don’t make their lives harder as a punishment, I do that for the storytelling. And they don’t try to work around me because we skipped a roll for athletics when they had a full day to climb a tree.
Oh but that reminds me. I was metagamed recently. When the team tried to decide what to do with a defeated enemy one of them said “let him live, he will come back as a sidequest. When we kill him then that plotline is dead as well”.
Well he was not wrong but that needn’t to be said.
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.
i’m kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i’d wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it’s just “i’m gonna skip this last encounter because we’re already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow” or even just “wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace” but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that’s part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i’m ok with them using fudging when they feel it’s warranted so long as they’re not abusing it to the point where there’s no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we’re all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they’re doing, and if we’re not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table?
Dice are terrible at making battlemaps, and don’t get me started on their awful faux-Scottish accents.
Actually, dice have a better scottish accent than me by virtue of not having one at all. But you don’t join my table for quality scottish accents.
Laddie, ye betterrrrr develop ain, afore ye git strung up by yer playerrrrrs.
Bro paragraphs are your friends.
What I found in the TTRPG community is that a lot of GM’s like to hear themselves talk. They write these huge paragraphs of sentences stringed together jumping from one topic to the next.
You can even notice this in the way the D&D books are written. Instead of using easy to navigate bullet points, it is just walls of text one after the other. Trying to find some specific knowledge in that is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
As a data nerd, I can’t stand it.
i’ve been writing a pretty big RPG module for years now and feel the same. in the beginning i was all about the prose and beauty of the written document. now, i’m just like “bullet points. go.”
if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table?
Well… If the story is so important why have players at all?
Where 2 RPG players meet there are 3 opinions
Rules are important, but they aren’t the most important thing as a GM.
The 2 things that are more important are: pacing and fun.
Not fudging dice is important, but if it is in the way of fun, then I either just not roll or only pretend to roll.
Same with pacing, if a roll is going to bog down the games pacing, making everything take longer for no reason other than the roll, then that roll does not matter.
I agree with this. I’ve always seen the rules as a framework to assist in collaborative story telling and keep things impartial and surprising. At any point where they begin to do more harm than good, we can change them.
I got down voted for saying this elsewhere, but to my mind there’s a huge difference between the GM unilaterally changing the rules, and the group deciding.
Scenario: the goblin rolls a crit that’ll kill the wizard. This is the first scene of the night.
Option A: GM decides in secret that’s no good and says it’s a regular hit.
Option B: GM says “I think it wouldn’t be fun for the wizard to just die now. How about he’s knocked out instead?”. The players can then decide if they want that or would prefer the death.
Some people might legitimately prefer A, but I don’t really want the GM to just decide stuff like that. I also make decisions based on the rules, and if they just change based on the GM’s whims that’s really frustrating and disorienting.
There’s also option C where this kind of thing is baked into the rules. And/or deciding in session 0 what rules you’re going to change.
I definitely dislike the idea of stopping the action and suggesting a direction. For my games I always try to aim for immersion, and this would really take me out of it.
I think you might have gotten the wrong idea about how I approach it, though. Part of keeping things surprising and impartial is avoiding changing things all the time secretly. That being said, I don’t believe in a hard and fast rule of never fudging anything.
Here’s an example where I would consider it. The players have been trying really hard to overcome an obstacle, and have had many setbacks already. They come up with an exciting and novel solution, but a bad roll happens on my end that would end this great idea in another failure. Because they’ve earned it by this point, and it will make for a more exciting game, I would likely fudge that roll and give it to them. I would do this in secret, because calling attention to it deflates the experience for the players.
I see the GM as a storyteller and entertainer, whose primary goal is to immerse the players into a story, and to create an exciting and unpredictable experience. Not everyone will view things like I do, and that’s fine, but I wanted to clarify what I mean anyway. Hopefully that makes more sense now.
For your example, I’d probably still ask if the players wanted me to let the dice decide or not before rolling. My players once had a clever idea of setting some poison traps and using earthbind to deal with a wyvern. The thing made all of its saves and nothing worked. I could’ve lied, but we’d already agreed to openly roll and abide by it. Would lying have made it better? Maybe. The game carried on and that arc had a thrilling climax later.
Alternatively, if we’d been playing a game that has a “succeed with a cost” / “fail forward” mechanic it could have been satisfying. D&D and close relatives are especially prone to disappointment because of how random and binary they tend to be.
Anyway. All of this I think it reveals a difference in how RPGs are enjoyed by different people.
On one hand, there’s going for immersion. The player wants to be in the world, be in the character, and feel everything there. It’s very zoomed in.
On the other, where I hang out, it’s more like a writer’s room. I’m interested in telling a cool story, but I’m not really pretending to “be” my character. My character doesn’t want a rival wizard to show up, but I as a player think that’s interesting (and maybe want the fate point, too) so I can suggest that my “Rivals in the Academy” trouble kicks in now. I enjoy when I can invoke an aspect and shift the result in my favor, or when I can propose a clever way I can get what I want at a cost.
Neither’s better or worse than the other, so long as everyone’s on the same page. It can be bad if half the table wants to go full immersion and just talk in character for two hours and the other half doesn’t.
I definitely agree that the beauty of ttrpgs is how many different things they can be to different people. We’ve got very different styles, but I think it’s great you’ve found a way to play that works for you and your table!
My 2 cents is that at the low levels, players need a bit of a buffer. A Lvl1 wizard with +0 CON can be one-shot by a goblin rolling a crit, to say nothing of the bugbear boss of the first encounter in Lost Mines of Phandelver (many people’s first introduction to DnD 5e)
So minor selective fudging to keep the characters alive long enough for them to at least be wealthy enough to afford a Revivify seems like a small and harmless enough concession to me
It is the reason why I prefer starting at lvl 5
Also the classes all feel and play the same below that level.
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
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.
Depends heavily on what you and your players want out of the game. In all the campaigns I’ve been in the focus has been storytelling and character growth, so having a character die to some random happening would be counterproductive.
There have been situations within those campaigns where we’ve done things knowing that character death was a possibility, though, and in those cases we’ve carried through if the dice fell that way. The key is having buy-in from both player and DM on those particular moments of risk. Even a regular combat could turn into one of those if the player decides to press forward into danger.
Yeah. I can see I’m clearly in the minority, but I do want my character to be able to die at any moment.
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.“Oh fuck, that must mean something was there before, keep rolling perception checks, whatever it is must be around here somewhere”
Wait, what took the air away?
How to tell if someone likes writing more than improv:
How dare you cut a thread short, that could have gone on for pages and pages of bikeshedding, with your one truthful and incisive comment.
Don’t write on me.
As long as you’re not going super hardcore, I don’t see the problem with just letting the truth of the dice decide whether a character receives a ‘fatal’ blow, only to find after the combat encounter that the character is barely alive, and the rest of the group needs to focus all their resources on triage and emergency evac.
Getting out of a dangerous place with a barely conscious character can make for a pretty tense situation.
Some games have this built in and you don’t have to fudge it.
Fate, my go to example, has important but simple rules around losing a conflict.
At any point before someone tries to take you out, you can concede. That’s a player action and not a character action. If you concede, you get a say in what happens to your character. That’s where you as a group say “maybe they stab me but leave me for dead in the confusion” or “maybe the orcs take me prisoner so you all can rescue me next week”. Whatever the group decides is cool goes, but you get a say. You make this call before the dice are rolled. You also get one or more fate points, which is nice.
If you instead push your luck and let them roll, and their attack is more than you can take, you’re done. The rest of the table decides what happens but you don’t get a say beyond what was agreed to in session 0.
This would also be pretty easy to import into DND or most other systems.
That’s why revivify is for. What you did here is taken away a meaningful moment from a player, just because you wanted them not to make a different PC. If you want that moment, write it into the story with an NPC. Don’t keep someone alive “just because”. Playing “hardcore” has nothing to do with this - that’s about balancing enemy encounters. Don’t throw a dragon at an unprepared party sort of things.
Otherwise people will either be annoyed that a moment was taken away, come to the conclusion that their choices don’t really matter, or they would expect of you that every time a character dies, they become “half concious”. Suddenly you have a “why didn’t my char do that???” moment at the table. It’s the same with fudging dice, but when that happens, you are behind a GM screen so you are less likely to be found out. Still a shitty thing to do though.
It’s all about what sort of group you’re playing with. I run a group for some kids at my school and I know they would be heartbroken if I just straight up killed them.
I’ve only had to do this once though. I made it a lesson about caution. The player was being reckless, and they ‘died’. Seeing how distraught he was, I decided after the encounter, that the other players should roll for a perception check, and noticed the character still breathing slightly. It was nice to see the kid perk up immediately afterwards.
