When one of your players has either been doing exceptionally bad or exceptionally good...

When one of your players has either been doing exceptionally bad or exceptionally good, have you ever fudged dice rolls in their favor/against their favor?

Is it justifiable to fudge rolls to help out a player who can't catch a break, or to hinder a player who is mopping the floor with your encounters?

No, fudging dice is stupid. If you change the outcome, why fucking roll anyway? To give your players the "illusion"? Forget it, they know.

No fudging.
Rolls in the open.
Final destination.

Just talk to the player who's causing problems about it. If they don't change then don't play with them. Passive aggressive dice fudging seems like a way to prolong the suffering of everyone involved.

as gygax said, the only reason the DM rolls dice is for the skunf they make

im not advocating always messing rolls, players arent dumb they will catch on and notice if you do it too often, but as DM fun is priority one

and really, the players are gonna blame you anyway if they fail 10 checks in a row due to bad luck

As a general principal I never fudge anything against players unless it would take away from the fun of an encounter. (giving the the big bad some extra HP when they nearly one shotted him for example.) Not seeing dice rolls makes things more fun my adding tension and gives the DM more potential for those fun moments of rolling dice and snickering behind the screen.

I think he meant a player who is doing more damage than the rest of the party and causing balance issues. Fudging rolls because you don't like someone makes you an even bigger That Guy then the supposed That Guy you're doing it to.

>the players are gonna blame you anyway if they fail 10 checks in a row due to bad luck

I know I do

Gygax said a lot of dumb shit if the day was long.

>Not seeing dice rolls makes things more fun my adding tension
But how? Knowing that a roll is absolute and you'll get fucked or saved by the grace of fate produces a lot more tension than existing in limb-wristed safespaceland where the DM may just save your character's dumb ass if he feels like it. Or completely fuck him over if he doesn't like what's going on right now.

It depends on the situation. Seeing the dice being rolled for certain things like perception and such can make players start metagaming even if they don't mean to. It also depends on the group and tone of the game. You don't really want to be killing your PC's off in a regular old encounter just because a goblin got a crit if your playing a high adventure kind of game.

I want that. If a goblin can't shank me ever, why the fuck are we fighting them?

>as gygax said, the only reason the DM rolls dice is for the skunf they make

And Gygax was a fucking cocksucker who didn't know shit. If he lived today he'd probably run FATE where everyone died in one hit. Killing off characters to make his erect peener feel big, was the only reason he DMed. You can tell this if you read his books, he got off on being all big and powerful because it was the only way he could feel good in his dead-end fucking job and life. He was a fucking awful Dungeon Master, the Tomb of Horrors should be enough evidence of that. I don't know why anyone uses "Gygax did it" as an argument for anything. That's like "lol well Mussolini did it so it can't be that bad" while unironically slobbering at his grave. Just stop. Just fucking stop. Nothing Gygax did is special, he was just in the right place at the right time. He invented D&D which is now unequivocally one of the shittiest RPGs out there, yet still survives due to brand recognition and hordes of normies and roasties who don't know any better because D&D is the only RPG they know of.

Do not ever use Gygax in an argument again. Not only is it ethos-based bullshit which is not an argument because this is not a goddamn debate about a higher field of learning, but also he was a fucking terrible RPG player, a control-freak of a DM who pretty much singlehandedly created the meme of adversarial Dungeon Master, and sounds like a huge douchebag to boot. He did not know shit about DMing or storytelling and if you use that as a justification to cheat at your own game, retcon shit, and fudge rolls, just because YOU, a shitty dungeon master just like your worthless hero, cannot structure a game or adventure properly, then you are the lowest fucking form of human scum and I feel sorry for anyone who gets invested in any campaign you run.

You seem upset buddy. Gygax probably didn't get this upset.

If this wasn't pasta before, it will be now

He's also dead. And yes I am upset when DMs pull bullshit and make Rule Zero a dirty word. Gygax started that shit and he should have quit RPGs after D&D first started so no one would be poisoned by his shitty DMing methods.

>Not seeing dice rolls makes things more fun my adding tension
>But how? Knowing that a roll is absolute and you'll get fucked or saved by the grace of fate produces a lot more tension
Start rolling dice behind a screen for no reason when the players are in a dungeon, the reactions are priceless.

No, but I sometimes remind them of resources they weren't using or introduce a complication to keep things from rolling out of hand.
I'll bet you think that Issac Newton was a shitty scientist because he thought the philosopher's stone was a thing.
Get a grip, man. Holding one of the original genre-definers to current standards is like calling Greek plays bullshit because they invented deus ex machina.

and in this case, the DMs job isnt to tabulate dice rolls, its for everyone to have fun
if fudging dice rolls makes it fun, do it
if playing the dice as they land is fun, do it

Gygax was right in this case, the dice are a means to an end for fun, and if they arent fun dont use them

Aww look another Gygax apologist. Were you the one who made the original post above?

I'm sorry I shit on him, I hope I didn't hurt your feelings too much. But you said it yourself, standards change, and no one is going to tolerate this "lol I don't even roll dice or even have creature stats I just make up bullshit the whole session lololol." If I wanted a DM who made up bullshit the whole session I would play FATE.... or better yet, I would find another DM. You can get the fuck out. if you just want to cheat and be a general shithead to prove what a rebel you are, fine, but stay far the fuck away from anyone who actually enjoys RPGs. This whole "lol rule zero" has a caveat: if no one respects your fucking game, you just lost. Unless the whole idea was to get out of DMing in the first place, in which case just say you don't want to like a fucking adult. Don't do this bullshit. Do not be a bullshit DM. Because if you abuse Rule Zero, then it won't be there when you really need it. Because all your players will have left to play with a DM who actually runs the fucking game.

...

Fun > RNG. Whatever Fun may be. If you're too autistic to bend the rules so everyone involved has a more fun or memorable time, then both you and your players are missing out. Used sparingly, fudging dice rolls can be used to spare the players from a lame anti-climax, or turn a straight forward encounter into an exciting one.

>like calling Greek plays bullshit because they invented deus ex machina
To be fair, Medea is a really shit play. Though I don't think it was the first deus ex machina it was the first to come to mind.

Shitty person making a shitty post.

Tomb of Horrors was SUPPOSED to be stupidly deadly. It wasn't something used at a home module for shits and giggles. It was like a crazy endgame bullshit dungeon to test how paranoid players were, and to kill people in tournament play. Please go away.

> if X is fun, do it!!

Cocaine smoking is fun, does that mean you should do it? In the middle of an RPG I thought it would be fun to get up and pull down my trousers and take a fat fucking shit all over the gaming table, burying my friend's miniatures under a torrent of fecal matter. That would have been amazingly fun! But did I do it? No. because "fun" is the reasoning of a fucking child. If you base whether or not you do something off of whether or not it is "fun" then you are a mental infant who is not fit to live in adult society.

Similarly, when you do things in an RPG because they are "fun" you are being a fucking asshole. "Well I'm going to destroy the believably of this campaign by letting Jonathan fly to the goddamn moon on his Jump check because he got a NATuRAL TWENTY and if anything else happens, well, that would be against the spirit of the game, which is to have FUN, right guys? Even if we are fucking over the entire story and destroying the point of playing an RPG, it's okay, because as long as we are having FUN with it, that makes it a good thing, right?"

That is what you sound like.

> Gygax was right in this case, the dice are a means to an end for fun, and if they arent fun dont use them


Then you are not playing Dungeons and Dragons anymore. Full stop. You are no longer playing D&D or even really an RPG.

If you can't even follow the rules the majority of the time, then what the fuck are you doing? Go play goddamn Cards Against Humanity or some shit. That's a game better befitting the kind of autistic ADHD edgelord garbage that you need to sustain yourself. What kind of fucking infant are you, that the only way you can justify what you are doing, is that it is "fun"??

>Shitty person making a shitty post.

Not an argument.

> Tomb of Horrors was SUPPOSED to be stupidly deadly. It wasn't something used at a home module for shits and giggles. It was like a crazy endgame bullshit dungeon to test how paranoid players were, and to kill people in tournament play. Please go away.

What, it was a test of skill? The only fucking test of skill in the module is "don't go inside." Bam. End of story. None of the module has any logic to it, it is entirely arbitrary bullshit meant for random "lololol you died" to give the DM a stiffy he can stroke while he rolls for damage on the last surviving character. It's not even an adventure module, it's just "haha rocks fall everyone dies." But I don't know why I am wasting time explaining this to you when you clearly haven't even read the module. Because if you had, you wou;dn't be defending it.

...You do know that Rule Zero originated from a time period when most of the rules weren't hard and fast, right? OSR design philosophy, designed to emulate the 'feel' of older editions, tends towards making rulings rather than bringing up rules.
The whole point of Rule Zero is to fill in where there are no rules, or fix edge case situations where the rules don't make sense, not to act as a constant safe base.
IIRC, the first ToH crawl was a no casualties run specifically requested by the party because they thought Gygax went too easy on them.

>The whole point of Rule Zero is to fill in where there are no rules, or fix edge case situations where the rules don't make sense, not to act as a constant safe base.

Yeah but it doesn't mean constantly ignoring the fucking rules just to get what you want to happen. You're not saying anything different from what I said at all.

thanks for the new pasta

You need to chill out, dude. You're pushing your "ALL RNG OR GO HOME" shtick a little too hard and only hurting your case for it. And giving examples like

>Well I'm going to destroy the believably of this campaign by letting Jonathan fly to the goddamn moon on his Jump check because he got a NATuRAL TWENTY

only further erodes your credibility as a sane or rational person. Most of us who are in favour of fudging dice rolls are talking about giving a boss a few more hit points so it's not a face roll, or letting our player characters build a decent narrative instead of letting the story be entirely directed by random chance.

This is like someone who verbally shits all over Tolkien while claiming to be a Tolkien fan.

Do you even D&D

>You're not saying anything different from what I said at all.
But you're actively portraying Gygax as a shit designer in reference to a time period where calling him a shit designer doesn't really make sense, and treating Rule Zero as fucking Satan rather than the duct tape of the DM toolbox.
Fudging isn't something people do all the time, or it wouldn't be fudging.

>letting our player characters build a decent narrative instead of letting the story be entirely directed by random chance.

Then why are you rolling dice at all, faggot? You aren't. You're just using them as positive reinforcement for what you want. Oh you got critical-hitted at that climactic moment died? OH SHIT TIME TO FUDGE THAT ROLL. WE CAN'T HAVE ANYTHING THAT WOULD HURT SOMEONE'S FEELINGS HAPPENING! Yep time to delete it, how dare you let the campaign have a sad and un-fun ending. How dare that "epic climactic moment" actually turn out badly for once? Better fudge it so as to completely sap value from the tension and destroy anything special about when the characters DO succeed through luck and pure moxie.

You're not a good storyteller. You're not a good roleplayer. You're just a child who can't handle not getting what he wants.

>Then why are you rolling dice at all, faggot? You aren't. You're just using them as positive reinforcement for what you want. Oh you got critical-hitted at that climactic moment died? OH SHIT TIME TO FUDGE THAT ROLL. WE CAN'T HAVE ANYTHING THAT WOULD HURT SOMEONE'S FEELINGS HAPPENING! Yep time to delete it, how dare you let the campaign have a sad and un-fun ending. How dare that "epic climactic moment" actually turn out badly for once? Better fudge it so as to completely sap value from the tension and destroy anything special about when the characters DO succeed through luck and pure moxie.
>You're not a good storyteller. You're not a good roleplayer. You're just a child who can't handle not getting what he wants.
This thread turned into a copypasta goldmine real quick.

If you want that, play WFRP or something. Any unit has a decent chance of landing a head-chopping hit.

my man

Holy shit dude, you need to be sectioned or something.

> verbally

I think it goes without saying that no one actually literally shits on Tolkien, my friend. And yes, I do play D&D, I've been playing D&D for years, same as most of Veeky Forums. And I've seen my fair share of DMs who fudged rolls because they were fucking pussies. Case in point: one player brought in a new character after retiring his old one who was 2 levels lower and got one-shotted by an attack. The DM literally cut the damage in half because he didn't want to kill anyone. Because god forbid a character dies in the dozens of battles we fought. God forbid the story isn't exactly like a fucking children's fairy tale where we all the defeat the bad guy. God forbid someone just plain gets killed in a battle, not in some special symbolic way that represents a close to their character arc or whatever. No, sometimes you just get shitty luck. But no he needed to take that away. Why the fuck are you even playing an RPG? It's like playing with cheat codes on. There's no fucking tension so why even roll the dice? Hell, if we fuck up at the campaign goal, are you going to come up with some ass pull to make us secretly succeed through our blunders ? Are you so set in the wrap-up-neat storywriter bullshit that you need to destroy one of the few things that sets RPGs apart from other media of storytelling?

> anyone who disagrees with me and my dogma is insane

First sign of actual insanity.

>Case in point: one player brought in a new character after retiring his old one who was 2 levels lower and got one-shotted by an attack. The DM literally cut the damage in half because he didn't want to kill anyone.

I would just love to see one of your characters die from falling down a flight of stairs, dying one of the most lame and ignoble deaths possible, and then try to pretend it was "for the best".

I'm not even agreeing or disagreeing with the content of your post, just commenting on the sheer, unnecessary amount of vitriol, autism and hostility.

Maybe go outside or something?

I thought the first sign of actual insanity was "claiming to be normal".

It's happened, actually. Well, first off, no one can die falling down the stairs in D&D, RAW. But I have lost characters to traps, random accidents, minor combats, et cetera. I've had a character get killed by two goblin warriors when he was level 7. Did I throw a bitch fit about it and rage out that the DM better fudge the roll to make it fit the precious fucking story? No, I grew a pair of bollocks and made a new character.

Those all sound like incredibly rousing and exciting tales.

>Well, first off, no one can die falling down the stairs in D&D, RAW

Laaaame. I had a character get his arm bitten off by a horse in WFRP once. No kicking, no trampling, just a one-shot biting off of the arm. And that's my point; no one is going to remember or at best only vaguely remember that time a guy died by being stabbed by goblins or clipped by a trap, but everyone is going to fondly remember the time the mid-level guy got his arm bit off by a starting zone horse.

Who gives a fuck what people remember? It happened. That's what happened in the game. Your character died being stabbed by goblins. That's it. Not everything has to be a fucking Polaroid moment. Stop thinking that the second that something stops being exciting and oh-so-interesting that you need to inject some shit to spice it up. Because god forbid there's a slow moment in your aspergers-infused roller-coaster of a game. For fucks sake, man, it's an RPG, not a Die Hard action thriller. If your memorable game events are all manufactured bullshit they aren't going to have much worth. It's one thing to have your character drive a burning tank through a wall using the smoke pouring from it to give his soldiers cover to cross the road and march to victory, in a fucking freeform game where nothing has any grounding. It's quite another when you actually pull it off within the rules, instead of ignoring them for something more "memorable" that isn't actually memorable, it's just hollow bullshit that you made up.

I'll wait for you to respond with "lmao rpgs are all hollow made-up bullshit so it doesn't matter" just to prove you're a stupid fuck who doesn't care about these games, only about getting your way so you can post your epic story on /r/rpg for upvotes.

It's one and the same, honestly.

last session I died after rolling two critical fails and then a normal fail. I was a bit annoyed but shit happens, I suppose. It was only a one-off so I wasn't attached to my character

Nah. Never.

>Start rolling dice behind a screen for no reason when the players are in a dungeon, the reactions are priceless.

This is a fucking meme. In reality, players mostly don't care when you "roll behind the screen". At best you get asked what you are rolling and that's it. The whole "roll dice menacingly and laugh diabolically to terrify your players" shtick is complete bullshit and the only people reacting that way are those, that memed themselves into believing it.

If a series of failed dice rolls is enough to suck all the fun out of the game for your player, maybe it's time to tweak the system, not the results of the dice.

Or fuck it, just give him a magic item that automatically lets him add (number between 1 and 5) to a bad roll. Either once per day, or once until it's recharged at a specific location. And when the player gets lucky again in the long run, it disappears, to help out some other unlucky guy.

No items. Fox only.

There is no word in the english dictionary, nay, within the entire cosmos of printed text, that can accurately describe the profound sense of rage that I feel towards those that quote Gygax. If rage were a form of energy, my rage would be enough to stave the heat death of the universe for eons to come. If my rage was an ocean, I would be able to drown every terrestrial creature in a torrent of blood that washes away all the sinners in a tsunami of boiling blood cells, all screaming incoherently as they gnaw at the flesh of the those bathed in my wrath. Even thinking about this causes me to tremble, but only because the visions of death that wash over my vision is so stark, that even my own psyche cannot accept its power without breaking. These people are neither friend no foe, they are insects, bugs given the form of man and allowed to walk upright rather than crawl upon the earth as they deserve. Nay my good user, they are creatures that deserve the cross and the whip, no quarter.

like i often say, the human who wrote the first book may have had some good ideas about book writing that can still be argued in favor of today
but he or she wouldn't automatically win in a debate with today's writers... far from it, since people have also had a long time to refine the craft.
in the end the First Writer is just as regular person with regular opinions that could be right of wrong but certainly aren't sacrosanct.

>If they don't change
How can they change rolling well or rolling badly?
Did you not understand the question?

Have you only every played online?
If I make a pointless roll during players planning/dungeon crawling it isn't so I can cackle and laugh at the players.
It noticeably creates tension and makes the players more aware of the world around them ad consider things they might not have done before.

I never fudge rolls.
I fudge target numbers.

so how many groups have given you the boot? be honest

>as Pelor said, the only reason the adventurer kills is for the skunf they make

And Pelor was a fucking cocksucker who didn't know shit. If he lived today he'd probably be a faggot where everyone would live forever. Saving his clerics to make his erect peener feel big, was the only reason he god'ed. You can tell this if you read his books, he got off on being all big and mercyful because it was the only way he could feel good in his everlasting fucking job and life. He was a fucking awful God, the new pantheon should be enough evidence of that. I don't know why anyone uses "Pelor did it" as an argument for anything. That's like "lol well Coleron did it so it can't be that bad" while unironically slobbering at his grave. Just stop. Just fucking stop. Nothing Pelor did is special, he was just in the right place at the right time. He invented some multiverses which are now unequivocally one of the shittiest Universes out there, yet still survives due to brand devotion and hordes of clerics and paladins who don't know any better because Pelor is the only god they know of.

Do not ever use Gygax in an argument again. Not only is it ethos-based bullshit which is not an argument because this is not a goddamn debate about a higher field of learning, but also he was a fucking terrible RPG player, a control-freak of a DM who pretty much singlehandedly created the meme of adversarial Dungeon Master, and sounds like a huge douchebag to boot. He did not know shit about DMing or storytelling and if you use that as a justification to cheat at your own game, retcon shit, and fudge rolls, just because YOU, a shitty dungeon master just like your worthless hero, cannot structure a game or adventure properly, then you are the lowest fucking form of human scum and I feel sorry for anyone who gets invested in any campaign you run.

fucked up last part
>Do not ever use Pelor in an argument again. Not only is it light-based bullshit which is not an argument because this is not a goddamn debate about a higher field of learning, but also he was a fucking terrible god, a control-freak of a deity who pretty much singlehandedly created the meme of good vs evil, and sounds like a huge douchebag to boot. He did not know shit about GODing or saving people and if you use that as a justification to cheat at your own life, redeem shit, and fudge baddies, just because YOU, a shitty current paladin just like your worthless hero, cannot structure a game or adventure properly, then you are the lowest fucking form of humanoid scum and I feel sorry for anyone who gets invested in any adventure you run.

Our group has a player who is cursed with having half of his characters die of fumbled climbing checks. It's turned into a running gag at this point. And it is fucking funny.

I own a bearded dragon named Gary.
Just wanted to let you know that.

My favourite character, a knight who survived two epic campaigns, who was blessed by the sun god and revered as a hero on the entire continent, died by getting shanked by two gangers in the slums. Was it the ending I had in mind for him? Fuck no! But it would have been worse if the gm just deus ex machina'd his ass out of there.

Rules make a game, and rules apply to every participant.

>Two experienced players and a complete novice to TTRPGs who needed a lot of help to make a character from a mechanic perspective
>The two experienced players like going yolo into everything and always have about 5 backups, each more min-maxed than the last
>New player plays super defensively, and notably didn't look comfortable roleplaying until about the 4th session
>Tells me openly that he really, really doesn't want to die, since he said it'd be hard for him to start roleplaying as someone else and making a new character from a gameplay point of view. Aside from that, he seems super into it,

I really hate fudging, but if fun is the first priority, I think it'd be best to not go too lethal with him (not to mention he's not min-maxed at all). Anyone else take things on a player by player basis?