Sometimes I can tell when my current DM fudges a roll to miss an attack or reduce damage. He has a tell in the specific way he pauses and breathes before announcing the roll, then tries to hurry to the next turn, which only seems to happen when someone is in a life-or-death scenario, but “luckily” survives.
Should I let him know he has a tell? Will it be less fun (or more stressful) for him if he knows I know?
I’m still a pretty new player, but I’m fairly certain that in my group’s second combat encounter, our DM saw that we were going to struggle, so a few rounds before he thought we’d die, he started hinting that people on the street were hearing us. He didn’t play around with his rolls at all, which meant us getting hit by some very powerful (even permanently crippling) critical hits, and some of us rolling awfully on his critical miss table. As we started to go down, one by one, the door was getting battered, and when the crew was down to 1 member alive, the city guard arrived and intervened, scaring the remaining mobs and healing up the three of us on the floor.
To me, it meant that he cared about the dice rolls and wanted consequences and actions to feel real, but also he didn’t want our journey to end on the first night. But he didn’t make the entire encounter feel like a victory, and our characters had to deal with the repercussions of that encounter.
As a DM, I ask my players at session zero, do you want me to fudge rolls to make the game more fun/interesting, or let the dice fall how they may? I’ve never had a table ask me to not fudge the dice.
Wait, so every table you’ve had has been fine with you fudging dice? That’s honestly wild to me.
In 22 years and close to probably 100 games that I have ran, not once have I been aske not to fudge. But also, I’ve not been asked to reveal when I do. Which is actually pretty rare. I’ve probably only fudged maybe a dozen rolls in that time.
That’s seriously crazy to me! Wow. It’s one of the things I would definitely say ‘do not do’ if a GM asked me that. Obviously I know everyone doesn’t feel as I do, I’m just surprised that in so long, no one has really cared.
I hate to say it, I think you might be in the minority here.
My take has always been that D&D isn’t an adversarial game - the DM isn’t trying to ‘win’, they’re just trying to keep things entertaining for the players.
The trouble with random is that it doesn’t always follow story beats, and doesn’t always feel fun.
A big boss not getting any hits in due to bad rolls deminishes the perceived threat, and the ultimate value of the victory. Stupid zombies that just won’t stay down despite the fact that everyone is now bored with them can easily be kept down.
As long as you know when to do it, it can be super useful for everyone.
sometimes the dice need to hit… and sometimes they don’t ;)
If you don’t mind dying, tell them and tell them they needn’t save you. I would tell tree and ask them not to do that, at least with me. I’d prefer if they wholly didn’t but meh
These days I play more 13A and it explicitly discourages such behavior too
Fudged dice ruin the mood for me. If I’m playing, I’m there to figure out how to make crazy things work in spite of the risks. If I can’t have that, I’d rather just read a book.
I don’t usually talk about it in the middle though - I believe arguments at the table should be reserved for serious conflicts (rudeness between players and so on), not personal preferences. This is more a reason I’d check out of a campaign gracefully, and it’s also one of a hundred reasons I really prefer to GM instead of play.
Since I’m from the OSR niche, fudging dice is a big no-no for me. When I GM I roll in the open and would prefer if my GM would do the same.
For me, fudged dice cheapens any victory and makes me less enthusiastic about the game. The stakes are gone.
Long time DM currently running Curse of Strahd for my group. I think I’m in the minority but I actually publicly roll everything. I use Foundry and let my players see all of my results. I also insist on seeing all of theirs. I find it actually kind of fun.
I would let him know that he has a tell, yeah. As for whether or not rolls should get fudged, I guess it depends on what you’re trying to get out of the game. For me and my players, my emphasis is on the continuity of the story I’m telling, so I tend to fudge rolls to keep things moving along.
Yeah we always played the same, number one focus was on the story. So if a dice roll was likely to completely trash the story continuity, everybody kind of accepted a little fudging now and then. But only for that very specific reason.
No, I’ll call it out. If they fudge it for me, they’ll also fudge it against.
Not necessarily true as there are entirely different reasons for doing each. Only a bad GM would fudge a hit that actually penalized you. A good GM might fudge a hit to take the story in an interesting direction. Fudging rolls is just another tool in the box.
As a player, I make a point of telling my GMs that I dislike fudged rolls and I’d rather roll a new character than claim a false victory.
As a GM, I will always at session 0 tell my players that I don’t fudge rolls and often prefer to make my GM rolls out in the open whenever there’s a chance they could kill someone or end an encounter. My attitude is that when the players can see my rolls and I tell them in advance “if this is higher than X it’ll hit so-and-so”, we’re all on the same side as we watch the roll play out.
IMO it’s not the job of the GM to tilt the game system itself towards the players, but rather to balance encounters and challenges to be beatable, and then see what happens right alongside the players.
To answer your question, tell him if it affects your experience of the game. Don’t let it ruin your fun in silence, no GM wants players to do that.
My DM once fudged something and I didn’t question it at all. It was in curse of Strahd, the party was level 3. He was using the RAW rules in the adventure for random encounters, one of which says the party can get jumped by 3d6 wolves. He rightly surmised that us getting ganked 10 wolves wasn’t a very interesting conclusion to our story, so he made up some dumb deus ex machina, and I was 100% there for it. If WOTC can’t make a balanced random encounter table, why should we be beholden to it?
Exactly. Encounter building/balancing doesn’t stop at initiative.
The point is to tell an exciting story - there’s no right or wrong definition of what that means for you.
The dice’s purpose is to take you down paths you might not have chosen deliberately but the goal is still to have an exciting story. If the DM wants to be like “I recognize the dice have made a decision but given that it’s a stupid ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it” then he has my full support.
Maybe a cleaner way would be to decide up front: which outcomes am I ok with? and simply cap the roll at that. You know the paladin only has 17 HP left and you don’t want the paladin to go down so the maximum roll you want is 16. So if you have roll 4d6 damage. You do: roll 3 roll 8 roll 12 roll
1816.I haven’t noticed that in my games, but if I was your DM, then I’d rather know that I had a tell
Agreed. Fudging should always be on the table, because sometimes an encounter will play out in an incredibly unsatisfying way, such as the DM accidentally making combat way too hard. In that case, you could easily fudge a roll and say “yup half the minions failed their saving throws and are killed outright” to get them off the table.
