Here’s another question for you tabletop RPG types:
When have you fudged a roll of the dice?
I’m less curious about your policies on this matter and more interested in a specific example that you can recall of when you have fudged, faked, or ignored a dice roll… and why.
You mean besides when I’m playing and decide to cheat and say I made a roll j dint want to bother with failing? 😉
While GMing?
There’s been not a single session in which I haven’t fudged at least one die roll.
Whenever I roll dice, I often ponder about the implications of the result of said roll. I also gauge my players’ reactions to previous rolls, and their ideas and conceptions of the situation. If fudging the roll provides more interesting results, I fudge it. If not, well, I just let the dice do the talking.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about — except I’m looking for a specific example. Why did you fudge a specific roll — what was so taxing about the failure that you cheated to skip it? What was so vexing about the success that you chose to ignore it?
The most often I fudge to save a player from dying at the hands of something piddly (kobolds, for instance). My players accused me of fudging to make my rolls better, so I started running without a screen.
It had the added benefit of stopping someone I suspected of fudging from doing so, using my screen as cover from me.
A great fudging incident was a guy who was knew to the group and in L5R’s Topaz Championship, he started fudging, so he’d win contests. I was notified of this by my brother, a Scorpion player who decided to deliver some justice of his own. He ‘accidentally’ stabbed out the eye of the player in the final round of the championship. The cheating player still won, but he lost the eye and that led to far better story developments than the player had lined up for him. He grew out of fudging and turned to being a tactician instead.
So there’s a lesson, don’t cheat against other players or they’ll take your effing eye out.
I fudge when the dice have no sense of dramatic timing. Ungrateful things.
I generally only fudge to save the lives of characters. For example: the ghoul NPC puts the trigger to the PC vampire’s chest, and I roll 4 10s, which result in 3 more successes on re-roll. The already-injured PC takes enough damage to be dropped into torpor, and his humanity is low enough to keep him out of play for a while, years maybe. So… drama ends.
This is lame.
It’s easy enough to avoid situations like this with nonviolent encounters (hate having your PCs make 12 climbing rolls to climb a cliff? switch from task resolution to conflict resolution, problem solved. A failed climbing roll doesn’t mean you fall, it means you climb successfully but take -1 to strength rolls because of fatigue) but most RPGs are written in such a way that combat encounters MUST be played out step-by-step, blow-by-blow.
So, sometimes, I fudge.
I can’t say I fudge dice rolls, more that I fudge situations. I had one combat that was going on too long because of the enemies ability to absorb damage. The paradigm of the battle had changed from get a few good hits on the tough bad guys to this is going on too long and the dramatic action has left. I cut the HP of the enemies so that it ended with a few good hits that took them out.
Another instance didn’t have me fudging the dice, but adding a last minute dice roll to avoid a total party kill. Most of the party had been dropped to low hit points and a dragon creature had a 2 round charge on his final breath weapon. The players were scrambling and trying everything they could. One player asked if he could take a last chance action. I gave him a %10 percent chance. If he could roll 90 or above on percentage dice I’d let him take one more action. He tagged it with a 91 and I let him try something else. The party happened to have a chain that absorbed magic. He grabbed it from the box and tossed it into the dragon creature’s mouth. It canceled out the attack and gave the party enough time to get final shots in. The secret. Totally fucking fudged. They made their rolls, but I pushed and tweaked at the numbers to let it happen. I didn’t make saving throws for the creature, etc. Couldn’t let the party get TPKed after an awesome finale battle. They’d gone most of their way on their own, but I had to give them that last little chance. Story trumped mechanics.
Still, without the mechanics base behind it, the fight and struggle of the dice, it doesn’t seem worth it to the players. I think that if you’re going to fudge, you’ve got to do it without letting the players know. So, hopefully none of them are reading this and feeling robbed of their glorious battle.
Recently I was running a D&D game where the oarty was fighting what was for all intents an purposes an avatar of Gargagos. They came up with an awesome plan to fight him that involved a darkness spell and several de-buffing spells. It was such a good plan and so well-executed, that I fudged the Spell Resistance rolls a bit to allow the plan to have a chance of succeeding…
The moral of thed story for my players? A well-conceived and executed plan will be rewarded more than just flailing away hoping for a lucky break.
I’d say 75% of my fudged rolls have been to save characters — but not always PCs. I have on many occasions had NPCs succeed on defense tests that they actually failed, usually in boss fights where the PCs have been a little too smart/deadly and I don’t feel the action has played out fully yet. When I’ve fudged dice rolls to save PCs, it’s generally only been to save PCs who were important to the story or to save the party from a lot of logistical grief (i.e., killing off the expert they need, who is the only one on hand, or getting stuck with a dead body in public and a lot of unanswered questions and legal trouble in the middle of a clandestine investigation).
The other 25% of fudged rolls has been when the characters are digging for intel. Sometimes they’re a little too quick/smart, so I rein in the info I’m handing out, and sometimes they’re having some bad rolls and need an info dump boost to keep the story going.
I have a bad memory for specific incidents like these (and also, for jokes). I also rarely play a particular RPG long enough to arrive at a detailed enough mechanical knowledge that I’d be sure I wasn’t missing modifiers and misunderstanding rules with greater effect than the fudge of a die roll.
As a result, I often wind up using die rolls and a vague sense of the rules as a kind of loose game-directional augury, rather than as a strict resolution mechanic.
I’m not saying that this is good, just that it’s how I observe myself behaving in the wild.
This is sort of what I was thinking about, actually: that fudging or bumping dice rolls is such a simple dramatic tool that most of us don’t remember the instances of actual fudging. Rather, we remember the little rules we give ourselves that exonerate the deed. We implicitly say that we won’t cheat much “…except in the case of a boring death,” for example.
That, and we remember the great story that came from making the roll we wanted; the roll that drama demanded. We count the unfavorable roll as one more thing the players overcame — through clever planning, through inspiring roleplay — to make a great tale.
But it’s an interesting list that appears when we examine this, isn’t it? Where does obedience to the dice fall on the GM’s priority list?
One of my favorite moments in the arc of any new GM is the moment when he or she first fudges a die roll to help the players overcome an obstacle so dreaded and so fierce — like ignoble death — that even the GM must fight a little bit dirty and side with the players against his or her own agents.
That moment can’t be planned for. It’s the moment that appears suddenly, when the GM stares an emerging story right in the eye and says “Give me your hand.”
More importantly, by the way, thank you all for sharing your stories and thoughts on this. I’d love to see more!
With regard to “…such a simple dramatic tool that most of us don’t remember the instances of actual fudging,” it’s interesting that the RPG moment that I remember most, in all of my roleplaying history, was one where the dice actually cooperated, literally against all odds, in bringing about a mightily heroic instance of real drama.
Dice enabling drama = memorable due to rarity; dice getting in the way of drama = bog-standard and thus entirely forgettable?
In the last game I ran (Dragon-Blooded), I had a villain who, I thought, would present enough of a challenge to the PCs that when the battle was over, they’d be relieved to be alive and then, swiftly, filled with the realization that they’d have to come up against the villain’s boss next.
Of course, I managed to roll embarrassingly low on the first round of init, and the two players who took their actions first managed to drop 10 after 10 on their attack dice. The only way my dodge rolls could have been worse was if I’d botched.
I realized, as they were gleefully counting up their damage dice, that if I didn’t fudge his roll a bit and up his health levels, my Harbinger of More Powerful Things to Come was about to shapeshift into an Anticlimactic Pile of Goo.
I upped his health levels, gave him a few extra dodge dice, and flat-out lied about his soak to make it through that round.
After that, I was able to get back to where I’d wanted things to be, and got the combat moving at the pace and with the tension I’d originally planned. Once they were standing over his body congratulating one another (and with no provocation from me), one of them looked up and said, essentially, “Ohhhh, The First and Forsaken Lion’s not going to like this.”
Which was exactly what I’d wanted from the start.