Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!  Hold up, guys!  We're letting something very important slip past us here.

...Are there really people who don't like Cherry Coke!?!?


faints

Well, I have to say with absolute certainty that out of all the drinks in the world, mine are prioritized in this order

Code Red
Mellow Yellow
Mountain Dew
Diet Dew of the previously mentioned kinds
Cherry Coke
Coke Zero
Root beer float
Tea.

So it's totaly on my list :D

Topic change much?

Typically a portent of a closed thread.

Also, closer back to our original topic, For the record: The stats given shows one deleted log entry that was not a GM hiding a roll from players, but rather them seeing how the feature worked, since I never used it before.  I wouldn't be surprised if I was not the only one.

Another use for delete option is to delete/hide a roll made by a player which they should have made as a secret roll.  Such as a character who isn't supposed to be (as far as other players know) a force user, using a force skill.

That doesn't reflect a fudging, but correcting an oversight in checking an option during the roll.
This message was last edited by the user at 02:25, Mon 09 June 2014.

So, AsenRG, your PC has made it through a ten thousand post game that’s taken two real-life years to complete, he’s made himself a small fortune, built himself a castle and he’s just about to rescue the princess he wants to marry...

But suddenly, you roll a string of 1s and if the GM rolls more than 3 on 1D6 your character will die.

You’d prefer your character to die than for the GM to fudge a roll ‘for the sake of the story’?

If so, I admire your honesty, but I suspect you’re very much in the minority. I think most players would want to ride off into the sunset with the girl and/or have another adventure with a cherished character rather than see their character die over a stupid bad luck roll.

I’ve heard far more players complaining about the dice being against them than complaining about GMs fudging rolls. In fact, this thread is the only place I’ve ever heard anyone say that...

Personally, I’d like to see a ‘karma’ fudge option, whereby a GM can secretly choose the result of the next roll made by a certain character, so the poor PC doesn’t roll that string of 1s in the first place. You wouldn't use it often, but if a player has just rolled three 1s in succession, the last thing he wants is a fourth.

As for ‘torpedoing’ games...
I suspect this is the inflammatory comment that got most people's goat and exploded the debate. It's the main reason I've bothered to respond.

As the GM, I have to think up plots and story hooks and interconnections not just for one character, but for all the characters, and all the NPCs, too. And that’s a lot of hard work. Hard work that I don’t want to repeat just because I rolled Snake Eyes on the dice roller.

Even if only one player wants to be fudge-free, that means every time that player has a character die, I have to write that character out of the plot, figure out the knock-on effects, think up ways to bring that character’s essential contributions into the story by another means, and spend time with the player developing a new character with new ties and interconnections to the other PCs... Just having such a player in the game is a fair sized torpedo in itself. :(

Having said that, if my players come to me as a unanimous group in the OOC thread and say to me openly, “We’ve decided amongst ourselves that we want to play this game entirely without fudges, come what may,” then I’ll run the game the way they want it, without any rancour. They’ll probably spend half their game-time rolling up new characters, but if that’s what they want, that’s fine by me. Until I get bored with perpetual character generation and thinking up new plot lines for the new characters (which probably won’t take long) - then I’ll close the game and open a new one with new players who are less demanding.

However, if one or two players try to browbeat others and/or spoil my game, ruining my fun or the fun of other players, I’m with BBR, I’ll ban them outright. They can go and soapbox in someone else’s game - if they can find a GM who will let them.

If you don't like my game, leave it by all means, but don't try to torpedo it. I own the nukes.

IMO, if you want your life to hinge on the roll of dice, go play in a casino. RPGs, even dice-moderated ones, are more about the story than the dice. Most gamers play games specifically because it’s an environment where we can beat the odds, rather than having the odds beat us - they’re an escape from the ‘bad dice’ we all-too-often roll in RL. Why on earth would we want to roll bad dice in a game, too?

We play games to win.

The way in which we succeed is interesting, and the dice add variety to our successes.

Getting a few hard knocks and bouncing back is exciting, and the dice can facilitate both the knocks and the bounce back.

Not succeeding at all, or having some initial success only to have it all taken away from you, simply sucks. That's not what the dice are for, IMO.

I don't. In fact, I play games to have fun. If there's no chance of winning, I might not like it so much (and probably wouldn't play that game), but winning is secondary to the fun of the experience in all cases for me, as long as the chances are fair. I've banned players who try to munchkin the system with their obsession with winning.

Agree with steelsmiter.

The game itself is important. You win (or lose) your life, when you die. If you live to win, you live to die. You must live to achieve and fail, to gather experience like you'll never die. Characters live as this. They learn like they will never die. But they are destined to die. Because they are as mortal as we are. And even if they are not, they will live only as long as those who cherish these characters live.

I am against fudging rolls for the win's sake. I care not for win, but fun. I will fudge a roll, if it will make a character hilariously fall in a freaking cherry pie, but I won't fudge a roll so a character/boss won't die. I will accept the failure, if I'm a player, and I will accept the blame, if I'm a GM.

Fudge is for fun! Not for win.

Perhaps I overstated my case.

Winning for the sake of winning in a munchkinesque manner is not what I meant. I just meant that life sucks enough, without having games suck too.

Yes, gaming is about having fun, and most of the players (and GMs) I've met don't get much fun out of their characters dying, except in the most exceptional and expedient of circumstances.

I have no objection to killing a character if it furthers the story and enhances the fun, but I'm disinclined to kill a cherished character (mine or anyone else's) on a (near) pointless dice roll.

Characters may go out in a blaze of glory aiding their companions to achieve their lifelong goals, or taking out the uber-villain in a self-sacrificing bear-hug off the cliff, but in my games they won't die from a double-critical arrow shot by the third bowman from the left, nor from a septic toe picked up from a rat bite, even if the rules state that there's a 1% chance and the poor sop rolls 01.

That roll is to determine how severe the sepsis is and whether the other characters have to carry a 250lb barbarian on a stretcher, it's not to see if he dies.

Personally I'm there to have fun, not to win ... but then again, I don't have a problem with characters dying either, no matter how attached I am to them - that's the beauty of RPGs, you just roll up another character and start a whole new adventure with them.  :>

Of course, anyone who's ever played more than one game of Paranoia thereafter expects to die more often than not, no matter what rules are being used.  It just changes you.  <grins>

Ah, Paranoia. That's one I haven't pulled out in a while. Though, I think that might be an example of one of those games steelsmiter referred to where the system discourages fudging. That's the game I pull out when certain party elements in my tabletop group need to get some backstabbing out of their system. The whole point of things is to die in ridiculous ways. I'm normally a "Don't kill the party (much)" GM, but when we pull that one out, I get a little bit of sadistic glee from all the player killing. I am perhaps meant to run more lethal campaigns than I usually do.

Not true.  Unless a system is so fluffy that it's basically freeform by another name, optimising is never useless.  It's making your character strong and dexterous if you mean for them to be melee fighting regularly.  It's making your character intelligent if you mean for them to be doing a lot of study and writing things up.  These are optimized characters.  Now the degree of optimization may certainly be different from system to system, and there are systems (Paranoia, I'm looking at you) where you're basically screwed no matter what, but excepting systems like those there aren't really any non-freeform systems where optimizing is inherently useless.

In reply to Maidenfine (msg # 57):

Actually, in Paranoia, "fudging" is an art form.  Players are given "perversity points" to modify the rolls of themselves or others, which they can spend -- though maybe this isn't fudging in the regular sense of the word since it still comes before the roll.  In the paranoia game I'm running, I'm actually finding it really hard to run it online with perversity points because waiting for others to spend (or not spend) perversity points holds up the game in a pbp system.

But I still think there's a value to the GM fudging roles in Paranoia after the roll, just as in any other game (at least for rolls where there are no perversity points put into the pot, because that would make them mad at The Computer -- i.e., the GM).
This message was last edited by the user at 18:24, Mon 16 June 2014.

The old WEG Star Wars RPG actually had a section in the rule book which pretty much said that the GM should fudge rolls - "never let an entire campaign be derailed by a single lucky/unlucky roll", or words to that effect.

So yes, let the dice do what they want most of the time, but if a freak coincidence (like the wild die rolling 6, thirty times in a row) means a TPK, or the Emperor falling off a platform (no safety rails on the Death Star) and breaking his neck on Day 1 of the campaign, then fudge it.

2nd Edition Paranoia:


I haven't read the rules for Tank Girl, but I think the WEG guys might have had an opinion. grin

...All the same, one of my favorite games on RPoL really clicked in at a point during a totally random encounter when a Wyvern hit my Swordsmistress for 34 damage and I realized the GM wasn't even looking.  He just rolled the dice and posted what they said and was leaving it for me to check and figure out if I was still alive or not after that.  Would it have kind of sucked if my character (three years old at that point, I think) had died right then?  Well, yeah -- but it was also.. I don't know, thrilling.

Almost sort of a little bit like real danger.  I mean, clearly, not, because even if she had, in fact, died, I would have suffered.. er, disappointment, followed by the joy of making a new character.  But on some level it was close enough to trick my brain into feeling like WHOAthatwasclose!

I mean, I didn't exactly have a sense before that that the GM was fudging things, or would, but knowing that he definitely wasn't was... interesting.  I've kind of tried to adopt that same sense in my GMing, but I don't think I've quite made it.

Hmmmm.... scribbles down note

Oh, yes, I should have quoted that famous infamous line, if only I had had my rulebook handy.  But the practical reality is that players want their use of perversity points to actually count for something, so those rolls are the closest thing to sacrosanct I can let rolls get in such a crazily delusional game.

Also, the rules were amended in the XP version about 10 years ago, which may be when they added perversity points and a little more structure to things like accusations of treason, as well as adding play "styles."  So that rule of thumb is more of a joke than anything else now, though it can still be used frequently in "ZAP" style play, I'm sure.

I'm pretty sure that knowledge of editions past Second is treason even at my Clearance.  LALALA LAAA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!

...Or, to tie in to that Community Chat thread -- Kids these days, with their hair, and their Perversity Points.  In my day, we had to traverse the Complex uphill! Both ways! In the Synthesnow!  And gol' durnit, we were happy about it!

Of course you were.  Failure to be happy is treason.


Your character was only three years old ?!!  Talk about babes in arms.  Tough GM ...

I know that thrill.  In my case it was realising the 'captive' I was standing next to was actually a polymorphed Yellow Dragon.  Concentrates the mind wonderfully.  But would you have felt the same if your Swordmistress got critically and fatally smited (I refuse to say smitten) by an unarmoured kobold armed with a feather duster, just because the dice fell that way ?  (fell that way several times, actually given the damage potential, but you know what I mean)  :>

I know what you mean lol.

Then again what gm would allow that to happen? That being said. Tuck's
(was it tuck, I forget) kobolds.

I am running a horror game, makes me wonder how people will react if I ask opinions about fudging.

Hey, she's precocious. shrug


Well... yeah.  The dice can totally do that in Earthdawn (virtually every roll is `exploding').  So d4-2 is a lot less likely to get up to 36 than, say, a d20+2d8, but... it's always possible.

Psychologically, in this case, the sense of danger wasn't really from the Wyvern -- it was from the GM.  Knowing that he was just rolling the dice and passing on the numbers.  And that sense of.. `threat', stayed, because in encounters after that I knew that we were, well, you know.  On our own.  So I don't think it mattered where the numbers came from in the game.  It was more meta.

As a person who has intense favoritism toward fudging, I have to say that I would absolutely hate fudging in a horror game under almost all circumstances. Nobody gets any favors in a horror game. It seriously removes too much grit.

I popped the question in ooc. to be fair one guy would be dead twice over without fudging.

If I were to be informed of that, I'd be annoyed if it was my character in a horror game. Although admittedly certain systems are too complicated and involved in their character creation process and I might be ok with fudging to avoid said process. Other than that, I think the dice and characters should both fall where they may for horror.

Fair enough I suppose. It is something I have been thinking about. It was a battle plagued with bad rolls. But we will see what happens.

I would certainly of allowed this. I think it makes it interesting, it would be an epic death, one that would get talked about long afterwards (that is the measure of a great event).

Even if I was going to save the players, it is imperative for me to never let the players know that, because if they did, then they would act like I'm going to save them, which leads to less fun. After all, if I make an encounter they are supposed to run from, they probably won't run unless they know without any doubt that I will let them die.

I fudge for story, to keep things rolling in a direction that I think will make things interesting. So if there is a TPK, for example, I'll fudge the last roll to keep to keep the last player alive, then they get taken prisoner, the other players roll new characters and are fellow prisoners captured elsewhere. The surviving player now holds the quest and is able to recruit the other prisoners into the original story instead of starting with a new adventure.

Personally, I think that is better, because if you actually become high level character, then you earned it (for the most part), rather then it being a guaranteed thing. Being able to say that you earned what you got when others couldn't, has always been a good feeling for me.

It is also part of my encouragement of smart play over "hulk smash!" play, as hulk smash will likely get you killed.

To be perfectly honest, a kobold with feather duster vs Sword Mistress is going to have one swing if he can't avoid it then run away as fast as he can - the point was to illustrate glorious vs ignominus ... but again, if it makes for a good tavern tale, then who am I to argue.  There just won't be any kobolds with feather dusters in my gritty games, though I can't promise in the others.  Though since Utsukushi plays in a couple of 'em, I suspect there may be kobolds with feather dusters appearing in any or all ! ;>

My own take is that I'll fudge rolls to keep things moving - the online format kinda requires that non-crucial search/knowledge checks sometimes succeed to stop things bogging down - but the chips can fall where they may in combat.