For me, it was: “If it’s going to help your players have more fun, cheat. Fudge a die roll. Make shit up. The dice don’t tell you what needs to happen, your players’ reactions do.”
Obviously, many people will disagree with this, but I’ve always appreciated this advice, and I believe it has made me a better GM.
You must log in or register to comment.
I was thinking and trying to come to with something and I realized that I never got advice.
My path as a DM was essentially all “jump in and learn to swim”.
First from the old red box an uncle left behind when he moved, trying to figure it out (and bashing my face into thac0 until giving up for years).
Then, when I got fed up with the first DM I played under, I said “fuck it”, then finally figured thac0 out enough to run some d&d for friends, and decided I liked the mishmash my first DM used that was a gurps/d&d/marvel heroes/call of Cthulu abomination. I took the things I liked that he did, rejected what sucked for me, then gradually grafted on my own home brew stuff.
My group vastly preferred the near future, science fantasy setting I cooked up to standard d&d, so that was what mostly got played over the years until I essentially retired from running games (tried to run some here and there, with varying degrees of flake leading to aborted games).
So I never got advice. What I got was players, friends, giving me shit when things sucked and helping me cook shit up to fix what was broken. I call it “my” system, but the mechanics that weren’t lifted from established systems then adapted are only maybe 90% mine. Even the ones I wholly cooked up got adjusted over time by my friends input.
My best friend completely designed two magic “schools”, and had a major hand in coming up with racial abilities for our weird-ass wants.
And I think that’s the advice I got indirectly. Make the game, whatever system it is, a thing of creativity and fun. The system doesn’t fucking matter. The setting isn’t important. The people are. Time and time again, my best shit as a DM wouldn’t have happened without everyone being fully engaged, fully free to pull shit out of their ear and see what happened.
It’s the advice I tend to give when asked. And it isn’t just rule of cool writ long winded, because you don’t actually have to do that for an engaging table. You can RAWdog the fuck out of dice and rules as long as players and DM are invested in mutual enjoyment.
There are other games than DND. Play more of them and steal ideas from them.
It’s not a game if your players aren’t able to make informed decisions. They can’t make informed decisions if you keep arbitrarily changing the rules.
Get your players to tell the story.
As a GM, I’m not the only story teller at the table. I ask my players to provide backstory, flesh out NPCs, explain how/why their characters can do things that aren’t on the sheet.
It takes a lot of load off me, and it makes it more fun for everyone.
I dislike the oft repeated fudge advice. Why not just do a collaborative writing exercise if you don’t want to actually use the rules of the game you’re playing?
As a player, I would be crushed to find out the GM was fudging. It would make all of my decisions pointless.
As a GM, if you fudge, you are effectively removing the players’ agency. You are becoming the sole arbiter of the story to be told, and they are just along for the ride.
If your spectators want that, cool. But I’d much rather be an active player.
I believe you’re blowing the idea of the fudged roll out of proportion, friend. No one is suggesting doing this on a continual basis - ie, fudging every single dice roll in the game. As a GM, my first responsibility is to ensure (as much as possible) that my players have a good time. I don’t get my rocks off watching my players die or have anxiety attacks at the table (though there are plenty of GMs who do). If the roleplaying would be best served by me overlooking a shitty dice roll from time to time, I have absolutely no qualms with that. At all. Of course, if my players make idiotic decisions and ignore every subtle warning I can throw at them to NOT do what they’re doing, then I let the dice fall how they will.
My opinion is not based on continuous fudging.
Perhaps I can reword my opinion to be better understood. You don’t need to agree with it, but this is my opinion.
The GM fudging is removing the agency of the players, by deciding that the rules of the game (Eg, the dice result) do not at an arbitrary time serve the story that the GM thinks is best.
Challenge: would you be okay with a player lying (fudging) a dice result to facilitate a result that they found more fun?
iamthetot > would you be okay with a player lying (fudging) a dice result to facilitate a result that they found more fun?
Thank you. No GM is going to accept their players declaring a bad roll to be a good one, instead. Cheating players is one of the more common GM complaints. I’m not sure why GMs seem to think that’s a one-way street.
That’s an ad hominem argument, I’m afraid. The player isn’t responsible for running the game - at least not in the same capacity. The GM is the one who either selects the adventure to run or writes it themselves. The players (at least not in any game that I’ve ever participated in over the last 30+ years) do not. As the one who is doing all of the legwork in creating, hosting and running the game to maximize the enjoyment of the group, overlooking a few terrible dice rolls here and there isn’t going to make me lose any sleep. In fact, in just about every TTRPG rulebook you will find an entry that states, in one form or another, that the GM is the final arbiter of the rules - up to and including overriding them as they see fit. Do things differently at your table, if you like. You don’t have to agree with me, either. Different strokes and all that.
I did not attack your character.
mr_noxx@lemmy.ml Honestly, I agree with the others. I don’t know why we’re playing dice games if we don’t want to adhere to the dice. The dice create the uncertainty and variation that the play at the table responds to.
The more honest and transparent solution to players being at risk of dying is roleplay or narrative transition. Enemies don’t need to be doing coup de graces, and going down in combat can mean capture rather than death. But if it’s only fun for everyone if they’re winning, then why not play something else where losing is never an option?
Is that the case though? When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play. Chalk that down to inexperience I guess, but a nudge in the direction of what the intended experience was I’ve found helpful, especially when the focus on the campaign is narrative. It can mitigate frustration that arises in situations that aren’t supposed to be difficult, and prevent boss encounters from being underwhelming when your players do a lot more damage than you anticipate.
> When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play.
Players are allowed to flee. Enemies are allowed to mock them and walk away.
I’m not sure why basically ever single discussion I ever see about GMing seems to live in this world where the only options in combat is “PCs die or NPCs die”, and the only workaround is to pick and choose when you’re playing a probability game.
Change or fudge enough rules and you’re basically playing a different game.
No time constraints? Now the GM has less levers to pull on to make choices feel meaningful.
Not tracking rations? Then there’s nothing stopping the players from travelling back to town to rest after every encounter.
Lots of game rules feel “less fun” in the moment but the alternative is constantly playing rocket tag because now fights don’t feel consequential unless player death is on the line - and that’s an easy line to accidentally cross. And then you end up fudging rolls to balance encounters.
But you wouldn’t need to make individual encounters so hard in the first place if pc death isn’t the only negative consequence on the table.
“You cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept.” - Gary Gygax
This advice can be taken in various ways. My take is time goes by while your PCs are doing their thing.
Nefarious plans are carried out by evil minions and the latest exploits of your party of murder hobos has reached the next settlement. If your party does a side quest instead of saving the queen from a sacrificial ritual, they going to have more xp and gold but Orcus is now wearing a new queen skin loincloth.
Time drives the consequences of PC actions. The world continues on while your party is on their 6th long rest in a 5-room dungeon.
Tell your players they can also create part of the world. If a player wants to jump up, grab the chandelier and swing towards the enemies, then there’s now a chandelier there. They don’t have to ask if one is there first.
And print out a long list of names and a long list of quirks (like “gorgeous”, "drunk ", “depressed”, “freckled”, “educated”, “short-tempered”, etc.)
Pick a name and 2+ quirks for every NPC they encounter, to give them more than “he’s the shopkeeper” to play off of.
You can make similar lists for villages you didn’t plan out, spaceships, etc. depending on the setting.I don’t like that advice. Part of the fun of TTRPGs, to me, is the randomness involved in outcomes.
But if it works for you it works for you.
Best advice I’ve ever gotten was that the DM isn’t responsible for everything. So now I let players handle the scheduling.
“Nobody actually uses the rules for traveling, man. They fucking suck.”
They were absolutely right. They do suck.
System dependant, surely.
Not only system, but also how you are using the system.
Some games are built around resource management. Travel rules solidify the way in which travel saps resources (like supplies and time) and force choices (every day we delay people die but if we press on through the night we will get there tired and hungry or might run into something dangerous in the dark) while also (with random encounters) showing that the world exists beyond the confines of the plot.
Some games are far more “epic hero”, the protagonists are the centre of the world and what they aren’t involved with doesn’t really matter.
It’s a good idea for a GM to know what type of game they are running and for a system designer to know what they are trying to design.
If travel rules suck then there’s a good chance that the GM picked a system that isn’t a good fit for the game they want to run or the system designer shoved travel rules in because they thought the game should have them just because it is an RPG.
Obviously, there aren’t absolutes and some games work perfectly fine if you jettison their resource management aspects as a house rule. I think it is useful to try to understand why rules exist before changing them though.
Yeah, it is probably important in WH40K more than D&D. At least from what I have seen of the game when I would go to the local game shop.
Similarly “The DM rolls the dice because it sounds good. Occasionally the dice tell an amazing story, unfortunately the DM must always tell an amazing story.”
Unfortunately, the first lesson I learned from GMing is that the story I planned is shit. The only reason these stories are worth telling is because the players make decisions you don’t expect and the dice send things in crazy directions. If there is no chance of failure, success is meaningless.
Instead, I let the dice tell whatever story they like, and I turn that into a better story than I could come up with. And if a roll would genuinely make things terrible if they didn’t roll a specific way, I don’t roll at all.
I tried fudging once. The players could tell, and the story lost all tension. Now I roll in the open, and every roll is exciting.
@mr_noxx
“Only prep what is either absolutely necessary for the next session, or actually fun to prep.”
I get this one from Kevin Crawford. I find that it helps preventing prep from becoming a chore, and gives the nice long-term goal of making the “necessary” part of the Venn diagram as small as possible, and as overlapping with the “fun” part as possible.If it does not serve the fun of the people in the table you are allowed to gloss over it.
I agree with this advice to a point. For me, it is a 50/50 decision. Fudging dice and cheating is part of dming to me, but it is a decision of when, where, and why. Crushing your players under under a severe string of bad luck can kill the game, but so can everything going their way. The point to me is to make the game compelling rather than a power trip, even if I am ultimately on my players’ side
I have to roll in the open, otherwise I’d fudge every roll. I don’t want my players to have a bad time. I equate failing on a roll with not having fun.
Instead, I roll in the open, and try to provide multiple ways to give a hint, or out of potentially lethal scenarios.
@mr_noxx do stars & wishes in the end of the session to prep the next session.
Explain this concept to me, my friend.
