I’m a first time DM and I struggle with this a lot haha. There are times where I feel a roll is appropriate, so I do it, and whatever is supposed to happen fails, then I realize… “what the hell is supposed to happen if that doesn’t work?” so it just kinda happens anyways… IDK if my players have caught on…
You could just skip the roll, because if failure is unacceptable then it isn’t appropriate.
That’s where my problem comes from. I’m not experienced enough to know immediately where failure is acceptable or not; rather, I don’t always have backup plans or ideas for when things that should be able to fail, fail. So I roll, and it fails, and it should fail, but I’ve got no idea what happens when it does. So it doesn’t fail.
I think I’m getting better at improv-ing events and making backup plans. It’s still difficult for me to find the balance between the story I want to tell/ have prepared vs the story that my players wind up creating, but checking in with my party here and there tells me everyone’s having fun and only rarely does anyone feel gipped or abused by dice rolls.
Prior to rolling, think about what will happen if the roll fails or succeeds. If you are worried about failure at all, that is a good sign that failing is probably not an option. Basically, if you are able to make the decision to fudge it when it happens you had the same time frame to decide notnto risk that need to fudge in the first place.
Over time with more experience you will find ways to make failure a bump in the road to fun tims.
if you don’t even roll, then you’re robbing your players from the feeling of a near miss
also taken to its extreme, your players will probably just work out that they aren’t going to die at all and start taking stupid risks that they shouldn’t
and yeah, at that point you can punish them, but you’ve been responsible for them getting to that state in the first place, so you’re essentially punishing them for your own mistakes
This is another thing I fear, that causes me to do probably unnecessary rolls. I want the story/ gameplay to have at least some semblance of believability, so I don’t want everyone risking their life on a curiosity because they know I won’t kill them, but I also don’t want to “punish” players every time they take a step off the walking path.
I’ll admit it right here: sometimes I roll the dice just to give the illusion of risk, when in reality I’m buying time to make up the results of what someone just did.
I occasionally roll dice as theatre myself. In my last session, I had a troupe of traveling performers that I rolled for on each act to see if they did well or not, with each roll hidden from the players, and I would then describe the outcome to them. Most of the rolls were real, but some performers I had already decided would fail from the beginning, because they were plants for the enemy faction and had a plan going on in the background that depended on their failure at the act. But of course I still had to roll to not set off any alarms. Going to be fun when my players later piece together “oh, that hypnotist didn’t actually fail, they just used mass suggestion to make everybody believe they did so they don’t come under scrutiny.” If a player catches on - one actually did pretty quick - then great, let them have the victory, but in general it’s one of the ways I like to create expectations so I can subvert them or use them to sneak things by. The enemy faction is very guerilla-oriented, so it fits their MO pretty well.
On a more general scale, when it comes to hidden rolls, if I really need something to succeed, I’ll make the roll not a matter of whether they succeed, but who succeeds. Keeps the story moving if I realize too late that that roll shouldn’t have happened because a failure brings the game to a halt.
You can roll some dice but it doesn’t need to be a skill check (or whatever the naming is in your system of choice). When I don’t know what should happen, I may roll a die. If it’s high then it should be something good and if low, maybe it will give me inspiration to think about some new lurking danger. But I may discard the result and go with the gut feeling. Whatever, it was an “oracle roll” as I like to call it. Not tied to anyone’s statistics.
I like to use a deck of cards as well. In Savage Worlds, it is used to determine a random encounter. Clubs indicate an enemy, hearts a friebd, diamonds some good omen and spades obstacles. I like to draw a card so it inspires me on what should happen next (of course as long as it makes sense with the world)
Roll in the open, fuck narrative first gameplay, it’s a game.
As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They’re a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.
Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.
Play a system that accounts for this.
Fate gives you fate points to spend when you do t like a roll. It also gives you “succeed at a cost” if your fate points are exhausted or not enough.
You can still just roll with it (pun intended) and die to a random goblin if that’s fun. But you also have agreed upon procedure for not doing that. “It looks like the goblin is going to gut me, but (slides fate point across the table) as it says on my sheet I’m a Battle Tested Bodyguard, so I twist at the last second and he misses (because the fate point bumps my defense roll high enough)”
This is pretty easy to import into DND, too, if you like the other parts of it
So that my players see me roll the dice. As long as they believe the illusion, the roll is real to them, and so their experience is meaningful and memorable; at the end of the day, that’s what matters most to me as a DM.
To newer DMs: Never admit to your players whether or not you fudge rolls. As the DM, The only thing you need to do to maintain the integrity of your game is to shut your damn mouth when you bend the rules. The players just need the illusion maintained.
Rules are important, but they aren’t the most important thing as a GM.
The 2 things that are more important are: pacing and fun.
Not fudging dice is important, but if it is in the way of fun, then I either just not roll or only pretend to roll.
Same with pacing, if a roll is going to bog down the games pacing, making everything take longer for no reason other than the roll, then that roll does not matter.
I agree with this. I’ve always seen the rules as a framework to assist in collaborative story telling and keep things impartial and surprising. At any point where they begin to do more harm than good, we can change them.
I got down voted for saying this elsewhere, but to my mind there’s a huge difference between the GM unilaterally changing the rules, and the group deciding.
Scenario: the goblin rolls a crit that’ll kill the wizard. This is the first scene of the night.
Option A: GM decides in secret that’s no good and says it’s a regular hit.
Option B: GM says “I think it wouldn’t be fun for the wizard to just die now. How about he’s knocked out instead?”. The players can then decide if they want that or would prefer the death.
Some people might legitimately prefer A, but I don’t really want the GM to just decide stuff like that. I also make decisions based on the rules, and if they just change based on the GM’s whims that’s really frustrating and disorienting.
There’s also option C where this kind of thing is baked into the rules. And/or deciding in session 0 what rules you’re going to change.
I definitely dislike the idea of stopping the action and suggesting a direction. For my games I always try to aim for immersion, and this would really take me out of it.
I think you might have gotten the wrong idea about how I approach it, though. Part of keeping things surprising and impartial is avoiding changing things all the time secretly. That being said, I don’t believe in a hard and fast rule of never fudging anything.
Here’s an example where I would consider it. The players have been trying really hard to overcome an obstacle, and have had many setbacks already. They come up with an exciting and novel solution, but a bad roll happens on my end that would end this great idea in another failure. Because they’ve earned it by this point, and it will make for a more exciting game, I would likely fudge that roll and give it to them. I would do this in secret, because calling attention to it deflates the experience for the players.
I see the GM as a storyteller and entertainer, whose primary goal is to immerse the players into a story, and to create an exciting and unpredictable experience. Not everyone will view things like I do, and that’s fine, but I wanted to clarify what I mean anyway. Hopefully that makes more sense now.
For your example, I’d probably still ask if the players wanted me to let the dice decide or not before rolling. My players once had a clever idea of setting some poison traps and using earthbind to deal with a wyvern. The thing made all of its saves and nothing worked. I could’ve lied, but we’d already agreed to openly roll and abide by it. Would lying have made it better? Maybe. The game carried on and that arc had a thrilling climax later.
Alternatively, if we’d been playing a game that has a “succeed with a cost” / “fail forward” mechanic it could have been satisfying. D&D and close relatives are especially prone to disappointment because of how random and binary they tend to be.
Anyway. All of this I think it reveals a difference in how RPGs are enjoyed by different people.
On one hand, there’s going for immersion. The player wants to be in the world, be in the character, and feel everything there. It’s very zoomed in.
On the other, where I hang out, it’s more like a writer’s room. I’m interested in telling a cool story, but I’m not really pretending to “be” my character. My character doesn’t want a rival wizard to show up, but I as a player think that’s interesting (and maybe want the fate point, too) so I can suggest that my “Rivals in the Academy” trouble kicks in now. I enjoy when I can invoke an aspect and shift the result in my favor, or when I can propose a clever way I can get what I want at a cost.
Neither’s better or worse than the other, so long as everyone’s on the same page. It can be bad if half the table wants to go full immersion and just talk in character for two hours and the other half doesn’t.
I definitely agree that the beauty of ttrpgs is how many different things they can be to different people. We’ve got very different styles, but I think it’s great you’ve found a way to play that works for you and your table!
I don’t fudge rolls, but I do dynamically adjust enemy’s max HP depending on how well my players are doing.
Yeah, I’m not big on fudging rolls, but that’s one thing I will do. In my last campaign, I had statted up the first real villain for my players to fight, and they knocked him out in one punch. I would have made him one level higher, but then his own attacks would have been strong enough to one-shot some of the players. Level 1 woes.
My 2 cents is that at the low levels, players need a bit of a buffer. A Lvl1 wizard with +0 CON can be one-shot by a goblin rolling a crit, to say nothing of the bugbear boss of the first encounter in Lost Mines of Phandelver (many people’s first introduction to DnD 5e)
So minor selective fudging to keep the characters alive long enough for them to at least be wealthy enough to afford a Revivify seems like a small and harmless enough concession to me
It is the reason why I prefer starting at lvl 5
Also the classes all feel and play the same below that level.
