This is revisionist heresy. Gary Gygax, who is expected to be cannonized via a trebuchet in the next couple of years, explicitly said that the official books are more like guidelines than actual rules.
And I mean that I actually had beverages with Gary at a science fiction convention back in the early 90s, and he said stuff like “If you want to pack a healing kit that heals +5 damage, do it.” Being serious now, it’s about the story, not the rules. I know that’s the point of the joke, but it’s been almost 50 years now and people we are still arguing about rules lawyers.
I always thought the White Wolf games that called the DM the Storyteller and explicitly made dice rolls optional were the apex of the interactive story idea.
On the one hand, games should enable you to tell the story you want to tell. If you’re fighting against the games rules and contents to make your story work, changing a rule, or even the system you’re using, is the right call.
On the other hand, we’ve all seen stories where the established rules of the world break for a moment to let the protagonist win a fight they’d obviously lose. It’s always a low point in the story, unless the story is just bad. The audience starts to feel like there are no stakes because physics will just bend to help the hero win.
If the rules of the system already in use would kill a character, then maybe the story is one where that character dies. It’s not the one you planned, but it’s the one that’s happening.
One way to think of this is that the players and the GM are all trying to tell a story together, and dice rolls exist to resolve conflicts between the stories they’re trying to tell. Or if you prefer, conflicts between their stories and a world that has other ideas.
Normally the player wants something to happen, and the GM calls for a a die roll, the GM is represents the world opposing that event… and that’s one of the many roles they fulfill at the table. However if the GM and the players all agree that the story should go the same way, you don’t need to roll a die at all. That means if the player thinks they made a persuasive argument, and the GM believes the NPC should be convinced by it, then the GM doesn’t have to say “roll persuasion” they can just say “yes that works”
Perhaps a better example - you don’t always need to make a player roll to find traps when they’re looking, especially if their score is much higher than the DC - you can just say “while investigating, you find this trap”. Maybe your story is more interesting because the trap is ingenious and needs something clever to disarm it, maybe it can’t be disarmed, and triggering it is a choice they have to make or go another way. Maybe the existence of the trap is only there to provide context or detail to the group, and it’s not intended to be a threat.
This goes for attacks too. Almost all of the time, the players will have less fun if they know the world is pulling its punches, because they’ll know there’s no risk and they’ll always win - it’s not fun or satisfying to beat a challenge that was rigged in your favour after all.
But… if the GM knows for sure that everyone will be miserable if (x character) dies, and they think it will make the game or the story worse, they can just roll a die behind the screen and not look at it, then say “oh it missed” just… don’t do it every time.
The whole fun of D&D is that nobody knows what the story will be until it plays out. Players don’t know what the DM has planned, and the DM doesn’t know how the players will react. And neither of them know what the dice will say.
On the one hand (again), I agree that you don’t always need to roll. A 29 passive perception will let you see everything from traps to shat pants, and I’ll just skip the perception rolls to move things along.
On the other hand, I don’t want to base my decisions on player actions (good arguments) rather than character actions. Sure, it’s a good lie, but you have a -2 to deception rolls. If I ignore that, then the dude with a +12 might as well have not bothered building a character.
On the third hand, I struggle as a DM with not holding back. I’m TOO nice. I don’t want your character to die either. But if the story is going to have weight and your actions have meaning, that means bad things must be possible. If letting a hero live would feel cheap, it may be worth more to let them die. Plus, memorials and funerals are great RP.
One way to think of this is that the players and the GM are all trying to tell a story together, and dice rolls exist to resolve conflicts between the stories they’re trying to tell. Or if you prefer, conflicts between their stories and a world that has other ideas.
It really is conflict between players and the GM, usually. A player succeeding every single roll in an encounter represents a total success for the player. A player failing every single roll in an encounter does not typically represent a total success for the GM, because the GM usually wants the player to be able to succeed. It’s much more conflict between the player and world in the vast majority of cases unless either the GM or the player is a shithead and are making the meta-level relationship needlessly adversarial.
That is one perspective that works for some people but I strongly disagree.
Dice rolls exist to resolve conflicts between the player and DM stories, yes…but they also exist to create new and interesting situations which neither player nor DM would have chosen.
Yes, the dice can create unsatisfying moments and even end characters or entire parties in a way that doesn’t feel great. But for each time they have done so in my experience, they have created far more awesome moments, simply by following the rules. And without allowing the unsatisfying ones, the good ones don’t really happen either, and don’t feel as satisfying.
There is a wide range in how RPGs can be played. For TSR era D&D there it has a lot of in built mechanical flexibility. White Wolf games like WoD or Exalted adds a layer of dramatic flexibility at the expense of in-built heroics, which works well for a dark modern setting.
I really like a lot of games for different reasons. WW games, particularly Wraith, are some of the more interesting to run. Due to the higher reliance on player creativity and inter-character interactions. I really enjoy Wraith’s shadow system for creating interactions between players for character flaws.
Paranoia is perhaps one of the most interesting GM experiences because it encourages so many deviations from standard gamemastering; railroading, PvP, splitting the party, killing PCs, … . Still it works so well.
Hey, at least Satan comes to sessions on time. Last time we played, jesus was 3 days late!
Jesus saves! Everyone else takes full damage
Fun fact
I roll in front of my players during combat
It adds to the tension
I can always fudge enemy HP though, and often I do
I’m just starting to DM, do you disclose how much HP creatures have to your players? Just did a combat sim with my guys last week to see if we understood the combat system and that probably affected how they played.
A common way to get around explicitly giving the HP of a monster and telling them nothing is the "They look… " rule. When they ask how many HP the baddie has left, tell them “They look injured, but not enough to hinder them” or “they look bloody and totally messed up” etc. As a rule of thumb, you can decide their health into quarters and come up with a common phrase for each, or come up with them on the fly depending on the situation: “Grog’s hammer has left some of its ribs broken, but it looks healthy enough to keep fighting for a while.”
Huh, interesting. Thanks! How do you keep track of health? I was using Owlbear’s character text window but, well, I think I’ll adopt that system you mentioned.
4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP, this represented that one of the attacks on them has been a telling enough blow that they’re showing signs of injury. I brought this with me to 5e, because it’s a useful contextualizer for players to get a feel for how well they’re doing.
One advantage of this system (especially for new DMs) is that if you massively overspec an encounter and the players are in trouble, you have some time to realize it’s going badly, and can drop the monster’s HP pool a little to compensate.
One advantage of this system (especially for experienced groups) is that if the party are doing badly, and haven’t realized it - the moment you say “right, the enemy is bloodied” they realize that they’ve “only” done half the dragon’s HP, and are reminded that retreat is an option they can take. Remember that if the whole party decides to retreat, it can be good to drop out of combat, and make the attempted retreat a skill-based challenge, rather than trying to run the retreat on the combat grid. 5e makes it very very difficult for creatures to “outrun” other creatures that are trying to kill them, and the combat system doesn’t handle retreating well.
If you want a mechanic for it, ask the player who wants to know to make a medicine check - this can add value to the medicine skill (which doesn’t see a lot of play):
If they beat 10, you give them a very rough idea, like “they’ve been hit a couple of times but they look like they’re going strong”
If they beat 15, give them a loose fraction to the closest 1/4 or so “they’ve lost about 1/4 of their HP” etc
If they beat 20, give them a number to the nearest 5 or 10 (depending on if you’re low or high level.)
Increase these DCs by 5 if the monster is something that they’d be unfamiliar with the biology of - how easy is it to tell how hurt an air elemental is? not very.
An important thing to always remember is, every table is different, if one thing works for your group - do that, don’t think that you have to follow any piece of advice just because it came from someone who sounded authoritative, or gave you a lot of numbers.
Usually not until they’re below half or unless a player asks, I never give them the actual numbers though as I feel that would detract from the experience.
For me the players having a fun experienceb and building a character’s story is more important than explicitly wargaming
I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.
The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don’t fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of “your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay” gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. “Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)”
Do whatever you want but the Dungeon Master’s guide encourages DM’s to (sparingly) fudge rolls to avoid your players getting screwed over by bad luck. It’s not against the rules at all.
Source: DnD 5e DMG page 235 and 237
Funny, my Hackmaster book p. 113 says fudging dice is cheating. But you are free to roll dice with the devil.
“Finally, this rule absolutely eliminates the need for anyone, be he player or, so help me gods, GameMaster, to fudge a roll. Fudging, also known as CHEATING has no place in a game that already has a mechanic designed to eliminate freak occurrences.”
I guess you are right, DMs can fudge all they want. GMs keep their honor and don’t roll dice with Satan.
