RPGMemes

Well when you arn't sure if the encounter is balanced from the beginning and the dragons breath would tpk in one hit its kinda better to turn the cone into a line and half the damage so you only have one player down.

Me when my players in a cyberpunk game are all on death's door after a firefight goes bad: "Skill issue, I would simply not have been shot"

I don’t fudge rolls, but I do dynamically adjust enemy’s max HP depending on how well my players are doing.

Legit, I don't fudge rolls because it's not fun for me.

If a roll would fuck up the session/adventure/campaign, I just straight up tell the players I'm making a call and override the results. It doesn't happen often, and it's really only when rng just screws things, like when you get multiple nat 1s in a session, way out of line with what makes sense without some kind of gymnastics to explain things in game.

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.

Sometimes You roll dice just to make them think something’s up.

The GM just rolls dice because they like the sounds they make.

I have just the die for such an occasion...

https://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0628.html

To give the illusion that fate was on their side.

I make a point not to kill my players unless they make a habit of doing dumb shit, or it's "almost" happened a couple times already.

Especially if I get several good rolls or they get several bad rolls in a row.

The game should be fun for everyone, and if even one player goes home upset with the session I will have considered my night a failure as DM.

Not that I consider it a failing or even "bad" if someone else kills off their players. Everyone has different expectations from games and I've seen fantastic role playing of deaths before.

One player ripped their heart out of their own chest, chugging a health potion to stay alive long enough to place it in their spouse who had just died died, and another player healed the spouse.

They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.

Fudging a roll is for when I, the DM, realise I made a mistake. No, I didn't realise this creature got a sneak attack until after I rolled that 20!

i'm kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i'd wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it's just "i'm gonna skip this last encounter because we're already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow" or even just "wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace" but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that's part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i'm ok with them using fudging when they feel it's warranted so long as they're not abusing it to the point where there's no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we're all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they're doing, and if we're not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue

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

Chance is an illusion. You cannot escape your fate.

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

-Sam Riegal refusing to use his free advantage except the one time where it would fuck with the rest of the table

I just like the sound they make. Low key asmr

How to tell if someone likes writing more than improv: