Re: [DL] Fudging

["Michael Sprague" <mds@rochester.rr.com>]

> Marshalls amongst us - an earlier thread raised the point of fudging,
> or cheating - to what extent to other marshalls use this?  What
> techniques are used to pull off fudging convincingly either in the
> favour of PCs or NPCs?

I have never been a Marshall, but have GM'd plenty of other games.  Do I
fudge?  Sometimes.  It depends on the genre and the story.

If the genre is supposed to be deadly (AD&D based fantasy games quickly come
to mind), then I would almost never fudge.  If, on the other hand, it is a
comicbook superhero or pulp based genre, then I will fudge to some extent,
but almost never against the players.  Rather, I will fudge to move the
story along and/or to make it more fun.

I probably spend 90% of my time playing or GM'ing HERO System based games
(Champions, Justice Inc., Fantasy Hero, etc), so it is not directly
applicable here, but there should be reasonable overlap here.

As a GM, I almost always roll dice in secret rather than in front of the
players.  I rarely fudge on dice rolls, but I can if I need to.  For what
it's worth, I often will roll when there is no need to roll, or when I have
predetermined that something will work.  It keeps people on the edge.

As a GM I ask (as do most of the GM's I game with) "What DCV (target number)
did you hit?" rather than saying, "You need to hit a DCV of 8."  Friends
still playing D&D do the same with Armor Class ... asking what was hit,
rather than telling what must be hit.  The main purpose of this is more for
an aire of mystery ... players do not know right off the bat excatly how
tough or wimpy an opponent is.  However, if it turns out that the opponents
are too strong or to wimpy, I can fudge and adjust on the fly.

Same thing goes for Skill Rolls.  I mentally figure out any bonuses or
penalties that the player-character would not know about, and ask how much
they made their roll by, tather than giving the target number.  This is a
little more difficult when your take 'Raises' into acount.

As a GM, I can always add or subtract opponents, depending on how a combat
might be going.  Be careful though.


> I ask because last session i was desperatly
> trying to 'kill' a PC so that she could become harrowed (player is
> bored with being a fourth wheel in a group of PCs with 'powers').

Isn't the term "fifth wheel?"  :-)  This area is a lot more difficult, and
fudging should maybe not be done.  Had you talked to the player ahead of
time?  I'm not saying you always should, but you need to make sure that the
player would be interested in that sort of thing.

Be careful of "forcing" something on players.  The following examples are
not the same as what you were trying to do, but ...

I remember back on one adventure where the DM (yes, D&D) decided that the
party was going to be captured.  My character had an old map that the DM had
forgotten about, and realized that we were headed into a trap.  He/I warned
as many of the other players as I could ... and three of us actually escaped
the trap.  We stayed on the lam for three days, with the DM using all sorts
of lame ways to capture us ... and finaly, he did.  It still irks me though
(years and years later :-) that some of us were clever enough to evade the
initial trap ... and the DM insisted that we all had to be captured.  As it
turned out, he could have moved into the next adventure by starting it would
the people he had already captured.  He didn't need every single one of us
to move things along.

On the flip side, some players absolutely can't stand to be captured (or
should I say, to "lose").  Once while playing Champions, our group was
soundy defeated by the bad guys.  One player was really pissed off, and
stormed out of the room and went home.  His parting words were "We're all
dead anyway."  Turns out, we learned what the _real_ plot of the adventure
was _while_ captured, and after escaping a death trap, we went on to "save
the world."  In hindsight, the GM intended us to be captured, though we
didn't know it at the time ... and with the exception of that one person, we
all had fun.

So what I guess I'm saying is if you want to force something to happen, just
make sure circumstances surrounding it are not lame ... and even if they are
not, some players still take great exception to being "railroaded" into
something.

> With hindsight, i probably should have noticed the chipstack and
> ground her down a bit first with some guts checks and random rock
> falls or whatever, which would have made it easier, but I also
> played the minions exactly by the rules - was this my (non-)fatal
> mistake?  I dunno.  Anyway, comments and suggestions appreciated.

Sounds like you have already isolated what you could have done better.  :-)

~ Mike