Re: [DL] Fudging

[Jason Young <jason_d_young@yahoo.com>]

--- Greg Vose <kitsune@xmission.com> wrote:
> Randomness is fine.  As a matter of fact, it can help drive the story.
> However relying on that randomness to the point that you cannot make any
> decisions or changes is stupid and shows an incompetence or inexperience
> at
> GMing plain and simple.

Not necessarily. If I decide that certain tasks are hazardous and will
always be determined by rolls, and the players know it, well, we all take
a chance every time we make those rolls.

That doesn't mean your GM wasn't incompetent or inexperienced, but this
alone is not evidence of it.

> Catastrophic results from a random roll are fine also so long as they
> don't
> take the complete party out on the way to do their laundry.  Frankly
> that
> whole scene should never even have been there.  It's like asking for a
> climbing roll for a character to walk up a flight of stairs. Idiotic.

Unless that's the way the world you were playing in was crafted. I don't
really know, of course. Maybe stairs are really, really dangerous. But
you'd know that before you climbed them, of course. And you would have
been making a roll to climb stairs every time.

> Now I would have absolutely no problem with it had the party been in
> their
> ship being chased by three Star Destroyers and the navigator had to make
> an
> astrogation roll while dealing with his hot coffee that had just landed
> in
> his lap because of a violent maneuver that the pilot, Ming Single had
> just
> performed.  Then if he misses the roll, fine, plop him down in the
> middle
> of an asteroid field and make the pilot make his rolls or they all go
> splat.  But we are talking about embarking on the adventure from a
> non-hostile location where the navigator can take a little time and make
> certain the calculations are correct.  It is simply routine.

I don't disagree. I don't know what the style of play typically was for
your group, so I may miss the mark on some of my comments. Rather than
going on about a situation that I don't have all the details on, I'll just
say that it's best for a GM to be consistent and for everyone to
understand the ground rules regarding the danger of the environment (and
most everything else, of course). Then apply those rules as agreed.

Sometimes you'll get unwelcome results, but that's the danger of playing
that style of game.

I don't want to sound like I'm disagreeing with you, because it sounds
like it was a bad experience, and that's never good. I'm not defending
what your GM did. I just don't think this case supports the idea that GM's
should be willing to fudge rolls.

On /that/ issue, I always come back to, "If you fudge a roll then why did
you roll?"

Jason

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online
http://webhosting.yahoo.com