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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/14567016
DMing is the Call to Righteousness and faith in God and His d20 (John 14:6)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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I have never fudged a roll once as a GM.
There's a new-school of player/GM culture that says that having a character die is the worst thing possible. From my perspective, it's far worse to lie to your players than to kill their characters.
Part of the fun is overcoming the risks and beating the challenges in your way. If your GM is making it impossible to lose, did you really win?
If you want to play a game where death isn't a consequence, that's an option too, it just isn't true of the majority of TTRPGs.
The important thing when DMing is to never let the players know if there was fudging going on. Fudge in secret if you need to, but the moment the players know there are no consequences then there's suddenly no reward.
See, whenever there's a chance something horrible could happen, I roll out in the open so everybody can see that it's the dice and not me.
So I guess I take the opposite approach.
I've only ran a few sessions in different games, and I have a hard time with the consequences part. I tend more towards games where the consequences of failure are, you try again a different way. Maybe you lose some reputation, or you don't get as big of a payout. I need to get better at enforcing consequences for players.
IMO a lot of it comes down to player expectations. If you say up front "player characters can and will die if they make poor choices or even just get unlucky" and your players sign off on that, you can put death traps and over-leveled monsters all over the place.
If you plan to run a high-lethality campaign I'd recommend having each player play 2 characters, with 2 backup characters ready to go. I call those meatgrinder campaigns.
"Yes it's a campaign but the whole thing is a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel! :D"
l mostly agree and i don't really ever fudge, but i don't really like instant death, as it's mostly just luck. If they die from poor choices or failed death rolls i don't mind, but like, i've had players at full healh "die" because the monster rolled a crit and the highest number on both damage rolls. I ended up just downing him and giving him a cool scar after he got up cause that's bonkers and it was literally the first fight of the campaign, lol.
I might make changes to the number of monsters or their stats, but that's always something i do before the fight, never during it. Homebrewing is alot different than fudging imo. Once the players have seen it, it's set in stone.