To Fudge or Not to Fudge Dice Rolls

So over the past week a lot of digital ink has been spilled on twitter about fudgin dice. There I tried to voice
my opinions but it felt disjointed. So I thought I’d share a bit more detail here and be able to point people
towards it when this conversation rears up again. 

I try not to fudge dice. I don’t like it when DMs do it to me and I don’t like doing it to my players.  Dice are
there to determine things I want taken out of my or my players control. When we roll dice in an RPG it is
done  to add dramatic tension of not knowing the result, to be an “arbiter of fairness” in combat, and
prevent the GM or players from just winning. 

So if I am going to fudge the dice I am violating one of these three statements for why roll the dice. If I am
going to fudge the dice I should ask myself “Why are you fudging the dice and was it the right reason or
should I have avoided a dice roll entirely?” In the heat of a gaming session it can be hard to be this
introspective. So note it down or ask a player to make a note1 for you and keep the game running. 

Three main reasons I want to fudge dice and usually there are better work arounds that I should have used.
1) The PCs should have succeeded at this roll or needed to succeed at the roll for the adventure to
continue.
2) The monster is really tough and the players should be hitting more or the monster should be hitting
less or vice versa.
3) I backed myself into a corner and ratcheted things up to far and now I’m going to see a PC killed over
something stupid like a series of jumps across buildings that just got too hard and now she’s going
to fail and fall.

In the first case. The right answer is to not do that. If the players should succeed let them do it without the
roll. Or better yet use the roll to see if there are complications that will happen later on. This is referred to
in some games as “Failing Forward”2. A good example is the players toss a crime scene looking for clues.
They ultimately need to find a clue here to keep the adventure moving and it will break things if they don’t
get the clue and frustrate me and the players. So give them the clue. But use the dice rolls to see if there
are other complications that arise. Maybe poor rolls mean they find the clue but it can’t be used as
evidence. Or they know contact poison was used because they managed to also come in contact with it.
Or the players take so long to complete the search another crime has been committed or the criminals
have shown up to clean up the scene and now there is a fight. These are some examples. But all ideas I
might jot down in adventures notes as ways to “fail forward”. The worse the players roll the more difficult
the complication is to overcome or the more time lost. But at least the adventure can move forward.
When running a published adventure this can be harder to remember to do or determine ways to
incorporate the concept but it is worth taking the prep time to think about.

The second instance of wanting to fudge dice is when a monster proves too difficult. This is also a harder
case for me to fudge my dice. This is because I always try to roll my dice in front of the players. They
can see what my dice are doing so if the dice are hot the players can see I’m not being a jerk chance
just isn’t on their side and my dice are cold (which seems to happen more frequently than I would like)
they can see that I’m not pulling punches to protect them. However, there are times when I’m testing a
new monster or trying something different that the creatures AC or attack is just too high. Rather than
fudge the dice and let the players hit a little more often or have my monster miss more frequently. I
would rather take the time to reduce the monster’s AC or attack roll. Maybe I’d even tie it to something
creative a player did to describe an attack or just in response to the monster getting hit.  “When your
warhammer slams the orc chieftain you know its helm off. It seems stunned for a moment.” If my players
have pegged the creatures AC at this point I might tell them the new AC of the monster at this point. If t
hey haven’t figured it out yet I would keep it secret so they can keep guessing. The same would be true
if I had lowered the attack. Another option I use less frequently would be to have imposed a condition like
dazed on the monster for a round or two. But that is something I would certainly save for clever actions or
descriptions from the players.

The final instance is the hardest to identify and fix. It usually happens because I’m running the game and
my players have left any semblance of why I had planned for. We are not in uncharted territory and the
dice are helping to tell the story but also based on what the PCs are doing and how the dice are going
they also give me time to think about what might be next. So I don’t always realize when there are critical
rolls about to happen that really shouldn’t be left entirely to chance and by the time I do a PC is
plummeting to their death or I or the PCs are backed into a corner and people are starting to get
frustrated. During this time I often have to call a break on the game grab something to drink and sit back
down after 5 minutes. We recap what has happened, what is going on, and what the PC are trying to do.
During this step back from the immediate action I can get my bearing. Then I can figure out what the
forward looks like and understand what failure might be as well. Now I’m back on track with determining
ways to have the party fail forward. At times like this I might even lean on my players and ask them to
provide me with ideas for what failure looks like and determine how they move forward from here.  It isn’t
my favorite style of running the game but sometimes you take a messy solution and keep things moving
over ruining a whole session because I couldn’t plan it all out perfectly.

In summary (tldnr) there are more options for GMs to use beyond fudging dice. They might have the
same effect but feel less capricious and are applied evenly across all players and actions. So think
about why you fudge your dice and try to use other methods in the future. At the very least it will help
stretch your thoughts about the game’s rules and how to apply them to odd situations. I hope it helps.

Pax ludi and have fun.

1 I try to get my players to keep track of things I may want to revisit later rather than stopping the game
to take the note myself.  It usually consists of me saying something like “X, please send me an email
about the ruling I just made. To check if there is a rule we should have used.”

2 Thanks Robin D. Laws I believe my first contact with this idea was reading about Gumshoe. I started to
get it while running 13th Age by Rob Heinsoo.