Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part III - Let dice be fudged, but not by the GM
I think this is probably as pearl clutch inducing a statement as I could make about how to run a roleplaying game session. The feuds about whether to fudge dice or not fudge dice has raged on since the get go, and I myself fell/fall strongly on the "Do not fudge" dice camp. But part of getting good at something is analyzing it and a core point in this whole series is that if a problem keeps coming up again and again in a new medium, it might not be a problem but a feature. So I started thinking about that and realized several "problems" a lot of GM advice is actually about treating symptoms of the same problem.
1.) Stopping players from cheating on dice rolls
2.) Why its important to fudge dice to make the story rewarding
3.) Why you should never fudge dice as a GM as it robs agency and fun, even in TPK situations.
So the first one is an obvious reason why its a problem, it becomes a fairness issue where other players don't want to cheat themselves as they enjoy the challenge, and worse that player will sometimes be willing to take higher risks knowing they can fudge the dice in their favour, which ends up landing squarely on the shoulders of the players who aren't cheating. But that one player also isn't cheating for no reason, maybe they need something out of the game it isn't providing. Perhaps they have had a rough couple weeks and they just want to relax and take their mind of their own personal or familial tragedies for a couple weeks and they don't also want to lose their character of 5 years to three natural 1s in a row of shitty luck.
The second is often a case of bad design in scenarios or games where the GM wanted an edge of your seat fight but didn't remember basic statistics that if the PCs are the underdogs then that means barring movie magic they will probably lose. If you engineered a situation (railroad) then its extra unfun because you sent a first level monk who isn't looking for a fight to challenge Goro one on one. But sometimes it is just bizarre luck. Sometimes your one goblin scout manages to go 4 rounds with the whole party, scoring 3 nat 20's doing max damage, while everyone in the party side fumbles, leaving one PC left standing about to die. The goblin scouts attacks again, a fourth nat 20. I personally would find this amazing and the best possible ending a campaign (assuming the rolls were open) as once things cooled off this would be one of those funny stories the group tells for 30 years, and what could be a better real-life outcome than that? But hey, maybe this is the second time in 2 weeks this has happened and its getting stale.
The complaint about agency robbing is to me the strongest. A lot of GM's seem to think they are smarter than their entire table at once the second they take on the mantle of GM for a game and that they can, like a Machiavellian puppeteer have their players dance for them without ever realizing that the GM is secretly rolling dice with no meaning to tell the story they've always wanted to write a novel about if only they were able to get it published. Everyone figures it out, some people don't care, but some people do. Its a game and part of the enjoyment for a lot of players isn't about the story, its about the challenge of overcoming problems. Knowing the GM is fudging dice is playing Doom with God Mode enabled. You can, everyone knows IDDQD after all, but its joyless. No, you are no so subtle that you can keep this charade up for a decade, weekly, with 5 people. If you were that skilled a manipulator you'd be too busy actually making money on pyr..multi-level marketing opportunities. Once a GM has been caught doing that once the assumption is you always are. If everyone knows you saved characters from death in one instance, then if they die later (Even through their own stupidity) then the assumption that you "let" that character die because you didn't like the player as much as some other player you did save via fudging will arise.
These are all the same root cause to me, and funnels back to a core design principle I put into NGR that I think I really will make explicit in the next version. The GM should be the impartial referee and the players are the storytellers out to make something interesting out of the sandbox the GM has prepared (including by using pre-made adventures).
When you look at the three problems from this angle, the solution is so blatantly simple. Let the players fudge the dice.
1.) Solved as its not cheating.
2.) This occurs, it just changes who makes the decision.
3.) This is also preserved, since everyone knows the GM isn't fudging (and ideally is rolling out in the open).
But what! What about the player who just fudges their dice all the time to take extra risks and forces everyone else to fudge or die. There is a key element you are missing because I as a writer deliberately downplayed it for the following dramatic reveal...
The players as a group fudge dice, any individual player doesn't fudge dice. Social norms will keep things in check. There is no secret fudging (correctly known as "cheating").
It went against every fiber of my body originally, but I've taken to just flat out tell people. Cheat all you want, if you don't like the roll of a die just tell me you are changing it. As long as no one in the group objects then the die is changed. What do I care? If anyone is being cheated then they are cheating themselves. Group dynamics will regulate the problem. Which will be a perfect segue into my next post in this series about how the GM just another player and not the boss.