In GM Don’t List #9: Fudging I discuss why GMs should avoid fudging, and if they do end up needing to fudge, why they should view that as a failure point in their game and a learning opportunity to figure out how they can become a better GM.
The most common form of fudging is changing the outcome of a die roll (the roll was a failure, but you say it was a success, or vice versa), but it’s widely understood that there are also other ways to fudge mechanical results (increasing a creature’s hit point total, for example).
What I think is less commonly understood, however, is that not all the dice rolls you make in a roleplaying game are mechanics, and it’s not actually fudging to change or ignore those dice rolls. Specifically, procedural content generators. Such generators can actually use any number of randomization techniques (for example, here’s a method for using CCG cards to generate adventures), but since we’ve already got dice laying around the typical RPG table most procedural content generators just use those.
WHY ISN’T THAT FUDGING?
If you’re struggling to understand why changing the outcomes of a procedural content generator isn’t the same thing as fudging a mechanical resolution, let’s take an extreme example. I’m prepping a scenario for my next session and I need a name for an NPC. So I pop open the Random Name Generator at Behind the Name, select for random surnames, click the button, and get:
Ivonne Eógan Masson
For whatever reason (maybe personal aesthetic, maybe because the Masons are already established as major power brokers in the city and I think it’s interesting this random generator has unexpectedly connected this NPC to the clan), I decide to drop the second “s” from “Masson” and name the character Ivonne Eógan Mason.
Did I just fudge?
Frankly speaking, no. Not by any reasonable/functional definition of the term.
What if instead of tweaking the outcome I actually just ignored it and rolled again by hitting the “Generate a Name!” button a second time? Still no.
What if I move this interaction from prep to actual play (I need to come up with a new NPC’s name on the fly, so I randomly generate one and then tweak it)? Still no.
What if the random name generator is published in the game’s rulebook? Still no.
This isn’t fudging not only because it would make the concept of “fudging” so broad as to be meaningless, but also because treating the outcome of a procedural content generator as a straitjacket or legally binding contract is to fundamentally misuse the procedural content generator. Using a procedural content generator is more like coating the bottom of an agar plate with a growth medium: As it’s exposed to your creative subconscious, the growth plate begins to accumulate a bunch of random creativity and odd synchronicities that begin to grow and thrive. (Ivonne Mason, for example, is a very different character than Lea Colton or Caroline Bone specifically because each of those random names provides a different creative stimulus.) Treating the outcome of the procedural content generator as if it were inviolable scripture, on the other hand, is like sterilizing the agar plate; it completely short-circuits the process.
ALL MECHANICS ARE PROCEDURAL CONTENT GENERATORS!
“Ah ha!” you say. “But aren’t all resolution mechanics actually procedural content generators, the results of which are meant to be creatively interpreted by the GM and other players? Is not the narration of outcome the same thing as taking a randomly generated group of bandits and creating the Blood Shield Bandits?”
Basically, no. There’s a similarity of process (roll dice, interpret results), but the function of resolution mechanics and procedural content generators are in many ways actually inverted: A resolution mechanic takes generally non-specific creative input and creates specificity (often literally a binary pass/fail state). A procedural content generator, on the other hand, produces non-specific creative input and expects the GM to create the specificity.
Because the processes involved are similar and because “specificity” can be a sliding scale, you can use procedural content generators as resolution mechanics (sterilizing your agar plates) and vice versa. But because the tools are designed for one thing and you’re using them for something else, the result is usually like using a screwdriver as a hammer.
GRAY AREAS
This is not, however, to say that there are no gray areas which lie along the boundary between resolution mechanics and procedural content generators.
You can see this perhaps most clearly when a game takes something which is traditionally a procedural content generator in other systems and makes it a hard-coded mechanic (or closer to being a mechanic) instead.
For example, in Apocalypse World characters are created from playbooks. For example, if you want to play a Gunlugger, you take the Gunlugger playbook and it instructs you, “To create your gunlugger, choose name, look, stats, moves, gear, and Hx.” Each of those categories then has a specific list of things. This becomes a surprising gray area: Many people, conditioned by other RPG character creation systems, looked at the provided list of names as a resource that could be used or ignored. (Many editions of D&D have similar lists of elven names, for example. Over the Edge provides a list of Al Amarjan names. And so forth.) Apocalypse World, however, specifically seeks to enforce setting through non-traditional mechanics, and so I’ve played at tables that instead interpreted this as a mechanical requirement: You must choose your name from the provided list of Gunlugger names (which are distinct from the list of, for example, Hardholder names, thus asserting setting). I’m actually still unsure what D. Vincent Baker’s intention was.
You can find another gray area in the dungeon stocking procedures of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons. While the rules allow for some discretion on the part of the GM in the distribution of treasure and monsters, the line between advice, procedural content generator, and actual mechanic is very fuzzy and open to a lot of interpretation. This is even more true when it comes to wandering monsters in OD&D: A random encounter check is often interpreted as a procedural content generator by modern GMs, but in OD&D it’s stated as a straight-up mechanic.
The Mythic Game Master Emulator is also an interesting example: In order to emulate the role of the GM, the Mythic system basically adds a lot of binding structure onto a suite of procedural content generators. But despite the gray area this creates, the system still draws a fairly strong distinction between the output of the resolution mechanics and the output of the GM emulator (i.e., the procedural content generators). If you want to get a really clear feeling for how using resolution mechanics and using procedural content generators differ from each other, spending an afternoon playing around with Mythic as a cap-system for your favorite RPG can be very illuminating.
There is another case I would say it’s not fudging: atmospheric rolls.
I had several scenario is which the result is completely determined by the players roll (i.e. the player with the better alertness roll get infected), however, since Alertness is expect to be a contest by the rules and players are expecting it, I roll behind the screen to create tension.
Same thing for interrogation. I started to apply a flat modifier, that’s unknown to the players but it’s defined for each npc based on their approach. The roll behind the screen is just to create atmosphere. It’s not technically fudging (cause I based it on the rules for the scenario) but it’s a prop.
Some games have introduced a buy in mechanics for the GM that makes not fudging interesting. A magnificent example is the blade clock, or the darkness point in games like Corriolis. You let the player roll, you make them succeed in some way even if they fail the roll, but they leave behind clues or they know something worst is coming later cause the GM can buy obstacles or the clock is going to fill.
I think I made this comment on an earlier post of your about this same delineation, but:
Man, I wish I had understood this distinction a few years ago. I ran an open-table-ish game for a couple of years that (among other things) used a lot of random encounter tables, and while those often led to some of the best unexpected outcomes in the game, it also led to several uninteresting or repeated encounters that I nonetheless stubbornly went forward with, out of a sense of obligation to the “system” I had cooked up.
Ah! This puts into words a concept I’d been groping towards but not nailed down.
I think it’s something like, depending on the scope or tone of your game, some things might be either procedural or mechanics.
Like, when someone plays DnD for the first time, you might “fudge”[1] so their first combat is representative of a typical combat experience. But if you play a lot, it’s more exciting if you follow the dice, and reward playing well, and have the possibility of failure.
And I think it’s worth *often* sticking to the dice, even when it’s not obvious whether you did or not because (a) the unexpected situations are often interesting and (b) the players know they have to be prepared for the unexpected, not just solely trust their “what would happen in a good story” sense to tell them how much danger they’re in. The players can pick up intuitively when you’re sticking to something even if they can’t tell.
But there’s still a spectrum. Anything that only comes up once, there’s not much benefit to “sticking to” your system, only if it repeats. To use examples from your write-ups, when the party were killed by a shark, a more narrative GM might have said, “of course I’ll fudge it, you’re only in real danger when it’s been foreshadowed in advance”. Whereas think when you ‘promoted’ the hex crawl exploration rules from “GM aid” to “player-visible mechanic”: that’s similar to something *becoming* a mechanic that wasn’t before, and a more simulationist GM would probably have done that in a lot more cases.
And I tend to agree with your style in both cases, but I can see where other styles come from. In one-shots, I’m a lot happier to play some more narrative style, fudging mechanics and having more story at the expense of less tension, effectively turning “official” mechanics back into procedural generation. But I’ll play others more “gritty” by-the-rules. And a big problem is that a lot of people haven’t thought what’s a mechanic and what’s procedural generation, and get it wrong, or get into disagreements they don’t fully understand.
Likewise, I’ve been thinking about where mechanics and procedural generation overlap. In some ways, the game becomes “about” whatever the GM and players put time into developing, whether that’s fluff, procedural, or crunch. The process of developing a three-clue plot, or of developing an interesting monster to fight, feel surprisingly similar, of working out what the players might discover and interact with. And there’s some things where I’m like, “maybe I should use a system for this” like more detailed social interaction (where NPCs have different levers you need to explore) or other competence based mini-games (like hacking), but I realise I’m working out as I go whether it should be a GM-aid system (where I decide what the challenges are, but actually resolving them is resolved ad-hoc) or a set of rules (where the difficulties or necessary skills for everything are described in advance) or some of both.
[1] Not necessarily fudge the dice, but make ad hoc adjudications or similar
You can always use your own name look or style in powered by the apocalypse, but the designers will often put thematic or cool ones in there as a tribute to people who created that archetype.