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.

Go to Part 1

No.

Bad GM.

No cookie.

Okay, we’ve been talking about things GM’s shouldn’t do for awhile now. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Fudging.

The most common form of fudging, and that from which the technique takes its name, is changing the outcome of a die roll: You fudge the result. If the die roll is done in secret, then you can just ignore it. If it’s done in the open, then you can invert the result by tweaking the modifiers involved. More advanced fudging methods can include stuff like adding extra hit points to a monster’s total in order to keep them alive.

But, regardless of the specifics, fudging is when a mechanical resolution tells you one thing and the GM chooses to ignore the rules and declare a different outcome.

JUSTIFICATIONS FOR FUDGING

Okay, let’s talk about the reasons GMs do this. All of these, of course, ultimately boil down to the GM not liking something that the resolution mechanics are telling them. The question is why the GM is unhappy with it.

#1 – Railroading. This one is pretty straightforward: Railroading happens when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome. Enforcing failure (so that the PC can’t do what the player wants) is a really common way of railroading the game, and fudging is a really easy way to enforce failure.

See The Railroading Manifesto for a lengthy discussion of this topic and all the reasons why railroading is terrible and you should never do it.

#2 – To prevent a player character’s death. Or, in some cases, GMs will only fudge if it’s to prevent a total party kill — the death of ALL player characters. TPKs tend to kill campaigns (at least those not built around open tables), and lots of people would prefer to fudge the outcome of a fight (particularly if they feel that it’s just due to “bad luck” or whatever).

See The TPK Gamble for a specific discussion of this.

#3 – To make the story “better.” The most infamous version of this is, “But they can’t kill the Big Bad Guy now! He’s supposed to survive to Act III!”

I say infamous for good reason here: Players hate this shit with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. And you basically can’t throw a stone in RPG circles without hitting someone who has a story about the time their GM pissed them off by doing it. Check out The Principles of RPG Villainy for a better alternative.

#4 – To correct a mistake you’ve made. Maybe you’ve been screwing up a mechanic for the whole fight and it’s made things much harder for the PCs than it should have been. Or you accidentally doubled the number of guards when the fight started. Or, going even further back, maybe you just screwed up the encounter design and something that should have been easy for the PCs is actually incredibly difficult. So you fudge something to bring it back in line with what it was supposed to be or should have been.

This is actually pretty understandable, and I discuss the difference between openly retconning a mistake and silently retconning a mistake in Whoops, Forgot the Wolf. But you can easily find yourself slipping from “fixing a screw-up” to “enforcing a preconceived outcome” here and end up back in railroading. So use caution.

DON’T FUDGE

In the end, all fudging is the GM overriding a mechanical outcome and creating a different outcome which they believe to be preferable (for whatever reason).

Over the thirty years I’ve been doing this, however, I’ve learned that many of the most memorable experiences at the table are the result of the dice taking you places that you never could have anticipated going. Fudging kills those experiences.

But what if the mechanical outcome really is terrible and would make both you and your players miserable?

If you and/or your players truly can’t live with the outcome of a dice roll, then you made a mistake by rolling the dice in the first place. You need to focus on fixing that problem.

This applies beyond individual dice rolls, too. If you don’t want the PCs to die, for example, why are you framing scenes in which death is what’s at stake? (This is a rhetorical question: GMs do this because D&D teaches them to (a) frame lots of combat scenes and (b) make the default stakes of any combat scene death.)

The Art of Pacing talks about the scene’s agenda being the question which the scene is designed to answer. (For example, “Can Donna convince Danny to go into rehab?”) If the question is, “Will the PCs die?” and the answer is always, “Absolutely not.” then the scene is drained of meaning and becomes a boring exercise.

This is why, when the players figure out that the GM is fudging (and they will), it deflates tension and robs them of a legitimate sense of accomplishment. What was once meaningful is suddenly revealed to be meaningless. And this is the biggest problem with fudging: It may fix an immediate problem, but it will inflict permanent damage on everything.

In a very real sense, fudging is a betrayal of trust. And once you, as the GM, lose the players’ trust, it becomes virtually impossible to regain it. Fudging ends up tainting everything you do: It removes the real magic of an RPG campaign and turns it into a cheap magic trick. Once the players spot the trick (and, again, they will), the magic vanishes entirely and you’re left with a hollow experience.

Regaining their trust and making them believe in the magic again is really difficult.

TRIAGE AT THE TABLE

Here’s my controversial rule of thumb:

The more you fudge, the shittier you are as a GM – either because you are fudging or because you need to.

If you’re not just fudging to be an asshole and screw over your players, then you’re ultimately fudging in order to fix something that has gone wrong:

• You adjudicated the resolution poorly.
• You designed the scenario badly.
• You screwed something up and need to correct it.
• You’re using a set of rules which creates results you and/or your players aren’t happy with.

And so forth.

This is not to say that you should never fudge. Mistakes happen and we don’t need to live with those mistakes in the pursuit of some unrealistic ideal. But every time you do fudge, you should view that as a failure and try to figure out how you can fix the underlying problem instead of just continuing to suck in perpetuity:

• Don’t roll the dice if you can’t live with the outcome. (And, ideally, learn how to still create meaningful stakes instead of just skipping the resolution entirely.)
• Figure out how to design robust scenarios that don’t break while you’re running them.
• Create house rules to permanently fix mechanics that are creating undesired results. Or, if the system is completely out of line with what you and your players want, swap to a different system.

And so forth.

Next time you find yourself in a position during the game where you feel it’s necessary to fudge, I want you to do a couple of things.

First, ask yourself: Is it truly necessary to fudge in this moment? Is it necessary to reject the improvisation prompt of the mechanical resolution’s outcome, or can you find a way to work with that outcome to create something interesting and enjoyable? At the stage in the resolution process where you’re narrating outcome, you usually still have a lot of power as the GM. An easy example of this is failing forward: Instead of the PC failing in what they wanted to do, they succeed with a negative twist or consequence.

But also, to a certain extent, just take a moment to second guess yourself: The outcome which you initially think cannot possibly happen, often can happen. It’s just not what you expected or would have done of your own volition. Try to push back that initial moment of rejection and really, truly think about what the outcome would be and whether there’s interesting and cool stuff that lies beyond that outcome.

Second, ask yourself: Can I just be open and honest with my players in this moment? Instead of secretly fudging the outcome, could you just explain to the players that, for example, you screwed up the encounter and things need to be retconned a bit?

And maybe you can’t! There are circumstances where you’re better off plastering over the cracks of your mistake with a cheap magic trick instead of damaging the players’ immediate immersion and engagement with the game world. It’s not ideal, but sometimes that’s the best you can do for right now. You’ll just have to learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

CODA

If you’re still a proponent of fudging, let me ask you a final question: Would you be okay with your players fudging their die rolls and stats and hit point totals?

If not, why not?

If you truly believe that fudging is necessary in order for you to preserve the enjoyment of the entire table, why do you feel you know better than the other people at the table what they would enjoy?

Think about it.

The Fudging Corollary: Not All Dice Rolls Are Mechanics

Go to Part 10: Idea Rolls