Friday, October 18, 2019

Corruption

From a DM defending fudging in an answer I received from Quora.
If I am focused on the story, I don’t want to kill off characters. They build up contacts, gather information and drive the story forward. Replacing them will disrupt the story. I am ok with a character death for a stupid action or a story reason, then I accept the disruption. But in most cases, I want to build on what is already there instead of introducing new characters on a regular basis.

Remember, here we are talking about a game.  But obviously not the player's game.  The DM here blatantly exposes his bias, his will to control the game, his personal entitlement where the story, the contacts and its possible disruption are concerned.  Note the language.  The DM is "ok."  The DM is "focused."  The DM is very clear on what he wants and what he will accept.  The players' opinions are not mentioned.  The players' acceptance is not solicited.  It is all "Me me, me me me."

Yet if the reader will take a look at the whole answer from the writer, it is plain the writer believes they have given this considerable thought and that they have the right perspective on the matter.  And this is the effect that total power has:  the delusional aspect that, having total power, and being determined to use if for what's "right," gives superior knowledge of rightness and utter blindness to what is plainly a selfish perspective.

This is why we don't fudge.

19 comments:

  1. I'm not sure I agree with you. While the DM does post from their point of view, I do not believe they are being wholly selfish. They are trying to tell a good story for their players and bad die rolls can ruin a good story. I also believe the DM does not have "total power." Players can always choose to not play.
    However, you are correct that all DMs should take what their players want into consideration.
    I have been known to fudge die rolls, not for the sake of the story, but for the sake of fun. My job as a DM is to try and make the game fun for all involved.

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    1. "Players can choose not to play" is a non-option. It's the most extreme response possible, a form of the take-the-ball-and-go-home stance. That is to say, if the player views his only bargaining chip as, "Well then I won't play," he's in a bad spot to begin with.

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  2. The phrase, "a good story," is constantly touted as the explanation for fudging. But there is no definition that clearly defines this, as "good" is a convenience for "my story" or "the story I preplanned" or "how I want this to go." Basically, there is a push-back against the use of dice and the adherence to that use, that chafes at people's perception at how things "should" go as opposed to how they do go.

    I am constantly assailed with arguments like, "It sucks when people die at the wrong time." Or, "too early." Or that, "It's no fun when a character has an unlucky night with dice." These are absurd, non-specific justifications for cheating. Define the wrong time. Define early. Define unlucky. How many bad die rolls defines an unlucky night? These non-specifics are a gateway to persons excusing themselves for bad behaviour, when they think they're entitled to decide arbitrarily how the game should run or where it should go, for reasons that make sense to them.

    I think that if you were able to watch another person fudge dice and take note of when it happens, it would quickly become evident that while the fudger saw the act as "necessary," you'd be scratching your head and thinking, "the death was totally fair" or "the player hasn't been that unlucky." It is all entitlement to act in a game setting as an arbiter.

    And it happens in no other situation. This attitude, this argument, occurs in no other game, because no other private game gives this sort of power to a single individual. Even an umpire is subject to examination by other umpires. But a DM is subject to NO ONE. And the knowledge of that provides a personal righteousness that is utterly unfounded.

    Such people who argue for fudging are villains and must be called out as such.

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  3. I briefly engaged with the person who answered. His responses made me think of a Greek God.

    He claims to be interacting with mortals for their sake, but clearly has his own agenda. He determines who lives and who dies based on fickle emotion.

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  4. This seems to be consistent, Tyler. I was thinking at work today that I never hear from players on this issue. I don't find that players write answers that say, "I like that the DM arbitrarily changes the die; I like my game play being put in the DM's hands."

    I wanted to add that another argument that is being made is that "dice are fickle." Like this isn't the purpose of dice.

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    1. Well I have played in lots of games with DMs that fudge and to me it is becomes very noticeable. I find that the fact that every encounter can be won by just charging straight at the opponents becomes makes it apparent in only a few sessions and the result is a slapstick kind of game where all the player characters win by sheer dumb luck a la the TV trope "mistaken for badass" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MistakenForBadass)

      Reading through the answers on Quora it really irritates me to see those defending fudging doing it to help tell "the story" while referring to a story they have imagived themselves and cheat to force upon the players. As a player in an RPG I am the protagonist ergo the story is mine, not the DM's. What they want to protect is not "the story" its their story.

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  5. I read through the quora exchange. Personally I find the guy's position indefensible.

    I don't get it. I mean, I can remember cheating at solitaire as a child (that is, playing different from the rules as taught to me in order to continue the game), but at some point I realized...why? To whom am I proving myself? The cards don't care...no other human cares. If I don't like the game I don't need to play it. But winning by cheating isn't really winning. It's empty victory.

    There is POISON in the RPG community...a poisonous attitude. I don't know if it comes from this whole idea that the game must "tell a (good) story" or if it grows out of permissive language in the instruction manuals (rulebooks) that are explicit in giving a GM authority to alter dice rolls.

    What then is the point of having rules or charts and tables of probability? To simply act as a momentary crutch for GMs who aren't adept of "telling a (good) story?"

    If players don't like the game, they don't have to play it. Sit around and tell stories. There used to be internet forum/communities for doing this kind of thing...I think they were called MUSHs. No mechanics, just role-playing and story-telling using agreed upon themes (like D&D-style fantasy or Harry Potter or whatever). Communal fan fiction that allowed individuals to create as much "drama" as they were comfortable with. No need for dice at all (though perhaps a person who was torn on a particular decision might flip a coin "off-screen" to come to resolve his/her quandary). There are probably community (face-to-face) "writing circles" that do much the same thing. Why invest hundreds of dollars in thousands of pages of rulebooks just to ignore the rules of the game? What a waste!

    And why are we insistent on teaching new players (through our words, actions, and even the instructions) this same poison?

    We suck: the RPG community. I mean, Jesus, we're already a bunch of nerds for playing an imaginary game, but now we're going to breed a society of CHEATING nerds? Is there anything more contemptible in the realm of entertainment? Maybe the purveyors of pornography, I suppose, or people who run dog fights and such. But for an entertainment that doesn't engage in criminal activity or perpetuate physical harm to individuals and animals...yeah, it's pretty contemptible.

    Corruption. That's an excellent title for this post.

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  6. The reason why storytelling without dice isn't a solution is that there is no power involved. That is what these fudgers are in it for: the power. The blatant manipulation of events for invented reasons that cover up, even for the speaker, the perverse need to feel "in control" of what's happening. The fakery of dice is a gateway to this control.

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  7. Contemptible indeed. Story story story the legacy of Dragonlance forever darkens our door. The game turns to masturbation and I for one find that real gross. I am not telling a story. I am adjudicating the decisions made by the players on an imaginary landscape.

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  8. I don't know if you saw this when it was first published about a month ago, but I finally got around to reading this post (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/43708/roleplaying-games/gm-dont-list-9-fudging) on the Alexandrian about why a DM shouldn't fudge.

    He covers a lot of the points you've raised over the years, he just presents the argument in a more polite/friendly way.

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  9. Lance, are you saying I'm not polite? I'm hurt.

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    1. It's just that you would probably get more readers if you weren't so abrasive.

      But then again, sometimes people need to be called out on their stupidity/childishness before they can change. I wouldn't have stopped fudging or using the screen if it weren't for your blog specifically. I had been reading his blog and others long before I discovered you, but none of those other blogs fundamentally changed how I run games.

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  10. I could not fit my answer, Lance, on a comment. I wrote a new post for it.

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  11. Ooh, boy . . .

    Went on Twitter, tossed out a statement, ruffled some feathers. Nothing to be unexpected.

    But one response basically came down to, "if you think fudging a dice roll is cheating or lying, then everything about D&d is cheating and lying," and all I can think is, wow, classic abusive boyfriend line.

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  12. A cheater will find any justification, argument or reason to go on cheating. Calling everyone in the world a cheater, or everything we do to be cheating, is a classic way of saying, if everyone does it, then I'm not a bad person.

    In fact, cheating makes me a good person, because then I'm like everyone else. This is the sentiment that makes a criminal politician ramble on for 71 minutes about his innocence.

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  13. Cheating allows the dm to ignore whatever underlying thing has gone wrong in the game. If the dm finds that the party can't survive an encounter without them fudging, maybe should they present lower level encounters to the party, design adventures that don't collapse if a PC dies, alter the rules to be less lethal or play a game other than d&d.
    The point is that these options involve admitting that something has gone wrong and analyzing your game. Somehow I don't think cheating dms want that level of taking responsibility.

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    1. While agree with everything you said, Oswald, your wording helped me find some empathy for those that struggle.

      Consider how difficult it is to simultaneously run and playtest a game. In many ways, each unique dungeon and each unique encounter scenario is its own game, particularly when it comes to the challenge it poses to the group.

      It's no wonder there is a strong temptation to fix problems prematurely.

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  14. A temptation and an encouragement to do so.

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  15. Interesting side note, I added this question ~ "Can a DM cheat at D&D?" ~ to Quora over two years ago and it hasn't stopped gathering answers. Seems that every two months or so, someone comes across it and feels compelled to add their two cents despite the fact that it picked up a couple dozen answers within the first two weeks, most of which say the same basic thing.

    I also find it fascinating that the most upvoted answer is one that relies on a personal anecdote to frame the response. It's a blatant appeal to emotion; a clear bias toward a personal experience, of a time when the author was a child, drawing upon those good feelings to justify how they run the game today.

    "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

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