Good day1 to everyone!
I recently came across a note which provoked the sort of reaction in me that makes me write things.2 It was a good note, which briefly says that DMs should fudge rolls, and it’s making the rounds. It goes:
“A common mistake most DMs make is to rely too much on random die rolls. An entire evening can be spoiled if an unplanned wilderness encounter on the way to the dungeon goes badly for the party.” (X59)
The article itself is here, because it’s good and I don’t want to just re-hash the thing:
Go have a read if you fancy it!
Why the DM has a screen
The presence of the screen has 2 distinct purposes, which are kind of the same thing - to hide the workings of the world from the players, and to keep the mystery. It’s a great place to hide miniatures for fights, and the mechanical presence of the screen allows you to pin up important information for the session, where nobody can see it (no spoilers!)
The most common and controversial use of the DM screen though is to fudge dice rolls.
What is Fudging a roll?
Some of you are here from outside of the TTRPG world, so I won’t assume you know anything3. Fudging a roll is something the Dungeon Master (DM) does when the dice are misbehaving. What makes a dice misbehave depends entirely on situation and the DM, the DM’s playstyle, and so on - a DM might turn a miss into a hit, a hit into a miss, a success into a failure, or a failure into a success, for the monsters and world that they are in control of.
But why? Many people believe that the dice should be sacred, and the roll is the roll.
I disagree. I don’t play D&D to roll dice - I play D&D to make a story.
A Collaborative Storytelling Experience
This is what D&D (and any TTRPG) really is. If you want competitive-level rules with absolute results, play a wargame4. If you want to make a story - one which stands retelling - you need a TTRPG, some friends, and a good DM.
Storytelling is at the heart of D&D. Most people like to kill things with their character’s murder-abilities, but 99% of them would like to know why they’re doing it, where they are, why their character wants the thing to die - all story elements. And the challenge which is presented in D&D, for the DM, is that this is a story with several main characters.
Every player is viewing the world through the lens of their own character’s story. To them, their character is the main character. As the DM, your job is to conduct the world accordingly so that everyone gets their moment, and that every story (one for each character) is interesting and compelling in it’s own right. And frankly, that involves fudging the dice from time to time.
Emphasis on from time to time.
There are several reasons to fudge the dice, and they should always be to lead to a more interesting story for everyone. some examples:
A monster which has been locked in place by a spell for 2 turns breaks free on the third.
A monster which has not landed a single blow for 2 turns due to poor dice rolls manages to roll double digits at last.
A monster which throws an offhand attack at a crippled5 character who hasn’t had a chance to do anything yet misses where it would have hit.
A contested skill check, where winning (or losing) could negatively affect the pacing of the fight swings in the direction needed to not do that.
We’re not talking “because the high AC character hasn’t been hit yet” or “Because the characters are losing”. A DM who fudges rolls all the time is one who hasn’t planned their side of the story very well. What happens if the party loses? If you’ve failed to plan that, then you’ll need to fudge.
And that’s why fudging the dice is something which I reserve for the non-pivotal sections of the game. The party randomly encounters a bear in the woods, and the bear somehow gets a critical hit every time, outright murdering the paladin to bits. The rest of the party runs, and the paladin dies - and their part of the story dies with them.
That’s the distinction a DM has to make - our commitment is to the story, which means to the enjoyment of the players, not the characters. The characters can be having the worst time of their lives, as long as the players are happy.
Death should be meaningful to the story6, so having the paladin who’s on a quest to rid the world of the evil Hakba, general of Evil McVillain’s armies, die on the way because a bear got lucky is, frankly, bad storytelling.
The DM needs to fudge those dice so that the paladin merely takes an absolute walloping and rethinks how immortal they are. It needs to be the catalyst, perhaps for doubt, perhaps for doubling-down on training, or perhaps reinforcing their belief that their god will protect them7.
When the party faces off against Hakba, they should face real consequences. The fudge needs to stop - if people die, people die. The dice will out. The DM’s job now is not to mediate the story, but to narrate it. If Hakba rolls appallingly and misses every attack, then they need to narrate that in a way that makes the story. The three faces of the story are the DM, the Dice, and the Players. This is the time of the Dice and the Players.
I like that analogy. I may return to it and explore it further in a later post.
So, back to the DM Screen. It’s purpose is to keep the players from knowing what the dice are doing. The DM may, from time to time, fib a little on what they rolled, to keep the story working properly.
Another aspect of the DM screen is to act as a metaphorical curtain behind which the DM can watch the world, unobserved. When I DM, the players often get into roleplay with each other, and the screen allows me to disappear from the peripheral vision; I’ll pipe up every so often, if they get a detail that their character would know wrong, but I can fade away behind a screen, leaving the whole table to the players.
So, there you have it. A rambling explanation of what fudging dice is, and why the DM screen is needed!8
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time of day dependent
I believe it is called “Inspiration”.
Except how to read, and probably what your favourite sandwich is.
or a video game, or any sport, for that matter
By which I mean “has taken a lot of damage or has been locked down”, and nothing else.
This is why George R. R. Martin would make a poor DM. I’ll die on that hill. For no reason.
Got bad news for them when it comes to the boss fight…
I feel that when I started writing this I had some great idea for a payoff, but it, like so many things, is lost to time. Farewell, idea! May you wash up on the shores where all my ideas have, by now, likely evolved into crabs.
"Death should be meaningful to the story⁶, so having the paladin who’s on a quest to rid the world of the evil Hakba, general of Evil McVillain’s armies, die on the way because a bear got lucky is, frankly, bad storytelling."
I - respectfully but firmly - disagree with this. The purpose of a random encounter is to make your world feels like a living and breathing place, not everything that happens should be tied to the party's actions. Also, random encounters help flesh out a place and distinguish it from others.
Random encounters are a tool in your GM's toolbox to make environmental storytelling and expose your worldbuilding to your players without lore dumping them.
And a world that "scales" to the player is, frankly, bad worldbuilding.
So, if the party is in the Old Forest known for its rampaging bears able to rip a strong man into shreds and the paladin is indeed ripped into shreds, so be it. It may not have been the story I had in mind but it's the story that emerged from play at the table and *that* is what matters in TTRPG.