i’m kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i’d wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it’s just “i’m gonna skip this last encounter because we’re already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow” or even just “wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace” but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that’s part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i’m ok with them using fudging when they feel it’s warranted so long as they’re not abusing it to the point where there’s no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we’re all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they’re doing, and if we’re not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
What I found in the TTRPG community is that a lot of GM’s like to hear themselves talk. They write these huge paragraphs of sentences stringed together jumping from one topic to the next.
You can even notice this in the way the D&D books are written. Instead of using easy to navigate bullet points, it is just walls of text one after the other. Trying to find some specific knowledge in that is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
i’ve been writing a pretty big RPG module for years now and feel the same. in the beginning i was all about the prose and beauty of the written document. now, i’m just like “bullet points. go.”
i’m kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i’d wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it’s just “i’m gonna skip this last encounter because we’re already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow” or even just “wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace” but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that’s part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i’m ok with them using fudging when they feel it’s warranted so long as they’re not abusing it to the point where there’s no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we’re all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they’re doing, and if we’re not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
Bro paragraphs are your friends.
What I found in the TTRPG community is that a lot of GM’s like to hear themselves talk. They write these huge paragraphs of sentences stringed together jumping from one topic to the next.
You can even notice this in the way the D&D books are written. Instead of using easy to navigate bullet points, it is just walls of text one after the other. Trying to find some specific knowledge in that is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
As a data nerd, I can’t stand it.
i’ve been writing a pretty big RPG module for years now and feel the same. in the beginning i was all about the prose and beauty of the written document. now, i’m just like “bullet points. go.”
Well… If the story is so important why have players at all?
Where 2 RPG players meet there are 3 opinions