My Life As A Gamer: The Pundit on Fudging Dice Rolls & More

Back with another video, The RPG Pundit has some wisdom to dispense regarding what any other gaming format would rightly regard as cheating: fudging dice rolls.

It's the Pundit. You should know by now what to expect from him. If you think he's big on this, you don't know the man.

I'm not going to gild this lily. I will go where the Pundit won't: never fudge the dice rolls. It ceases to be a game when you do that, and once that's gone the core of the medium's appeal is gone with it- the virtual testing of one's skill and acumen against whatever situation comes your way, with the GM as no more than Crom--a neutral, disinterested arbiter and referee who gives no shits if your man lives or dies--and as such your wins are your own as well as your losses. The accomplishment is virtual, but they are still real in a properly run tabletop RPG campaign.

I've been at this long enough to see what happens when players know that the dice aren't the final word. It warps the perceptions, often completely out of bounds, and more than a few times I've seen players flat-out troll the GM with doing things that they know force more fudging to preserve whatever the GM is trying to keep in once piece until the GM gives up and either stops doing it or kills the campaign. In short, it inevitably leads to freakouts like the death on Critical Role did, and it's not fun.

Just don't. Let their man suffer and die when the dice screw them; crunch them all, and the players--if they really want to play--will just reroll and play on. (Which is another reason for why slow PC generation and complex PC mechancs are bad; it makes rerolling painful when it shouldn't. Basic D&D and Classic Traveller got this right.)