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The Rule of No Fudge and the Rule of Tactically Interesting

In a comment on The Tough Part About Tactical Encounters [1], Crazy Jerome made some great points about zero-fudge games and tactical encounters [2]. I asked him if I could make part of his comment into a guest post, and he was nice enough to say yes. (Thanks, CJ!) Here it is.

Asserted as a hidden correlation:

Rule of No Fudge: Never allow a roll if you can’t live with the result.
Corollary: Replace a roll with something that the players can affect through informed choices, even if only an earlier decision.

Rule of Tactically Interesting: Players can affect results through informed choices.
Corollary: Never replace a chance for players to make an informed decision with a die roll.

What do you think of these rules?

22 Comments (Open | Close)

22 Comments To "The Rule of No Fudge and the Rule of Tactically Interesting"

#1 Comment By Gamer Chick On July 21, 2006 @ 10:58 am

For years, one of my #1 GMing rules has been: If you don’t want them to screw it up, don’t let them roll the dice. One of my long-time players made me a ceramic dice box with that on it for Christmas last year.

I’ve lost count of the times players have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by making an unneccessary die roll and critically failing it…

That doesn’t mean they don’t roll the dice, or that they don’t have enormous narrative control in the game. However, when it serves them and the story for them to succeed, it’s crazy to risk failure, just to hear the clatter of dice on the table.

#2 Comment By ScottM On July 21, 2006 @ 2:36 pm

I like them, though we’d all have to be awake and aware to do it. Too often we run essentially on autopilot…

#3 Comment By greywulf On July 21, 2006 @ 11:30 pm

Sounds good to me. We’ve played whole adventures without touching the dice right up to the final climactic battle – and we were tempted to run that diceless too.

There’s the Rule of Most Interesting as well:

If it fits the tale, that’s what happens.

#4 Comment By Discordian On July 22, 2006 @ 12:33 am

“Never allow a roll if you can’t live with the result.”

No No!
“Always know the consequences before dice roll. Always have more than one choice before.” is what I could sign to. If you can’t allow a roll you’ve taken a choice from the player! It is his choice to choose dice or give up.

And what are you protecting anyhow? Yer precious (plot)? If players want to win and gamble let them!

How to deal with TPK:s my way?

Accept surrender as viable option: captivity will just get you more interesting gametime. As will revenge afterwards.

Accept walking away as viable option: encounters with monsters will get rightfully scary since they give no mercy. You know that the Beast is weaker than you, but just one mistake and you will be eaten. Do you risk it for the fair maiden it guards?

Accept failure. This makes it a game instead of a story. And this is what D&D rules do. Just make it mean something.

If you want a story use different system where you game for how much you hurt for achieving the goals (Dogs in the Vineyard?)

#5 Comment By Frank Filz On July 22, 2006 @ 10:22 pm

Discordian:

Crazy Jerome’s idea isn’t to disempower the PCs. The point of the idea is that if a possible result of rolling the dice is “not fun,” then you need to re-evaluate the situation. Read those corrolaries…

And I don’t think Crazy Jerome is advocating a thought like: “Hmm, if the giant hits Fred the Paladin, he’ll squish him, and it will be all over for the PCs, so I’d better not roll the die.” More the idea is that you don’t roll on the random encounter chart for 1st level characters that has giants on it…

Frank

#6 Comment By Crazy Jerome On July 23, 2006 @ 1:11 pm

Discordian, what Frank said. Remember, this is talking about “no fudge”. Don’t roll a die if you will override some of the results. *That* is taking away player choice.

Note that some rolls aren’t optional. For example, a player can decide to make the attack (in d20) or not. You can’t just take away his d20 attack roll. As Frank said, make the decisions earlier. When you get to the point where people are rolling attack rolls, it’s out of your hands.

As I discussed in the tactical thread that spawned this line of thought, you can do a lot of things so that your players can make informed choices–such as whether or not they want to go into combat in the first place.

ScottM, this really isn’t that hard to do–once you get into the habit. It’s almost purely reflexive for me now, and I can do it on autopilot. 😀

#7 Comment By Alan Smithee On July 24, 2006 @ 3:46 pm

I’m not certain I agree. Some of the best stories from role-playing are from when the players were fantastically lucky.

Of course the problem is that to make a truly memorable story, the players have to know that there is utter doom in failure, which of course would ruin the campaign.

So, the truly imaginative DM finds ways to cheat.

I’ve had players that were talking about certain sessions for years afterwards. Their backs were to the wall, and only a truly heroic (= highly unlikely to succeed) act could save the them all. That miraculous 20 (followed by the DM cursing the players for the next 20 minutes) made the climax of a 2 year campaign.

Of course, it is vitally important *never* to spill the beans, and *never* to get caught. If the players even suspect that your cheating for them, the entire campaign is shot. But if you can maintain the illusion, it works better than anything…

(And yes, this is posted under a pseudonym :-))

#8 Comment By Martin On July 24, 2006 @ 5:52 pm

CJ’s Rule of No Fudge is very similar to Vincent Baker’s “Say yes or roll the dice,” which rocks equally hard. They also complement each other very nicely.

Alan, that does indeed sound like a situation that merits fudging — provided, as you said, that you never tell your players. It even makes my diehard no-fudge heart quiver. 😉

#9 Comment By Frank Filz On July 24, 2006 @ 7:15 pm

Alan – the problem is that chances are pretty good that at least one player will actually catch you cheating. Now most of the time the player doesn’t care, or at least doesn’t care enough that you notice.

My mind about cheating really started to change when a player I really respected told me why he didn’t play in my games. Now true, my cheating was pretty obvious. But he told me this after seeing a game where he perceived I wasn’t cheating (and I wasn’t – at least not in any way like I was before, perhaps a bit subconsciously), so suddenly he was interested in playing. So he played, and then he quit. Because he felt that the game was not what he was hearing about, and that I had gone soft on the players.

Yea, those miracles are a lot of fun. But they’re a hell of a lot more fun when the failure is real. Of course there are ways to soften the blow when failure occurs without “hidden” fudging. In the past couple years, I’ve had a couple battles where as a group, players and GM, we’ve decided “that was a bad dream.” And in one of them, I gave the players the option of trying again. And they took it and won the second time. They felt a real sense of satisfaction that would have been lost had I fudged.

Martin – yup, I almost mentioned “Say yes or roll the dice” myself. Actually, in one sense, I think CJ’s rule may be a better statement of what Vincent is getting at.

Of course part of what Vincent is getting at (and I think is part of what CJ is getting at also) is that the GM should not put needless obstacles in the way of the PCs, calling for senseless rolls (that then have a chance of failing, which then need to be fudged around). If you want the PCs to succeed in climbing the cliff, don’t make them roll to see if they succeed or not (now it’s just fine to roll to see if they have a complication). Of course the implicit corollary to Vincent’s statement is to make sure that the important things are rolled for – which is CJ’s rule of tactically interesting…

What it really comes down to is that players need to be presented with meaningful choices, and meaningful adversity. The player’s choices lose meaning if the GM will override bad choices (or good ones…). The adversity loses meaning if failure isn’t any different from success, or if failure isn’t real.

In the cases where my group decided it was a bad dream, the players knew they had lost. In one case, we as a group decide that the adversity wasn’t legitimate, we decided that a Tendriculous was in no way a CR 6 creature, at least not for Arcana Evolved characters (but we didn’t think an iconic D&D party would do any better – the name is also suspiciously close to ridiculous so perhaps the creature is a ringer). In the second case, the players had decided to press on without resting. They got whupped. So we rewound, they rested, and tried again.

Frank

#10 Comment By Crazy Jerome On July 24, 2006 @ 9:01 pm

Ooh, now in this post, I’m treading into some areas where I’m not sure of myself. So you’ve been warned. 😀

I think that, “Say yes or roll the dice,” is a separate thing that nevertheless has a strong correlation with my two asserted rules. I know, when I first came across the phrase, it was a different twist, but I instantly recognized it as consistent with what I was already doing.

Besides, the “rules” are pretty bland. Anyone proficient at running zero fudge as something other than “Killer DM” knows, for example, that you don’t have a hidden mage launch a 10d6 fireball at a party that can’t handle more than 40 points of damage–unless you give them some chance to avoid the confrontation. Even, “Say yes or roll the dice,” is pretty bland–once you know it. There’s not even much to argue about, past the semantics. 😀 It’s the corollaries and correlations that are interesting.

For example: You can certainly have tactically interesting things happen when using some fudge, as Alan’s story illustrates. Given the wide disparity in group abilities and preferences, there are probably plenty of groups that have very tactically interesting sessions with considerable fudge. Consider what a group of players very good at tactics can do. OTOH, if you run zero fudge (and do it well), you’ll get tactically interesting things far more *easily*–all other things being equal. I think you’ll also get more variety in that respect.

Likewise, if you care about making things tactically interesting, you’ll naturally find yourself fudging somewhat less than you otherwise would (whatever that is).

Frank said:

“… If you want the PCs to succeed in climbing the cliff, don’t make them roll to see if they succeed or not (now it’s just fine to roll to see if they have a complication)…”

The first part of that is, “Say yes or roll the dice.” The crossover with what I’m saying it just one of those happy correlations. What I’m saying would be rendered something like:

“… If trying to climb the cliff can kill the PCs, don’t make them do it (now it’s just fine to present them with complications that will make them consider it)…”

or:

“… Rolling to climb the cliff is boring, if it’s make the roll and succeed, or fail the roll and die (now it’s more than fine to include complications–like ledges, and someone to push, and risky levitation magic, etc.) …”

I hope that makes some sense. 😀

#11 Comment By Crazy Jerome On July 24, 2006 @ 9:51 pm

I blame busy week for not saying this earlier: While I make no bones about being a proponent of minimal to zero fudge, the “Rule of No Fudge” is neutral on the question of whether one should fudge or not. Rather, *IF* a GM decides to minimize fudging, then the rule is very helpful. If the GM decides to completely eliminate fudge, then it is absolutely required.

A happy fudger might get some good mileage out of following that rule, but it would be side effects related to some of the correlations, rather than a necessary part of the fudge policy. 😀

#12 Comment By Frank Filz On July 24, 2006 @ 10:22 pm

Crazy Jerome – Yea, I dig all of that (in response 10). I think in some sense, were trying to find the right wording for the real “rule.” “Say yes or roll the dice” doesn’t cover it completely. Neither does “Never allow a roll if you can’t live with the result.” But both of these statements are grounded in the same underlying principle.

Now I think I might differ with you on reply 11. Because, I’m beginning to think that fudging violates that underlying principle.

The trick is how to separate fudge from the other decisions the GM must make by fiat (the existence of the cliff in the first place is totally up to the GM). But perhaps that’s where the underlying principle comes in. That any decision the GM makes must follow that principle, whether the decision is whether to “Say yes or roll the dice.”, “Never allow a roll if you can’t live with the result.”, deciding the cliff exists and is important in the first place, or saying “No.” (“Say yes or roll the dice.” doesn’t mean the GM must allow the Dogs character to declare “I convince the townspeople to install me as president of the USA.” and the GM either say “Yes.” or roll out a conflict that results in the PC becoming president of the USA because his dice were hotter than the GMs…). And a fudge is anything that violates that principle.

I also think the players are bound by the same principle (they just may lack the power to violate it so easily – though certainly the players can cheat on dice rolls, by trained die rolling, rolling such that other’s can’t see the result and having an “oops” that destroys a bad result, or whatever).

And in some sense, the principle is the social contract (which would explain why my group’s collective “that was a bad dream” decisions are not a fudge – because those decisions are pure social contract negotiations).

And if so, then the GM hiding the specifics of fugding while perhaps having general permission from the player is still fudging because there is a lack of informed consent. If the social contract allows the GM to hold secrets, I think it’s only informed if the players are expected to eventually discover those secrets.

And by all of this, I guess you could have a social contract that allows the GM to say “Gee folks, I know Barandur is down to 3 hit points and I just rolled a crit, shall I reduce that to a flesh wound?” would be just fine under the principle.

And I think it comes down to honesty and trust. Be honest with yourself and each other. Trust each other. Trust the rules. Trust the dice. Trust the social contract. Trust the (Lumpley Principle) system. And only if the system proves to produce “not fun,” only then step in and tweak the results.

Frank

#13 Comment By Martin On July 25, 2006 @ 1:40 pm

Since (as CJ pointed out), the Rule of No Fudge isn’t really about not fudging, but about what to do when you’re not fudging, I’m straying a bit off-topic here.

I’ve never thought about fudge in relation to social contracts before, and man is that a doozie. As a player, I’m very unlikely to be happy if the GM says “I fudge rolls occasionally.” I’m more likely to be happy if she just does it without telling me, and I can imagine that those near misses are real.

…but that totally violates the idea of having a social contract in the first place. And it makes my brain hurt. 😉

#14 Comment By Frank On July 25, 2006 @ 2:50 pm

Resolving the brain hurt is how I came to the conclusion that fudge is absolutely wrong. Because it breaks social contract and that underlying principle.

Now you’re not wanting the GM to be too upfront about certain aspects of the game is a legitimate social contract issue. However, I think most people would become more comfortable after really talking it out. We’re so often affraid that talking it out will hurt that we make it even more painful to try and talk it out. But when we just let go, we discover that it really isn’t that painful to talk it out. And suddenly it becomes trivial to decide the deal with the ugly, fudge might be needed, situations openly, when they happen, and not lose sleep worrying about them until then. Because it’s not going to be painful to raise the “not fun” flag, and we’re all actually so much on the same page, the rest of us will say, “Martin, I’m glad you raised the flag, I was trying to decide if it was time to raise the flag myself.”

Frank

#15 Comment By Al On July 26, 2006 @ 5:14 pm

“Never allow a roll if you can’t live with the result” is excessive.

The whole Rolemaster system would need to be chucked. There’s open ended ‘success’ and ‘failure’ rolls – and in some cases explicit charts going into extremely absurd (but basically humorous/interesting) detail.

There’s places where it even says ‘Allow the roll… _YOU_ know the target number is +200 on a d100, but _they_ don’t… and they might get a critical failure he he he’.

One spell point shy of being able to cast a second level spell (read: nearly a D&D cantrip) led to a roll of 04 – a failure. It wasn’t ‘guaranteed to succeed’, or ‘doomed from the outset’, it was a roll that essentially needed to be made. Or not. 04 -> roll again -> 96. roll again… and with the final result add penalties for your encumbrance etc. etc.

The final result was a roll of -329 on a d100. The quote (near as I can remember it) from the spell failure table was ‘Hole in universe opened, everyone within 10 miles is dead. Intervention by major deity required, or the whole planet is toast’. This, like 7 minutes into the second scene of the first scenario of a brand new campaign.

That was fudged to ‘The mage screams and bursts into flames, everyone within XX take lots of damage … on the other hand, he _was_ just trying to cause a distraction, and I think this qualifies’.

‘Fun’ was served by the actual fudging. A nickname like ‘… the Exploding Mage’ isn’t one you can earn for something minor.

#16 Comment By Crazy Jerome On July 26, 2006 @ 8:38 pm

Al, in this context, “live with the result” means “accept the result in good spirits”, not literally that the character will necessarily live. If you can accept the character getting decapitated in RM, then no problem. Furthermore, as I said in post #6, by the time you get to combat, then you *must* live with the result (when running zero fudge). Some rolls aren’t optional.

OTOH, if you are going to fudge, then see post #11 above. RM wouldn’t be my first choice for a zero fudge game, anyway. 😀

#17 Comment By Frank On July 27, 2006 @ 10:27 am

I made my biggest shift towards running no fudge with Cold Iron which has open ended rolls. Of course the most that can happen from a single roll is a single character is dead. But I have rolled really well, when a PC was already nearly dead. And lopped the head off a PC. And didn’t fudge the result.

“Never allow a roll if you can’t live with the result” implies you should run something like RoleMaster (unmodified) if you can’t live with the 1 in a million chance a fumble blows up the campaign. Personally, I think such rules are pretty stupid, fudge or no. If you’re going to end up fudging that result, why have it in the rules? Is it really that much fun to say “well, the wizard almost blew up the world trying to cast a cantrip, but the gods took pity on us”?

The ONLY place I can see ignoring a die roll is when you are just using the die roll on some kind of random table (treasure, event, encounter, whatever) for inspiration. The intent from the beginning is not to use the table as an absolute part of system but as inspiration. But that’s not fudge. You aren’t breaking social contract (as long as the social contract never included a “you must always roll on the encounter table, and take what it gives you” – but I don’t know anyone who has ever played an RPG that way). Deciding a 3rd orc encounter in a row is boring is not cheating. Deciding a PC didn’t really fumble, or at least didn’t fumble as bad as the table says they do, is cheating (well, unless the social contract is up front with “the fumble charts have some ridiculous results on them, I may choose to ignore or substitute” which changes them from a hard and fast table to an advisory table, but why not go the whole way and make up fumble tables that are acceptable, instead of continuing to use an admitedly broken rule?).

Frank

#18 Comment By Frank On July 27, 2006 @ 10:31 am

Oh, and one last little bit:

The reason the fumble table and the encounter table are different (I would never tell someone to try and make a perfect encounter table), is that the encounter table is something that aids the GM in moving the game forward, and providing situation, but the GM is always allowed (and expected to) create situation.

The fumble table is different because it is part of the resolution system. By fudging the fumble results, you are fudging resolution, and the resolution system is no longer predictable, and may lose meaning.

Oh, and if the group as a whole said “man, that fumble result is ridiculous, GM, why don’t you change it?” and everyone agrees, that’s not a fudge. That’s making a mid-course social contract adjustment – perfectly healthy.

Frank

#19 Comment By Cliff Nickerson On July 27, 2006 @ 9:31 pm

I think replaying a particularly bad combat in a very tactical tabletop game is the same as starting from the last save point in a computer game. No problem, no bad dream. This should be established up front between players and DM, if possible, as should any “I never, ever pull punches” policy from a DM.
I hope that all of you DMs that advocate this policy never bump up the difficulty of an encounter once you realize that it’s too easy. Never give the enemy special chances to notice the PCs when they come up with a plan that in fact subverts the security you designed for them. Never let that powerful enemy miraculously escape so that he can appear again later “for plot purposes” when the archer makes a perfect critical hit and kills him fair and square. No fudge goes both ways. You can’t cheat to save the players’ necks, and you can’t cheat to save the bad guys’ necks, either.

#20 Comment By Alan Smithee On July 28, 2006 @ 4:13 am

I have to agree with Frank Fitz that “no fudge” is a social contract, and breaking it should not be done lightly. In my case, the “no fudge” wasn’t explicit, but absolutely there, cultivated by years of playing with a non-chalance about results that made it clear I was “no fudge”.

Abusing that trust was done on the basis of weighing the positives (happy players) versus negatives (I deceived the players + *massive* unhappiness if they found out). I’m not certain I’d recommend my course unless you’d made very certain you didn’t get caught. (I’d been planning for the eventuality for a long time, and had put in place the mechanisms that would allow me to successfully fudge without player knowledge. As well, I fudged about 3 times in the 2 years of weekly campaigning. Rarely enough that players didn’t catch on.) Lastly, it means that you can’t discuss certain aspects of the DMing until the Internet is invented and one can anonymously post :-). I do take the violation of that contract with the players seriously. It’s why I’ll never reveal that last die roll to the players. It’s in essence my obligation to my contract to the players…

I will also have to agree (from bitter experience) that if the players know you fudge, it can kill the experience for everyone. The campaign *after* the one I described above (and everyone had graduated from university and got jobs in the far corners of te universe) I started with a new bunch of players who were vastly less capable. So of course I over-estimated them and put up way too much opposition. They failed to retreat (and I usually make it pretty easy to retreat so I don’t have to fudge, although getting bodies back can end up being an adventure all in itself…) and I obviously fudged to not end the campaign. Bad mistake. If there’s any place to let a campaign end, it’s right at the beginning. A day of character rolling is all that’s necessary to replace them, it establishes your credentials as a no-fudge, and it makes the players take your opposition a lot more seriously. I didn’t, and an obvious fudge made it clear that the players weren’t in serious danger. Necessary tension drained from the campaign, and the campaign folded from lack of interest (mine and theirs) in 3 months.

I will say that “never allow a roll if you can’t live with the results” is golden, fudge or not. Even in a campaign where it is accepted that the DM will fudge, you pay a price in player enjoyment every time you fudge.

That necessary tension slowly drains each time the players see you fudge. Fudging (if done ever) is for saving the campaign, not saving a life.

#21 Comment By Frank On July 28, 2006 @ 9:34 am

Cliff – yep, you’re right. And actually, that’s a more important part of no fudge than not saving the PCs bacon. Because when the GM pulls stunts to save his NPCs, that’s when he’s totally yanked the players success out from under them.

That doesn’t mean that there can’t be reactions to the PCs success. That also doesn’t mean you don’t ramp up the opposition in the next encounter (oops, 3 orcs wasn’t quite enough of a challenge for you folks).

On fudging to save a campaign – why not use my idea instead. Instead of fudging a roll or two so the TPK doesn’t happen, let it happen. Then ask the players how they want to deal with it, roll up new characters? Write it off as a bad dream? Restore from saved game and retry?

Saves the campaign AND lets the players be directly involved in the campaign direction. Some players would be happy with “roll up new PCs,” even after months of play, and especially if the encounter they lost ratchets up the tension in the world a bit (the BBEG managed to take over the empire – now we have to work from underground to restore the empire). By taking the choice away from the players, you impose YOUR opinion of the best way to continue.

Now lastly I want to say that probably few of us are perfect. We’ve especially probably not played NPCs to their fullest. Most of us who try to be no-fudge have probably applied inconsistent rules to fumbled dice rolls (cocked dice, one die lands on the floor, what is the acceptable area of the table for dice to land in and be counted). I bet that unfortuanate 20 that landed on the floor gets picked up and re-rolled, while other times, when the die that lands on the floor isn’t so unfortunate, it just gets picked up and used, or dice bowling (rolling dice one at a time, and using subsequent dice to try and knock undesireable dice onto a different face) gets overlooked occaisionally when tensions are high. Reinforcements have shown up when the opposition turned out to be too easy without requiring the usual listen roll or whatever you usually do. Creative applications of rules can be a pain too (hey, I just ran an encounter, where I make extreme use of a rules absurdity on the part of the NPCs… Normally it’s PCs who get to use absurd rules, but I really pulled a winner – I have since proposed new rules that manage to logically shoot down what happened [see it was RuneQuest, which has 12 segments to a turn, movement costs 1 segment per hex, it costs 5 segments to ready a weapon, which can be mixed with movement, a high DEX character can shoot a missile weapon in 1 segment, bows and slings can be fired twice per round if you can manage two reloads plus 2 shots in 12 segments, humans max speed is 8, so combining the readying with the movement, a character can move at full speed AND take two bow shots…that’s really screwed up]).

Frank

#22 Comment By Crazy Jerome On July 28, 2006 @ 5:45 pm

“I hope that all of you DMs that advocate this policy never bump up the difficulty of an encounter once you realize that it’s too easy…”

Absolutely. The flip side of, “Hey, this tough encounter could kill us if we aren’t smart and have a bit of bad luck,” is, “Hey, we could run roughshod over this tough encounter if we are smart and have a big of good luck.” 😀 That creates uncertainty. Uncertainty creates tension.

A good D&D 3E example is the CR 1/2 orcs with 16 Str and great axes. (They were toned down in 3.5.) You don’t need that kind of encounter in zero fudge, because use those guys enough for 1st to 3rd level characters, you’ll gets some results you don’t want to live with. But it doesn’t matter, because goblins with daggers, played clever, might get lucky. They probably will not, but the players know that they might. Ergo, tension, with extremely low probability that a death will occur.