Participant fudging and fiat are excellent techniques for all RPGs (and other games, but they’re really great in RPGs). People say a lot of silly things about it for three reasons:
- Peer pressure.
- An unacknowledged desire to dominate others through the game’s text.
- A misunderstanding of how it works (which is often contrived due to the influence of the other points).
The first two problems are pretty easy to fix unless you get caught in a destructive scene, which happens frequently when people start gaming as teenagers. Teenagers are status and peer group focused to the point where it mutes individual moral and creative agency, but that’s not their fault. The second and third points stick around because of Graphocentric cultural biases and poor explanations in the books, respectively. They reinforce each other in a pretty insidious fashion.
What do I mean by “Graphocentric?” We belong to a literate culture where certain texts are privileged as sources of revelation. These texts typically have teaching roles, are the focus of communities and are not written to be chronologically sensitive, like newspaper articles. At the simplest level, we have a tendency to revere texts, but once you combine that with a slightly educated middle class its members discover that they can jockey for position over who gets to tell you what the text means. Either way, power doesn’t flow from the text, but from us. One really dangerous aspect of the Graphocentric perspective is that even though hermeneutics are subjective, we are reluctant to admit this because it makes the text look weak and undeserving of its central role. That’s where you get a lot of chapter and verse bullshit about what things really mean, but make no mistake: It’s really a social control strategy using the text as an instrument. To express it simply:
People use RPGs to tell you what to do because we all like to pretend the RPG is really telling us what to do, to the extent that even the folks telling you what to do through the RPG believe it’s all the game, not them.
Vague advice about fudging doesn’t help, though it’s vague for a reason. In their own way, game designers understand the triple threat and usually advise fudging as a way to escape it and take ownership of the game. Many know (though some have forgotten) that the most serious play issues have little to do with differing agendas or any of that bullshit. They stem from hermeneutic conflicts between people aiming for the same thing. These people fail because they put the rules at the center of the relationship instead of each other. That’s why designers who advocate fudging are reluctant to codify the process. They fear that text will just assimilate the specifics anyway, making them a new source for dispute, but it should be obvious by now that people are so twisted by Graphocentrism that they’ll use any bit of text to reflexively impose their wills.
(Once we acknowledge Graphocentrism we can also see that hitching your wagon to a text is a foolish way to cure social problems, that expressing the group’s relationship as a contract [text] of any sort isn’t significantly useful compared to a bunch of other things, and how poisonous in-vogue advice to do either of these things is.)
This insight frees us to talk about what fudging and fiat really are. Let’s begin by looking at a common but incorrect formulation:
Fiat happens when the GM ignores the results of the rules in favour of what s/he wants.
or
Ignore the system for a GM-determined result.
But when you observe fudging and fiat in the wild it generally doesn’t go down this way. The GM is usually very concerned with the rules, and rarely makes a decision that ignores them in such a simple, binary fashion. (If you haven’t taken the time to sit by a game as an observer, there are a bunch of places you can read about this stuff. I recommend Over the Edge 2nd Edition to start, though it’s more about in-world consequences than where the dice fall.)
It’s more like this:
Rules results + player input + GM input + story needs = result
Changing your perspective answers the question of why GMs roll dice if they’re going to make a ruling that ignores them – they aren’t! GM-adjusted/”ignored” dice rolls (or equivalent system outputs) are extremely useful. Let’s look at a classic move: Changing a hit that will kill a PC if left as is. The rules results tell us that the monster hit and inflicted 20 HP damage. The target character only has 8 HP. Depending on the exact situation this could tell us the following:
- The encounter might be too difficult if the scene’s function was to drain resources. This teaches us to use the system better and recognize any issues that require our ongoing attention.
- If it’s a fluke result we get a better understanding of how variable rules results can be.
- We might learn more about the player’s competence as a tactician, or whether s/he even cares about that aspect of play.
With this information in hand we consider the player’s input. What does s/he want? What did s/he do to get there and how does it relate to the situation at hand?
- If the player really wants to be thrown to the wolves for strict tactical gaming we might let the roll stand. If not, we’ll consider fudging it.
- If the player wants something in between or is at a critical stage where s/he’s testing the waters of tactical play but also feels very invested in his/her character or a certain narrative arc, it may be more useful to use the result as an inspiration, scaling it back to an incapacitating blow, to send a signal to the player that this is a serious situation without killing his/her character.
GM input exists throughout the whole process in this instance, but it’s easy enough (though not always desirable) to open this up to group discussion and reduce the GM”s direct input. In terms of traditional GM responsibilities s/he may consider the following:
- The whole encounter might have come about due to players ignoring or misinterpreting signals. If the campaign is meant to impose serious penalties for error or question player agency in course of events (concepts that many people are terrified to bring into play, but which can work well) then it might be time to let the dice stand. If Frodo and co. head in through the Black Gate, they’re screwed.
- Then again, it just might be the GM’s fault for any of the reasons above or because s/he communicated the situation poorly. S/he may be forced to tweak the entire encounter to compensate for the mistake, starting with this roll. After that, s/he revises monster stat blocks accordingly and inserts the possibility of new narrative threads that stem from this encounter.
- The GM may have something special planned for that particular character, and sticking with it would be more interesting for everyone than dropping it upon that PC’s death. S/he fudges the roll, but takes its existence as a hint to foreshadow or even implement the special event. In some situations s/he could pull the trigger on the event without fudging the roll. S/he might bring the character back from the dead – it worked for Jesus!
Fudging is the sum total of these influences, so it really is silly to say that the dice or player actions are meaningless. They’re usually more important than the GM’s intentions, though the GM has some serious responsibilities in the whole equation. I should also note that this flood of information doesn’t wait for the decision point. Most of it happens in the run up, as the group discusses its situation and play unfolds, so it’s already done most of the “work” required. It’s not that hard when we compensate for the Graphocentric perspective, put the game in its place and trust each other.
That’s it for now. I was going to delve into objections that hiding fudging and fiat is a bad thing, but it struck me that the arguments against these are so value-laden (like getting mad at costumes in plays, erasing wires with CGI and a host of other craft techniques) that it’s probably a waste of my time to deal with them. The idea that fudging and fiat can be eliminated by better design is dumb, but I’ll talk about that some other time.
Quite the thoughtful analysis on the subject, and not one that I’ve usually heard in defense of fudging. However, I remain skeptical about the need to fudge when it would be easier to just play a game with rules that are clearer and be sure everyone knows what those rules are.
I get where you’re coming from though. Let’s take this out of RPGs into, say, tennis. You love tennis and you want to get your friend into it too. You take him out to the court, hit a few balls around, but you don’t keep score. Or maybe you give him some advice on how to improve his swing. Or maybe you go easy on him with your swing while he’s still learning. All of these are a kind of “fudging” of the rules, but also are clearly within the context of a practice session or “training mode,” to lift a term from video games.
I think that’s something a lot of tabletop gaming needs, honestly. A friendly, supportive space and time for a game to be “practiced” where fudging is totally fine.
The other motivations for fudging, such as for story needs, seem less convincing to me. If I sit down to play a game, I know that this game produces a certain kind of story. A story where my character may be eaten by a grue (D&D). A story where talking can defeat fighting most of the time (Doctor Who). By sitting down, I accept and consent to those potential consequences. For a GM to deny me those consequences… Well, that fundamentally changes the game I agreed to play. It’s a bait and switch, y’know?
To me, that’s what it comes down to. Just communicating first the sort of game you’re about to play. That may take a practice run or three, but ultimately I want to play the game I was sold.
Quite the thoughtful analysis on the subject, and not one that I’ve usually heard in defense of fudging. However, I remain skeptical about the need to fudge when it would be easier to just play a game with rules that are clearer and be sure everyone knows what those rules are.
From my observations, it usually doesn’t make that much of a difference, though occasionally it makes play worse, because the message that the rules are clear and obvious ends up butting against the problems people have interpreting texts. Go to forums and talk to people and you’ll see it all the time.
I get where you’re coming from though. Let’s take this out of RPGs into, say, tennis. You love tennis and you want to get your friend into it too. You take him out to the court, hit a few balls around, but you don’t keep score. Or maybe you give him some advice on how to improve his swing. Or maybe you go easy on him with your swing while he’s still learning. All of these are a kind of “fudging” of the rules, but also are clearly within the context of a practice session or “training mode,” to lift a term from video games.
RPGs aren’t video games or tennis, though. They have their own artistic and technical concerns that focus on manipulating a narrative in progress. There certain is a tendency to see the goal as creating a quasi-finished, refined narrative (“graduating”) but I can get that experience a bunch of other ways.
It’s interesting that you mention video games, though. They’re instructive because most of them have bugs or more pervasive systemic flaws. MMOs require long term modification to correct errors discovered in play. When teams of several dozen people cannot perfect a type of game where player participation is strictly defined and code-able, it’s kind of silly to suggest that pen and paper games can be perfected so that fudging is never called for. What seems to happen more often is that texts order players to not fudge or redefine fudging (a la Burning Wheel’s Let it Ride, where extraordinarily intrusive fudging is disguised as a hedge against GM interference). From here we get into all kinds of silly semantics. For instance, if I integrate my essay here into a game’s text does it magically “graduate” from fudging to firm rules just because I’ve phrased it as a procedure? It’s the same damn thing!
Excellent breakdown of how to use Fiat well, but I think you do yourself and your readership a disservice by dismissing the arguments against fudging so quickly. Even if one is comfortable fudging, they are useful to consider because they shed light on when *not* to fudge.
My own experience has run the gamut, and if nothing else the Amber DRPG can make a person comfortable with all-fiat, all the time, but it also reveals the flaws of that sort of approach. Most players are going to put themselves somewhere between the two extremes, and realizing why they’re uncomfortable going to one end to the other.
I won’t run through the arguments because I don’t doubt for a second that you’ve got a solid grasp on them, but a lot of them are concrete, player comfort and fun issues, not abstractions, and as such the dismissal seems a bit blithe.
-Rob D.
I think it’s pretty much a matter of taste. There’s a certain aesthetic behind not fudging and it’s definitely possible to decide that’s what you want. Treating it like a solvable problem is kind of like Picasso sticking with his Blue Period because he believes it finally solves the problems he had with polychromatic work. Of course, this analogy falls apart with RPGs because several artists work together, and fiat/fudging helps disparate perspectives work in concert. In my opinion, “This book sez we all use blue!” isn’t a terrific substitute.
Fiat has gotten a bad rap because too many poorly design games use it as a shield to excuse their shortcomings. 1990s D&D was horrible about this sort of thing, with DMs told to ignore overly fatal or swingy results because the rules were designed to produce exactly that. If you want a primer to how dysfunctional this all can be, check out the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb guide, DMGR 1. You’ll find the source of many bad gaming experiences in those pages.
I don’t have a problem with gamers fudging. If anything, I think a slavish adherence to both mechanical (“Sorry, but your ship crashes into an asteroid and you all die.”) and story rules (“The secret passage is the only way into the fortress, so any other plan must fail.”) is the bane of good gaming.
However, I think there’s good fudging and bad fudging.
Good fudging is when you let the group, and its preferred play style, override canonical rules and setting elements. Maybe it’s impossible for Brak the Barbarian and his 5 Charisma to hit the target number need to fast talk the prince, but Brak’s player drops such a fantastic, in-character monologue that it’d be criminal to let him fail.
In that case, I wish designers would just tell GMs to not even bother with the dice. Creativity and excitement trump rules. If the rule pops into the flow and disrupts it, don’t bring it in. Don’t try to justify it with an awesome bonus or whatever. The rules are there to handle gray areas. If it isn’t a gray area, don’t call on it.
On the other hand, fudging can lead to lazy GMing. If his holiness Lord Splarg of Foo must survive the riot in Waterdeep, then don’t bother trying to justify that result with rules or an illusion of player choice. Find something else for the characters to do in that scene, or maybe their failure sets up someone else (a hated rival) as Lord Splarg’s savior. Overuse of fiat keeps a GM from being ready and willing to keep things interesting in the face of success or failure.
IME, fiat as tool to make RPGs work even better as RPGs = fun and awesome. It reminds everyone that this isn’t a computer game, moderated on high by some implacable force (be it AI, dialog tree, or inviolate rules text). Even better, it teaches players that a good faith effort to invest in the game and its setting is rewarded with an instant success outside of the rules.
OTOH, fiat can trade away the interesting, unexpected turns in an RPG, swapping out the rule text as inviolate truth for the GM’s linear story.
Fiat has gotten a bad rap because too many poorly design games use it as a shield to excuse their shortcomings. 1990s D&D was horrible about this sort of thing, with DMs told to ignore overly fatal or swingy results because the rules were designed to produce exactly that. If you want a primer to how dysfunctional this all can be, check out the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb guide, DMGR 1. You’ll find the source of many bad gaming experiences in those pages.
I used to have that book. Parts of it were pretty bad (“Roll 7 on 1d6″ basically tells the DM to mock the player instead of just saying no) but as I recall, other chunks of it were pretty adamant that beyond the completely impossible, characters should be able to try anything, and that was pretty well integrated with other fudging advice. What gets me, however, is that if the same advice was specifically linked to save or die and explained procedurally (“failing a save that had an over 50% chance of success on a save or die effect on an intermediary encounter changes it to a lesser effect of the DM’s choice,”) it would “graduate” into a rule, even though that same thing’s happening at the table. The only difference is that it’s in a book!
Still, it *is* bad design because explaining this as a procedure is easier to implement – but there’s a problem here. Once it gets pinned down, it ends up being something else for game participants to beat each other about the head with, which I think is the reason fudging is treated so vaguely to begin with. It’s an attempt to create a realm of extra-textual authority because basic bad gaming is centered around arguing over the book.
Good fudging is when you let the group, and its preferred play style, override canonical rules and setting elements. Maybe it’s impossible for Brak the Barbarian and his 5 Charisma to hit the target number need to fast talk the prince, but Brak’s player drops such a fantastic, in-character monologue that it’d be criminal to let him fail.
In that case, I wish designers would just tell GMs to not even bother with the dice. Creativity and excitement trump rules. If the rule pops into the flow and disrupts it, don’t bring it in. Don’t try to justify it with an awesome bonus or whatever. The rules are there to handle gray areas. If it isn’t a gray area, don’t call on it.
No way, dude. Brak’s roll tells me a lot about how to proceed with the scene even if I don’t use it by the book. Maybe Brak convinces the prince but his brash manner pisses off a vizier because the prince is playing favourites despite the fact that Brak is obviously a jerk. Maybe Brak convinces the prince, but then commits a social faux pas so serious that the prince still needs to give him a whipping (while whispering apologies because it’s only to keep up discipline). Remember, I’m saying the whole concept that fudging just replaces a mechanical result with one of the GM’s choosing is wrong.
On the other hand, fudging can lead to lazy GMing. If his holiness Lord Splarg of Foo must survive the riot in Waterdeep, then don’t bother trying to justify that result with rules or an illusion of player choice. Find something else for the characters to do in that scene, or maybe their failure sets up someone else (a hated rival) as Lord Splarg’s savior. Overuse of fiat keeps a GM from being ready and willing to keep things interesting in the face of success or failure.
See, as in your other example there’s this excessive reduction of what matters down to pass/fail modes. If it’s about Brak convincing the prince or not, or Brak living or dying, you’re right – there’s no point having a system because the rules can provide no useful input into the fiction. But as with Brak, me cheating on ol’ Splarg’s behalf doesn’t mean the dice rolls and actions that got to that point mean nothing. The PCs beat the living hell out of Splarg but I decide that he banfs out of there I can add a whole bunch of experiences to how he acts. He may panic and show his hand early, or refuse to return to the city, hiring a Darth Maul type flunky badass to do his bidding.
These examples bring home my main concern with anti-fiat stuff. Alternatives have this tendency to lead to shrunken aspirations about what the play experience can do. I certainly don’t deny that you can do it badly, but you can do it very, very well, too, and games that discourage it seem to encourage a limited vision and take people away from the table relationship, because everything gets shrunken down to values being interpreted from a text instead of the interpersonal field of play.
When I read responses like this I feel like all of our differences are purely semantic and there is no disconnect at all.
Maybe some day we can game, share a meal, talk MMA and crossfit and get BFF tattoos.
I think we’re in much closer agreement than my examples show. That’s what I get for cranking out a quick response.
Fiat encompasses exactly what you’re talking about – the unexpected directions the game can go. Yet in *game texts*, it all too often ends up as a tool to guide the game on to the GM’s narrow course. That’s selling it way short. It’s the chance for a GM to improvise, adapt, and push the game in an exciting, unpredictable direction. That pass/fail switch is what I see a lot of game books pointing to.
Admittedly, most of my experience is with D&D, d20, and bog standard fantasy gaming rules, but that’s what I see a lot of.
What I’d rather see is exactly what you’re talking about. Brak convinces the prince, but the prince is so moved that he askes Brak to serve as a diplomat, and no isn’t an answer you give the royal family. After all, Brak just showed he’s an eloquent speaker! Stuff like that.
My Splarg example was unclear – the PCs need to save him, they screw up, so the annoying, Newman-from-Seinfeld NPC is the guy who saves him. Failure isn’t Splarg’s death, because that’d mess up the campaign. It’s instead this annoying NPC getting a lot more powerful, and that makes things interesting. Or Splarg does die, but the enemy ressurects him as an evil badass. Or Splarg is captured and turns traitor. Etc – fiat gives a GM the improvisational tools to keep things interesting. When you go too by the book, you’re making a bet that what you thought of last week while prepping is always better than the option that arises out of play.
In my mind, that’s like sticking to a game plan even though a nice, juicy, obvious chance at something better has come up.
When fiat is just used as a yes/no proposition, it’s selling itself and the entire form of RPGs short.
See, I’d argue that both good planning and a fair amount of adaptability allow you to not need much fudging. Perhaps I just use fiat to a greater degree when I’m GMing, but if Splarg has to survive, then either I’m going to put dozens of people between the PCs and him and a way out for him that doesn’t need fancy tricks or illusions (my favourite is he ducks behind a door and then leaves) or I’m going to have the PCs hear about him fleeing the city from their informants on the street (or the innkeeper who’s a notorious gossip). If I don’t want my PCs to kill him, he’s never going to get within range of them. I did this effectively a few times in my 3.5E game set in the world of the Thief video games, where major villians were seen down the street with dozens of minions surrounding them and a panicking crowd pushing and tugging at the PCs. I also use fear, since I try to cultivate a healthy dose of realism in my games. In the Thief example above, most of the PCs were rogues or roguish fighter-types and they were introduced to a god-like being that grew in size and started killing the people around it. They were intimidated and, being a party of fairly good characters, they had the problem of the crowd. Two of the characters started pulling up people from the street, people who were being trampled by the freaked out crowd. They had smaller, more intimate problems than dealing with the big nasty in the street that they were nearly positive they’d die battling. Similarly in my 4E game, I had my 4th level characters arrive in a city just as it was attacked by an elder red dragon (level 22). I established the power and magnitude of the dragon by the other people it killed and then I used the dragonfear on my PCs. Mechanically, I’m airtight since the dragon’s breath weapon hasn’t recharged yet and it has bigger fish to fry than yet another small group of humanoids who wish to die quickly and story-wise I’m airtight because the characters were only going towards the dragon because it was the right thing to do and the dragonfear gave them every excuse to flee the monster they originally had no intention of facing.
It’s not that I’m railroading my players. It’s that I’m obviously putting them up against a foe that overmatches them yet they feel a moral obligation to engage it or an understanding that their immediate actions aren’t going to change the situation. In my Thief campaign, the second last villain in one of the final scenarios I decided would receive terrible news telepathically right after it downed one of the characters, but it overmatched the players significantly. The entire goal of the encounter was to drain player resources, but they thought this was the final encounter so they went all out, as intended. But I didn’t have to tell them that it was a bad situation, they knew it. I didn’t have to tell them not to retreat, they knew the end of their world was dependent on their actions. And I didn’t have to fudge rolls since I knew that it was nearly impossible for them to beat my villian, but that was the point.
So my planning meant that I didn’t need to fudge the numbers, my adaptability allows them to try what they want, but the effectiveness of their attempts meant that the players were immediately informed about the situation they’re facing.
And again I’m rambling.
This is an extremely important issue that, unfortunately, is consistently dismissed out of a knee-jerk desire to grant authority to text, exactly as you identify. I’ve had this conversation many times and the reaction often boils down to “but… why would you want to not listen to the book?” Which, well.
I do think there’s a secondary mode, above and beyond the centering of the text, that pushes people into this, though: overvaluing the outputs of a system. I quite often see this in people who are happy to completely tear apart what is provided to them as a “text” and reassemble it into a new form (metaphorically and now even sometimes literally, thanks to electronic publishing and the photocopier) but who view this as a strictly outside-of-play activity — it’s fine to change things as long as they become sacrosanct again when play begins. This seems much more like the bad-science-thinking equivalent to the bad-humanities-thinking of graphocentrism — people are seeing the game as a software product or repeatable experiment where you put in certain inputs (player participation) and get out certain outputs (specific varieties of “fun”), where “fudging” is somehow tainting the result.
(The comments here specifically make me think that formulating this tabletop RP activity as a “game” probably contributes to this too.)
What I’ve observed myself from this whole process is that what I simply thought of as normal “playing” and “GMing” in fact includes huge levels of constant minor “fudging,” or rather, on-the-fly adjudication of situations based on GM intuition combined with whole-group or stakeholder desires: combats that build to a climax right when everyone in the group is just about ready to be done (or get skipped when everyone’s tired and cranky), unusual situations that get talked out by the group for how we should resolve them, etc. Members of my current playgroup and I (long-running Exalted game) have started referring to this as “the freeform strata” because it’s become so clear that the bottom layer of what we’re doing is just a free-flowing shared imaginative exercise and the rules are serving other purposes on top of that: a shortcut to resolving certain situations, an enjoyable minigame to occasionally participate in, a way to codify character abilities that everyone has fairly similar understandings of so disagreements aren’t too common, etc. Thinking about it this way — that the entire experience is just “fudging” and the rules are only there for us to occasionally decide in the moment to use — has really drastically improved the experience of play.
This post is exactly what happens when people start defending and attacking names of ideas instead of ideas.
A tale of my subjective experience: I disagree with the blog writing itself, even though it mentions hermeneutics, which is always good. Then, later, there is the parenthetical note ‘Burning Wheel’s Let it Ride, where extraordinarily intrusive fudging is disguised as a hedge against GM interference’. Huh?
My default definition of fudging is modifying the output of mechanics once they have been engaged (or, if I want to make a point about honesty, secretly modifying …).
Now I’d like to know: When you write about fudging, what do you mean by it?
This post is exactly what happens when people start defending and attacking names of ideas instead of ideas.
I know this trick. It’s where you hem and haw over definitions until you arrive at a near-tautology — except that it doesn’t apply to the way people really do things. Over in Story Games, this happened when the thread about this topic was beaten down under the pretense of clear definition to basically get Corley to shut up.
There’s obviously a continuum of related practices under fiat and fudging that escape attempts to define them in narrow, useless terms.
Then, later, there is the parenthetical note ‘Burning Wheel’s Let it Ride, where extraordinarily intrusive fudging is disguised as a hedge against GM interference’. Huh?
Let it Ride says you can’t call for multiple rolls in the same situation, except that the GM is the default arbiter of the nature of the situation anyway, so it’s just a trick. You can say that the conflict’s outcomes make a difference, but it’s trivial to change those too while continuing to get what you want. Its only hard-coded purpose is that the advancement system breaks unless you limit dice rolls. Beyond that, it actually screws the player by making him/her more susceptible to fluke rolls.
Hi, uhhh…, Malcolm?
My intention is not to attack or criticize whatever definition or explanation you provide; I’ve tried that in the past and it does not work as a means of communication. So I won’t be doing it.
Here’s a bit of reasoning behind this position: I study mathematics. There, definitions precisely line out what one is engaging with. That makes mathematics elegant and easy. Real world, for good or ill, is messy. Most things can’t be defined precisely, because language is not built to do that.
What definitions do is that they highlight some parts of a phenomenon (or family of them) and rule out other parts. This is useful.
So, what I’m interested in knowing is what aspects of roleplaying do you mean when you say fudging. Is it somehow different from fiat, or do you use them as synonyms?
Let it ride: Yes, it does not protect players against game masters, yes, it is necessary for the advancement mechanism. Assuming a non-poisonous group dynamic I would say it screws nobody; for players it gives meaning to spending artha on a roll, knowing that a second one won’t be immediately asked for, so as such I’d say it is also necessary for the artha rules. I like it as a tool for transparency, since it makes it possibly to judge how hard it really is to succeed at lengthy tasks.
I still don’t see the connection to fudging; I do see a connection to fiat.