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Basket Ball general managers...

Not sure I would say the GM was the bad guy:
We decided to play the RPG that shipped with Diablo 2 and let us say we played it straight up and my necromancer and golem got owned by a demon. Really bad timing while trying to get past a large drop. Our GM friend could not roll low if his life depended on it at the time. All he could do is laugh hysterically and kept saying "please witness my rolls, I am not believing them either!!!".

We ritually melted the dice afterward and prayed the evil spirits would not hurt anyone further.

 Talizvar wrote:
Not sure I would say the GM was the bad guy:
We decided to play the RPG that shipped with Diablo 2 and let us say we played it straight up and my necromancer and golem got owned by a demon. Really bad timing while trying to get past a large drop. Our GM friend could not roll low if his life depended on it at the time. All he could do is laugh hysterically and kept saying "please witness my rolls, I am not believing them either!!!".

We ritually melted the dice afterward and prayed the evil spirits would not hurt anyone further.

Not bad GM; just the dice good being sort of dickish towards you and your grup alongside the DM

A good GM should have hidden the rolls so that he could 'cheat' in the players' favor when necessary. Rules are far less important than everyone having a good time.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
A good GM should have hidden the rolls so that he could 'cheat' in the players' favor when necessary. Rules are far less important than everyone having a good time.

I'm not sure I can agree with this fully.

Now hear me out.

I agree that everyone should have a good time, but to me, the good time gets hurt when I realize that the GM is protecting me. If he rolls hot, he rolls hot and that is the way of the dice. As soon as the GM starts cheating to save the party from a good roll, what's the point of fights anymore?

Half of the point of a GM screen is to hide the rolls that you are cheating on, as far as I know. Or maybe models you have put on-hand for coming encounters.

It's not like you are cheating on every roll to "save" the players. It's just for when you fudge the latest roll so you haven't just critted the same player for the third attack in a row.

Especially because sometimes you cheat in the game's favor, rather than the players, if you are having a really bad night of rolling. Fights are not epic when the big baddie whiffs with every single attack and the players kill them effortlessly.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Half of the point of a GM screen is to hide the rolls that you are cheating on, as far as I know. Or maybe models you have put on-hand for coming encounters.

It's not like you are cheating on every roll to "save" the players. It's just for when you fudge the latest roll so you haven't just critted the same player for the third attack in a row.

Especially because sometimes you cheat in the game's favor, rather than the players, if you are having a really bad night of rolling. Fights are not epic when the big baddie whiffs with every single attack and the players kill them effortlessly.

But that is the nature of the game. If the GM has full reign to modify and alter the rolls as his mood or desire takes him, why even have the dice at that point?

 curran12 wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Half of the point of a GM screen is to hide the rolls that you are cheating on, as far as I know. Or maybe models you have put on-hand for coming encounters.

It's not like you are cheating on every roll to "save" the players. It's just for when you fudge the latest roll so you haven't just critted the same player for the third attack in a row.

Especially because sometimes you cheat in the game's favor, rather than the players, if you are having a really bad night of rolling. Fights are not epic when the big baddie whiffs with every single attack and the players kill them effortlessly.

But that is the nature of the game. If the GM has full reign to modify and alter the rolls as his mood or desire takes him, why even have the dice at that point?

I have done "Diceless" Games for decades. The trick is to get players who are willing to miss.

 Anpu42 wrote:

 curran12 wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Half of the point of a GM screen is to hide the rolls that you are cheating on, as far as I know. Or maybe models you have put on-hand for coming encounters.

It's not like you are cheating on every roll to "save" the players. It's just for when you fudge the latest roll so you haven't just critted the same player for the third attack in a row.

Especially because sometimes you cheat in the game's favor, rather than the players, if you are having a really bad night of rolling. Fights are not epic when the big baddie whiffs with every single attack and the players kill them effortlessly.

But that is the nature of the game. If the GM has full reign to modify and alter the rolls as his mood or desire takes him, why even have the dice at that point?

I have done "Diceless" Games for decades. The trick is to get players who are willing to miss.

And that is a workable system, absolutely. I'm not intrinsically saying that one or the other is bad, don't mistake me.

But I feel if you are going to use a dice system, use a dice system. Don't use a dice system with backsies.

But that is the nature of the game. If the GM has full reign to modify and alter the rolls as his mood or desire takes him, why even have the dice at that point?

That's the GM's JOB. They are there to alter the game fluidly while keeping everyone having fun. The whole point of a good GM's is to do it so the players can't tell they are changing anything.

I have played games where we steamrolled everything due to horrible GM rolls. Those games were not very fun.

It's the same reason you can save an accidental TPK by having the bad guys take the heroes captive instead of slitting their throats. Boom, additional adventure material.

 AegisGrimm wrote:

But that is the nature of the game. If the GM has full reign to modify and alter the rolls as his mood or desire takes him, why even have the dice at that point?

That's the GM's JOB. They are there to alter the game fluidly while keeping everyone having fun. The whole point of a good GM's is to do it so the players can't tell they are changing anything.

I have played games where we steamrolled everything due to horrible GM rolls. Those games were not very fun.

It's the same reason you can save an accidental TPK by having the bad guys take the heroes captive instead of slitting their throats. Boom, additional adventure material.

I think this is an instance where we have to agree to disagree on some points.

I agree that it is the GM's job to keep the game fun. And to ensure that the players are having a good time and that the story is moving forward.

I disagree that the GM has to cheat to make that happen. If a GM is fudging rolls because he feels things are too easy or too hard, that is a correction for poor encounter design. It is not the GM's job to guarantee that all players live, nor is it his job to ensure that there are always casualties either, mind you. The GM is the referee, and the referee cannot change the rules to suit the narrative. A GM should be designing encounters and events that challenge, and if there is no risk involved in the challenge, since the GM will bail out the players, I feel the value of the game is lost.

There is no joy in winning a game where you have a free out if things go bad.

I understand, but that theory is a lot like saying it's evil to build the framework of an adventure to challenge the party of characters your players are running and then "cheat" by changing some elements because a player is not playing that night and so would make the combat's too hard for their not being there. That's actually a giant leap up from fudging a roll or two over the course of an adventure.

Mind you, I'm not advocating fudging half your rolls. More like a couple in a entire night, mostly to even out a nasty curve in ways the player's shouldn't even realize.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I understand, but that theory is a lot like saying it's evil to build the framework of an adventure to challenge the party of characters your players are running and then "cheat" by changing some elements because a player is not playing that night and so would make the combat's too hard for their not being there. That's actually a giant leap up from fudging a roll or two over the course of an adventure.

Mind you, I'm not advocating fudging half your rolls. More like a couple in a entire night, mostly to even out a nasty curve in ways the player's shouldn't even realize.

This is where I have less experience in that regard, as my gaming groups tend to be the type that sticks to the philosophy of 'if we all can't play, we'll do something else or wait' style. Since we primarily play via Skype and online rollers, this isn't as big an issue.

I guess the heart of it, to me, is that the GM taking the reins to direct the game, even with the most noble intentions, can begin a course where less and less freedom is given to players. After all, if the GM forces a fail/success because of a bad roll that screws up the GM's plans, what's to stop a GM from doing it if I as a player use my skills and items in a way that runs contrary to the planned encounter? Now, I would not imply that my GM would do that, or that you would, but there is a level of trust that I feel is violated when the GM simply takes command of the encounter. Because players trust GMs with the hidden rolls, with the rolls that they cannot know the general effectiveness of. If the player cannot be assured that their GM is fudging the rolls, even for the best of intentions, they lose the desire to have those, because hey, the GM might just say otherwise if he botches/crits the roll.

I get you. That's usually within the realm of trusting the GM. You trust him to take your out of the box idea and let it be effective (as well it should be), while at the same time throwing you a bit of pity every once in a while that won't be game-changing, but yet might relieve some frustration.

Now, it could also some from my playing games like Savage Worlds, where the dice rolling has a different flavor than with normal D20games because the game uses all levels of dice *except* D20's. To-Hit rolls are a pretty finite and well known thing to the players, so they will know they are winning or losing on their own merits of luck vs. skill level. Like, a Ranged attack always hits on a "4", plus or minus some well-known modifiers.

But sometimes there can be weird situations where in a combat it seems like the majority of a party is tending to get off scot-free with bad attack rolls on the GM's part, while one unlucky guy just keeps getting all the nasty hits right to the face. So maybe instead of the third attack knocking him down yet again, you fudge your roll unbeknownst to him and sarcastically tell them, "There- good god,he finally missed you for a change!"

But you are the one that knows that it is a rare occurrence, when at the same time that guy might later just mutilate a bad guy and you just go with it.

Our GM generally goes for full transparency as his style. Any rolls that the players would have be visible, he makes visible as well. He still has hidden rolls for things that would clue off players to bad events (such as a Perception rolled against my Disguise and so on, where I'd instantly know in an OOC way that I'd better prepare to fight). But things like attack rolls, we see them as he rolls them, so we have to take the good with the bad.

And, I gotta say, in our Pathfinder group...we get a lot of the good and the bad. I hesitate to call our dice bipolar...more like schizophrenic. Our house roll for critical fumbles is a d100 roll to see how bad the fumble is, where higher is worse for the fumbler.

And I ate a critical miss, followed by a 100. The saving grace was that I was far from the party, so a lot of the, shall we call them, AOE elements of the fumble were negated, but I still wound up with gear all over the ground and a broken leg. All this while I was trying to convince a guard I was a divine being...

 Anpu42 wrote:
We had a game master once set his Vampier Game in Denton, yes the Denton of Rocky Horror Fame!
He forced the group to sing the Theam Song "Denton" everytime Deton was said or they lost EXP.
I am so glad I did not play in that game.

That would become onerous.

Curran, you seem to have a more adversarial approach to RPG's than I have personally encountered in my groups. The way we play, it's more like telling a story. The GM provides the setting and some of the plot, but it is very much the players' story. Generally, we do not do very much dice rolling, except during combat or sneaking/gambling/hotwiring-style shenanigans, when random results simply force the players to be more creative. As the GM, I have let players die, when the time is right. However, no one wants to go out like a chump. At the same time, no one wants to feel a mission is too easy. If we had to stick purely to the dice mechanics, it would have taken forever to fine-tune the system into actual enjoyability.

I feel like I should point out there that my group tried a lot of RPGs, including several Palladium ones, D&D and others, yet kept coming back to the West End Star Wars RPG because the mechanics were more transparent (as in, they don't block your appreciation of the game) and the games were smoother for it.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Curran, you seem to have a more adversarial approach to RPG's than I have personally encountered in my groups. The way we play, it's more like telling a story. The GM provides the setting and some of the plot, but it is very much the players' story. Generally, we do not do very much dice rolling, except during combat or sneaking/gambling/hotwiring-style shenanigans, when random results simply force the players to be more creative. As the GM, I have let players die, when the time is right. However, no one wants to go out like a chump. At the same time, no one wants to feel a mission is too easy. If we had to stick purely to the dice mechanics, it would have taken forever to fine-tune the system into actual enjoyability.

I feel like I should point out there that my group tried a lot of RPGs, including several Palladium ones, D&D and others, yet kept coming back to the West End Star Wars RPG because the mechanics were more transparent (as in, they don't block your appreciation of the game) and the games were smoother for it.

I don't know if I'd call it adversarial, as that puts me in a position where it seems like I am in the more 'the GM is there to beat the players' side which is anything but the true. In fact, our longest-running GM is very similar in that he only requires rolls in combat and other situations like you described that have very clear numbers checks involved. In situations where, say, it is story building, or character roleplay, it is done purely through our RP abilities, with the dice rolls in social skills coming in situations where the RP is not enough to get a clear answer.

But I do stand by as much transparency in dice rolls as possible. As I said before, once the GM starts taking liberties with dice rolls, the trust between player and GM begins to dissolve, even if the liberties are taken for the best of reasons. Sometimes the dice fall good and sometimes they fall bad, it is something you have to accept in a game like this, imo. And this is not to say that if we crap out a roll our GM is utterly merciless, as I've had a long-lived and very loved character die in an event before, but rather than just rip up the sheet and go home, we discuss if there's any way to work it into the story, which in turn led to some interesting quests to bring my character back, that I could be involved in as part of it involved an adventure in the afterlife. The death did not lose meaning, and it had teeth (as I lost 6 months' worth of playing gear), but it wasn't handwaved away with a 'well that crit is actually not one.'

To me as a player, knowing that the GM can simply change the results hurts the story far more, it takes me out of the story knowing that I do not have complete freedom; if I roll too good or bad, there are limiting factors in place for that. This thread, we have pointed out GMs who railroad the plot as a very bad thing, but I would argue that fudging rolls and cheating the system is in the same aspect as railroading. After all, if I roll bad/good and the result is 'corrected', is that not the GM exerting control over my character's story in an artificial way?

Neither myself or any other GM I have played with has altered a player's roll that is in their favor That would smack hugely of being a "bad GM". I would never alter an enemies defense roll if it was bad, only strange extreme results of the attack rolls against players that would artificially halt the "feel" of the combat.

But then again, it's part of what system I play, I think. Savage Worlds actually gives each player a number of "bennies" before each session which can be turned in to re-roll bad dice rolls. And the GM also gets a mechanically allowed number of those for their use as well. That fosters more of a casual approach to gaming if it's what you're used to, I think, and can be seen on other parts of a gaming session.

Like I said, it's all trust and going by the feel of the game session moment to moment. I have had the same GM drive my character into making Incapacitation rolls with a single attack, and in the same session after a horribly botched roll on my part smile and go, "What? I didn't see that roll- you might want to roll it again so I can see". He's my favorite GM to run games.

i always rolled in the open, just that sometimes, I don,t tell the player what this or that roll was for.

I mostly use the screen to note down the status/health of enemies, init order, other notes stuff like that..

if i roll behind my screen, knowing me, I'll always favour the players, since i don't want them to die and the game be done after some lowly combat...as for me rolling like crap and them rolling like Gods, I simply add more health to the bosses, so that gives me a round or two of grace to hopefully do someting

Kind of depends on the system/setup for me.

In my 4e campaign I usually ran everything off my laptop including using a computer dice roller. I'd kind of bump it both ways, although it seemed like I would consistently fudge attack rolls in my favor and damage rolls in the PC's favor. It's always kinda annoys me when the big boss monster misses 4/5 of the party with his 1/encounter mega burst attack. That and the cleric was pretty much invulnerable to attacks (not sure if it was a pattern in the dice roller or what, but I rolled more single digit attacks against the cleric than against the rest of the party put together), so I always had to bump attack rolls against him 1-2 times per encounter so he'd actually get hit.

If I'm doing a single evening adventure, or usually when I'm doing Pathfinder (when they rope me into that) I just roll out in the open and say "screw it". It's more a case of me not being invested enough in the game to care how the combat turns out at that point though. The players have learned to fear me rolling out in the open, because that's when I'm in a mood to have the monsters start coup de graceing whenever somebody goes unconscious.

Edit: You know, this post above makes me sound like a very bad GM indeed now I read it. I'm kind of ok with that. I figure as long as the players are enjoying themselves I can't be doing too bad, and to the best of my knowledge I haven't had anybody complain yet.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Neither myself or any other GM I have played with has altered a player's roll that is in their favor That would smack hugely of being a "bad GM". I would never alter an enemies defense roll if it was bad, only strange extreme results of the attack rolls against players that would artificially halt the "feel" of the combat.

But then again, it's part of what system I play, I think. Savage Worlds actually gives each player a number of "bennies" before each session which can be turned in to re-roll bad dice rolls. And the GM also gets a mechanically allowed number of those for their use as well. That fosters more of a casual approach to gaming if it's what you're used to, I think, and can be seen on other parts of a gaming session.

Like I said, it's all trust and going by the feel of the game session moment to moment. I have had the same GM drive my character into making Incapacitation rolls with a single attack, and in the same session after a horribly botched roll on my part smile and go, "What? I didn't see that roll- you might want to roll it again so I can see". He's my favorite GM to run games.

I wouldn't imply that you or your GM are bad GMs, of course, but I suppose it comes down to an interpretation of trust between player and GM. On the one hand, you have a level of trust that you know your GM is watching out for you, and on the other you have a level of trust where you know the GM is playing by the same rules as you are. They are not mutually exclusive, nor is one more right than the other, it is just what you find for the trust level, I think.

You guys seem to have much more formal relationships with your players. I only played with friends and family, usually just 2 or 3 of us playing at a time. Having a set number of re-rolls before hand wouldn't make any sense since we wouldn't be sticklers for any part of the rules if anyone felt the need for a re-roll to begin with. Our sessions were more like cooperative storytelling than a game that is won or lost. I tried getting into 4E and Pathfinder recently, but the mindset is just alien to me. Might as well play against a computer if we're going to let the mechanics determine everything.

I honestly have played sessions where I got more re-rolls than bennies, but still had a benny left after the game. Pity is my friend.

But I am also the guy who can use a benny to specifically re-roll 2D6 because I got a "1" and a "2", only to get a....."1" and a "3". Much laughter ensues after those.

Having a set number of re-rolls before hand wouldn't make any sense since we wouldn't be sticklers for any part of the rules if anyone felt the need for a re-roll to begin with.

One of the main benefits with bennies in Savage Worlds is that some defining abilities in that game system actually let you start sessions with more then normal (eg. "Luck" skill). Also, it's usually seen as good form for GMs to give out a benny for things that in normal D20 settings would generate bonus XP, or the like.

We even play a high-fantasy setting that introduces a single special one for each person (per game) that can only be used immediately on another player's roll, if something they do is deemed especially worthy of exaltation (usually an extremely good idea or awesome roleplaying), because when using a benny to re-roll, you always get to keep the best roll of the two.

So maybe my mindset is driven by the system, which is really the only one I have ever played (save for several sessions of FantasyCraft and it's bajillion different styles of attacking in combat, urgh)

A lot of games use some sort of equivalent of bennies/action points/etc. to take the sting out of bad luck. Nothing is worse than pulling off a special maneuver that is both really powerful and really cool in context then whiffing the roll and having it fail. :(

Savage World's implementation is good,though... Especially since they dropped the initial roll where bennies also converted to XP, so there was a huge disincentive to using them.

I know one of the major things that provokes me to tell a player to re-roll is when they roll a tremendously awesome to-hit roll, but then roll almost as low as possible on their damage roll. I'm not as familiar with D20 games, but with Savage Worlds that can happen on a fairly frequent basis. I can roll double what I needed to hit a monster, but then roll a 5 or 6 on 4D6.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I know one of the major things that provokes me to tell a player to re-roll is when they roll a tremendously awesome to-hit roll, but then roll almost as low as possible on their damage roll. I'm not as familiar with D20 games, but with Savage Worlds that can happen on a fairly frequent basis. I can roll double what I needed to hit a monster, but then roll a 5 or 6 on 4D6.

Tell that to my Dark Heresy players..roll under 10 for hitting, then roll 1 or 2 on the damage dice.

My gaming group also kind of uses a sliding scale where the crazier and riskier something is that the player wants to do, the less likely the GM is to be charitable if they botch it.

If you suddenly want to grab the wheel of a car (against the driver's will) from the passenger seat and try to force the vehicle to ram a monster that is made of fire and capable of phasing through walls (setting the walls afire as it goes) because you want to be the center of attention, then go ahead. You have a Driving skill of barely above average, and you seem to forget that you are in a car full of gas, ramming a fire monster.

Pass/Fail, buddy.

*Absolutely true story from a modern fantasy game.

I think it all depends. I started out with more "plot" centric games with recurring villains and so on. As time went on I began to see the merits in allowing more freedom to the players, so I began to be pretty ruthless with my villains- if my players murdered him early, so be it. I was still fairly loose with other rolls as I felt it was needed.

As I've been gaming longer, I've begun to move into a more "sandbox" style, though reading about the OD&D stuff leads me to believe it's just how the game used to be played. In this system, I tend to roll everything in the open. I don't really worry about "balanced" encounters, either, I just make sure the players have reasonable signposts towards danger and if they make dumb decisions, then that's their issue.

Both playstyles are fun. If you are a GM that likes to run heavily based on the storytelling side of things, a little fudging here and there greases the wheels of the story. If you are the sort who leans on the simulationist side of things, rolls out in the open reassures the players that when things go wrong it really is the dice and not you being vindictive.

As to bad GMs, I've been avoiding posting in this thread for a while because I am a sort of perma-GM, so when I get to play under someone else I tend to be really grateful for the chance and prefer to encourage rather than criticise.

I've been a bad GM before though.
I started a homebrew once a few years ago (2007/2008). I had had a fairly successful run of running things in other settings, and my players were pretty keen to see what my homebrew was like. Well, I found out a lot about GMing from that. let me tell you.
1. I spent way too long on world building and not nearly long enough on fleshing out NPCs and villains like I normally would have. This lead to flat villains no one cared about.
2. The world was fairly generic, of course it had a twist, but looking at it now, it was just base D'n'D with all the problems inherent.
3. I was way too interested in "showing off" the setting and didn't work out any sort of plot or motivations for my players.
4. I broke my own golden rule of always giving the group a reason to be together, leading to group infighting and a lack of direciton.
5. When it became obvious the game was stalling, I fell back on some awful clichés (which I am still embarassed about!) including giving the female PC "visions" (argh, cringe, so overdone!).

My players were all very graceful about it, but I really learned a lot about my limits as a GM!

Thankfully, my latest "homebrew" has been much more focused on plots, situations and characters, and way less on cosmology and trying to be "different".

 curran12 wrote:

I agree that it is the GM's job to keep the game fun. And to ensure that the players are having a good time and that the story is moving forward.

I disagree that the GM has to cheat to make that happen. If a GM is fudging rolls because he feels things are too easy or too hard, that is a correction for poor encounter design. It is not the GM's job to guarantee that all players live, nor is it his job to ensure that there are always casualties either, mind you. The GM is the referee, and the referee cannot change the rules to suit the narrative. A GM should be designing encounters and events that challenge, and if there is no risk involved in the challenge, since the GM will bail out the players, I feel the value of the game is lost.

There is no joy in winning a game where you have a free out if things go bad.

'Fudging' is obviously a contentious issue. In my years as a GM, I've come to an opinion that some fudging and railroading tend to be necessary to fully enjoyable storytelling. Though it is a delicate balance, and anything beyond minimal fudging of the dice makes players and their actions irrelevant. Players also aren't idiots and experienced players can smell when things are being fudged and that takes away from the game. In the past there have been some sessions where I was just railroading things too much (for example, making encounters tougher by adding their stats or abilities on the fly when they proved too weak), but I toned it down big time when I noticed that the sessions were just less enjoyable that way. Players need to be able to play, not just travel along.

Having said all that, I think that "if the encounter is too easy/hard, then it's just poor planning" -folks just haven't played systems which are way too unpredictable for that. Maybe it's not such an issue in D&D, but when you play something like RuneQuest, where even weakling monsters can easily cripple or incapacitate very high level characters with nothing but plain dumb luck, sometimes players would just get too frustrated if you didn't tone down your truly awesome dice day.