fudging dice rolls

[eudas]

Oh yeah. Eudas, it'll help a lot of you'd tell us which sort of D&D we're talking about, in terms of published texts. Year of publication and author would be ideal.

In terms of the example I started with (not to be confused with the examples that the original source thread started off with) it was referring to AD&D 2nd edition (TSR, Gary Gygax et al); the style of play was generic fantasy, hack 'n' slash.. I guess you could describe it as almost entirely Gamist, peppered with Simulationist ("my guy would do X in this situation") details. (Correct me if i'm butchering the use of GNS model terms.)

However, the theme that (i thought) we were exploring was what drives people to fudge dice rolls (psychology, perceived limitations of the system, etc) rather than the system used in my example. It's useful for some context, I suppose, so there it is (above).

In some ways, i feel a little out of my league here, so i'm going to go back to lurking for a while.

Cheers,
eudas

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eudas,

No, stay, you're doing fine. I asked about the system so that we wouldn't be applying values and standards for altering dice rolls that make no sense for the game in question.

Let's see, if I go back to my own AD&D play experiences, which were actually pre-2nd edition, part of the values involved were Good Sportsmanship, straight out of gym class. In other words, if you rolled a 1 for damage, that's too bad. There's another chance to hit coming up. And if it so happens that the monster rolled a 16 on its 2d8, and my character gets (as the rulebook put it) "rent to bits," well then. Weenies don't prosper. Quitters never win. That sort of thing.

Groups quickly segregated themselves into camps based on whether these principles were really adopted or not. The fundamental dichotomy was whether one played for personal advantage or for team effectiveness. Within the former, you get the by-the-rules strategists, the calvinballers (rules lawyers), and the "cheaters"; within the latter, you get the hard-core follow-the-leader types and the more happy-go-lucky zesty-fun types, who would ignore rolls that screwed up the fun.

(I'm limiting myself to Gamist D&D here; people played all kinds of ways back then, and I'm leaving out the Sim and Narr modes.)

So even within Gamist D&D, I observed people altering the dice outcomes for different reasons. On the one hand, you have personal advantage and ego; Bob doesn't want to lose in any way, shape, or form, so he pretends he rolled an 18 instead of the 6 he rolled (Bob's average outcome on d20 ends up being about 15 ...). On the other, Bill doesn't want to stop playing, because he's having fun playing, and his character's death would be a downer for everyone, so he does the same.

Bad? Good? Doesn't really matter; it's a matter of priorities. It's kind of interesting to me that Bill's group might come to an explicit agreement that some rolls can be ignored, probably with one person being the final judge, whereas Bob's fudging may actually come to be a form of strategizing against one or more people at the table. I think some points in my Simulationism and Gamism essays respectively do a pretty good job of explaining both of these eventual versions of play.

Overall, my point is that Bill's group might be considered more mature by some people because they alter certain dice rolls, rather than less. I don't necessarily share that view (I think they should find a system which is fun for them regardless of dice outcomes, so they don't have to alter them), but I can see where it's coming from.

Best,
Ron

[pete_darby]

OK, I'm still none the wiser as to Lumpley, reference please?

The ongoing , ah, refinement of the LP rolls on here

I think cheating refers to breaking some kind of social contract. There's some convention that you should report dice rolls accurately. Although I'm not sure I've ever seen it stated in any rules as such, so it's more of a social convention than belonging to RPGs in particular.

If you discard this part of the social contract, and replace it with, for example 'roll the dice as a guide to the outcome of some modelled action' (rather than 'let the dice dictate the outcome of some modelled action'), then the whole question of cheating as such goes away.

It's perhaps the mature thing to understand where the conventions come from, and to realise that they can be changed, or adhered to, as the group concensus allows.

So, I'm don't think though that just sticking to a convention has anything to do with maturity, unless you understand the issues around that convention.

Steve

Again, I'm using "cheating" to denote, for example, misrepresenting the results of die rolls or manipulating the character sheet without the express support of either the rules or the group. With the support of the rules, it becomes a metgame issue, with the support of the group (without the rules) it's drift. Without either, it's unilateral drift, and leads to the cheater literally playing a different game to that played by non-cheaters. And that seems pretty dysfunctional to me.

To get back to actual play of D&D... okay, I'm pretty sure that in actual play, most people fudge from time to time. If, as in the example of play given for teenage AD&D, you're cheating for gamist advantage, the extent to which you can get away with cheating becomes a metagame between the players...

"Maturity" seems to be a synonym for "awareness" here. Awareness of why you cheat, it's effects on the game, and the effects of not cheating lead to a player or group taking an agreed stand on it within the implied social contract as the group develops: "We allow re-rolls ocassionally to preserve characters form pointless deaths." "We don't allow re-rolls EVER." "We use a hero/drama/fate point mechanic, even if it isn't in the rules."

And, as a result, designers taking lessons form their own play, incorporate these opinions on the sovereignty of the system into their designs, hence the tendency towards metagame "overruling" mechanics in most designs outside pure sim.[/url]