Quote from: jeff37923;1057343and what I would consider acceptable odds during play.

Apparently not.

Holy shit, did this thread get hijacked by Traveller. AGAIN!

I like how Jeff handled this. It's not excessive dice fudging. It's making a judgement call and leaning towards fun.

I believe that the fudging advice is more often trying to reduce the footprint of shitty game design. Worse, the people who often advocate for frequent dice roll fudging are usually just frustrated authors desperate to inflict their story on unsuspecting players. If you're strongly focused on "seeing what falls out of play", the fudging feels twice as dirty (when you're choosing to do so out of selfish railroading/illusionism...). I don't believe Jeff's choice here even comes close to that. It's a good point. There's generally no black/white solutions. I believe it's your motivation that differentiates shitty dice roll fudging from pertinent dice roll fudging.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1057348Holy shit, did this thread get hijacked by Traveller. AGAIN!

Actually, in CT there is a 1 in 216 chance that on any particular trip, one of your passengers will try to hijack your ship.

While we're speaking of hijacking...

Both older editions of D&D and CT share in common a heavy reliance on dice. Which means the temptation to fudge things. I mean, nobody needs to fudge diceless games, it's built into the system, that's how they get all thespy. Now, later editions of the games... well, you don't need to put your thumb on the balance in favour of your players when you've already got your whole arse sitting on it.

I wish I could remember who said this first, but it comes down to: do the player-characters survive because they are the heroes, or are they the heroes because they survive? As in any game, how much is choice and how much is chance? As I said earlier, a game like rock-paper-scissors is all chance, one like chess is all choice, but roleplaying games as originally conceived have both choice and chance. The nature of them, though, is that if you remove enough chance you also remove choice. "You're going to win, you just get to choose HOW you'll win!" removing two-thirds the possible outcomes (not only losing, but no result) narrows things somewhat.

A long-time friend of mine was a disability care worker, she told me about taking a wheelchair-bound guy to a pub some time. He fancied a girl he saw, and asked my friend if he should ask her out. "I don't know!" she said, "if you want to, do it."
"But she might knock me back."
We discussed it, and she explained that her job as a care worker was not to protect him from failure, but to enable him to get into situations where he could make choices with uncertain outcomes. "It is a human right to fuck up," she said, "and fail miserably; he deserves the same chance to have his heart broken as an able-bodied person does."

And I agree with her. The great thing about rpgs is that we can do it without real consequences. I'm not that keen on risking my own life and limb for glory, but my character? Sure, why not.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1057345Apparently not.

That's my feeling, I can't see how a 1 in 800 insta death chance is ever going to be desirable.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1057345Apparently not.

Quote from: S'mon;1057366That's my feeling, I can't see how a 1 in 800 insta death chance is ever going to be desirable.

 If you don't want your characters to take risks, then they should stay home and not be adventurers.

Quote from: trechriron;1057350I like how Jeff handled this. It's not excessive dice fudging. It's making a judgement call and leaning towards fun.

Seconded and how I roll at the table depending on the situation.

Quote from: jeff37923;1057392If you don't want your characters to take risks, then they should stay home and not be adventurers.

A 1 in 800 (or 1 in 10, say) chance that a risky mission ends in death seems fine to me as player or GM. A 1 in 800 chance of death on any Jump might be acceptable to me as a player I guess, but as GM would be a deterrent from using that system. If it's 1 in 216 or 1 in 36 chance of death if you Jump with a damaged drive, or within a gravity well, ok. It's the pointlessness of it as a routine campaign-ending feature that makes it feel like a bad rule to me from GM POV.

Edit: But then I'm a no-fudge GM, so if I rolled death on the table then that's what I'd apply. I guess if I were a fudger and it were player-side-only fake danger it'd be different.

All combat dice in the open. #NoFudging. Ever. There are other, better, ways the GM can influence outcomes if they really feel they must.

Gameplay > Plot.

"OK, folks I have some good news and bad news. Bad news first - you all just died in a horrible jump accident. No one is going to even remember the name of your ship. The good news? For $100 cash I will completely ignore that roll and we can keep playing. Like it never happened. Seriously, I'm going to go to the bathroom and when I come back, it never happened. for $200 we won't even roll again. You'll just get there. In one piece."

(my new idea for incentivized professional GMing...)

It seems to me that roll in which the whole party is arbitrarily killed as a result of doing something that PCs would just normally do is one of the few instances in which I would "fudge" the dice.

Except I wouldn't see it as fudging, because I wouldn't actually hide the result and pretend something else.  I'd just say.  We rolled this - but it's stupid - I'm going to house rule it.

Quote from: TJS;1057441It seems to me that roll in which the whole party is arbitrarily killed as a result of doing something that PCs would just normally do is one of the few instances in which I would "fudge" the dice.

Except I wouldn't see it as fudging, because I wouldn't actually hide the result and pretend something else.  I'd just say.  We rolled this - but it's stupid - I'm going to house rule it.

I fully agree with this sentiment. Unless you actually wrote the system (and sometimes not even then, I have horror stories about the Arcanis RPG design process) no GM is going to be aware of every little quirk of the system they're using and, from my experience, very few are versed enough in actual probability to be able to judge things related to it with any accuracy. So if something comes up in the rules that you think is just damned stupid as a mechanic (in this case because it completely derails the campaign before it even starts) and, after seeing that unexpected result come up you, as the GM, want to change that rule permanently to prevent the stupid thing from ever possibly happening again in your campaign... I don't think that's fudging the dice role... that's just making a ruling.

The notion that the rules even allow something like that to occur when there are so many more useful and interesting options is one of those things as a GM that just make me shake my head at what the designers were possibly thinking when they designed that mechanic.

Then again I've known legit game designers who thought 2d10+1d6 had the exact same probably curve as 1d20+4 because the average was 14.5 for both (No, I am NOT actually kidding; they thought they could replace the d20 with 2d10 and static ability modifiers with dice rolls while keeping the exact same target numbers as 3e D&D used and that it would have NO effect on the probabilities in the game).

So it's entirely possible the person who designed the mechanic actually failed to consider that "instant TPK" was going to eventually come up at someone's table because to them something like a 1 in 216 chance would probably never even come up in any given campaign and almost certainly not on the very first jump, though the probably of it coming up and wrecking someone's campaign on the first jump reached 100% once you had enough tables playing the game.

Quote from: Chris24601;1057452I fully agree with this sentiment. Unless you actually wrote the system (and sometimes not even then, I have horror stories about the Arcanis RPG design process) no GM is going to be aware of every little quirk of the system they're using and, from my experience, very few are versed enough in actual probability to be able to judge things related to it with any accuracy. So if something comes up in the rules that you think is just damned stupid as a mechanic (in this case because it completely derails the campaign before it even starts) and, after seeing that unexpected result come up you, as the GM, want to change that rule permanently to prevent the stupid thing from ever possibly happening again in your campaign... I don't think that's fudging the dice role... that's just making a ruling.

Yes I agree. I think if I were GMing, had not noticed the stupid rule, and rolled the instant death result I would immediately edit the table to something less silly (probably a misjump + damage to the ship) and go on from there.

I think about the harshest result I would apply would be a misjump to interstellar space without enough fuel to reach an inhabited system, plus damage to the ship. Hopefully the crew have enough low berths for cold sleep as it will likely take decades to get back to civilisation... and that point would be a reasonable one to roll for death during cold sleep, unlike routine passenger transit. So I could imagine eventually killing off some PCs as a result, but probably not all of them. Or they might have a choice of heading for a nearby habitable but uncivilised world, vs risking a long sublight voyage back to a civilised system. That's the kind of hard choice space opera adventure is made of!

I very much enjoy procedural content generation vs dice rolls - the randomness creates adventure. Randomness that just ends the game is bad unless it's the result of appropriate player choice, such as PCs choosing to go for the long voyage in cold sleep, then rolling unlucky on survival check.

Quote from: S'mon;1057459Hopefully the crew have enough low berths for cold sleep as it will likely take decades to get back to civilisation...

You know what happens when you wake after decades in coldsleep? You did see that documentary about Ellen Ripley, yeah?

Quote from: S'mon;1057459Yes I agree. I think if I were GMing, had not noticed the stupid rule, and rolled the instant death result I would immediately edit the table to something less silly (probably a misjump + damage to the ship) and go on from there.

Funny thing is, i had noticed it, but thought that a 1 in 800 chance was pretty unlikely.

Quote from: S'mon;1057459I think about the harshest result I would apply would be a misjump to interstellar space without enough fuel to reach an inhabited system, plus damage to the ship. Hopefully the crew have enough low berths for cold sleep as it will likely take decades to get back to civilisation... and that point would be a reasonable one to roll for death during cold sleep, unlike routine passenger transit. So I could imagine eventually killing off some PCs as a result, but probably not all of them. Or they might have a choice of heading for a nearby habitable but uncivilised world, vs risking a long sublight voyage back to a civilised system. That's the kind of hard choice space opera adventure is made of!

What I did after fudging the roll was declare that this was the Mother Of All Directional Misjumps instead of a TPK. The original campaign idea was scrapped since the ship with the PCs was now over twenty parsecs into uncharted territory. They spent the next year of game time fixing their ship and jumping back to charted space while encountering pocket empires, wildcat colonies, and pirates.