Quote from: SettembriniIt´s a matter of preferences.
The only absolute: Be fair and honest.
Not neccessarily to the characters, but to your fellow humans.

Yes.  This should be a given.

Quote from: RPGPunditFrom the "open dice rolling" thread, a theme worth exploring in its own thread has come up.

Its my position that the GM has the prerogative to choose to not kill or otherwise fuck up a PC when straightforward dice rolls would indicate it, if he feels that it would be detrimental to the overall health of the game and the group; he likewise has the option of letting any single bad roll stand if he thinks it will not be harmful to the game, or that the possibilities it generates outweigh the harm it might cause, or if he just plain felt that the Player had it coming.

Opinions? Do you agree or disagree?

RPGPundit

Agree.

However -- doing this can have severe repercussions. I'm running a game where the PC's are in contests against a variety of opponents. Last night one of them almost lost a vital struggle.

Losing the fight wouldn't have killed the game but it would have hurt momentum in a serious way.

But if I'd fudged it, the sense of a hard won victory would have been destroied. No one would have enjoyed it, and that probably would have damaged the game more.

I will note that there have been times when I've collosally and obviously fucked up (giving bad guys weapons well in excess of what they'd reasonably have, or making off-the-cuff , arbirtary rulings that were ill-considered) that I've changed things (oops... um... having the police shoot you with sub-machine guns and kill you probably wouldn't have happened... I dunno what I was thinking), but this is *rare* and hasn't happened in a *long* time.

In general, I think changing die rolls probably damages the game more than allowing bad results to stand.

And, over the long term, if rolls are meaningful, I think that benefits the game, even if there's a few instances of bad games or TPKs along the way.

Cheers,
-E.