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Certainly you can't believe that deception is always evil. Without going into any moral arguments for how deception could be used for good, I'll just stick to the idea of gaming. Many games require you to deceive, so much so, that in some of these games that is kind of the whole point of the game. E.g. Werewolf, Mafia, Among Us, TTT. I'm not even trying to defend fudging the dice, I started rolling in front of my players several years ago. Mostly because some felt I was lying about monsters critting, and I was tired of hearing them whine about the imbalance, of me getting to see their rolls and not the other way around.

@Runehammer1 - Please do a video on why fantasy games generally have a greater longevity than cyberpunk/sci-fi games and, again, generally, why fantasy games are more fun. I love cyberpunk and sci-fi, with fantasy always being my last choice, but people/players just love fantasy games more.

Have you ever read "Steal Like an Artist" by Austin Kleon? It's a quick read about how we can't help but to mash-up the creative influence of our lives. Yes, we steal artistic ideas, but we use them as fuel for our own creativity. Keep up the good work. 11:51

So basically, easy is a +3 bonus to your roll, hard is a -3 penalty

EPIC!!! 🔥🔥🔥

The ethical pit at the bottom of Fudging is player buy-in (consent). Either they are spending hours of their life every week engaged in a game that they have agreed to the terms of, or they are being fooled into participating in something other than what they wished, and are being tricked into spending hours of their precious limited leisure time on a farce. People do not understand how many player decisions back through chains and chains of decision making causality can be made worthless by fudging a single roll when the culmination of all of those decisions and risk management should have resulted in one outcome, but a referee's preference makes it all moot. Either success and failure, character survival or death, are decided by fair play, player decision and risk management, or they are decided at the referee's whim. Which are your players playing, and which have they agreed to play?

Not fudging rolls is the fairest way to play and it bears repeating.

I have a strong feeling in the opposite direction of this sentiment. I get why you might not want to fudge dice, but I take issue with the reasoning behind it here: You don’t want to lie, and you don’t think anyone should, but at the end of the day, are we not already all lying at the table? There is no dragon. You are not a barbarian. There is no forest. We are sitting at a table, visibly getting drunk with our friends. The entire premise of our hobby is built on top of a lie. Therefor, I say the following: a shared lie is not necessarily a lie. It is a suspension of the real in order to experience the truth. Similarly fudging dice is a suspension of reality to experience the truth of what actually happens in the scene.

I don't even roll. Players can just roll damage dealt to them, it's more fun that way.

Thanks to covid I started playing online, now I am playing more often and I am playing a pc centered game (Blades in the Dark) were I rarely roll and if I role in the open. I will never fudge again. It's not the solution. If you feel that you have to fudge at a game to make it more fun or to fix it: you are playing a broken game.

Gatekeeping has become a bad word. In a practical application it protects the hobby. Table Top has always been open minded, presuming it isn't and then trying to blame grognards is the true crime of the hobby. Gatekeeping could have saved star wars, gate keeping could have helped the justice system from being so polluted. It's actually necessary to protect what you love, otherwise people who dont love it will destroy it.

I'm a very new DM - the first game i ran, i fudged the dice as i was scared one the characters would die. I felt so dirty and guilty - after that i always roll in the open and it feels much better and it's more exciting for the players too.

This is a very interesting video. Lots of pointy ideas are put together in a way that is approachable. I have some thoughts. You start by bringing up how relativism in courts was based on the perp's environment and upbringing. You mention how people are willing to dismiss or hold information in less regard based on the physical characteristics of the people they come from. You mention not wanting to just be another penny next to the worst penny, which is very relatable. You bring up how magnanimity is hard to argue with and feels right. The thing that comes to my head is how people feel right in looking down on others based on their upbringing and experiences, and how people can feel good and encourage others to do the same when they see it happen. Unless someone lazily adopts someone else's views rather than having their own views, how do we argue as a proof whether someone should view something as positive or negative if we already allow looking down on certain others based on lack of backlash from our environment?

Off topic and yet topical, I received my run Hammer Dice and put them through the paces at a recent stormbringer RPG session. They are masterful! Easy read at my Advanced age, they have a great heft and a wonderful weight to them so they stop rolling quickly and with a degree of assertion. Yeah I think this will be the last set of dice I buy

I have to disagree with your core premise here. Relativism isn't an attack on Truth, it is an attempt to grapple with the fact that the world is more complex than any single one perspective can capture. Instead of simply laying out truisms about what works and what doesn't, shifting our perspective allows us to figure out what works best in different situations, and why. We can go from cooks who simply repeat a recipe, to chiefs that understand how the recipe works, and when to tweak it for optimal results. This doesn't mean that Everything that Anyone says is just as true as everything else. Some things are broadly true, some things are narrowly true, and some things aren't true, but might look it from a wrong perspective. This is why relativism is so important, because True things, Real Capital T True things, are true regardless of your perspective. If you are finding that your truths don't hold up under other perspectives, then they are either; not sufficiently complex, not sufficiently specific, or wrong.

"We are men of action, lies do not become us." - The Dread Pirate Wesley. Jokes aside, lying about the dice rolls shows a GM doesn't trust the Players, their own abilities, and even the game. Just like how a Player lying shows they don't trust the GM, their own abilities, the other Players, and the game. It's terrifying, but you've got to trust people. Without this trust you can't really experience something cooperative like D&D.

Okay Hankerin, I know you're a hardcore philosophy guy. I have some thoughts. Relativism contains its own undoing as an ethical standpoint, both logically and practically. First, the idea can be stated that there are no universally true propositions about morality. That includes itself, which leads to the conclusion that universally true propositions about morality must exist, even if we don't know what they are. Second, suppose we take the cultural relativism position (which is generally the main thrust behind relativism). Suppose we encounter a group that holds that there are universally true moral propositions. Can another culture day they are wrong? If not, then they have once again contradicted the concept behind relativism. What do you think?

I love your thought process, thanks for sharing. First off, all the ttrpgs Hankerin is refering to are games in which the fundamental feature (imnsho) is the rolling of dice to generate randomness in what would otherwise be just fantasy storytelling. So in reference to specifically those games i completely agree, the rolling of dice and acceptance of what numbers fall is something that should not be messed with. There is nothing wrong with gathering around a table and making up a story with friends without rolling a single die. You could just as easily play a game where every single moment is rolled and picked from tables and you follow along. Both sound less enjoyable in my mind and in practice they lack the sort of supercharged creativity that results from obstacles, limitations and constraints (a whole other topic that could take up an hour). Take every dice roll with total honesty but understand that that isnt the whole story. A 1 on a jump check isnt prescribed death, it could create a whole other adventure to rescue a friend from the pit of sadistic emerald fairies that wouldnt otherwise be undiscovered. Or the fall could in fact save them from being captured in the overwhelming battle above. Likewise a 20 charisma check could win you diplomatic immunity but at the same time the jealous baroness falls in love and in the future becomes a terrible nuisance. In short, the dice rolls exist to force YOUR creativity to come forward and provide thrills beyond the little boxes of what our minds pre-conceive. That's what the game is to me and my feeling on the subject.

Never make a player roll unless you are prepared to live with either result. Set the stakes in advance instead

_[S]cientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative, that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders according to the values it extracts from them_ --Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _What is Philosophy?_ (1994), pg. 130. So, for example, "cultural relativism" is one of the core tenets of Boasian four-field anthropology. This has nothing at all to do with making value judgements, including truth values, about other cultures; it merely means that to understand another culture you must understand it within its own context. In other words, actually follow the historical trajectory of learned behaviors and thought patterns that resulted in the current configuration of a particular culture. You started off acknowledging that relativism was specific to relationships in a particular contexts, so I'm not sure how you managed to backslide into thinking that had anything to do with uncertainty in truth values. As for if one should fudge dice rolls, or under what circumstances one should or should not do it, that has always been subjective and at the sole determination of the game master (presumably with consideration of the particular assembled group of players). The most explicit statement from an early role-playing game context comes from Gary Gygax, on page 110 of the AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide: _You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player character with your actions. 'ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!' (caps in the original)_ Of course, the inherent danger in "fudging" die rolls is that when players are aware of it, then it sends the message that consequences can be avoided by fiat. If that message is sent repeatedly, then it will erode suspension of disbelief to such an extent that the "meaningfulness" of player and/or character decisions comes to seem irrelevant to playing the game.

Obviously fudging dice is a topic that folks will disagree about. "What is true" is a great question and I don't have an answer to it. Is dice truth "relative"? If we are taking a dice survey, I always roll dice in the open. Put my check mark in that box. As I see it, Players and GMs are both "playing a game". That means respecting the random roll of the game's dice. A good rule of game relativity seems to be "if a die roll outcome can ruin the game, don't roll". Don't leave the fun of taking a "risk" to a random result if that risk is potentially unacceptable. Just decide and move on. Dice rolling should involve excitement and fun and acceptable risks. Transparency and honesty promotes trust and makes reality. It's a game, but is it a real game? Cheers!

Manners weren't more intense. People slandered each other all the time. They just settled it with duels or wrestling. The Greeks were assholes that way; they believed in might-makes-right.

"The dice are what's real. The dice are what's true. The dice are what gives the game meaning." -Professor Dungeon Master

sorry about the audio on this one, gang.. not sure what the hell happened. GREMLINS!

The opportunity for application of this video could not have come at a better time.

I used to fudge when I first started DMing but I grew out of that fast 😆 “if they die, they die”

Good philosophy. I wasn't expecting so much out of the topic of dice-fudging 😂 I "grew up" on tables where I had no DM screen; and on VTTs, you typically can't fudge either. Even if I could, I wouldn't. The worst version of this, imo, is running monsters (especially bosses) without HP; and deciding combat is over when it seems dramatic. Like- I get wanting to mid-combat patch a monster (such as maxing its HD/HP rather than going with the average; because you overestimated its defenses) But making your friends do the math for the attack and damage; and pick their strategies; and be careful with their resources - while you just kinda godmode until you're bored? That suuuuuuuucks (imo)

No, back to realism is not an option. I would suggest moving forward until you reach philosophical anti-realism. I mean as flawed as feminist theory is, returning to the outdated patriarchal pastoral colonialist Aristotelian realism or Platonic idealism is just a horrible solution.

The audio is a little rough today

<3 Hankerin! Been watching for years, I really appreciate your encounter build videos! Keep up the good work!

I always roll in the open. I Never fudge dice. It's part of the game. If characters die Oh well. That's part of the game. There are other ways to prevent dice from killing the characters unfairly. If you fudge dice, you might as well not even roll.

Sounds a lit lie saying 'I follow the Natural Law' and trusting it to allow an emergent narrative to come forth. For me (and my admittedly limited understanding of Augustinian theological and philosophical thinking) this sounds a very sane thing to do. There are simply some things that are 'wrong'. What they might be is up for debate in some cases, but the fact that there is a 'wrong' state is not often debated. Man, I love this channel. RPGs. Lunatic (in a good way) creative whom you can relate to. Philosophical debate. All it needs now is strippers and blackjack!

Great topic! Always roll in front of the players!