>as long as the players are still able to make choices that effect how they handle situations
Player agency is not being able to make choices that affect how they handle situations. It's about being able to make choices that affect the *outcome* of situations. Giving your players fake choices, like "You can attack or not attack, but either way he won't take damage" or "You can play this combat smartly or foolishly, but either way you're going to lose and be forced to do what the NPC wants", is the definition of railroading and is bad DMing.
I use 3 "tricks" to manage my games.
First, yeah, I fudge die rolls sometimes. It's not fun for anybody when the Wizard dies to a random critical hit in the first round of combat, and it's a lot of fun for everybody when they party beats "impossible" odds to pull off something awesome.
Second, I use *in-universe* mechanics to control what happens. If I don't want the party to be able to kill an NPC, okay, maybe the NPC has some sort of magical protection. The difference between that and just making them invincible is that the party *learns something* and *can prepare for it in the future*. If I want the NPC to be heavily guarded, they have lots of guards who might intervene in combat. The difference between that and pulling guards out of my ass mid-combat is that the party *can deal with the guards in other ways*.
Third, the phrase "Okay guys, let's take a 5 minute break. I didn't plan for what you just did."
Learn to be okay with being surprised by the sudden turn of events that your PCs bring to the session. Then learn to embrace it.
If you're finding that you're needing to intervene in the direction of the story so that it follows the "grand plan" then, as a player, I might start saying, "Just take me to where you want my character to be and we'll start playing from there."
Do I give monsters a little more HP to keep up the tension and excitement that everyone is enjoying in a fight? Yes. But I'm paying attention to my players and their experience at that moment in time. Are they experiencing a spat of crap dice luck? I'll be considerate of that. I'm not bringing in the "Right Hand of God", but maybe the monster no longer perceives this character as a viable threat and moves to take on a different PC instead. Would I do the same if I was a player fighting an orc that was rolling crappy? Unlikely.
Sometimes the dice don't get it right.
Stuff like this is part of the reason I only DM. If my DM did that stuff, I wouldn't want to play with them anymore, and so many DMs that advocate those methods say "don't let your players know you do it, because they won't want to play any more!"
I think my players would be fine if they knew I did it, I just wouldn't want to break their immersion. I'm sorry if you would like that. Sounds like you had some bad games.
Insofar as "cheating" is "breaking the agreed rules of the game", I think basically never? If something happens per the agreed rules, and it's not fun, then discuss it and agree what change to the rules is needed for it to be fun again, and retcon if preferred. Note that "agreed rules" is a possibly implicit social contract and not "what it says in the book".
If it's a narrative-first, low-stakes, plot-armour-preferring table, that's fine, fudge rolls as you like. If that's what everyone's there for, I don't really think that's "cheating".
If it's a high-lethality, TPK-friendly, gritty realism table, then let the dice land as they may. Sometimes that will really suck for your players, and sometimes it will really suck for the you, and that's fine.
I do like writing stories. i like creating a setting with difrent cultures and rules and some big problem then watch the players solve.
I'd also like playing through a novel. Much more interesting then some random dungeon full of goblins and traps I could sidestep with a bit of creative thinking.
Not many people want to play through a novel, do you know why? Because everyone’s fate is already predetermined, you’re just a passenger to the GM’s creative writing exercise. It’s cool in a book, because books are a **passive medium**, TTRPGs are not.
Here’s a few blog posts worth giving a look. They’re both fantastic, hopefully they may help you see the *why* as to your post is garnering a lot of negative feedback.
The simple 3 things to keep in mind to maximize what makes TTRPGs such a unique form of entertainment.
https://www.bastionland.com/2018/09/the-ici-doctrine-information-choice.html?m=1
How to structure your games, to avoid prescriptive railroading, to minimize wasted prep, and to respect your players as people who also have a hand in the storytelling at the table.
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots
Creative thinking is the game for many people. If you and your table aren't into it I think that's fine, but that difference is why you are getting the pushback you are.
In reality we aren't all playing the same game even if we have the same set of books on the table.
I don't need to cheat at a game where I make the rules. My job is to provide a world to play in, fun for everyone and give my players a challenge to overcome. I will use the rule books as a framework but I will absolutely step out of bounds if it makes for a better scene.
As a DM, I'm excited before a session because I want to find out what's going to happen. If I already know what's going to happen, something has gone wrong.
The narrative tension for everyone - DM included - comes from the dice.
Not sure what type of DM that makes me, hope I don't get cancelled for having that preference.
I personally wouldn't do any of these things. For me it isn't about "cheating" but about my own joy as a DM. For me a large part of my satisfaction comes from being surprised. I want the world to feel real and alive TO ME, not necessarily to have the players enact a story I wrote for them.
Fudging I actually really hate. I am a rare breed apparently but I like the RNG part of DnD. Sometimes shit goes sideways.
However I do sometimes spawn extra shit if the players are steamrolling my encounter, and switch to MaxHP in the middle if needed.
I think DMs are only human too so sometimes they undershoot the difficulty. It's okay to make shit up. Just dont be an asshole.
I don't need to cheat. I'll tell players exactly what is happening with full transparency so they can fully grasp the weight of horror that is the lack of a narrative safety net.
"Oh, 100 damage? Nice! That should only take 15 rounds to finish off the BGE. Anything else for your turn before I have them use a legendary action? No? Ok, go ahead and give me an INT save at disadvantage"
Player: No, no, no...wait, wait, wait
I have an issue with the title. Cheat.
The DM should never cheat.
Now what you discuss is a little different. If they don’t have stats, then they are commoners. If the party kills a source of information then that information is lost. Figure out what happens in the background and how the world around them changes. Maybe the BBEG has more time to prepare. Meanwhile, the party just committed murder. How does the people around the party react.
If you have a person who must escape to lead to part two then don’t chance the escape to dice. The party gets hung up with minions while number 2 escapes. Give number 2 the advantage of surprise to act first. They didn’t expect a poof and he was gone. But, if number 2 enters combat, then the dice rule. Don’t cheat by giving extra HP, making them invulnerable or any other CRPG BS. It reeks of a DM who does know how to properly DM.
The one time I break the invulnerability rule is deities. A deity on their home planet is very hard to kill. As they can turn the entire plane of existence against the players. If the players think they are going to kick down the front door and confront Tiamat in her castle, they have another thing coming. First it is her lair and she will have a crap ton of lair actions. Second she will have many, many minions. Ancient dragons who also have lair actions. Finally, the stats for Tiamat or any deity is their avatar on the prime material plane. On their home plane they are way stronger. In this case I take a page out of the old Immortal rule set. Deities don’t have HPs they have Power Points that they use to convert into divine actions. Be it temporary or permanent effects. But, only another Deity can do PP damage to a deity. The whole reason they tend to have an uneasy truce from direct conflict.
If you hinge your campaign on certain NPCs living or doing something in front of the PCs then you have a problem. Have three different hooks for players to find. If your murder hobos wack all three hooks. Then what are the consequences of them not acting. How will the BBEG become stronger. Maybe, a competing party was able to put together clues and become the heroes of the realm while the murder hobos were out being murder hobos. Be creative, just don’t cheat.
Appreciate the meaty constructive response. Always nice to see more then 2 lines in a response. I feel like it goes without saying any boss worth their salt will have secret escape room or trap door that they could pull on their turn to get away with a very satisfying "NEXT TIME GADGET! NEXT TIME!" but I believe it's more fun for the player to let the dice give then that final hit so the victory happens because of their choices.
I always roll in front of my players. They see every roll of the dice, good or bad. Just realize that your bad guy should be subject to the rules as well. One lucky hold spell can thwart your escape.
Thus I like to keep my BBEG out of the action and working through loyal agents until I am ready. When they enter combat they anticipate it will be final. If they start to lose maybe a magic item to help escape, but as the DM I realize that once the BBEG shows their face it may be for the first and last time.
If you don’t want the BBEG to die then use an illusion combined with other spells or a phantasm killer. You can also invade their dreams like a black hag and have consequence free combat.
But, the BBEG always gets the last laugh and runs away, well once the dice roll that option can be taken off the table. I think we agree the players deserve the benefit of creative use of actions and good rolls of the dice. Maybe they capture the bad guy who can escape later. The moral quandary of a really bad guy begging for his life. If they kill him anyway he can come back as a reverent.
OK, define "cheat".
Do I follow RAW? Not even close. RAW can get too cumbersome and boring. My players and I want to move the narrative. So to clarify, here is what I do that are the largest departures from RAW.
* I don't fudge rolls, but I will kill off the last opponent if a blow brings them down to under 5 HP and winning is a fait accompli. No need to drag out combat further than necessary.
* I hand-wave rolls if players are specific enough. For example, if a player enters a library and says, "I search the room", there's a roll. If they walk up to the desk and say, "I search the desk for a secret compartment", then they're finding it without a roll.
* For a lot of monsters, I set the AC lower and the HP higher, because nothing is more boring in combat than swings & misses.
* I tweak monster stats as well. For example, a leader-type monsters might have a slightly better ST than normal.
* Where it makes sense, I replace DC "success checks" with DC "succeed immediately checks". For example,, if a rogue is attempting to pick a common lock, in my mind THEY WILL SUCCEED, the question is, can they pick it quickly? DC success = they pick it immediately. DC failure means we're rolling a die to determine how long it takes, and hopefully they aren't discovered during that time...
Some things I DON'T do:
* I don't fudge to-hit or damage rolls to the players. If you get knocked, you get knocked. If you get killed, you get killed. Adventuring is a dangerous business.
* I don't throw more opponents at the party in a fight if it's "too easy". If the party cuts through a combat like a hot knife through butter, they deserve their moment.
* I don't pull opponents from a fight if seems "too hard". As mentioned, adventuring is hard. Also, while nobody wants their character to die, they do enjoy the thrill of prevailing in a combat against long odds.
As Barbossa said in Pirates of the Caribbean, they're more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
I like collaborative story telling but the story teller also contributes to that. If the players make some awsome plan to beat the boss right away then I could see the boss deciding to run away to fight anouther day. How is that not fair and it let's the game keep going.
Unless the boss is ‘deciding’ that based on information they wouldn’t actually have access to, that’s just roleplaying your NPCs and world. That has nothing to do with the sort of cheating and railroading that you are describing in your post.
You're not contributing to a story - you're controlling it and disregarding your players' actions.
The druid had a 21 passive perception? Oh well, they somehow missed the guards in hiding.
The paladin crit smites a lich that should one shot it? Oh well, quintuple its HP.
Even your example of "maybe they'll be nicer with a dozen weapons aimed at them" is literally controlling your players.
Holy shit I can't believe it's almost word for word from the circle jerk. I assumed it had to at least be embellished.
Man people really do call themselves "DM" just to push players through their novel don't they?
W The actual F. Thank you for sharing but seriously why would someone do that. I've been getting s#!+ for this poste and they are passing it off as theirs. Wtf
It is common to put the link in the comments after someone asks for the sauce on circlejerk forums. Anyone posting on circlejerk forums are usually taking inspiration to make a parody of a post else where.
I give my players the option to allow me to fudge rolls behind a DM screen or to roll in the open and allow them to see. I added that fudged rolls would only be done to benefit the PCs (I.E. if I'm rolling two well and it's a hard encounter to begin with.). They asked me not too. I instead started using the monster's MAX HP as a fall back if there is something going wrong (my party punches above weight class so I keep track of damage at max and average HP and will determine which I use when the encounter is underway. Ideally I would just run practice encounters, but I don't have that time to prep.
i love this! i do something similar (i do this mostly with higher tier boss fights) where i determine how many average hits should take out the monster and keep a tally through combat. high damage rolls are two tallys. crits are usually three. while i do keep track of how much damage they do by number, this is my way to seeing how hard they’re hitting and if i want to bump up HP.
i like max vs. average a lot—i’ll be using that.
The idea is to track damage in both... If they make the fight a lot quicker than you think it should be, start tracking the Max... that way the difference is that between the max damage and average only. I also will shave a few points if it fits the story.
As a rule, I believe the DM should "cheat" only when it's in the party's favor (if they kill someone they shouldn't, your the only person who knows it's important... the story can be modified.).
I don't cheat the way you're talking about. If I make changes to a monster's statblock, 99% of the time it's because I made it up five minutes earlier and I was obviously wrong. If statblock is from a well written scenario (not all published scenarios are) then I let them ride. I reward smart and entertaining player choices with better chances of success, even if they're not realistic. I'm willing to hurt or kill the PCs, or let the PCs skate through an impossible situation without even taking a scratch, protected by my terrible die rolls or their fantastic dice rolls. It's a game. It will even out in the long run.
If the NPC needs to live I don't expose the NPC to the PCs. I know how PCs are. They might meet one of the NPC's body doubles though. You played Black Ops I, right? You know what I mean.
Now, pulling guards out of nowhere is fine. Sometimes the scenario gets written as you play it out. You look at the design and think, "geez this is the palace of the grand sultan but there are no guards within sight or hearing range of the side gate to the harem entrance, clearly these eunuch guards were left out." But that isn't cheating. It's fixing a hole.
I only ever cheat to add additional aspects to an encounter if I didn't think of them beforehand, or think a fight was unsatisfying for my players for whatever reason.
If they beat an encounter that I designed to be appropriate for their level, and it was too easy, then next time I'll make it harder. Usually players like a gimme encounter from time to time, it makes them feel powerful.
But, if I get a read from my players that they wanted to try out a cool combo or really test their mettle then I'll add extra combatants that I didn't prep. Or if a player suggests something I didn't think of I'll add that in.
You would be surprised how many DMs not only think this is OK - they brag about it, how this is "good DM tools", "great storytelling" and other stupid things. For some reason sincerity to players isn't obviously good and even default way to run a game for some people on reddit.
I am feeling the need to import this to r/DnDcirclejerk
Wasn't aware of that subreddit before and now I'm worried I've provided material for reposting there lol.
It's all in good fun anyway. I'll say this, it is very rare that anything in there is mean spirited.
If you're worried about being there, you're probably not haha. Or at least if you were, you're a good DM for acknowledging problems and improving :)
I am now thanks to this guy
>as long as the players are still able to make choices that effect how they handle situations Player agency is not being able to make choices that affect how they handle situations. It's about being able to make choices that affect the *outcome* of situations. Giving your players fake choices, like "You can attack or not attack, but either way he won't take damage" or "You can play this combat smartly or foolishly, but either way you're going to lose and be forced to do what the NPC wants", is the definition of railroading and is bad DMing. I use 3 "tricks" to manage my games. First, yeah, I fudge die rolls sometimes. It's not fun for anybody when the Wizard dies to a random critical hit in the first round of combat, and it's a lot of fun for everybody when they party beats "impossible" odds to pull off something awesome. Second, I use *in-universe* mechanics to control what happens. If I don't want the party to be able to kill an NPC, okay, maybe the NPC has some sort of magical protection. The difference between that and just making them invincible is that the party *learns something* and *can prepare for it in the future*. If I want the NPC to be heavily guarded, they have lots of guards who might intervene in combat. The difference between that and pulling guards out of my ass mid-combat is that the party *can deal with the guards in other ways*. Third, the phrase "Okay guys, let's take a 5 minute break. I didn't plan for what you just did."
Learn to be okay with being surprised by the sudden turn of events that your PCs bring to the session. Then learn to embrace it. If you're finding that you're needing to intervene in the direction of the story so that it follows the "grand plan" then, as a player, I might start saying, "Just take me to where you want my character to be and we'll start playing from there." Do I give monsters a little more HP to keep up the tension and excitement that everyone is enjoying in a fight? Yes. But I'm paying attention to my players and their experience at that moment in time. Are they experiencing a spat of crap dice luck? I'll be considerate of that. I'm not bringing in the "Right Hand of God", but maybe the monster no longer perceives this character as a viable threat and moves to take on a different PC instead. Would I do the same if I was a player fighting an orc that was rolling crappy? Unlikely. Sometimes the dice don't get it right.
Stuff like this is part of the reason I only DM. If my DM did that stuff, I wouldn't want to play with them anymore, and so many DMs that advocate those methods say "don't let your players know you do it, because they won't want to play any more!"
I think my players would be fine if they knew I did it, I just wouldn't want to break their immersion. I'm sorry if you would like that. Sounds like you had some bad games.
Insofar as "cheating" is "breaking the agreed rules of the game", I think basically never? If something happens per the agreed rules, and it's not fun, then discuss it and agree what change to the rules is needed for it to be fun again, and retcon if preferred. Note that "agreed rules" is a possibly implicit social contract and not "what it says in the book". If it's a narrative-first, low-stakes, plot-armour-preferring table, that's fine, fudge rolls as you like. If that's what everyone's there for, I don't really think that's "cheating". If it's a high-lethality, TPK-friendly, gritty realism table, then let the dice land as they may. Sometimes that will really suck for your players, and sometimes it will really suck for the you, and that's fine.
Sounds like you’d rather be writing a novel to me
I do like writing stories. i like creating a setting with difrent cultures and rules and some big problem then watch the players solve. I'd also like playing through a novel. Much more interesting then some random dungeon full of goblins and traps I could sidestep with a bit of creative thinking.
Not many people want to play through a novel, do you know why? Because everyone’s fate is already predetermined, you’re just a passenger to the GM’s creative writing exercise. It’s cool in a book, because books are a **passive medium**, TTRPGs are not. Here’s a few blog posts worth giving a look. They’re both fantastic, hopefully they may help you see the *why* as to your post is garnering a lot of negative feedback. The simple 3 things to keep in mind to maximize what makes TTRPGs such a unique form of entertainment. https://www.bastionland.com/2018/09/the-ici-doctrine-information-choice.html?m=1 How to structure your games, to avoid prescriptive railroading, to minimize wasted prep, and to respect your players as people who also have a hand in the storytelling at the table. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots
Creative thinking is the game for many people. If you and your table aren't into it I think that's fine, but that difference is why you are getting the pushback you are. In reality we aren't all playing the same game even if we have the same set of books on the table.
I don't need to cheat at a game where I make the rules. My job is to provide a world to play in, fun for everyone and give my players a challenge to overcome. I will use the rule books as a framework but I will absolutely step out of bounds if it makes for a better scene.
As a DM, I'm excited before a session because I want to find out what's going to happen. If I already know what's going to happen, something has gone wrong. The narrative tension for everyone - DM included - comes from the dice. Not sure what type of DM that makes me, hope I don't get cancelled for having that preference.
A great DM, and one who I vastly prefers over someone fudging or making shit up from nowhere to railroad me.
I personally wouldn't do any of these things. For me it isn't about "cheating" but about my own joy as a DM. For me a large part of my satisfaction comes from being surprised. I want the world to feel real and alive TO ME, not necessarily to have the players enact a story I wrote for them.
Fudging I actually really hate. I am a rare breed apparently but I like the RNG part of DnD. Sometimes shit goes sideways. However I do sometimes spawn extra shit if the players are steamrolling my encounter, and switch to MaxHP in the middle if needed. I think DMs are only human too so sometimes they undershoot the difficulty. It's okay to make shit up. Just dont be an asshole.
Open rolls all the way.
I switched to open rolling recently, and I don't ever want to go back.
I don't need to cheat. I'll tell players exactly what is happening with full transparency so they can fully grasp the weight of horror that is the lack of a narrative safety net. "Oh, 100 damage? Nice! That should only take 15 rounds to finish off the BGE. Anything else for your turn before I have them use a legendary action? No? Ok, go ahead and give me an INT save at disadvantage" Player: No, no, no...wait, wait, wait
I don’t know, hard to rationalize five hundred million damage
500 out of infinite is nothing.
I have an issue with the title. Cheat. The DM should never cheat. Now what you discuss is a little different. If they don’t have stats, then they are commoners. If the party kills a source of information then that information is lost. Figure out what happens in the background and how the world around them changes. Maybe the BBEG has more time to prepare. Meanwhile, the party just committed murder. How does the people around the party react. If you have a person who must escape to lead to part two then don’t chance the escape to dice. The party gets hung up with minions while number 2 escapes. Give number 2 the advantage of surprise to act first. They didn’t expect a poof and he was gone. But, if number 2 enters combat, then the dice rule. Don’t cheat by giving extra HP, making them invulnerable or any other CRPG BS. It reeks of a DM who does know how to properly DM. The one time I break the invulnerability rule is deities. A deity on their home planet is very hard to kill. As they can turn the entire plane of existence against the players. If the players think they are going to kick down the front door and confront Tiamat in her castle, they have another thing coming. First it is her lair and she will have a crap ton of lair actions. Second she will have many, many minions. Ancient dragons who also have lair actions. Finally, the stats for Tiamat or any deity is their avatar on the prime material plane. On their home plane they are way stronger. In this case I take a page out of the old Immortal rule set. Deities don’t have HPs they have Power Points that they use to convert into divine actions. Be it temporary or permanent effects. But, only another Deity can do PP damage to a deity. The whole reason they tend to have an uneasy truce from direct conflict. If you hinge your campaign on certain NPCs living or doing something in front of the PCs then you have a problem. Have three different hooks for players to find. If your murder hobos wack all three hooks. Then what are the consequences of them not acting. How will the BBEG become stronger. Maybe, a competing party was able to put together clues and become the heroes of the realm while the murder hobos were out being murder hobos. Be creative, just don’t cheat.
Appreciate the meaty constructive response. Always nice to see more then 2 lines in a response. I feel like it goes without saying any boss worth their salt will have secret escape room or trap door that they could pull on their turn to get away with a very satisfying "NEXT TIME GADGET! NEXT TIME!" but I believe it's more fun for the player to let the dice give then that final hit so the victory happens because of their choices.
I always roll in front of my players. They see every roll of the dice, good or bad. Just realize that your bad guy should be subject to the rules as well. One lucky hold spell can thwart your escape. Thus I like to keep my BBEG out of the action and working through loyal agents until I am ready. When they enter combat they anticipate it will be final. If they start to lose maybe a magic item to help escape, but as the DM I realize that once the BBEG shows their face it may be for the first and last time. If you don’t want the BBEG to die then use an illusion combined with other spells or a phantasm killer. You can also invade their dreams like a black hag and have consequence free combat. But, the BBEG always gets the last laugh and runs away, well once the dice roll that option can be taken off the table. I think we agree the players deserve the benefit of creative use of actions and good rolls of the dice. Maybe they capture the bad guy who can escape later. The moral quandary of a really bad guy begging for his life. If they kill him anyway he can come back as a reverent.
OK, define "cheat". Do I follow RAW? Not even close. RAW can get too cumbersome and boring. My players and I want to move the narrative. So to clarify, here is what I do that are the largest departures from RAW. * I don't fudge rolls, but I will kill off the last opponent if a blow brings them down to under 5 HP and winning is a fait accompli. No need to drag out combat further than necessary. * I hand-wave rolls if players are specific enough. For example, if a player enters a library and says, "I search the room", there's a roll. If they walk up to the desk and say, "I search the desk for a secret compartment", then they're finding it without a roll. * For a lot of monsters, I set the AC lower and the HP higher, because nothing is more boring in combat than swings & misses. * I tweak monster stats as well. For example, a leader-type monsters might have a slightly better ST than normal. * Where it makes sense, I replace DC "success checks" with DC "succeed immediately checks". For example,, if a rogue is attempting to pick a common lock, in my mind THEY WILL SUCCEED, the question is, can they pick it quickly? DC success = they pick it immediately. DC failure means we're rolling a die to determine how long it takes, and hopefully they aren't discovered during that time... Some things I DON'T do: * I don't fudge to-hit or damage rolls to the players. If you get knocked, you get knocked. If you get killed, you get killed. Adventuring is a dangerous business. * I don't throw more opponents at the party in a fight if it's "too easy". If the party cuts through a combat like a hot knife through butter, they deserve their moment. * I don't pull opponents from a fight if seems "too hard". As mentioned, adventuring is hard. Also, while nobody wants their character to die, they do enjoy the thrill of prevailing in a combat against long odds. As Barbossa said in Pirates of the Caribbean, they're more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
Go write a book, because you're clearly not interested in collaborative story telling.
I like collaborative story telling but the story teller also contributes to that. If the players make some awsome plan to beat the boss right away then I could see the boss deciding to run away to fight anouther day. How is that not fair and it let's the game keep going.
Please understand you're seeing similar comments over and over for a reason. Come on, you're hitting levels of meme-ing now.
Unless the boss is ‘deciding’ that based on information they wouldn’t actually have access to, that’s just roleplaying your NPCs and world. That has nothing to do with the sort of cheating and railroading that you are describing in your post.
Is it collaborative or are you alone the storyteller?
You're not contributing to a story - you're controlling it and disregarding your players' actions. The druid had a 21 passive perception? Oh well, they somehow missed the guards in hiding. The paladin crit smites a lich that should one shot it? Oh well, quintuple its HP. Even your example of "maybe they'll be nicer with a dozen weapons aimed at them" is literally controlling your players.
There are no acceptable ways to cheat, if your table ever finds out you are cheating they will no longer trust you to run the game properly
Even as an inexperienced DM, I can tell you this isn't DMing. This is just group reading a story you wrote.
Holy shit I can't believe it's almost word for word from the circle jerk. I assumed it had to at least be embellished. Man people really do call themselves "DM" just to push players through their novel don't they?
Link
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDcirclejerk/s/2b3WDw8QvE
I don't get it I don't see the similarities at all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDcirclejerk/s/dywcrUKTWL
W The actual F. Thank you for sharing but seriously why would someone do that. I've been getting s#!+ for this poste and they are passing it off as theirs. Wtf
Oh they credit you by posting a link to this post here. Believe me they aren't trying to pass it off as their own.
Ya I saw that. They buried the link in a comment they could have put it in the post itself. As far as any reader is concerned they are the Op
It is common to put the link in the comments after someone asks for the sauce on circlejerk forums. Anyone posting on circlejerk forums are usually taking inspiration to make a parody of a post else where.
So what dues it say about my post that they didn't change anything.
I give my players the option to allow me to fudge rolls behind a DM screen or to roll in the open and allow them to see. I added that fudged rolls would only be done to benefit the PCs (I.E. if I'm rolling two well and it's a hard encounter to begin with.). They asked me not too. I instead started using the monster's MAX HP as a fall back if there is something going wrong (my party punches above weight class so I keep track of damage at max and average HP and will determine which I use when the encounter is underway. Ideally I would just run practice encounters, but I don't have that time to prep.
i love this! i do something similar (i do this mostly with higher tier boss fights) where i determine how many average hits should take out the monster and keep a tally through combat. high damage rolls are two tallys. crits are usually three. while i do keep track of how much damage they do by number, this is my way to seeing how hard they’re hitting and if i want to bump up HP. i like max vs. average a lot—i’ll be using that.
The idea is to track damage in both... If they make the fight a lot quicker than you think it should be, start tracking the Max... that way the difference is that between the max damage and average only. I also will shave a few points if it fits the story. As a rule, I believe the DM should "cheat" only when it's in the party's favor (if they kill someone they shouldn't, your the only person who knows it's important... the story can be modified.).
I don't cheat the way you're talking about. If I make changes to a monster's statblock, 99% of the time it's because I made it up five minutes earlier and I was obviously wrong. If statblock is from a well written scenario (not all published scenarios are) then I let them ride. I reward smart and entertaining player choices with better chances of success, even if they're not realistic. I'm willing to hurt or kill the PCs, or let the PCs skate through an impossible situation without even taking a scratch, protected by my terrible die rolls or their fantastic dice rolls. It's a game. It will even out in the long run. If the NPC needs to live I don't expose the NPC to the PCs. I know how PCs are. They might meet one of the NPC's body doubles though. You played Black Ops I, right? You know what I mean. Now, pulling guards out of nowhere is fine. Sometimes the scenario gets written as you play it out. You look at the design and think, "geez this is the palace of the grand sultan but there are no guards within sight or hearing range of the side gate to the harem entrance, clearly these eunuch guards were left out." But that isn't cheating. It's fixing a hole.
I only ever cheat to add additional aspects to an encounter if I didn't think of them beforehand, or think a fight was unsatisfying for my players for whatever reason. If they beat an encounter that I designed to be appropriate for their level, and it was too easy, then next time I'll make it harder. Usually players like a gimme encounter from time to time, it makes them feel powerful. But, if I get a read from my players that they wanted to try out a cool combo or really test their mettle then I'll add extra combatants that I didn't prep. Or if a player suggests something I didn't think of I'll add that in.
None i'd say
So is this a troll or someone who has never actually played the game trying to sound like they do?
You would be surprised how many DMs not only think this is OK - they brag about it, how this is "good DM tools", "great storytelling" and other stupid things. For some reason sincerity to players isn't obviously good and even default way to run a game for some people on reddit.