How and When to Fudge Rolls

Your players are locked in combat with intermediate enemies. You're in the middle of a combat that will eventually lead to the final encounter of your session. Your players are rolling low numbers and the enemies are rolling well; it looks like the party may not survive the encounter. What do you do? Let the players die because they weren't proficient enough in combat to survive? You could, especially if you were running a hard combat simulation. But most groups are not well-served by dying like this. You could fudge a roll or two, but how do you decide when it's appropriate to do so? This guide will tell you everything you need to know about fudging rolls in and out of combat. 

Let's start with combat, since it's the realm that requires fudging most often. As described in the above hypothetical, your players might be outmatched. Perhaps that's the fault of the module you're running--it overwhelms the players. Or perhaps you've dropped in too powerful an enemy, and it's going to wipe the party. Perhaps--and this is usually a stretch--the players are too poorly-built or too non-strategic to defeat an enemy they should be able to beat. No matter which of these is true, the players stand to lose everything: the story, their characters, every detail that's led them to where they are. And while some DMs would rationalize that makes it right to let the party die, I disagree. The point of D&D and TRPGs like it is that the players can inhabit a fictional space and do with it as they please. The end of the story is what matters, not the players' fitness as combat gods. So we want to grant them some balance. 

The most obvious case in need of fudging a roll is when a character will die otherwise. A character has low hit points and is targeted by the BBEG; a successful attack would mean their death. You have a few options here. First, you could fudge the roll. The BBEG rolls a 2 or so and misses the character. Crisis averted, and now the whole party has another chance to attack the BBEG. You can use a tool like a low roll here to stretch out the combat and allow the party to catch up. But you can only use this tool so often. The players will notice if the BBEG misses again and again because they're supposed to be the biggest challenge. So you can only get away with a straight-up fudge in big moments. Fortunately, there are other ways to fudge the numbers. 

You can also make the enemies easier to hit. You may have established a higher armor class for your enemies early in combat, but now you want your players to be more likely to hit. You have options. You can simply lower their armor class on the grounds that their armor has become damaged in combat. If you do this, I recommend using a successful hit from a player to harm the armor of the enemy, lowering their armor class for the rest of combat. You could also have the enemy remove a piece of armor--perhaps their shield is getting in the way and they want to use their weapon two-handed, so now their armor class is a few points lower. Alternatively, maybe they remove a helmet that obstructs their field of vision, or they get rid of a heavy gauntlet to swing faster. Each of these examples allows the characters to get a leg up in combat without compromising the encounter. 

You can also manipulate the numbers that players can't see. Imagine that we're in an encounter with the BBEG and the players have only removed half of their hit points, but are on the edge of death. We can, as the DM, decide to simply cut short the remaining hit points of the BBEG. Our numbers say he has 45 hit points left, but who's to say they don't have only 3? The players won't know that you've abbreviated the encounter (unless they have compared the standard amount of hp for that type of monster, and even then, who's to say that enemy wasn't weaker or already damaged?). So you can keep the story going even when the enemy is overwhelming. 

Hit point manipulation goes both ways. Just as you can adjust the damage to enemies, you can do it for your players. Let's say an enemy does heavy damage to a character. You think it's enough to knock out or even kill the player's character. But your story isn't served by the players failing, so you want to fudge the roll. My favorite tool for this moment is to act very concerned and ask the player, "Uh, how many hit points do you have left?" Whatever they answer, adjust the damage so that they end up with only a few hit points remaining. This creates drama--now that character is badly hurt, meaning the strategy of the battle must change or else the character will face serious consequences. 

All of this is not to say that you want to protect your players' characters at all times. When they do something reckless, ill-advised, or just plain stupid, there should be consequences. If a character ripped off all their armor and charged the BBEG with nothing but a pointy rock, we would want them to suffer consequences rather than fudge a roll for them. Think of consequences in combat as being a balancing act. If your players are strategic and careful, they should be rewarded with survival, even by a narrow margin. If they are wild and unwise, they should be allowed to fall unconscious or suffer some lasting impact (a minor handicap like a -1 to hit or disadvantage on certain rolls). But you don't want things to feel too random. 

"Not too random?" I can hear you saying. "But it's a dice-based game! It's supposed to be random." And that's true. D&D was designed to have randomness as a key feature of the game experience. But when we use a TRPG as the mechanism for delivering a story, the rules change. Randomness makes things exciting, so we use a degree of randomness for spice, but a truly random game could have no overarching story. It would just be scenes with no rhyme or reason. So we curtail some of the randomness in favor of guided storytelling. It's a matter of spectrum as opposed to binary: most DMs and players would agree that a certain degree of fudging rolls can be appropriate or even necessary, but the question is how much you should do it. 

My rule is that if fudging a roll makes a story moment more interesting in a way that benefits the players, I allow myself the option of fudging that roll. That's pretty broad, obviously, but it serves me well. Big moments are obvious contenders for fudged rolls--that's where we shift the momentum of our story in the right direction. But small moments can be appropriate too. Consider the following scene: The players are investigating claims of ravenous animals living in an abandoned mine shaft outside of a small town. There's a clue I've planted as DM: the mixture of animal tracks outside the mine include a dire wolf's. The characters do survival checks to scout for information, and all of their rolls are just shy of the DC I've decided on beforehand. But I really want them to be aware of the dire wolf threat, and at least one player is enough of a tracker that he probably would have found them in a normal situation. So I pretend the DC is a little lower than I had previously decided, and I allow the party to notice the tracks before moving on. 

Obviously, this only works in certain situations. If the players all rolled below a 10, they certainly wouldn't find anything useful. The players all know they've rolled low, and there's nothing I can do to fudge the rolls. We more or less have to stand by the failure and keep going. There are, however, two ways we could push it further. We could treat the dire wolf tracks as obvious information and imply that there's some greater information being withheld for a higher roll. This lets us tweak the story in the direction we want and keep going despite the failure. Or, we could have the party advance a bit and then offer the same survival check, allowing them a new opportunity to succeed on the roll. Because this second attempt is in a different place, we can also lower the DC, arguing that the dire wolf tracks have become more obvious in this second location. So you can see that fudging rolls is not just about changing the number on the die; it's about shifting the goalposts so that your players stand a chance. 

You'll notice that this most recent example is not combat-related. In fact, for me, many of the rolls I have to decide whether to fudge or not are not combat rolls. This is in part because I run a low-combat campaign most of the time, but also because skill checks are a great place to fudge rolls. When you're doing a story-based campaign, oftentimes the players' ability to progress will be tied to specific rolls. Does the party notice the mercenaries approaching? Does their persuasion check convince the BBEG to take mercy on the countryside? Does their athletics check allow them to survive a leap across a chasm? These sorts of rolls are delicate and important, and you'll need a way to ensure the players succeed if you want them to advance through your story. 

A skill check can be easier to fudge than a combat roll. In combat, it's generally known that a roll below 12 or so is a miss and a roll above 17 or so is likely to hit, depending on the level of the enemies. But DCs are more variable. You can decide that a roll as low as a 7 or so is a success if the check represents a simple enough action. Should your players succeed in this way, describe their success as barely being enough. In addition to making the low roll seem more legitimate, you'll have the opportunity to create a dramatic moment by highlighting the narrowness of their success. 

I'll provide an example skill check from each of the six attributes so you can see how fudging a skill check works:

• Strength: Athletics - Your player is trying to run up a tree's trunk and pull themselves up into the branches; they roll a 10. You tell them that they manage to get off the ground and wrap one hand around a low branch. Their success is not what they'd hoped, but it's still a success enough to allow them to progress in the direction they had intended. 
• Dexterity: Stealth - Your player is trying to move through the shadows and sneak up on an enemy archer; they roll an 8. You tell them that they stay in the shadows but don't remain 100% silent--the enemy notices them only when it is too late, and the player character gets a sneak attack. This is not a pretty or elegant success, but it does allow the player to get the kind of tactical advantage they were hoping for. 
• Constitution: Saving Throw - Your player is on the ground, choking from having been forced to ingest poison; they roll a 4. Rather than have the poison shut down their system, you interpret the low roll as an inability to process the poison, and the player character vomits it up. Now they've taken the damage they must because the roll was so low, but they avoid further damage from it because it's out of their system. 
• Intelligence: Investigation - Your player is walking through town, asking strangers for the last known whereabouts of a person of interest; they roll a 6. You tell them that they spend an hour getting no real responses, until just as they are about to give up, a bystander overhears their question and comes forth to share what they know. Rather than an outright failure, the player succeeds in a way that takes time and energy, and so their success is moderated. 
• Wisdom: Medicine - Your player is attempting to stop the bleeding on an important NPC; they roll a 7. You tell them that the NPC loses a good deal of blood, but they manage to stop the bleeding just as the NPC passes out. Rather than an outright success (where the NPC is able to immediately assist the party) or at outright failure (where the NPC dies), this option allows the player to succeed but retains the consequences of a failure. 
• Charisma: Performance - Your player is attempting to curry favor with a noblewoman by playing a beautiful piece on their lute; they roll a 5. You tell the player that although their performance is mechanical and awkward, it stirs the court, who have not heard a lute played in generations--the noblewoman is not moved, but agrees to help the party because of what they have done for her people. Rather than accept that the player outright failed, we can twist this story moment into a moderated success. 

With each of these examples, you want to explain the moderating feature that allows their success. For the performance check, for instance, you want some NPC explanation of the way that the court has missed out on music like this. You could improvise that the noblewoman has not allowed music to be played because it confuses the passions. Now, rather than a player failure that halts the story, you have a moderate success that moves the story forward and characterizes the scene you're in. 

So when should you fudge a roll? I would argue that any time a fudged roll allows your players to have a better time than a random roll. You will need to stick by critical rolls--those cannot be avoided. But use your strength as a GM to control the experience of your players by fudging anything that would change the story you have planned. Remember that D&D was invented as a twist on miniature wargames, and that storytelling emerged from that form over time--you don't have to abide by the dice if you're aiming for a story instead. 

Coming soon: spicing up my homebrew world with dragon lore, a guide for beginning players, and a guide to using the dice for beginners. Until next time, happy gaming!

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