Game Mastery

A couple unrelated thoughts on fudging preferences and long term plot.

Fudging is one of those topics in gaming that can go either way, but people will always argue about.  Some players want to do everything by the dice.  Some players want the random elements fixed in the name of fun.  Either way is valid, yada, yada, yada.
What I’m wondering is if it’s possible to run a game with fudging preferences determined by each player.  Gorak’s PC is very attached to his character and doesn’t want to lose Gorak and have to reroll.  He opts to have death fudged away so he can keep his favorite character.  Rofelio’s PC likes challenges.  He wants to believe that he overcame all the challenges of game on his own.  So he opts to stick with each and every die roll, even if that means losing to a crit happy kobold.  I want to think those players could co-exist.  I also have high expectations for player maturity.  I’d hope that if Rofelio’s PC didn’t like the idea of another PC being immune to death, that he’d speak up before the GM asked for preferences, rather than throwing a hissy fit when Gorak somehow lived through the Tarrasque’s digestive tract.

Can it be done?  I dunno.

Will I try?  Probably not.  At least not for a little while.

And my other thought…

I was talking to one of my players about the fact that I don’t really do dungeons in my games.  Or travel.  He pointed out that they’re easy to write.  You can spend an afternoon setting up a dungeon that has 3-4 sessions worth of play time. I have to admit that that’s appealing.

But then I thought about what kind of effect the dungeon would have on the game and how I see dungeons when I’m a player.  The thing about dungeons is that they take you out of the game world for a while and isolate you from what’s going on.  That can be a good thing.  I like giving players a session off from the main plot every now and again.  But if you do it for too long, they’ll lose the plot.  The world will move on without them.  Even if it doesn’t (maybe the dungeon was in another dimension where time moves differently), the players will have been away from the main plot so long that they’ll have lost bits and pieces of it.

Long story short, you can’t put the players in a hole for months at a time and expect them to remember (or care about) what was going on on the surface while they were away.