Krafty Matt: Facing the Dark Lord, I knew my PC would die. I knew my men would die. I dove headlong into battle to save my friends, and save the kingdom. The GM fudged the dice, completely destroying the moment because he didn't want to kill a PC, taking that heroic moment from me.
Alexander Macris: When you fudge, you steal from your players the chance for real glory.
What is fudging? It's the GM changing dice results without telling players. In other words, it's cheating: Fudging is the euphemism bad GMs have invented to camouflage their cheating. Roleplaying is a tough genre, and toughest of all on the GM, so few can do it properly. And those who can't, cheat—same as in any other game.
Now you will find countless pages of discussion on this subject across the internet, with the bad GMs trying their best to justify their cheating against the arguments of the good GMs. But in print, you will find nothing—let alone in GM guides. There is no book—not even GM-specific book—that says "but you can change the results whenever you feel like it". This alone tells the whole story: that the math and rolls are in the game for a reason, and that arbitrary modulation of the results isn't a game mechanic, and is thus cheating.
But the bad GMs persist nonetheless, and now and again even get a designer to side with them. In some cases, even legendary designers like Sandy Petersen. But if Petersen believes that arbitrary result modulation is part of the game or should be part of the game, why doesn't he put it in print? Why hide it in random Twitter posts? And it's supposed to be an important rule! Why then hide it from the GMs? Why hide it from the players?
Of course the answer is because it would destroy the game, and designers know this on a gut level. But gut level isn't theory, theory requires something much higher than the gut: it requires the brain. And designers simply suck at theory almost as much as the bad GMs whose bad GMing they feel obliged to defend, since they comprise at least 50% of their customers. Not to mention that designers themselves are often bad GMs, since designing and GMing are two distinct disciplines which therefore require distinct competencies. Even fewer are therefore good at both than those few who are good at either. Practically no one, then (except me, of course).
The final nail in fudging's coffin is that it can only work in the short- and medium-term. In the long run, players will figure out the GM is cheating, and stop playing. Alexander Macris (who's half-Greek btw, and that's why he's good at both design and theory), explains:
Around 1876, wargames were divided by a disagreement into two camps, "rules kriegspiel" and "free kriegspiel". The division has never healed. Most of today's RPG debates are just reiterations of that classical rules vs. free kriegspiel debate.
Imagine a Prussian staff officer who runs free kriegspiels in 1880. He is asked by the King of Prussia to run a wargame that will "inspire the young prince to take up the profession of arms". "Make sure he wins gloriously", the king adds. Our officer therefore makes sure that the outcome of the wargame is exciting and dramatic. Having the prince get killed by a sniper in the first 15 minutes is off the table, even if it's "what really would have happened". He's running a sort of narrativist game.
Later, he is asked by his army commander to run a wargame designed to test how his corps's leadership fares under adversity. When he runs the game, he uses his power as game judge to make sure events always go wrong, every decision leading to bad, stressful outcomes. The goal is not realism or fairness, it's inflicting stress through unfairness to see how people respond. He's running a reverse gamist wargame (unfun is the goal).
Finally, he is asked by the Prussian general staff to run a wargame designed to evaluate their plans to invade Estonia. When he runs that game, he uses all of his knowledge to make the game as realistic as possible, so that the officers can evaluate their strategy as plausibly as possible. He's running a simulation.
Free kriegspiel is thus a method that can be applied towards any goal. Whether it achieves that goal consistently and reliably is a different question. The Prussians ultimately decided free kriegspiel was *better* than rules kriegspiel for training officers for war, and the free kriegspiel tradition continues to be widely used by DOD today in the form of "matrix games" and similar rules-lite judge-ajudicated games.
So why do I not personally use free kriegspiel? I believe that free kriegspiel, when used outside of simulation, gradually undermines its own basis; and when used inside a simulation, requires such a level of objectivity and experience that it's a hard ask of the judge.
For instance, the Prussian prince enjoys the wargame where he is a heroic military commander precisely because it's being run by a senior staff officer who normally runs kriegspiel simulations. The officer's experience as a judge of simulations validates the reality of the experience for the prince, making it "feel real". The same game run by the prince's nanny wouldn't inspire him at all; and if the prince knew the judge had been instructed to let him win, the game would lose its value. If the prince plays once, he'll be fooled. If he plays a hundred games, he'll realize it's a sham. Note that this is simply the same debate as "should you fudge?" Fudging only works if the players believe you don't fudge. Eventually they figure it out.
Likewise, if the officers undergoing the test of adversity realize they are undergoing a test of adversity, the kriegspiel fails. It is only the pretense that it's a simulation that makes it seem fair and plausible. And they will eventually realize it's a forced test, because without dice or probability, it will eventually become evident that the judge is just against them. At that point future effort becomes worthless; and the player develops an ironic distance to the game that robs it of some of its value. Note that this is just the railroad problem in D&D, applied to a wargame. In a D&D railroad, no matter what you do it advances the GM's plot. In the free kriegspiel, no matter what you do, it causes more friction of war. Same thing, and equally damaging in the long-term.
So for free kriegspiel to work long-term, it has to be grounded on judges who are actually interested in simulating what would really happen. Unfortunately, that requires an enormous amount of experience from the judges, as well as a deep commitment to objectivity and fairness, and a willingness to let things sometimes be "unfun" in the short-term. This is the complete opposite of the advice given to judges (GMs) today about when to fudge, when to override the dice, and so on.
In sum, the fudgers have no leg to stand on at this point, and nothing proves this more than the fact that they have to constantly hide their cheating from their players to avoid their game collapsing, even though they know that, in the long run, the players will find out and collapse is inevitable. But they struggle so much with running the game that even a short-term cheating-based game is preferable to not being able to run the game at all.
