So that my players see me roll the dice. As long as they believe the illusion, the roll is real to them, and so their experience is meaningful and memorable; at the end of the day, that's what matters most to me as a DM.

Play a system that accounts for this.

Fate gives you fate points to spend when you do t like a roll. It also gives you "succeed at a cost" if your fate points are exhausted or not enough.

You can still just roll with it (pun intended) and die to a random goblin if that's fun. But you also have agreed upon procedure for not doing that. "It looks like the goblin is going to gut me, but (slides fate point across the table) as it says on my sheet I'm a Battle Tested Bodyguard, so I twist at the last second and he misses (because the fate point bumps my defense roll high enough)"

This is pretty easy to import into DND, too, if you like the other parts of it

I don’t fudge rolls, but I do dynamically adjust enemy’s max HP depending on how well my players are doing.

Rule #1: Maximum Game Fun

To newer DMs: Never admit to your players whether or not you fudge rolls. As the DM, The only thing you need to do to maintain the integrity of your game is to shut your damn mouth when you bend the rules. The players just need the illusion maintained.

I'm a first time DM and I struggle with this a lot haha. There are times where I feel a roll is appropriate, so I do it, and whatever is supposed to happen fails, then I realize.. "what the hell is supposed to happen if that doesn't work?" so it just kinda happens anyways.. IDK if my players have caught on..

If my players need plot armor, they can spend their hero points on it.

i'm kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i'd wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it's just "i'm gonna skip this last encounter because we're already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow" or even just "wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace" but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that's part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i'm ok with them using fudging when they feel it's warranted so long as they're not abusing it to the point where there's no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we're all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they're doing, and if we're not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue

Rules are important, but they aren't the most important thing as a GM.

The 2 things that are more important are: pacing and fun.

Not fudging dice is important, but if it is in the way of fun, then I either just not roll or only pretend to roll.

Same with pacing, if a roll is going to bog down the games pacing, making everything take longer for no reason other than the roll, then that roll does not matter.

My 2 cents is that at the low levels, players need a bit of a buffer. A Lvl1 wizard with +0 CON can be one-shot by a goblin rolling a crit, to say nothing of the bugbear boss of the first encounter in Lost Mines of Phandelver (many people's first introduction to DnD 5e)

So minor selective fudging to keep the characters alive long enough for them to at least be wealthy enough to afford a Revivify seems like a small and harmless enough concession to me

As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They're a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.

Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.

Sometimes You roll dice just to make them think something’s up.

Depends heavily on what you and your players want out of the game. In all the campaigns I've been in the focus has been storytelling and character growth, so having a character die to some random happening would be counterproductive.

There have been situations within those campaigns where we've done things knowing that character death was a possibility, though, and in those cases we've carried through if the dice fell that way. The key is having buy-in from both player and DM on those particular moments of risk. Even a regular combat could turn into one of those if the player decides to press forward into danger.

How to tell if someone likes writing more than improv:

Look if someone's having a bad time, it don't cost much to throw em a bone. Like sure, that last attack killed them a round early because everyone has had a moment to feel proud today but you. Or like the spellcaster who is feeling a bit shitty because every monster has saved against their spells by some fluke today.

Like if they aren't having fun, what am I doing here?

Video games do this shit all the time. Famously the first GoW gave new players a small boost in multiplayer. It led to a community and better engagement in the long run because people had more fun. BG3 has that goofy 'karmic dice' system, which is on by default. Fire emblem lies. etc etc

As long as you're not going super hardcore, I don't see the problem with just letting the truth of the dice decide whether a character receives a 'fatal' blow, only to find after the combat encounter that the character is barely alive, and the rest of the group needs to focus all their resources on triage and emergency evac.

Getting out of a dangerous place with a barely conscious character can make for a pretty tense situation.

The GM just rolls dice because they like the sounds they make.

Fudging removes the joy of surprises and working through failures, or is a band aid to poor planning if failure isn't an option.

Well when you arn't sure if the encounter is balanced from the beginning and the dragons breath would tpk in one hit its kinda better to turn the cone into a line and half the damage so you only have one player down.

i love how these threads are just people discovering the principles of game design on their own lmao

To give the illusion that fate was on their side.

I make a point not to kill my players unless they make a habit of doing dumb shit, or it's "almost" happened a couple times already.

Especially if I get several good rolls or they get several bad rolls in a row.

The game should be fun for everyone, and if even one player goes home upset with the session I will have considered my night a failure as DM.

Not that I consider it a failing or even "bad" if someone else kills off their players. Everyone has different expectations from games and I've seen fantastic role playing of deaths before.

One player ripped their heart out of their own chest, chugging a health potion to stay alive long enough to place it in their spouse who had just died died, and another player healed the spouse.

They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.

Fear, fear and suspense.

Answer: to give the players the illusion of fairness while I reach behind me to grab the plot gaf.

I don't agree but I like the meme, upvoted!

I prefer games with player-facing rolls. I also prefer emergent gameplay so I'll roll on random charts, but that's it. Stakes are stakes, and character death should be something in the forefront of player minds imo