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

Rule #1: Maximum Game Fun

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

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

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.

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

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

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Fudging a roll is for when I, the DM, realise I made a mistake. No, I didn't realise this creature got a sneak attack until after I rolled that 20!

I used to think fudging Vs not fudging was a stylistic decision, but as I've played more I feel it's a system issue. If you feel a need to fudge rolls, either to raise or lower the stakes, to force desired plot points or avoid unnarrative deaths, or to fix broken challenge ratings, you're probably using the wrong system for you and your group.
Think about what issues you're actually trying to avoid by fudging, and then look for systems that are structured to avoid those issues. If the rolls get in the way of your narrative, switch to a more narrative system. If you're fighting against the system to build satisfying combat encounters, switch to something more tactical.

It'll always take a couple of sessions to get used to a new system, but learning one is always a lot faster than continuing to waste time trying to force a system to do things it wasn't made for.

Roll in the open, fuck narrative first gameplay, it's a game.

Me when my players in a cyberpunk game are all on death's door after a firefight goes bad: "Skill issue, I would simply not have been shot"

Glaze at the result but donut turnover the die, it will fudge your rolls