 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and as a recent Bards for Bards stream will tell you I am a big fat liar. And that talent at gaslighting and manipulating is a trait learned from running many, many games of D&D, where I fool 4-7 people into thinking that they're playing a game when really they're just playing themselves. Now I should mention that I do not condone cheating. Wink. I do not believe that the DM will ever or should ever cheat. Wink. But I do know that sometimes you're just watching your players fight a new monster that you think they can handle and then it one shots the party barbarian before it can get its rage off. And you're left there thinking, oh, well, shit. And in these moments the only solution to your problem is crime. So being the criminal mastermind that I am, it's my responsibility to teach you how to modify your games on the fly so that you can get the game that you want and your players will think that they're the ones in control. When really, as I said before, they're just playing themselves. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you're a DM that doesn't spit in the face of RNGesus, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So when the DM uses their surprise tool, it's usually because they messed up. I know DMs are supposed to be infallible creatures, but a lot of what makes them infallible is the little man hiding behind the green curtain that we refer to as lying. And it can be for any number of reasons. Maybe the party isn't doing too hot, maybe the party is doing too well and you want the fight to be more memorable. Maybe a player is down on their luck and you want to shield them from even worse luck. Or maybe it would just make for a better story if things went a little bit in a different direction. Whatever the reason, there's an art to manipulating the forces of destiny, meaning you can't do it all the time, or else your players will start to notice. Make no mistake, every time you turn that success into a failure, a hit into a miss, you're taking the agency away from your players. You're taking the game away. Their choice doesn't matter, it's all up to you, and that's why DM Fiat should only be used to turn the tides of a scenario when you know that leaving things the way they are will make for a worse game. And part of that moderation is because using DM Fiat is like breaking a seal. Once you start, it's hard to stop yourself without clear rules on what not to do. And before you know it, your 20th level paladin will swing at a goblin and their sword will just bend around its green skin because you thought that'd be funny. And from there, it's just a stepping stone to vengeful DMing. Your cheating should always be reactive, but never vindictive. If you give the boss an extra attack, it should be because the boss isn't BBEGing enough, and not because the players spent the last 30 minutes viciously mocking its bathrobe. The goal of the game is to make sure that your players are having fun, and if the most fun can be had for the players by not influencing the game in your favor, then just don't do it. But if you find yourself in a bind, and the game is on a one-way track to Lamesville, California, then there are four main tricks for you to pull out of your DM robes. Dice modifying. This is the most obvious example, and the most polarizing, for a lot of the reasons that I said before, when you change the result of your die, or change the number of players die has to reach in order to accomplish the same goal, then you are taking the game away from your players. There's no way around that. The conversation logically has to become, when is it okay to take the game away from the players? And for a lot of DMs, the answer is never. But personally, I found that when the game stops being fun, it's the DM's responsibility to make that right. Just recently, I played in a game where my party stormed a castle with an angry mob. We crafted our plans, infiltrated the fortress, launched our assault, and every roll was terrible, and we got our asses kicked. And all of our planning went out the window with no alternative, except a boot to the face. This was, up until the DM's enemies started to miss a few more times than normal, and our bad luck eventually recovered, while miraculously sliding onto the bad guys. As a seasoned player, I recognized the change. But I didn't say anything, because we had gone for so many sessions without a victory, and we just needed a wind for the morale, or the campaign was in danger of cracking under the weight of its own bad vibes. It's not to say that failure can't be very fun, but it's completely subjective, and if the subjective view of all your players is that things aren't fun, then you need to fix that. This is half of why a DM screen even exists. In fact, a lot of the time when I'm playing online, I'll ask a player to roll privately to me, and even though I've done nothing to make myself more transparent, bringing the player in and giving us both a shared secret somehow makes people less likely to question me rolling a natural 20 on my d6. But of course, this being the most effective strategy also makes it the most damaging, so use with caution. Number changing. This is different from dice modifying in that you aren't changing the variables, you're changing the constants. Maybe you'll raise the AC of an enemy when it's not threatening enough, or the player left a monster at one hit point, but you'd rather let the monster die so that the player feels more like a badass. These are the things that allow you to throw anything that you want at anybody you want, because as I talked about in my balance guide, the stats don't matter. See that goblin? He's super fast, so he's got 18 AC, and he deals an extra 10 damage per hit. Bet your level 15s will be scared of the goblin caves now. Another good thing about this trick is that it throws off meta gamers. I know, intrinsically, that a goblin has an AC of 15, 7 hit points, and a scimitar with a plus 4 to hit that'll do a d6 plus 2 damage. I have sent 8 million goblins into the world to get mowed down by players. I can't not know these statistics. But if I play with a different DM, they might be wise to my encyclopedic knowledge of cave fungus and decide to screw up the stat block so that my weapon breaks against the gelatinous cube's chiseled abs. Doing this does not ruin the game for me. It enhances the game to know that I'll always have something new to look forward to, even if it comes in a familiar package. And it always helps me know who the meta gamers are when they roll a 16. I say it's a miss, and they look confused as they realize that all of their scanning of the monster manual amounted to nothing. Scene swapping. This is one that I talked about briefly in one of my vlogs, but when your party's having a hard time picking which town they want to go to, and you're sweating because one town is really laid out with a story and a map, while the other one is just a sticky note that says sexy moose. You can lower your anxiety a bit by taking a step back and realizing you can just use your well-made town plot in either of these locations. You just change the name and keep the same story. That way, you stay on top of your notes, and your players will incorrectly believe that they're progressing, when really, they're on the Super Mario staircase. It's called scene swapping, and it's just taking elements that you were going to use elsewhere and putting them in the path of the players when the players would otherwise not run into them. Characters, puzzles, even entire locations, as I just said, can have their descriptions changed ever so slightly so that it fits within the story, and your hard work doesn't go to waste. This is probably one of the least egregious ways to cheat, because there's almost no way for the players to know that it happened, and even when they do find out, they're usually pretty understanding about it anyway. After all, it's hard work being a DM, and no one wants their hard work to amount to nothing. Problem solving! So, this is something that I sort of do really often, because it's just so harmless, and it makes the players day. A lot of times, when I create a puzzle, or an obstacle that the party can't get around by punch-stabbing, I'll give a lot of clues to what the answer is, because the players are around to miss them, and without having an idea of what they're doing, the players will just get frustrated, so it's best to give more than necessary, than less. However, sometimes there's a glitch in the matrix, and the players arrive at the solution to my puzzle by using some backwards swamp logic, or more specifically, they misunderstand my clues, and create their own solution, which I didn't even think of, and technically, it isn't what I wanted them to do, but it solves the problem in a way that I can just say, yeah, that works! I mean, totally, yeah, that's what I meant for you to do! And I'll sweep my own solution under the rug. Yeah, I did go through the process of designing a puzzle for them, but the end result is always going to be that they solved it, and if it makes them happier to think that they're clever, and that they figured out my master plan, then far be it from me to rob them of that experience. Overall, life sucks in a lot of ways. It's cruel and uncaring, and we all make the wrong choices because the whirlwind of living doesn't care who we are or what we want to do. That's why we play D&D, to get away from all that. And if I have the chance to make the world less obtuse for three hours so that my friends can feel good about themselves, then I'm going to. They'll never know how much I create for them, but it's not about knowing, it's about doing. Buuuut that about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can keep cheating on my players. But yeah, Dabby out.