This is revisionist heresy. Gary Gygax, who is expected to be cannonized via a trebuchet in the next couple of years, explicitly said that the official books are more like guidelines than actual rules.
And I mean that I actually had beverages with Gary at a science fiction convention back in the early 90s, and he said stuff like “If you want to pack a healing kit that heals +5 damage, do it.” Being serious now, it’s about the story, not the rules. I know that’s the point of the joke, but it’s been almost 50 years now and people we are still arguing about rules lawyers.
I always thought the White Wolf games that called the DM the Storyteller and explicitly made dice rolls optional were the apex of the interactive story idea.
Hey, at least Satan comes to sessions on time. Last time we played, jesus was 3 days late!
Needing to fudge dice usually means the rules have failed.
A common trope is “I don’t want my PC to die!”. Fine. Reasonable. You can have rules about that. Look at how Fate handles “concede” and getting taken out. Look at how DND does jack shit.
Many games also have a fail forward mechanic. You don’t need to fudge their check if the rules have mechanics for “if you really want to succeed but luck isn’t on your side, here’s what you can pay to succeed”
DND kind of sucks.
Rules don’t have to fail to fudge dice. You do it to curate the experience - the dice give us the illlusion of fairness but that’s about it. Just because we expect them to roll somewhere in the averages doesn’t mean a common bandit won’t roll four crits in a single encounter or one of your playera won’t have a session where they cannot roll above 6.
I had to look it up to make sure-- there is an actual Chick tract about D&D and it is both hilarious and disturbing
Did you know they made a movie out of it?
A D&D player won the lottery and decided to spend his winnings in an attempt to “bring Jack Chick’s epic 1984 graphic novel / tract to film.” He got the rights from Jack Chick, ran a KickStarter (the lottery winnings were, after all, a mere $1000), and then he partnered with Zombie Orpheus Entertainment. They made a short film based off it and screened it at Gen Con back in 2014: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Dungeons_(film)
Fun fact - it was not a parody. They took themselves seriously the whole time and stayed true to the source material. Worth a watch, IMO.
